This useful survey and analysis of African American religious history, meant for introductory classrooms and general readers interested in getting the lay of the land, represents what I would call the fourth generation of scholarship now in the field.

The first began with the “race historians” and early denominational chroniclers of the nineteenth century, and extended through DuBois, Benjamin Mays, and others who wrote in a sociological vein about “the black church” and “the Negro's God.” Their pioneering work came when few took it seriously, not surprising since DuBois's own masterwork of historical scholarship, Black Reconstruction, was not given the dignity of even a short notice in the American Historical Review. But their studies, emerging from the era of Negro History, remain indispensable today.

The second came out of the civil rights years, and produced works of black church history (more critical than the earlier generation's) and black theology, from the likes of Gayraud Wilmore, James Washington, and James Cone. These scholars sought to uncover how “the black church” might uncover its potential social power, and realize that power in the social world. Most of the authors here were themselves products of “the black church,” as were the women who responded to them by creating ideas now known as womanist theology.

Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (Oxford, 1978) typified the work of the third generation, which also featured major books such as James Campbell's Songs of Zion (Oxford, 1994), Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent (Cambridge, 1992), and Mechal Sobel's Trabelin’ On (Greenwood, 1978). Much (although not all) of their scholarship recovered the religious history of enslaved (or, in Higginbotham's case, recently freed) peoples, and in Campbell's case the work internationalized itself to provide comparisons to South Africa. Other scholars followed in that train, with works comparing “black religion” in the Caribbean and Brazil to that of America. My own textbook, Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), provided in part a summary of the work of that entire generation. Afro-Christianity remained the main focus, even if ideas about what constituted “religion” or Christianity per se were broadening and encompassing a more diverse array of expression. Studies illuminating cultural expressions, especially in conjure, music, and the arts, also played a key role in this cultural turn of American religious history, as Lerone Martin memorably has done recently with Preaching on Wax (New York University Press, 2014).

We are now, I believe, entering a fourth generation of work, including this thoughtful and engaging survey text as well as powerful recent specialized academic works such as those by Sylvester Johnson, Judith Weisenfeld, and others. The influence of questions from the discipline of religious studies (and that discipline's constant grappling with the question, “what is religion?”) on this work is clear, as it is in Bailey's text. He writes: “African American religions are a diverse group of beliefs and practices that emerged from the diasporic experiences of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade that forcefully and tragically dispersed people of African descent across the western hemisphere.” He then points out that “although the ‘diversity’ of African American religions is regularly invoked, the presumption of a shared outlook on life stretching back across black communities through space and time is resilient” (xii). And thus the trope of “the black church” lives on rhetorically. Bailey's is one of many recent works to try to deconstruct that image and give us a richer, more variegated portrayal of the past and present.

Bailey does so with careful scholarship and writing, showing multiple sides of many issues, from the issue of African and American identities in early America, to the relationship of Christian and other traditions in African American life, to the complexities of interpreting Malcolm X's autobiography after the revelations provided in Manning Marable's posthumously published biography of the man and of his agenda-driven amanuensis. Like many other works in what I have called this fourth generation, Bailey devotes more attention than previous scholars did to non-Protestant and non-Christian groups, from the excellent discussion of black Catholics in the chapter “African-American Religious Institutions,” to the extensive case study of The United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors about two-thirds of the way into the book, in a rewarding chapter entitled “African American New Religious Movements.”

Does it matter that some sections of the “African American New Religious Movements” chapter, including that just mentioned, are longer than discussions of the Civil Rights Movement, or of black Pentecostals, or other topics historically conceived as the important ones? Instructors looking for a text to use (and I certainly recommend this one highly) will consider such questions. In a sense, this contemporary generation of scholarship assumes much prior knowledge gleaned from the previous work, summarizes it well (as is done here), but then often zooms in on more unusual characters or stories that have been virtually ignored. And in any case, the insights provided in these sections may compel students to think in different ways. For example, in a lucid discussion of the troubled nature of the use of the word “cults,” Bailey states: “There is too much at stake in the self-identity of the ‘mainstream’ to acknowledge that the work ethic of the Nation of Islam is possibly not so different from the ambitions of the Puritans or the early Christian Church” (173). The chapter concludes with a compelling discussion of how “Black NRMs [New Religious Movements] have walked the line between maintaining their distinctiveness and embracing assimilation” (173).

And thus, some unconventional choices on Bailey's part yield insights that come from addressing questions posed by studying those outside the mainstream. For this and many other reasons, this text will serve readers, and classroom instructors, very well.