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African American Christianity can be used to engage the questions of social practice and theology. From a variety of sources, the Black Church has constructed practices that counter and subdue oppressive forces felt by African Americans while simultaneously establishing a context for a more abundant life. This chapter presents a model for teaching those contexts. It presents the rationale and several of the strategies used in the course, “The Social Contexts of the Black Church”. The course requires students to ground their ministerial vision in a dialectical understanding of the Black Church. Moving between the contemporary interdisciplinary interpretation of the sociocultural contexts of African Americans and the history and established theological teachings of the Black Church, an approach is presented that equips theological students to construct a ministerial direction and praxis.

This chapter proposes a reconfigured Black Theology based on the contemporary context of the Black Church in the US in a contested post-racial, post-American world. In that context, Black churches are besieged by the “cultural hauntings” of race, in all of its shifting shapes and reinventions. This reference to shape-shifting is a form of critical signification on Black Church traditions. Historically, the Black Church has taken its metaphors, its parody and transformation of Western stories and ideas too literally and has mistaken these rhetorical devices for preordained things, essences. Shape-shifting is a form of postmodern self-reflexive critique of all signs which claim to be Absolute, including race, blackness, and theological metaphors. The chapter recommends, therefore, that the Black Church remain open to revisability of language and remember its own tradition of shape-shifting, signifying, reinterpreting in preaching, liturgy, and playing on words.

This chapter illustrates how Fr. George Clements creatively combined Black Power with the methods of early-twentieth-century missionaries with great success in his pastorate at Holy Angels parish. It examines the relationships Clements forged with other Black Power organizations and explores the life of Holy Angels Catholic school. It expands the scope of the story from the previous chapter and discusses the establishment of national Black Catholic institutions and organizations. Ultimately, it argues that, faced with opposition from fellow Black Catholics who resisted the influence of Black Power, activists became missionaries of a sort as they worked to convert their coreligionists to a particular understanding of what it meant to be Black and Catholic. They brought to life a distinctively Black Catholicism in the process. It devotes attention to what activists meant by “authentic Blackness” and whether it was compatible with Catholic religious practice.

This chapter demonstrates how the potential for collaboration was developed in Denver and Atlanta and how it is proving appropriate and effective for both internal and external strategies of social reform. Membership size of churches in both cities varies widely; many—49% of churches in Denver and 52% in Atlanta — have between 100 and 500 members. There is a strong tendency in both cities for black churches to own their buildings rather than rent them. In addition, a majority of churches in both cities conduct at least one nonreligious community outreach program. Metro Denver Black Church Initiative was launched in Denver to improve conditions in low-income black neighborhoods through the local churches. Furthermore, the outreach to the community in Atlanta is described.

This chapter turns to the era of the Black Power Movement, probing its contours as the ideological heir to the Civil Rights Movement. It also examines the interpretive work of Albert Cleage. Delivered in October 1967, his sermon “What Can We Give Our Youth” interprets the exodus narrative both as an exercise in radical race politics and Cleage's own pillar of fire politics. While most figures of the Black Power Movement abandoned the Black Church for what they perceived to be its accommodationist orientation, Cleage constructed a theology and a politics that maximized the best insights of the Civil Rights and the Black Power Movements, while remaining grounded in the history and traditions of the Black Church.

The second chapter examines the worship styles and practices of interracial churches and compares them to those of other kinds of churches. Focusing on a conflict over worship practices that emerged during the case study, this chapter further discusses African‐Americans' and whites' perspectives on worship and illustrates how the worship styles and practices preferred by whites can come to prevail in interracial churches.

This chapter introduces “the Living Stations of the Cross,” a Black Catholic reenactment of the passion and death of Jesus performed annually by parishioners of Chicago’s largest Black Catholic church from 1937 to 1968. This devotional practice serves as a lens through which to better understand the ways in which Catholic ritual life and relationships distinguished Catholic converts from the Protestant churches proliferating around them in the midst of the Great Migrations. It argues that Black Catholics should be understood as sharing in the same impulse as other new religious movements or “religio-racial movements,” such as the Black Hebrews and Black Muslims, who adopted religious practices and bodily disciplines that marked them as different from the assorted Black evangelical practices that were quickly coming to be understood as normative for Black religious life (known by the shorthand “the Black Church”).

This chapter addresses why people attend an interracial church by exploring their past interracial and religious experiences as well as those qualities and practices they appreciate most about attending an interracial church. The chapter gives an understanding of how past experiences and religious preferences influence people's reasons for attending interracial churches.

Religious dissent within the Black Church focuses on defending the Christian gospel against the alliance of Christianity and the race order of white supremacy marks the contribution of the Black Church to the wider dissenting tradition. It engages in the religious delegitimation of the dominant racial order. While the White Church in the United States has historically replicated the dominant racial order of African American subordination, the religious dissent of the Black Church has resisted and subverted the dominant racial order in a way in which grace pre-empts race in the functional ecclesiology of the Black Church with Christian egalitarianism affirming the equality of the races, envisioning a church where grace structures ecclesial life rather than racism.

The continuing immigration of practicing Muslims into the United States and the increasing occurrences of conversion poses several challenges to the typical historical accounts of religious experience in the country. For the African Americans, looking into such concerns means addressing religious pluralism issues that were frequently associated with the spiritual monopoly of the Black Church and the legacy of slavery among specific minority groups. Fundamentally, aside from the concept of hijra and issues of religious history, Islam initiates an attempt to reconstrue history through illustrating how African Americans have been able to find themselves through umma that disregards socioeconomic status while also accounting for diversities evident across various cultures. These social and religious changes promote unpredictable effects, both positive and negative, on the Muslim umma and on the African diaspora.

Drawing from a qualitative study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) conservative Christians and their allies, our research names a form of spiritual violence we call sacramental shame that impacts the lives of LGBTQ members. Through this shaming dynamic, homonegative churches make constant displays of endangered belonging a requirement for sexual/gender minorities’ acceptance and even their salvation. This chapter explores how racist discourses impact sacramental shame experiences for African-American LGBTQ church members. African-American churches have long resisted the spiritual violence of white supremacy; however, with the goal of protecting an image of Blackness that defies the sexual stereotypes at the root of white supremacy, they often unwittingly instil in LGBTQ members distinct forms of sacramental shame. At the same time, many in these churches cultivate personal relationships with a liberator God who sides with the oppressed, avenges those who endure injustice, and inspires communal work for justice, promoting a life-enhancing ethos of love.

This essay explores the professional journey of scholar, activist, and pioneer Ira E. Harrison. Harrison was cofounder of the Association of Black Anthropologists and the organization’s first archivist. His educational path, activism in the 1960s, ethnographic research in the black church, and commitment to preserving and recognizing the contributions of black anthropologists, renders him a revolutionary pioneer in anthropology. He has conducted research on traditional medicine and integration on health policy and coedited African American Pioneers in Anthropology with Faye Harrison.

Although such an endeavor may make room for numerous errors, the author finds the need to create a historical account about what he refers to as the unchurched culture of African Americans during the period between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to grasp the intellectual, social, and political elements involved in the upsurge of modern Islamic conversion. This chapter attempts to illustrate the evolution of Islamic conversion through analyzing the following: certain religious and folk practices; religious themes such as Sufism, gnosis, and hermeticism, and the relationships established between the white, black, and red Americans. An awareness of international diplomacy is also relevant to this study since this played a significant role in how race relations in America were often undermined. This account aims to contravene a taboo through presenting evidence that asserts how the Black Church did not play that big a role in the formation of the spiritual life of African Americans.

Identifying W. E. B. Du Bois as a historian of African religion, this chapter examines his rethinking of fetish, God, and the continuity between African religion and African American religion. Originally agreeing with imperial comparative religion that fetishism marked the beginning of religious evolution, Du Bois eventually critiqued the notion of the fetish as a European invention and an ideological supplement to the slave trade. Initially relying on European reports that the Yoruba believed in God, Du Bois came to emphasize the Yoruba God Shango, who was not like Rudolph Otto's “wholly other” but a deity of political sovereignty. By contrast to an early confidence in the transatlantic continuity of African religion into the Black Church in America, Du Bois eventually stressed the disruptions of slavery and colonialism that separated African religion in Africa from the diaspora.

This chapter explores the conflict between Pentecostal premillennialism—the pervasive conception of eschatology in Pentecostal churches—and black racial consciousness and suggests that the former is not sufficiently compatible with black liberation theology. It first provides an overview of eschatology in black religion before discussing the shift from postmillennialism to premillennialism that accompanied the emergence of Pentecostalism from the Holiness movement. It then examines the compatibility/incompatibility of Pentecostal premillennialism with eschatology in black religion and argues that Afro-Pentecostalism falls short of restoring primitive Christianity and of renewing the Black Church by not articulating a sound eschatology. In order to reconcile Pentecostal premillennialism and black liberation theology, the chapter calls for a shift in Afro-Pentecostal theological discourse toward a conception of eschatology rooted in black folk sources and black millennialism.

This chapter examines the relationship between the Underground Railroad and Poke Patch's free Black community, arguing that routes connecting iron furnace regions surrounding the community reveal an overlooked escape strategy for those fleeing slavery. After providing an overview of Ohio's multiple highly developed routes along the Underground Railroad, the chapter discusses the role of Poke Patch as an Underground Railroad site in the state. It then considers the Black Baptist Church's involvement in the Underground Railroad, along with the AME Church's role in helping escapees fleeing slavery. It also describes several escape routes leading into and out of Poke Patch, including one that converged at Berlin Crossroads, and those running toward Ohio's iron furnaces in Lawrence and Gallia Counties. The chapter explains how routes connecting these iron furnaces served as major pathways to freedom, with free Blacks silently operating in the background.

Discussions of pluralism in African-American religious life flatline in mainstream scholarship. Religious diversity and religious pluralism are given short shrift as statistically insignificant in black communities and thereby rendered invisible. In fact, religion within black communities historically as well as contemporaneously has never been as monolithic as scholars and the media ordinarily portray it; for instance, even when slaves practiced Christianity, they understood it quite differently than did their masters, even those in the same denomination. The idea of a monolithic “black church” is a historical construction of the 1970s-1980s, which appealed to both blacks and whites, though for different reasons. This picture homogenizes history and overrides the researches of black scholars who, earlier in the twentieth century, recognized that African-Americans practiced a variety of traditions. More careful analyses of African-American religious pluralism will need to consider cultural factors, racial content, economic disparities, and the presence of non-Christian traditions.