African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction

An Introduction To African American Religion

Eddie Glaude begins his "Very Short Introduction" to "African American Religion" with a story. Glaude was raised in a small town on the Mississippi coast and attended a predominantly African American Catholic Church as a child. Following Vatican II, Glaube attended an inter-denominational gathering of various African American churches at a local gospel festival where his church choir was invited to participate. Glaude sat in a crowded pew in the church and experienced for the first time the singing of the black Pentecostal and Baptist traditions. "This was true theater", Glaude recalls, "It took my breath away." During the singing, a large elderly woman sitting next to him "caught the spirit", lost her balance, and tumbled onto the shy youngster next to her shouting, "Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus."

Glaude's youthful experience roughly captures what many Americans probably consider a characteristic of African American religion, "the preacher, the music, and the frenzy". But following this engaging initial story, Glaude's book takes a different course. Glaude distinguishes between "religion as practiced by African Americans" and "African American religion". The former includes many different practices, as African Americans follow different religious traditions including Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, and more in different ways. To identify and describe "African American Religion", Glaude argues, more is required. If there is, in fact, "African American religion" as opposed to African Americans practicing different faiths, it must be found a commonality of African American experience. Glaude finds this commonality in African American history, with its beginning in slavery and the subsequent continued oppression of and discrimination against African Americans in the name of white supremacy. Glaude is the William S. Todd Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University and chair of Princeton's Center for African American Studies.

Taking what he describes as a "pragmatic" approach to African American religion, Glaude identifies three defining ideas. First, Glaude sees African American religion As teaching a "practice of freedom" to open up possibilities closed by white supremacy. Second, Glaude sees African American religion as based on a "sign of difference" in which African Americans deliberately set themselves apart in important ways from the oppression from the majority. Third, Glaude sees African American religion as having an "open-ended orientation" as its practitioners look to a better world "beyond the constraints of now." Glaude writes:

"The preacher, the frenzy, and the music (what I experienced in that small church house on the coast of Mississippi) stand as just one dimension of a complex religious response that has made possible freedom dreams, that has rejected the evil of white supremacy, and has insisted that the future remains open. The phrase 'African American religion' turns our attention to this wonderful human response to the ordeal of living."

Glaude describes three forms of "African American religion" following his delineation of the topic. He discusses the practice of conjuring and its historical and continued impact. He offers three chapters on African American Christianity, covering its development during the years of slavery, its change in character with Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Great Migration, and its current status, with a culture that aims, with dubious success at "color blindness." Glaude tries to show how African American religion has changed and evolved with changing social conditions and demographics. In his final chapter, Glaude discusses the rise of African American Islam, arguing that its appeal is based upon a rejection of African American Christianity as overly-accommodating to an oppressive culture. This succinct chapter offers a perceptive overview of several different strands of African American Islam. In a brief conclusion, Glaude questions whether "African American religion" will remain a proper descriptive category given changes in African American life and changes in the culture.

I learned a great deal from this book but want to offer some comments. The writing style in the book varies from the personal and immediately engaging, as in the opening material, to the stilted and overly-schematized. The study becomes overly-conceptualized at times. The historical and the religious discussions frequently are insightful and fascinating and Glaude relates them well to history and to African American experience. Still, for a short book with limited space, I wanted to learn more about the religions themselves and about different varying approaches during a particular time that might be considered "African American religion". I thought Glaude was frequently too short with the views of different churches and leaders and that he spent too much space on historical events, such as slavery, the Civil War, and the Great Migration, that are amply covered in other books. In other words, the book leans too heavily on social history and too lightly on religion. Finally, I found the book in places anachronistic and polemical. Glaude tends to stress throughout feminist related themes when, by his own account, such themes were neglected or not well-received by African American religion during much of the time covered by the book. The polemical portions of the book, I thought, arose when Glaude downplays or tries to explain away parts of African American religion that took a more accomodationist, apolitical stance to social issues than Glaude believes warranted. To summarize these comments, I think the distinction between the "religions of African Americans" and "African American religions" on which the book turns is useful but too sharply drawn.

This book is thoughtful and provocative. Readers interested in American religion or in African American studies will enjoy and learn a great deal from Glaude's "Very Short Introduction" in the outstanding series from Oxford University Press.

Robin Friedman1