The End of the “Black Church”: New Directions in African American Religious History The Burden of Black Religion. By Curtis J. Evans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xx + 372 pp. $24.95 paper. Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion. By Barbara Dianne Savage. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. 360 pp. $27.95 cloth.

摘要

The supportive blurb Robert Orsi supplies for the back cover of BarbaranSavage’s new book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, promises a “new history ofnAfrican American religion” that refuses to present that history as a “sacrednnarrative” but instead offers to grapple with the “powerful but ambivalentnChristian legacy in African American life.” This new history, in fact, hasnbeen emerging for some time. Savage’s work is one of many in recent yearsnthat attempts to place established African American Protestant churchesnwithin a broader cultural context that sees Christianity’s centrality in blacknlife as a deeply contested reality. For many years, black religious history innthe United States seemed to consist of three important moments: thenconversion of many of those enslaved to evangelical Protestantism beforenand during the Civil War, the rise of black denominations during thennineteenth century, and the crucial participation of black churches andnreligious leaders who helped define the civil rights movement for the nationnand the world. From “the invisible institution” of Al Raboteau’s seminalnSlave Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) to the increasingnnumbers of monographs that cover black religious life in the nineteenth andntwentieth centuries, stories of a heroic and often political “black church”nhave shaped how we view all of black religious history.