Conclusion

African Americans are generally more religious than other groups in the United States. But African American religion is much more than a description of how deeply religious African Americans are. The phrase helps to differentiate a particular set of religious practices from others that are invested in whiteness; it invokes a particular cultural inheritance that marks the unique journey of African Americans in the United States. African American religion is rooted in the sociopolitical realities that shape the experiences of black people in America, but this is not static or fixed. The ‘Conclusion’ suggests that African American religious life remains a powerful site for creative imaginings in a world still organized by race.

3. African American Christianity: The early phase (1760–1863)

The majority of African Americans are Christian. Black Christianity has played a critical role in the history of African American responses to white supremacy in the United States. ‘African American Christianity and Its Early Phase (1760–1863)’ is the first of four chapters that examine this complex history and introduce key moments and personalities, as well as the importance of black churches over the course of three historical periods. The early phase covers the period when the economy of slavery dominated political matters up to the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the plantation regime. Slavery defined the contours, even among free black populations, of black Christianity during this period.

7. African American Islam

In some ways, Islam best represents the idea of African American religion as a practice of freedom and a sign of difference. For those African Americans who embraced Islam during the modern phase, their conversion was as much an expression of skepticism about Christianity and the United States as it was an acceptance of Islam. ‘African American Islam’ situates African American Islam within a broader global religious imagination that seeks to expand how African Americans understand themselves as members of a global community, an understanding that has shifted and morphed in light of the pressures of Muslim immigration to the United States. Those pressures have involved an insistence on decoupling Islam from the particulars of African American racial experience.

6. African American Christianity since 1980

‘African American Christianity Since 1980’ is concerned with the contemporary phase, beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the significant demographic and political shifts that have changed the landscape of American Christianity. The neighborhood church is fast disappearing. More and more African Americans are joining large megachurches and are engaged in neo-Pentecostal worship. The influence of celebrity preachers continues to grow as they leverage various media to propagate their message and their brand. All the while the political and economic circumstances of black America continue to worsen, and one wonders what role might this particular expression of African American Christianity play in the lives of so many who suffer in the shadows.

5. African American Christianity: The modern phase (1935–1980)

The political dimension is important to any understanding of the modern phase of African American Christianity, and it is clearly expressed in the explosion of civic and religious energy in the middle of the twentieth century that fundamentally transformed the United States. ‘African American Christianity: The Modern Phase (1935–1980)’ describes the civil rights movement and the important role that black churches played. Martin Luther King Jr. drew on the language of the black church in his public ministry. Womanist theologies, James Cone's black liberation theology, and the centrality of black Christianity to the civil rights movement demonstrate how the social and political circumstances of black life shaped the form and content of black Christian expression in the United States.

4. African American Christianity: The modern phase (1863–1935)

‘African American Christianity: The Modern Phase (1863–1935)’ describes three distinctive moments: firstly, the nationalization of black Christianity, as the “invisible institution” of the slaveholding South became visible and as black denominations in the North extended their missions overtly into the South. Secondly, large numbers of African Americans migrated from the South to relocate in the North and the West, which changed the demographics of American cities as they confronted new forms of labor discipline and different social constraints. Finally, the modern phase was also characterized by American imperial ambition and the consolidation of a new racial regime called Jim Crow. Racial segregation and the extralegal violence that attended its implementation fundamentally shaped the expression of black Christianity during this period.

2. Conjure and African American religion

‘Conjure and African American Religion’ draws our attention to the continuity and discontinuity with African religious practices as well as a particular instance of a religious imagination, which differentiates itself from those who enslaved and discriminated against others. It shows how the debates in the field of religious studies about the difference between magic and religion fall apart when an oppressed people take up secret religious knowledge to make sense of their lives. Conjure is a religious practice that connects with a distant past, shadows Christian practice, and animates everyday life in ways that offer some semblance of control over circumstances that seem, at first glance, uncontrollable.

1. The category of “African American religion”

African American religious life is not defined by just the “Negro church”—the preacher, music, and the frenzy—but consists of all the varied religious practices that occur within black communities in the United States. African American religion emerges in the encounter between faith, in all of its complexity, and white supremacy. ‘The Category of "African American Religion"’ explains the three key ideas used to organize the study of African American religion: practice of freedom, sign of difference, and open-ended orientation. Taken together, and using three representative examples of African American religion (conjure, Christianity, and Islam), they help us navigate the complex religious history of African Americans in the United States.