The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of several new religious communities among African Americans. The scholarship on these movements—notably the Peace Mission, the Nation of Islam (NOI), the Ethiopian Congregation of Commandment Keepers, and the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA)—has interpreted various dimensions of black religious life, especially in light of the exigencies defining the Great Migration. Arthur Fauset's Black Gods of the Metropolis (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944) was the first and brought important scholarly attention to these religious communities. His work encouraged other experts to research these new religious movements. From Milton Sernett's Bound for the Promised Land (Duke University Press, 1997) to Wallace Best's Passionately Human, No Less Divine (Princeton University Press, 2005), more recent studies have elucidated the complex interplay linking social structures to race and religious practices in this period of African American history. This is the context in which Judith Weisenfeld has rendered New World A-Coming. She centers her study of black religion during the Great Migration on “religio-racial movements,” a category that she theorizes as encompassing those religious communities that interpreted their racial and religious identities as mutually constitutive or determining. In so doing, Weisenfeld brings theoretical precision to what distinguishes these movements from the more familiar Christian sects that preceded them.

The entire study coheres through the overarching significance of religio-racial formation. The book's total execution, however, obtains through an exquisite structure of interpretation that elucidates the role of narrative (part 1), the constitution of subjectivity (“selfhood”) (part 2), and the dynamics of community (part 3) that sustained these religio-racial movements. The section on narrative compares the way geography functioned to sustain theological claims about race, religion, and divine histories in these communities. Weisenfeld notes, for instance, that Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Morocco were among the regions anchoring geographies of racial imagination among Ethiopian Hebrews and the Moorish Science Temple. Here and throughout the book, Father Divine's Peace Mission both exemplifies and departs from key motifs of the Moorish Science Temple, the Ethiopian Hebrews, and the Nation of Islam. As the Peace Mission emphasized, there existed only the human race—so, no blacks or whites—Weisenfeld explains how Father Divine's followers re-narrativize the racial identities otherwise foisted upon them. In part 2, Weisenfeld details the formation of “religio-racial bodies” to foreground the significance of material practices and the recoding of racialized bodies that featured in these movements. The constitution of families and the politics of space are the focus of part 3. Readers are presented with a vivid analysis of how religio-racial families were constituted. It is here that one learns, as well, of the conflicts that ensued. The Peace Mission actually drew its members away from their natal families to become members of a new, divine family—raceless children of God. Alternatively, the NOI and MSTA depended heavily on family networks to gain new converts, as new members typically learned of the NOI from siblings or parents. In a yet different mode, Weisenfeld accounts for how Ethiopian Hebrew founder Rabbi Wentworth Matthew rejected intermarriage with gentile blacks, instead anchoring the perpetuity of his congregation on the principle of “religio-racial endogamy.” At every turn, Weisenfeld's study reveals both collective and hauntingly personal experiences of these religious communicants, a testament to her insatiable capacity for archival detail.

The distinct intervention of Weisenfeld's research is especially salient when she describes the trend whereby members of these religio-racial communities defied state-based racial classifications to assert their divinely instituted identity. In fact, Weisenfeld opens with an account of an MSTA convert who registered for Selective Service in the 1940s. As his draft records indicate, the man's racial identity was entered as “Moorish American”; the registrar noted that the MSTA member nevertheless appeared to be “a Negro.” This was paradigmatic for religio-racial movements. The Nation of Islam's members asserted they were “Asiatic,” and not “so-called Negroes.” Ethiopian Hebrews likewise rejected the “Negro” moniker and identified instead as the quintessential Hebrew people. Members of the Peace Mission argued that race was a fiction and insisted they were simply members of the human race. These religious communicants defied the state-based system of racial classification. It is no accident that Weisenfeld engages so seriously with these religious actors. She deliberately shows that official categories of race were susceptible to disruption from these subaltern dissenters. The divine identities of religio-racial actors opposed the capacity of a racial state to manufacture and internalize difference and impose social consequences. Weisenfeld demonstrates that asymmetric power structures (of an apartheid state versus that of racialized minorities) did not obliterate the capacity of these black religious actors to create and administer social identities and to invent new racial formations through tactics of theological narrative and community formation. Weisenfeld also achieves something else of at least equal significance. She compels readers to consider how scholars imbue the categories of state racism with the aura of truth, insofar as some experts tend to portray the claims of religio-racial movements as patently fictive—were members of the Moorish Science Temple truly Moorish? Was Father Divine merely pretending that his true race was “human” and not “Negro”? This is a problem not only because sidelining the religio-racial assertions of identity reinscribes the perverse project of state racism but also because scholars uniformly recognize and readily express that state practices of racism rely on a fictive system whose variable manufacture is predicated on destructive ends. Weisenfeld transcends this scholarly dissonance and charts a bold path through an intellectually astute account of religion and race.

The creative power of Weisenfeld's methodology is also on display in this book. It comes to the fore through her engagement with the primary sources. It is impossible to study what one cannot imagine, and Weisenfeld demonstrates no shortage of vision. She has amassed myriad sources, true enough—census records, pamphlets, membership paraphernalia, and FBI records are just a few. Her innovative use of digital methods, however, is uniquely rarified and deserves its own meditation; this was critical for locating and identifying records that reveal how her subjects defied state racial categories to claim their divine peoplehood. Weisenfeld's nuanced reading of analog materials, moreover, is an exemplum for the rest of us as she discerns how and when to read with and against the grain of the archive to yield the often effervescent but nonetheless formidable traces of religio-racial agency.

New World A-Coming is exquisite history and enfleshed theory. Even more, it is a philosophical manifestation of lifework that results from the seasoned rigor and intellectual deft that come only through the long-term of labor. This is a product of an intellect that thrives on the most difficult work of discovery and interpretation. The book will certainly become a commanding guide for contemporary scholars and a classic source for future generations seeking to navigate the arduous craft of elucidating and interpreting the history of African American religions.