In this lively, accessible, and wonderfully illuminating book, Alphonso F. Saville IV recasts our understanding of eighteenth-century Black Atlantic Christianity and one of its most important figures, John Marrant. Born free in New York in 1755, Marrant spent much of his childhood in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. After siding with the British in the American Revolutionary War, he traveled to London where he became affiliated with the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion. He went on to serve as a missionary in Nova Scotia, where other Black Loyalists had settled. Through a close reading of Marrant’s published works, Saville shows “how West and West Central African religious cultural themes, symbols, and cosmologies informed biblical interpretation, ritual culture, and communal formation in early Black North American Christian communities” (3).

Saville structures his argument chronologically. Chapter 1 surveys rituals and symbols of the Black Christian communities in which Marrant lived as a child – in St. Augustine, Savannah, Charleston, and New York. Chapter 2 reads Marrant’s depiction of his conversion and adolescence as a ritual initiation whose narrative structure draws on elements of West African rites of passage. Saville focusses on, “five phases – call, wilderness seclusion, instruction from tutors or guides, physical impression, and communal reintegration, or covenant” (37). For each, he points to parallels between Marrant’s narrative and what is known about African and African American initiation rituals. Saville argues, “Although the Bible provided the narrative models through which his formation was depicted, African ritual forms determined the meanings assigned to the text he produced” (59). Chapter 3 traces a pattern in the writings of Marrant – and of David Margrett, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and Zora Neale Hurston – in which elements of the biblical Exodus story are used to depict divine retribution on enslavers. This pattern, Saville shows, involves the use blood and wilderness as important symbols.

Chapter 4 traces Marrant’s ministry in Nova Scotia, focusing especially on the meanings of ritual shouting and baptism. The chapter contains the core of Saville’s argument, his best case for the thesis he sustains throughout the book. “Structural rather than theological modes of narrative analysis primarily informed black religious consciousness in the eighteenth century. The presence of African narrative forms in early black religious literature implies corresponding African meanings. In Marrant’s texts, the explicit religious rhetoric and symbols are Christian, but the structures by which they are made intelligible are African” (118). Chapter 5 examines Marrant’s involvement in African American Freemasonry in Boston. Saville points to the secrecy and ritual progression of West African initiation societies and shows how these served as institutional forerunners to African American Freemasonry. For Marrant, “Ritual initiation in Freemasonry … reformulates African American collective identity by restoring contemporary Black men to divine and ancestral (i.e., biblical) legacies” (120). A brief epilogue treats Marrant’s influence on the Black Loyalists who left Nova Scotia for Africa with the Sierra Leone Company.

The principal differences between the White Christian theological traditions that swirled around Marrant and his own Black Atlantic Christianity are captured by Saville under the rubric of conjure. “Conjure,” writes Saville, “describes the black folk magic tradition in which practitioners utilize complex invocations of powers and processes intended to heal and harm others” (4). Eighteenth-century Black Christians, Saville argues, “utilized the Bible as a conjure book” (4). They did not simply accept White Christianity, with its theologies and accepted rules of biblical interpretation. As the examples Saville explores in Chapters 4 and 5 show, “early Black Americans adopted and appropriated Euro-American institutional forms of social and religious organization. But, importantly, these processes of adaptation utilized Africana Religious symbols, rituals, and ways of knowing to conjure biblical texts” (148).

Saville uses conjure, then, to encapsulate what he understands to be characteristically Africana in the eighteenth-century Black American Christianity he recovers throughout the book. Does Saville’s conjure involve conjuring? Saville admits, “While this study utilizes conjure to interpret Marrant’s texts, it is important to note that Marrant likely would have eschewed conjure as a religious practice” (10). Conjure as a religious practice involves efficacious rituals that perform their work by hidden, occult means. By using conjure to describe what Marrant does with his writing, Saville highlights the fact that the meanings of Marrant’s writings have remained hidden from readers who privilege White Christian theological and hermeneutical frameworks. Marrant’s sermons and published writings performed their work on listeners and readers steeped in Africana traditions. With this approachable and erudite book, Saville has deftly uncovered the Africana symbols and rituals with which Marrant and his Black contemporaries resisted their oppressors, affirmed their community, and made Black Atlantic Christianity.