Show Us How You Do It: Marshall Keeble and the Rise of Black Churches of Christ in the United States, 1914–1968. By Edward J. Robinson. Religion and American Culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008. xii + 243 pp. $39.95 cloth.

摘要

Two salient characteristics have shaped scholarship about the institutionalninfrastructure of African American Christianity. Emphasis has been placednon the seven large historically black religious bodies of Baptists, Methodists,nand pentecostals, and the smaller but influential enclaves of AfricannAmericans in largely white Presbyterian, Congregational, Episcopal, andnMethodist Episcopal denominations. Blacks in these church organizations,ndespite their doctrinal diversity and worship styles, embraced a publicntheology aimed at challenging and destroying racist institutions and practicesnthat oppressed them. Edward J. Robinson in his study, however,ndemonstrates that the religious landscape among African Americans includedna broad range of clergy and churches whose perspectives and practicesnshowed a remarkable divergence from the standard narrative that scholars ofnblack religion have advanced. Like an older and recently revised literaturenabout new urban religions, Robinson’s research on the black Churches ofnChrist, though grounded in the rural American South, presents AfricannAmerican Christianity as a multifaceted phenomenon. His scholarship addsnto the complexity of black religious expression and belief and discouragesnscholars from making easy generalizations about these experiences.