The supportive blurb Robert Orsi supplies for the back cover of Barbara Savage's new book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us, promises a “new history of African American religion” that refuses to present that history as a “sacred narrative” but instead offers to grapple with the “powerful but ambivalent Christian legacy in African American life.” This new history, in fact, has been emerging for some time. Savage's work is one of many in recent years that attempts to place established African American Protestant churches within a broader cultural context that sees Christianity's centrality in black life as a deeply contested reality. For many years, black religious history in the United States seemed to consist of three important moments: the conversion of many of those enslaved to evangelical Protestantism before and during the Civil War, the rise of black denominations during the nineteenth century, and the crucial participation of black churches and religious leaders who helped define the civil rights movement for the nation and the world. From “the invisible institution” of Al Raboteau's seminal Slave Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) to the increasing numbers of monographs that cover black religious life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stories of a heroic and often political “black church” have shaped how we view all of black religious history.

But in recent years, scholars have increasingly argued, as Curtis Evans does in his marvelously meticulous The Burden of Black Religion, that the very notion of a black church “has obscured . . . differences among African Americans” and “rendered invisible or regressive those black religious groups and practices that do not fit” the broadly shared expectations that black churches be “progressive or prophetic” (165). Like other important recent works including Judith Weisenfeld's Hollywood Be Thy Name (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) and Anthea Butler's Women in the Church of God in Christ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), the two books reviewed here focus most directly on the decades leading up to the Second World War in their efforts to remake the study of (black) religion in the United States. Black religion became a modern culture in the increasingly urban and pluralistic terrain of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, and any study that grapples with those years must navigate a black religious culture that, while still defined by prominent Christian congregations, was increasingly shaped by those outside the sway of established churches and their male leadership.

Indeed, even though Evans's history of Americans’ conception of black religion spans the time from the antebellum period to the 1950s, the first inspiration for this important study was his initial focus on the interwar period. Following advice he received from his graduate school professors to “look at sociological studies of African American religion in the 1930s and 1940s,” Evans found himself transfixed by “black sociologists” of that period who insisted that African Americans were not “innately religious” despite what a (white) public might believe (vii). In his early chapters Evans registers how this widespread belief emerged from the “romantic racialists” of the 1830s when black people were seen in the eyes of white (and many black) missionaries as “emotionally extravagant” in their religion. After the War, white (religious) elites north and south saw the newly emancipated as “primitive or culturally inferior” because of their distinctive emphasis on “bodily religious expression” that made African Americans “unfit for productive citizenship in a reconstructing nation” (65, 68).

The slightly overstuffed narrative Evans offers of how primitivism shaped white conceptions of African Americans since slavery and later shaped widely held white perceptions of black cultural and biological inferiority is not entirely new. But what sets Evans's work apart is his ability to trace how “older notions of a unique [black] spirituality” would eventually combine with the rise of a new “social scientific notion of ‘the black church’” in the thought of W. E. B. Du Bois (142). Du Bois helped establish more than any other thinker how black religion would be understood by several generations of black artists, intellectuals, and activists. Informed observers like Charles Long have long gestured at the importance of Du Bois and the rise of social scientific approaches in the 1930s and '40s to the very emergence of the study of black religion in the modern period. But where Savage declares that “there is no such thing as the ‘black church’” at the outset of her book (9), Evans carefully illuminates how a Du Bois deeply reliant on “German social thought” almost single-handedly created “the developing language of the singular Negro Church” in ways that linked social science with long-held notions of an intrinsic religiosity within black people (162). After this exploration of Du Bois in chapter 4, Evans in later chapters further demonstrates how black artists and activists managed to extend these notions of a distinct black spirituality into their various cultural and political domains. Typically they managed to transmute black religion into a folk culture to be exploited for art and identity while overturning Victorian mores of the past. “During the first three decades of the twentieth century,” Evans observes, “the modernist movement reconfigured the meaning of the primitive” in ways that “challenged received canons of artistic form and representation” (188–189).

At times, I wonder whether the ambiguously referenced “burden” of black religion Curtis pronounces in the title of his impressive first book is actually the burden Curtis and many of us feel as contemporary scholars of (black) religion in the United States. For scholars lodged in secular academies, the most identifiable people from the past are scholars and artists like Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston, who found themselves by choice and temperament on the outskirts of established religious communities. When many of these observers (with the notable and partial exception of Hurston) considered the role black congregations play in society, they saw institutions that were central to black life but mismatched for the modern age. Echoing Milton Sernett's Bound for the Promised Land (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), Evans argues that the Great Migration helped shape these perceptions. It helped foster the new expectations of “the church's mission,” which generated “scholarly studies on black [religious] life” and pushed “black religious and secular leaders” in the North to agitate for church authorities to move their congregations “from internal to external concerns” in an increasingly tumultuous world (172).

But however Evans ultimately understands this burden he references, to what extent can Evans truly separate the burden of black religion from blackness itself in a land where, as Michael Gomez has so ably described in Exchanging Our Country Marks (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), black racial formation has coincided with and reinforced the Christianization of the descendants of Africans? These questions are never explicitly answered, but what is clear is that in focusing on the study and interpretation of black religion in U.S. culture and how it is perceived by the outside world, men's voices are privileged over women's. The focus on how black religion is interpreted serves to obscure the inner and lived religious lives of everyday black believers in favor of outside observers and the externally recognized (male) representatives of the faith.

Savage in fact offers a more focused presentation of how early scholars began to interpret and understand black religion's status just as it was emerging as a modern culture in the early decades of the twentieth century. Savage's treatment of Benjamin Mays, Charles Johnson, Carter Woodson, Arthur Fauset, and Du Bois has more narrative drive than Evans's account with a keener sense of the internal dynamics of black (religious) life in the years of the Great Migration. Savage's story does not become enmeshed in complicated genealogies that connect differing conceptions of “the black church” to older claims of an intrinsic black religiosity. Instead, Savage more directly establishes the political stakes for the early interpreters of black religion in the early decades of the twentieth century. For Savage, segregation and inequity are never far from her analysis of “the politics of black religion.” In her analysis, “the black church” is an “illusion” that Savage bracingly declares from the outset of her noteworthy book is in fact “a political, intellectual, and theological construction” that ultimately serves as “an all-purpose stand-in for the dearth of other black institutions” (9).

At the same time, Savage manages to offer a fuller and more textured picture of black religious culture even while she analyzes how black religion has been constructed, studied, and interpreted in a politically fraught environment. She does this in part by focusing on the practical assessments of women leaders like Nannie Burroughs and Mary McLeod Bethune as they considered the role black churches might play in the public square even as their religious commitments shaped their own pursuit of civic engagement. Savage's portraits of civically minded religious women and her insistence in seeing “southern black liberal Protestants” like Benjamin Mays as religious actors and exponents in their own right paved the way to better understand religiously inflected activism to come. In focusing on these portraits Savage invites us into the inner dynamics of twentieth-century black religious culture in ways Evans's account cannot.

But even as Savage highlights the forgotten (religious) leaders who paved the way for the modern civil rights movement in the postwar era, she is not as surefooted in her later chapters as she is in the early ones. As she casts the black freedom movement as a “religious rebellion,” Savage sketches how participants in political struggle saw their (religious) leaders, their comrades and themselves as Christ-like figures who, whether they were religious or not, saw themselves, in their bodily sacrifice, as instruments for American redemption. Her attempt to knit together believers and nonbelievers within a common language of activism carries tremendous promise for the future study of religion and the civil rights period, and it leavens a far too truncated treatment of the “politics of black religion” in the postwar period. She acknowledges that much of the “burgeoning historical literature about the civil rights movement” simply accepts the “political role of religion . . . as a ‘natural’ part of black life” (273). Here Savage's book ultimately fails to frame the civil rights movement with the precision she brings to understanding the early figures of Du Bois, Woodson, and Mays. I wonder whether an approach like Evans's, which more forcefully considers the origins of the presumed naturalness of black religion, might have anchored a more focused analysis for the postwar period in Savage's account.

In any case, readers can see a certain failure in imagination from the very beginning of her book when Savage describes the religiously inflected Southern-based freedom movement of the 1950s and '60s as a “startling departure” from the political narratives of African Americans we have for the prewar period (2). But instead of calling the “religious revival” that marks much of political activism of the 1950s a “miracle” that seems detached from what came before, we need more analysis of how Southerners like Howard Thurman, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King redefined churches for the political square and managed to sacralize political activity in ways religious authorities like J. H. Jackson of Chicago would contest.

But, whatever their limitations, both of these recent studies, along with Weisenfeld's recent innovative work on black religion's representation in American film, have been impressive in their deconstruction of the central singular narratives of “the black church” that have guided the study of black religious culture since its inception. They mirror the work of Ann Taves's Fits, Trances, and Visions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999) (not to mention Leigh Eric Schmidt's Hearing Things [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000]), which deconstructs the modern study of religion in the United States, even as she contextualizes the emergence of an emphasis on (religious) experience among progenitors of evangelicals, religious liberals, and academic psychologists. But unlike Taves, they have largely left those who are the object of study mute before their scholarly gaze; their voices are partially sacrificed to more fully render the contested nature of black religion in an increasingly pluralistic age.

In the end perhaps no study has embraced the lively eclecticism of black religion in the twentieth century like Colleen McDannell's commentary on government-sponsored photographs of black religious institutions as found in various urban locales during the 1930s and '40s in the concluding chapters of her peerless Picturing Faith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). Specialists in the study of black religion have yet to develop a synthetic history that appreciates the unruly quality of African American religious culture while recognizing how a wide spectrum of religious belief and disbelief, identity and practice shared a common language and sense of exilic reality in the Babylon that was America. Even so, these two studies in their deconstruction of “the black church” represent a new direction in the study of black religion. They lay the groundwork for new critical histories that more fully grapple with the variegated quality of black religious culture in the modern era.