Many Faithful Forsake Festivities to Usher in Y2K With Spiritual Hoopla

They were islands of spirituality amid an ocean of millennial hype.

For many Americans, religious services offered an alternative Friday to guzzling champagne, worrying about computer bugs, partying in the streets or watching others celebrate on television.

That was especially true for African Americans among the Christian faithful. For many of them, church was the place to be on New Year’s Eve.

“I’ve never missed it in the 30 years I’ve been here,” said Aurelia R. Downey, 82, a retired educator who came late Friday to Washington’s Shiloh Baptist Church. “It makes me reflect on my life--what is it I may have done to help and what is it I failed to do and can do better.” With that, Downey stood up in her pew and grabbed a wireless microphone to pray aloud.

In early December, the Harris Poll reported that nearly a quarter of all African American adults surveyed nationwide expected to be in church at midnight to mark 2000, compared with just 2% of other Americans.

Those figures, even accounting for potential polling error, struck several black ministers and a prominent historian of black religious movements as plausible. And while the phenomenon may have been fed by Y2K, it reflected a trend in historically black churches dating to before the Civil War.

Black congregations--and to a lesser extent, white congregations--in several Protestant denominations have long observed a tradition known as “Watch Night,” in which the faithful and their ministers pray and watch the arrival of the year at midnight.

But this year, in predominantly black churches across the country, Watch Night had special resonance. At Shiloh Baptist, a red-brick church in central Washington first organized by freed slaves in 1863, the Rev. Wallace Charles Smith hosted several hundred for a night of gospel singing and personal testimonials, followed by a post-midnight spread of eggs, bacon, grits, fried potatoes and fried apples.

Smith attributed the larger-than-usual turnout in part to a mood of unease among some African Americans.

“There is a general apprehension. There is a feeling that the economy’s good and all that. But there’s a sense that there’s something morally askew and that society is moving toward some kind of confrontation with that moral malaise,” Smith said.

One of Smith’s deacons, William D. Thomas, a 55-year-old economist, said attending church on New Year’s Eve helped him start off the millennium with a clean slate. “You want to make sure certain things are in order, especially the spiritual life.”

Across town, the Most Rev. Desmond Tutu, the retired archbishop of South Africa, was scheduled to address an interfaith and interracial gathering at Washington National Cathedral.

On Friday and in today’s early hours, many other religious events large and small took place around the country--some of them having little or no direct connection to what Christians celebrated as the end of the second thousand-year epoch since the birth of Jesus Christ.

For Jews, sundown Friday marked another Sabbath in the year 5760. Some synagogues altered their routines--shortening services or holding them earlier than usual--to accommodate the many Jews who would be swept up in the secular occasion. But a memo distributed to rabbis from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations reiterated: “All agree that the millennium has no Jewish religious meaning.”

Many Muslims fasted from dawn to dusk and prayed in mosques in observance of the holy month of Ramadan in what is year 1420 by the Islamic lunar calendar.

And thousands of Native Americans, whose ancestral roots in North America date back many millennia, were expected to bless the sunrise this morning in Arizona to kick off what was billed as the “New Millennium First Peoples’ World Fair and PowWow.”

Experts said many religious leaders were focused Friday night on a more practical message. The Rev. William E. Pannell, a professor who preached at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, said pastors were likely “to remind our people, with all due respect to millennial talk and New Year’s, that we live a day at a time, and we still get the kids up and wish them well and send them off to school, hoping they’ll return safely. After all the hoopla, that’s what it’s going to come down to.”

For African Americans, after a century of struggle for civil rights, undercurrents of racial tension continue to provoke soul-searching on major occasions such as the millennium eve, said C. Eric Lincoln, a historian of black religious movements who lives in Durham, N.C.

“I would imagine that Watch Night on this particular year will have extraordinary meaning for many, many people, and particularly for many black people,” Lincoln said. “There’s great debate as to whether there has been progress in race relations or not. We don’t know where we’re going.”