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The black church was the center of the free black community, and the spirituality it expressed was a this-worldly faith. Formal black churches began with small informal groups meeting for worship in peoples' homes, with Sunday school classes, with a core of black worshipers relegated to a corner or gallery in predominantly white churches, or in the camp meetings or revival weeks held by evangelical sects. The black church became a sanctuary from oppresion where the spirits of God and the ancestors who had suffered through two hundred years of slavery and discrimination in American could be called on to give guidance, strength, and support to members of the congregation."-Source: James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, historians, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860, 1998 The excerpt most strongly supports which of the following arguments about the role churches played in the abolition movement?

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