- As someone who has grown up in a black baptist church, I am very familiar with spirituals. We still use many to this day. To think that spirituals would still be so prominent in black churches today is amazing. These spirituals bring some type of connection with our ancestors and the trauma and hell they went through but still trusted in the Lord to see them through. One big thing that separates spirituals from gospel/Christian music is the repeated theme of allusions. Water is a very prominent image in spirituals. I knew that slave owners wouldn’t teach the slaves how to read, but I didn’t know they would purposely take out passages from the bible omitting the idea of liberation from slavery. That is evil.