351. Lord, I Want to Be a Christian

The Story Behind the Hymn

"Lord, I Want to Be a Christian" is an African American spiritual that the historian Miles Mark Fisher, in his study Negro Slave Songs in the United States, traced to a possible origin in Virginia in the 1750s. Fisher pointed to a documented account from Hanover, Virginia, in 1756, in which an enslaved man approached the Presbyterian evangelist Samuel Davies — the same Davies who wrote "Great God of Wonders" — and said: "I come to you, sir, that you may tell me some good things concerning Jesus Christ and my duty to God, for I am resolved not to live any more as I have done. . . . Lord, I want to be a Christian."

Whether or not that specific encounter is the song's direct origin, both its text and tune were first published together in 1907, in Folk Songs of the American Negro, a landmark collection compiled by brothers Frederick Work and John Wesley Work Jr. of Fisk University — the same institution whose Jubilee Singers had already carried spirituals like this one to wide public attention decades earlier.

The hymn's four verses trace a simple, deliberate progression: from the initial desire to be a Christian, to a desire for greater love, then greater holiness, and finally the wish to be like Jesus Himself — each stage building on the one before it, sung slowly, in the long, sustained phrases characteristic of much spiritual singing.

What gives the hymn its lasting force is the specificity of its request. It does not ask simply to hold the name "Christian," but to be one "in my heart" — a distinction the historical account behind it makes plain: not a status to claim, but a resolve, stated plainly, not to go on living as before.