Henry Louis Gates Jr. is mindful of the complexity of the black church as an African and African American cultural preserver. Through it, black clergy and the laity often organized to challenge white hegemony through physical rebellion and in nonviolent mass mobilization. Moreover, the permanent project of the African American ecclesia lay in developing black religious and institutional autonomy and protecting the sacredness and dignity of black personhood. The diversity and centuries-old resilience of black religious bodies, whether housed in outside brush arbors or inside brick-and-mortar edifices, maintained their standing at the center of African American life. Gates, however, noted in the twenty-first century the rising profile of “nones,” who are either indifferent to faith or unmoved by religious matters and the broadened range of Christian, Muslim, and a variety of other non-Christian affiliations. Nonetheless, the book declares that the black church has not been replaced in the breadth of its influence as a locus for energizing and supporting African American advancement.
Gates tracks the development of the black church on a familiar narrative terrain. He emphasizes in the text and in the documentary the transfer of elements of African religion into an emergent African American Christianity. In the African Baptist Church in Savannah, for example, surviving Arabic script remains visible within the internal architecture of this eighteenth-century congregation. Moreover, “praise houses” in the Sea Islands around South Carolina and Georgia sustained ritual and worship practices that reflected African religious sensibilities. Whether through the rise of independent black churches in the North or within the spirituals sung among Southern black slaves, the blending of the African religious background with existential reckonings with slavery blended to produce a distinctive faith witness among African Americans. When the Civil War ended, with substantial input from self-emancipating slaves, some of them soldiers, and a scattering of black chaplains, black churches were spurred into unprecedented growth. Accompanying educational, economic, missionary, and other institutional activities, anchored in black religious bodies, became foundational features of black communities all across the United States and abroad. Reconstruction, though highlighted with an impressive array of black officeholders, many of them ministers, ended and opened the way for such deteriorating conditions for African American southerners such that one historian called this period the “nadir” in the black experience. Denunciations of American racism moved some to embrace an Afro-centricism that motivated Bishop Henry M. Turner's bold theological declaration in 1895 that “God is a Negro.”
The Great Migration, Great Depression, and two world wars provided a backdrop in the twentieth century to the rise of Pentecostalism, the creation of the gospel blues, and growing assertions of women's empowerment. Black religion, while hardly the sole source for African American insurgency against racial caste in the United States, played pivotal roles in generating ideas and leadership for the black freedom struggle. A cadre of black religious intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s traveled to India to explore nonviolence with Mohandas Gandhi and to communicate it to a subsequent generation of civil rights activists. Gates chose to focus on Howard Thurman and his seminal Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) as a channel of this influence to Martin Luther King Jr. Another source of intellectual energy emerged from James H. Cone whose themes in Black Theology and Black Power (1969) were reminiscent of Turner's theological daring expressed in “God is a Negro.” These developments, however, did not obscure Gates's gaze on the uneven reckonings of the black church with women's equality in both pulpit and pew nor with its unsuccessful grappling with heteronormative policies and practices and how they disfavored those of other sexual orientations. These observations are poignantly presented in both the text and the documentary despite the praiseworthy tone of most of the Gates chronicle.
The landscape of black church history embraces a large terrain, only some of which Gates included. Two areas of major significance were deserving of treatment. Although resilience and triumph are the main narratives about the black church, patterns of vulnerability also must be acknowledged. On Juneteenth in 2021, at a service of commemoration on the former site of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, participants lamented the 1957 destruction of the large Romanesque edifice. Founded in 1818 the membership of over one thousand was displaced to a less desirable location with compensation that was far less than the value of the land and the building. Urban renewal brought the wrecking ball to Bethel, like that of innumerable other congregations whose vulnerability lay at the core of a parallel black church history narrative. New interstate highways and the construction of new government and corporate buildings gotten mainly through “eminent domain” removed black churches from historic properties. Notwithstanding examples of remarkable agency and insurgency, black churches still suffered victimization and gentrification and were attacked by menacing antebellum mobs, burned by rioting whites angry about these symbols of black religious and economic autonomy, and torched for their involvement in black rights movements. Moreover, instances of accommodation to industrial capitalists who enlisted their support in the recruitment of nonunion black workers or clergy hired to spy on King and other militant ministers stood in contrast to the defiant heroism of Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, and Al Sharpton.
The diasporic reach of the black church also requires acknowledgment. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the historic black denominations built ecclesial structures consisting of churches, schools, and clinics in the Caribbean and Africa. Some, including counterparts in white-led bodies, educated diasporic peoples in African American institutions and many returned to Caribbean and African settings as clergy, teachers, and other professionals. An infrastructure of conferences, conventions, and other jurisdictional entities parallel to dioceses in the United States, showed the transatlantic structure of black religious bodies. Across several denominations, diasporic leadership populated the governing and administrative components within the black church and accompanying networks of congregations and educational institutions constituted black churches as a black Atlantic ecclesia. Moreover, while male officials administered funds for these Caribbean and African projects, the principal funding came from women's missionary societies in the large black denominations and some from a white ecclesia that supported black churches and schools on both sides of the Atlantic.
The documentary, shown in two parts, closely tracks the book. Gates anchors both parts to some of the latest scholarship and clerical commentary on black church history. Hence, he brought scholars and ministers front and center in the narratives where they are presented often in conversation, with Gates himself as narrator. The two formats, while they are different instructional platforms, complement each other. The advantage of the DVD lies in the display of photographs, art, documents, and pedagogical instruction from an array of experts connected to sundry subjects covered in this medium. The approach is transdenominational and interreligious, despite the normative term “black church” and the Christian bias that it signifies. Despite an acknowledgment of fissures about sexuality and women's empowerment, too often absent from the book and documentary is a sense that rigorous debate still abounds about other areas of contested scholarship within African American religious studies. One receives the mistaken impression that consensus has emerged on issues about which there is substantial disagreement across several disciplines. Readers and viewers, however, should remain mindful that Gates has tackled a large topic sweeping both in content and chronology and that he provides a competent overview of a still developing and multifaceted area of scholarship.
