According to the Census Bureau's 2006 American Community Survey, more than 1.3 million African immigrants currently reside in the United States. While the figure represents only 3.6 percent of the total foreign-born population, its significance is augmented when one considers that nearly three-quarters of African immigrants are recent arrivals and that, as a group, they constituted 17.7 percent of all legal immigrants since 2000. If the influx of increasing numbers of Africans has largely gone unnoticed, even less attention has been given to their religious identities, much less any impact that the latter phenomena might have, both in the lives of the individual immigrants and in their communities.

African Immigrant Religions in America, a collection of 14 essays edited by Jacob Olupona and Regina Gemignani, is the first book to explore in depth the religious traditions and institutions that have accompanied the recent wave of African immigration. The volume, which includes the work of scholars from the fields of theology, religious studies, history, sociology, and anthropology, is an outgrowth of the African Immigrant Religious Communities Project at Harvard University, a Ford Foundation-supported initiative of Olupona's that combines research of with support for the religious communities (for example, facilitating access to information, networking opportunities, and interfaith dialogue).

The volume aims to explore “the nature of the African religious communities, what they aim to accomplish, and their wider social impact” (3) and does so by examining the five types of African religious traditions present in the immigrant communities according to Olupona's taxonomy: “(1) African Pentecostal and charismatic churches, (2) African Initiated Churches (AICs), (3) specialized African ministries within major (‘mainline’) U.S. denominations, (4) African Islamic traditions, and (5) African Indigenous Religions” (31). While groups belonging to the first four categories are covered extensively in the various chapters which, because of the varied perspectives of their respective authors, felicitously overlap and complement each other, it is rather disappointing that the fifth group, which includes representatives of traditional African religions like the West African babalawos (diviners), is not. The very reasons Olupona adduces for deeming religious communities of this type “most problematic” are precisely why it would have been invaluable to have included them: “the interconnection of religion and culture in African society” and the fact that “traditional religious beliefs and practices often manifest themselves in a variety of ways in African immigrant life journeys” (32). As Stephen Ellis and Gerrie ter Haar demonstrated in their study of the influence of religion on politics in Africa, religious ideas, especially those derived from indigenous faiths and experiences, show what people actually think about the world and how they deal with it (Worlds of Power: Religious Thought and Political Practice in Africa).

Another regrettable omission in the book is any in-depth consideration of the shift, documented extensively by Philip Jenkins, in Christianity's center of gravity from Europe and North America to Africa and Latin America (The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity). African leaders are not only becoming influential voices within Christian churches with global reach, but in many cases they are exporting their theological visions to Europe and North America and transforming the very religious communities which had, in an earlier period, sent missionaries to Africa. Archbishop Peter Akinola, primate of the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion), for example, not only had chaplaincies ministering to the approximately 150,000 Nigerian immigrants in America, but, through network relationships forged through those ministries, he gradually acquired under his jurisdiction more than 60 parishes in the United States that have broken from the Episcopal Church over theological differences. The Kenyan, Rwandan, and Ugandan provinces of the Anglican Communion have similarly ordained bishops for missionary endeavors in the United States. Surely these are all manifestations of African immigrant religion — and rather influential ones at that — which deserve inclusion, especially when one considers that the gospel preached by these missionaries is one that has been appropriated by Africans; indeed, its reading has been influenced by certain characteristic elements of their religious experience, including a greater openness to supernatural and mystical aspects that largely had been forgotten in post-Enlightenment Western Christianity.

These two shortcomings notwithstanding, African Immigrant Religions in America is a significant contribution, laying the foundations for what promises to be a rich field of study. Several of the chapters merit special mention. The essay on West African Pentecostal congregations by Akintunde E. Akinade and the one on the global missions of AICs by Elias K. Bongmba are both welcome additions to a hitherto all-too-limited body of scholarly literature. The history of the Nigerian Muslim Association in the United States by Yushau Sodiq and the struggles of West African Muslims in New York to manage their relations within the larger Muslim community as well as with non-Muslim African Americans by Linda Beck are both compelling case studies, as is Worku Nida's ethnographic portrait of an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian parish in Los Angeles, although the latter could have been improved if its author had more thoroughly examined the connection between the divisions within the congregation and political developments in the Horn of Africa. The theoretical piece by David Daniels, with its historiography and its call for a serious engagement of African immigrant churches by the Black Church will certainly provoke much discussion among both. The conclusion by the two editors not only summarizes the findings of the contributors; it helpfully outlines only the contours of future research as well as the conceptual tools that will be needed to understand its eventual findings.

As the first important work on the subject, African Immigrant Religions in America inevitably suffers from an excess of ambition. Nonetheless, within its limits, the volume will be an important resource for both policymakers and academics seeking to understand a burgeoning and diverse group of religious communities and their experiences as they bridge the societies from which they trace their origins and the polities in which they are now an established presence.