For all of the rich and methodologically innovative studies on religion among various groups of diasporic Africans in the Americas that have been published in the past three decades, few authors have attempted a thoroughgoing introductory historical survey of African American Christianity. Despite the apparent precision of racial and religious designations, which would seem to exempt plenty of terrain from consideration, the subject proves maddeningly elusive. It thrusts scholars onto the slippery ground of recent theoretical discussions in race theory, on the one hand, which leads one to question what might make a religious tradition racialized. Are black churches included only if they were established and led by African Americans? If not, at what point does a church become a “black church”? What roles do expressive styles, theology, politics, or ecclesiology play in making a church “black”? On the other hand, the topic also skids into movements that might not look terribly Christian or indeed, terribly religious at all. Were hush harbors visited by enslaved people religious gatherings? Was Marcus Garvey or Father Divine a Christian leader?

At the same time, discussion of race is clearly so central to a comprehension of the development of Christianity in the United States that one can scarcely ignore it. The trick is to present a narrative that introduces the reader to the broad historical sweep while still keeping in play the complexities and ongoing contestations over the subject. Paul Harvey's spry and succinct survey is a welcome addition to the teaching toolkit. His study forefronts the paradox of the black church as both an identifiable tradition, one bound by varying modes of racial oppression, and an internally divided entity. Ably synthesizing the findings of recent monographic literature, Harvey offers a rich and complex history that stresses the role of Christianity as a politically contested strategy for cultural survival. Ultimately, Harvey argues, African American historical engagement with Christianity not only kept slave and free communities alive; it also resulted in a host of distinctive cultural products, especially music, through which religion itself was redefined.

Although his focus is on North America, Harvey steps the reader through the journey of religious practices from West and Central Africa beginning in the fifteenth century. He covers the historical encounters with Islam and Christianity on the African continent, as well as the creolized traditions that developed from the coming together of peoples from around the Atlantic World. Harvey ably describes the interrelated processes through which some forms of Christianity became Africanized and the institution of slavery became racialized.

Subsequent chapters turn to the institutional development of Afro-Christianity in North America in its multiple forms: evangelical awakenings and Moravian communitarianism, the role of Christianity in slave insurrections, the elaboration of independent black institutions in the antebellum period, the spread of those churches south after Emancipation, and the reversal of migratory patterns in the early twentieth century that facilitated a thorough blending of northern and southern musical and liturgical patterns. Harvey keeps an eye trained on the efflorescence of new religious movements, such as Pentecostalism, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and Father Divine's International Peace Mission Movement in the 1910s and 1920s, as well as the birth of novel musical and sermonic forms, evidenced in the skills of Mahalia Jackson, Thomas Dorsey, Rosetta Tharpe, and the Reverends J. M. Gates and C. L. Franklin.

Harvey also pays consistent attention to the political import of African American Christianity. Black churches carved out cultural space for collective efforts from the eighteenth century on, and became especially important under Jim Crow policies in the postbellum south. Most attention here, though, is focused on the role of Christian institutions and political practices during the Civil Rights Era. The narrative attains historical density and theological import in discussions of the entwined themes of Exodus, redemption, and salvation that animated social protest. Harvey gives considerable weight to Martin Luther King, Jr., but does not slight the contributions of women such as JoAnn Gibson Robinson and Ella Baker. He underscores the abiding significance of music as both religious expression and social protest, and traces the multiple valences of popular music by Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, and others. Ultimately, Harvey's survey suggests, African American Christianity has been internally diverse, intensely creative, and historically contradictory in its outcomes.

There is much to admire in this tour, and Harvey's book is certainly the best concise overview of the subject to date, one that will work well in undergraduate courses. The author explains historical changes, discusses tensions and disagreements, and raises questions about the future of black churches. The timeline and primary source documents at the end are a useful addition, although I would have liked some discussion of the criteria for their selection.

My main quibbles with the interpretive frame result more from Harvey's close following of trends in recent historiography, which have constrained the focus of scholarship in particular ways. Although Harvey laudably discusses internal debates among African Americans, we hear little of blacks that remained in predominantly white churches, of religious pluralism within black communities prior to the 1990s, and of the enduring interest of black Christians in missionary enterprises and outmigration. We also see scant evidence of the commitment of many black Christians to American imperialism and conservative causes, or to a deep-seated strain of theological fundamentalism that has contributed to current debates about homosexuality in black churches.

These are critical omissions, because the narrative thereby privileges a particular strain of black Christian participation (liberal, progressive, self-governed), and in doing so, sets up the rise of integrated megachurches as competitors to “black churches” as central communal organizations. In doing so, this trajectory (and it is not Harvey's alone) runs the risk of reinscribing the very racial bifurcation that so many African American Christians have sought to dismantle. This fine survey demonstrates the potential dangers of representing a race-based religious perspective. But it also places Harvey in a century-long lineage of authors from Leila Pendleton, Carter Woodson, and others who have recognized the historical and political value of such an interpretive act.