Black is a Church: Christianity and the Contours of African American Life

"Across four chapters that proceed as chronologically organized episodes, Black is a Church maps the ways in which black American culture and identity has been animated by a particular set of, often unmarked, Protestant logics. In doing so, the book charts the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity constitutive of the content and forms of blackness. As such, Black is a Church accounts for the entangled logics of Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism that coalesced within the modern category of religion and which facilitated the emergence of black subjectivity and social life in North America. Chapter 1 argues that Afro-Protestantism relied upon literary strategies to enunciate itself since the earliest years of its formation. Through slave narratives and spiritual autobiographies, it shows how the content of Protestant Christianity was essential to the establishment of the earliest Black literary forms. Chapter 2 moves from the emergence of Afro-Protestantism to track its heterodox history in the convergence of literature, politics, and religion at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter tracks a set of social movements to reveal how religious aspirations animated early calls for a "race literature" and how "the color line" provided an organizing logic for religious innovations as divergent as the practices of pluralism and Pentecostalism at the century's close. Chapter 3 surveys historical, sociological, and anthropological work during the 1930s and 1940s - focusing especially on the launch of Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture -- all at a moment when the academic study of African American religion and culture reached a degree of critical maturity. Finally, Chapter 4 presents three more recent episodes, across the spheres of scholarship, literature and politics, that illustrate the persistence of Afro-Protestant logics at the turn of the twenty first century"--
In Black is a Church, Josef Sorett maps the ways in which black American culture and identity have been animated by a particular set of Protestant ideas and practices in order to chart the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity essential to the very notion of blackness. In doing so, Sorett reveals the ways that Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism coalesced in the modern category of "religion" and became formative to the emergence of black identity in North America. Black is a Church examines the surprising alliances, peculiar performances, and at times contradictory ideas and complex institutions that shape the contours of black life in the United States. The book begins by arguing that Afro-Protestantism has relied upon literary strategies to explain itself since the earliest years of its formation. Through an examination of slave narratives and spiritual autobiographies, it shows how Protestant Christianity was essential to the establishment of the earliest black literary forms. Sorett then follows Afro-Protestantism's heterodox history in the convergence of literature, politics, and religion at the end of the nineteenth century. And he shows how religious aspirations animated early calls for a "race literature" and "the color line" provided an organizing logic for religious innovations as divergent as pluralism and Pentecostalism. From the earliest literary productions of the eighteenth century to the #BlackLivesMatter movement in thetwenty-first, religion--namely Protestant Christianity--is seen to be at the very center of black life in North America.