Eddie Claude has produced an incisive and meticulous examination of African American religion. His Uncommon Faith: A Pragmatic Approach to African American Religion is based on the George H. Shiver lectures that the author delivered at Stetson University in 2016. Glaude explains the distinction and formation of African American religion through an intellectually rich account of philosophical pragmatism. In so doing, he argues for a distinctive, compelling view of what constitutes African American religion and how scholars might approach its study.

The book is executed in three moves: the first provides Glaude's original conceptual account of pragmatism through its relevance for understanding African American religions. In the second, Glaude explains why declension narratives claiming Black religion abandoned some authentic highpoint during the Great Migrations misconstrues the secularization that emerged during this time. He ends, finally, with interpreting religion through W. E. B. Du Bois's response to tragedy, an approach that rejects easy recourse to spiritual comfort in the midst of extreme loss (43).

It would be difficult to undertake a study of pragmatism without mention of John Dewey, so this is precisely how Glaude develops his discussion of pragmatism. Acknowledging Dewey's indelible role in the genealogy of pragmatism, Glaude affirms Dewey's axiom that philosophy should address the real problems afflicting human society rather than ignoring these in pursuit of strictly abstract intellection. This emphasis on positively impacting the practical concerns of human society is foundational for the author. He connects this imperative of resolving real word challenges to the historical forms of African American religions. Glaude never reduces Black life to struggle or suffering. He does rightly note, however, that the suffering induced by extreme loss (forced displacement through the slave trade, state-sanctioned violence, and mass incarceration are important examples) structures contexts that powerfully shape the imagination and agency Black people have rendered.

Glaude carefully distinguishes African American religion from African American religious life. Scholars who study African American religion, he observes, do not typically engage with “the enduring and deep-seated dispositions tethered to a transformative ideal” that constitute what Glaude terms “black religious attitudes” (7). But these are precisely the workings that must be explored to appreciate what is uncommon and valuable about African American religion as a phenomenon that transcends particular sects, denominations, and religion more broadly.

In relationship to this last point, Glaude also foregrounds Dewey's shift from seeking exceptional origins of the religious quality of experience to asserting that any dimension of human life (so, not necessarily religion) might prompt this religious quality of experience—reading a book, surviving a tragedy, or discovering friendship. This is central to Glaude's approach to studying African American religion, as it unsettles what typically passes as a presumption. Most studies of African American religion, for instance, have privileged Christianity (more specifically, Protestantism) to interpret the history of Black religion—the role of Methodism among Blacks who were enslaved is a common example. Such accounts easily convey the sense that African Americans owe a special debt to Christianity especially and to religious traditions generally for equipping them to survive and thrive in a world beset by systemic adversity. By this style of interpretation, African Americans find resources in religion as such to conquer challenges and achieve liberation. Glaude acknowledges that Christianity has often functioned in consonance with Black empowerment. He intervenes in the methodology of studying Black religion, however, to emphasize the cultural history of agency, vision, and critical resistance that is in no way reducible to organized religion. As a consequence, Glaude foregrounds not a particular religion but rather the remarkable human strivings of African Americans that can be fruitfully examined to appreciate their religious quality. In other words, this is not a laudatory account of religious traditions but rather a skillful and convincing interpretation of Black life qua transcending structures of dehumanization.

By secularization, Glaude means that African Americans tended far less often to share presuppositions about the form and nature of Black religion. This Black religious diversity, he emphasizes, was generative in a positive sense. Indeed, examples of this diversity abound. New communities of African American Muslims emerged during this time (consider the Moorish Science Temple of Americas and the Nation of Islam), as did Black Judaism and so-called alternative movements such as that of Father Divine. In this way, Glaude departs from an earlier trend of interpretation that has viewed the growth of religious sects as an unhealthy competition for more established Black Protestants.

For instance, rather than claiming that Black urban churches failed to meet the social and spiritual demands of their would-be constituents (a thesis popularized decades ago by Gayraud Wilmore and Milton Sernett), Glaude proposes that scholars have often misinterpreted the evolution of the Black church from the 1800s to the present time. Rather than viewing this history as a narrative of decline from a putative golden age (a retreat from radicalism, as Wilmore argued), Glaude proposes that focusing on the moral language of Black migrants to the North and their efforts to form moral communities is more productive.

Glaude also skillfully intervenes in understanding the essence of African American religion. In his thoughtful reading, this emerges not as a particular set of religious experiences but rather as a pattern of producing and reproducing religious meanings through a persistent faith in the capacity of Black people to muster resolve, to reshape their world, and to transforms their own lives (12 and passim). The result is an “uncommon faith in the capacities of broken people” (52).

Glaude's nimble rendering of African American religion advances an astute methodological orientation, one that will prove fruitful for future scholarship. The book demonstrates both an appreciation for religious studies methods and refined attention to the human qualities and cultural productions that scholars have come to understand as religious formations. Those formations, under Glaude's skillful gaze, are rehumanized here to clarify that African Americans were not redeemed or rescued by Christianity or any other religion. This uncommon account of the religious qualities of Black experience leads us to understand why African American life is not a derivation of religion; rather, African American religion is a product of Black humanity.