Working with W. E. B. DuBois's classic dialectic of double-consciousness—being black, being American (The Souls of Black Folk in Three Negro Classics [New York: Avon Books, 1965], 215)—Rita Roberts explores “the important role evangelicalism played in the development of American identity for a prominent northern black minority” during the antebellum era (12). Her eight-decade study in intellectual history draws upon nearly seventy public intellectuals, mostly male, about a third of whom were clergy and the rest laity, in African American Protestantism. She highlights the interplay of religion and politics, race and class, and to a lesser extent gender in the evolution of a distinct gestalt of black evangelicalism. It emerged interactively within the larger complex of Anglo-American evangelical theology by sharing the central tenets of biblical authority, “conversionism” (8), Christ-centered redemption, and active responsibility for family and society. That definition Roberts reiterates throughout the six chapters. Within the diversity of African-American discourse her approach allows black evangelicalism to harmonize “Christian republicanism” with social reform to counter the expansion of slavery, with its conflicting strategies for citizenship and for confronting scientific racism and with varied responses to the colonization, emigration movements, and antislavery politics. Separating her thesis from the construct of black nationalism, Roberts, nonetheless, imposes the template of evangelicalism over virtually the same thematic subjects but with assimilationist assumptions.

Her work demonstrates considerable skill in mastering the debates and exchanges of the representative characters; in showing differing nuances of thought between generations; in allowing for shifts in perspectives over time with some individuals; and in featuring illuminating passages by the writers. Roberts contends that there was a parallel assimilative process to that of Europeans into white American identity—articulated by De Crevecoeur—in the ways West and Central African slaves intermixed customs, languages, survival strategies, and the appropriation and reshaping of evangelical Christianity to become “Africans” and eventually “colored Americans” (106, 123–24). While repeatedly insisting on how crucial the evangelical mode of theology and experience was for northern black people, the author works hard not to obscure the diversity of thought among her central players. Her fourth chapter is entitled “We Do Not All of Us Think Alike.” One way she was able to show differences between the varying figures was to extend the conversation beyond the better known spokesmen like David Walker, Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, James Forten, Sr., Absalom Jones, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin Delany to a dozen important but less familiar figures. Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministers like Samuel Cornish, James W. C. Pennington, Lemuel Haynes, Theodore Wright, and Charles B. Ray and AME Zion preacher Hosea Easton join Maria Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper who voiced women's perspectives. Laymen Charles Remond, William Whipper and, foremost of all, medical doctor James McCune Smith likewise demonstrated how evangelical assumptions interacted with their social and political views.

On occasion Roberts caricatures white abolitionists as deficiently anti-racist, thus failing to comprehend how far this small minority of European-American activists deviated from the proslavery, racist national majority, North and South. They were the first “whites” to interact on grounds of relative equality with free African-Americans who numbered a quarter million by 1860. And their immediatism was, as in black abolitionism, a normative and constant “ought,” not some measure of chronological time. Despite the appropriate attention given to defending and extending voting rights, she also neglects to note those few African-Americans who vied for public office within antislavery third parties. One little recognized consequence of religious disestablishment opened ways for early black independent churches, fraternal societies, and proto-national organizations to incorporate and thus secure property rights and certain legal protections. That phenomenon was critical for the westward expansion of black denominations. This book, however, is not a survey of black church history even as those institutions spread the evangelical ethos across African-American communities. Since it was a meeting at which abolitionists exposed white slaveholding clergy delegates from the United States, triggered by Federick Douglass' lecture tour in Great Britain, the black denominational presence at the international Evangelical Alliance of 1846 in Edinburgh symbolized the very paradigm Roberts highlights.

In the end Roberts shares Albert Raboteau's conclusion that this era produced “two Christian Americas”—one predominantly of black Christians with allies, in this period, like the white come-outer churches, and the other largely of white Christians whose assumption was to insist that the normative American was white and male and that slavery was an acceptable economic system (“African Americans, Exodus, and the American Israel,” in Religion and American Culture: A Reader, 2nd edition, ed. David G. Hackett [New York: Routledge, 2003], 73–87). As others have noted, evangelicalism contained pro-slavery and slave-owning as well as abolitionist and egalitarian adherents and it coexisted with racist and anti-racist scriptural based argumentation. Indeed, there were several versions of “Christian America” vying for attention from the Mormons to northern white Protestants whose general passivity about slavery was rationalized by a warped view of Providence. The churches of the Confederate States of America had another version so that after sectional reconciliation by thwarting Reconstruction their successors co-created a triumphalist “white Christian republic.” In her conclusion Roberts suggests extending her paradigm to post-Civil War African-American Christianity for its continuities and discontinuities. The haunting question a century and a half after this analysis ends is whether, given its contradictory legacies, the trajectory of First and Second Great Awakening evangelicalism can have truly transformative outcomes or whether it is trapped in its black and white histories and in captivity to promoting cultural wars conflict in the United States.