John M. Giggie's focus is the religious culture of rural African Americans in the black-majority counties of the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the Great Migration to the urban South and North. He contends that during this period Delta blacks “developed a surprisingly rich and complex sacred culture” (5) that “enabled them to blunt – but never completely banish – the prescriptive power of white supremacy” (7) by making “strides toward building a world of their own design” (10). Giggie investigates the region's most important African American religious groups and explores how impoverished rural blacks experienced, understood and shaped their religion. He argues that religion infused the everyday lives of the region's African Americans. Consequently, they often discerned religious meaning and significance in settings beyond formal church gatherings. Far from monolithic or static, black religion in the Delta was diverse, sometimes riven by conflict, and in a constant state of flux.

Giggie draws from an impressive range of sources including church and denominational records, African American newspapers, personal papers, autobiographies, recorded music, and interviews with former slaves by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Aware of problems with some materials, such as inaccuracies in transcribing lyrics and interviews, and interviewer bias or misinterpretation, Giggie usually selects and treats sources with care.

In five chapters the book discusses the influence of the railroad on religion, the impact on churches of the growth of black fraternal orders, consumerism and religion, material culture and religion, and the development of the African American Holiness movement. Giggie demonstrates that while the railroad influenced the location of some churches and facilitated regional religious events, it also appeared in religious visions and chanted sermons as blacks applied the metaphor of railroad travel to spiritual journeys and religious experience. Fraternal orders offered material benefits, such as health and burial insurance, and a sense of identity, connectedness and worth, but they also borrowed from religious forms. Concerned that these orders absorbed time and money formerly given to the church, churches condemned them and undermined some orders by adopting insurance schemes. Surviving orders help stem church opposition by indicating their subordination to the church. Churches and clergy took advantage of rising consumerism to raise money by selling or endorsing products, and religion also shaped ideas about appropriate goods for a Christian home. The nondenominational Holiness movement developed in the 1890s in response to the growing formalism and materialism of Baptist and Methodist churches and advocated a return to the simplicity of early Christianity. Nevertheless, many Holiness leaders were unable to separate themselves entirely from the culture they criticized. For example, they established burial societies and accepted some commercial advertising.