Two salient characteristics have shaped scholarship about the institutional infrastructure of African American Christianity. Emphasis has been placed on the seven large historically black religious bodies of Baptists, Methodists, and pentecostals, and the smaller but influential enclaves of African Americans in largely white Presbyterian, Congregational, Episcopal, and Methodist Episcopal denominations. Blacks in these church organizations, despite their doctrinal diversity and worship styles, embraced a public theology aimed at challenging and destroying racist institutions and practices that oppressed them. Edward J. Robinson in his study, however, demonstrates that the religious landscape among African Americans included a broad range of clergy and churches whose perspectives and practices showed a remarkable divergence from the standard narrative that scholars of black religion have advanced. Like an older and recently revised literature about new urban religions, Robinson's research on the black Churches of Christ, though grounded in the rural American South, presents African American Christianity as a multifaceted phenomenon. His scholarship adds to the complexity of black religious expression and belief and discourages scholars from making easy generalizations about these experiences.

He focuses on the Southern-based Churches of Christ, a majority-white religious body that emerged out of the Stone-Campbell movement. Their Restorationist doctrine required them to emulate the beliefs and practices of the early New Testament church. In 1906, the C of C parted with the Disciples of Christ because the latter, whom they described as “digressives,” used musical instruments in worship and organized missionary societies to facilitate evangelism. Because the C of C believed that these and other practices lacked scriptural support, they adopted an ecclesiology based on biblicism and radical exclusivism. Hence, all churches, grounded in man-made traditions, were inauthentic, and only the C of C was truly Christian.

African Americans joined the Stone-Campbell movement both before and after the Civil War and comprised a small but significant segment of the Disciples of Christ. Some, like Marshall Keeble, transferred to the C of C and embraced its beliefs. Despite the influence of such black clergy as his father-in-law, Samuel Womack, white editors and writers played a larger role in shaping Keeble's understanding and regurgitation of C of C doctrine. Through his powerful preaching, he attracted black converts and spearheaded black congregations primarily in the American South and in a few urban areas in the North and West. Additionally, Keeble was unimpressed with the emancipationist ethos and institutional independence that characterized black churches. He found little in the black religious heritage important enough to influence or inform his unyielding biblicist and radical exclusivist perspectives. He also criticized black pentecostalism for its emphasis on the Holy Spirit and its failure to embrace the primacy of water baptism after conversion. Keeble consciously set black C of C adherents in opposition to the salient attributes of black mainline and pentecostal churches.

Keeble distinguished himself and his colleagues from other black religionists in two other significant areas. First, the C of C, lacking a formal ecclesiastical structure, relied on its leading journals and college lectureships to define and enforce its orthodoxy. Keeble espoused the views of these Southern white biblicists, most of whom defended racial segregation in both sacred and secular settings. Keeble uncritically imparted their religious and scriptural interpretations to black and white listeners, seldom refining what he learned to address the segregated situation in which he ministered. Second, his successful evangelism drew from the financial contributions of southern whites who willingly financed Keeble's revivals and aided his establishment of separate and dependent black congregations. Though some black preachers whom he trained believed that no biblical basis existed for segregation, Keeble offered only tepid encouragement to these voices of dissent and rarely raised any protest himself. The irony of his acceptance of C of C doctrine lay in Keeble's private admiration of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his liberationist preaching and activism, and his public declaration that this Baptist believer was not authentically Christian.

Robinson exhaustively enumerates nearly every revival that Keeble and his black colleagues conducted. Despite the energy they expended, many of the congregations they started remained small, and several eventually closed. The lack of demographic analysis leaves unexplored the consequences of Keeble's church-planting strategy. His dependence on random assistance from white C of C supporters prevented him from identifying target populations and areas with greater growth potential than the disparate places where he preached. Robinson also examines Keeble within the restricted confines of and interactions with C of C blacks and whites. Though derisive of other churches, he and other blacks in the Churches of Christ lived in the same segregated communities as the persons whose congregations they derided. How did they function as community residents where they confronted the same privations and humiliations as fellow African Americans? What was their place in an all-black social order where they battled and resisted the white hegemony and violence heaped on this proscribed population? Did Keeble consciously offer a salve or an emotional escape from this social misery? Whatever the answer to these questions, Robinson's study of black Churches of Christ broadens the discourse about the black religious experience and discourages any easy generalizations about the complicated history of African American Christianity.