African American Religion: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation

by Hans A. Baer, Merrill Singer (Contributor)

Now in an updated second edition, African American Religion remains an invaluable overview of the great diversity of religious groups within the modern African American community. This plethora of forms reflects a tension that has characterized African American religion since its beginnings—a tension between accommodation to and protest against white society's domination.

Viewing African American sectarianism as a response to racism and social stratification in the larger society, the authors trace the history, beliefs, social organization, and ritual content of religious groups in four types of sects. These include the Black mainline churches; messianic-nationalist sects, such as the Nation of Islam; conversionist sects, such as the Holiness-Pentecostal groups and Primitive Baptists; and thaumaturgical sects, including the Spiritual churches.

For this new edition, the authors have incorporated research that has appeared since the book’s original appearance in 1992 and have added two new chapters—“African Religious Healing and Folk Medicine” and “African American Sacred Music”—because of these topics’ enormous significance to the African American religious experience.

352 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1992

Reviews

[Jim Gulley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Baer and Singer were American anthropologists who argued that the historiography has implied that the religious experience of blacks has been uniform or monolithic, they argue that the black religious experience has been diverse. The antebellum black church was predominantly rural and affiliated with either Baptists or Methodist Episcopals. During WWI and the Great Migration, the black church diversified and became more urban. The Civil Rights Movement was led by the urban black church.

The authors segment the black church in the 20th century into four sects: mainstream, messianic-nationalists, conversionists, and thaumaturgical. The mainstream sects are denominational and stress the social gospel. Messianic-nationalist churches are separatist, identify with the Exodus motif, and are majority Muslim. The conversionists are charismatic, Pentecostal or small Baptist churches. The thaumaturgical sect is oriented toward the prosperity gospel and often dominated by a pastoral cult.