The Black Church in the African American Experience

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This study is complete with a comprehensive bibliography of literature on the black experience in religion. Funding for the ten-year survey was made possible by the Lilly Endowment and the Ford Foundation.

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Disability Requests Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here. If book has an editor that is different from the article author, include editor's name also. To be sure, certain highly gifted students of the African-American religious experience have been as harsh in arguing a case for the social regressiveness of black churches as any scholar bent on demonstrating that the social gospel preached in white pulpits intentionally masked the exploitation of the greedy money barons who paid the minister.

Biographical/historical information

Franklin Frazier, whose The Negro Church in America is a classic in the field, offered a mixed assessment of his subject. But for him the downside was very far down indeed. First set forth by W. DuBois, then pushed by the white anthropologist Melville Herskovits and the white Marxist historian Eugene Genovese, and subsequently sustained in the work of such younger African-American scholars as John Blassingame, Albert Raboteau, and Margaret Creel Washington, it locates a tradition of African-American resistance in an innovative black Christianity.

More important, the authors bear witness to the continuing effectiveness of that role in the present. The mood of the story they record is most definitely upbeat. Interestingly, Lincoln and Mamiya pay relatively little attention to the shaping of African-American Christianity by the slaves and whatever African past they were able to retain. Nor are they much interested in theological disputes, noting that the impetus for independent black churches did not arise from such differences.

Their study concentrates instead on the social projects of the visible church institutions created by free black Americans. So strong is the descriptive side of this study that readers can make use of it as an encyclopedia of factual information about organized black religion. Forty tables summarizing everything from the annual income of rural churches to the number of choirs in black churches are an essential part of the text.

What Crisis in the Black Church?

Though a threat of blandness often bangs over books as loaded with statistical description as this one, Lincoln and Mamiya manage to keep things provocative. They are engaged, passionately so, with the implications of their findings, and their data are deployed to back up a set of related arguments. They maintain that black churches, taken together, have been in the past, and remain in the present, the most important and the best-managed economic and cultural units of African-American communities.

Routinely, black churches have been intimately linked to political parties, insurance companies, burial societies, schools and colleges, even to theatrical groups. This linkage of the sacred to the secular, according to Lincoln and Mamiya, is much more pronounced in the case of African-American churches than in the case of white churches. Unparalleled opportunities opened to African-Americans as a result of the civil rights struggles of the s, and many of them for the first time discovered strategies for autonomous collective action that bypassed their churches.

Even so, the only partial differentiation between the sacred and secular remains a distinctive feature of African-American life. Black churches, both urban and rural, continue to cooperate with other institutions in African-American communities, especially institutions linked to civil rights protest. In doing so, they provide African-Americans as effectively as any other agency with a sense of racial pride. As they always have done, they make freedom the focus of the gospel message, a message that never acquiesced in the social injustices practiced against black Americans. They are far more respectful of Frazier himself, suggesting gently that had he lived to see the part that churches played in the civil rights movement of the s he died in , he might have changed his mind.

The passivity that Mays and Nicholson charge to black churches is not denied but interpreted as a mood peculiar to the interwar years, one that did not prevail earlier and that did not continue into the recent past. There is no question, of course, about the central role of black churches in shaping the culture of African-Americans. Statistics about black churches, as Lincoln and Mamiya lament, are unreliable. However, scholars, aided by pollsters, can demonstrate with reasonable certainty that African-Americans are more attached to their churches than any ethnically identifiable group of white Americans.

Account Options

Seventy-eight percent of African-Americans claim to be churched, and of these, according to estimates of Lincoln and Mamiya, 80 percent belong to one of the independent black denominations covered in their survey. These are, to be sure, impressive figures, but the conclusion to be drawn from them is far from self-evident. Readers can quickly calculate from the statistics that a lot of African-Americans are either unchurched, belong to largely white Protestant churches, or are part of religious movements that are left at the margins of this volume, such as Muslims, Roman Catholics, and various cultic movements of the sort once profitable to Daddy Grace and Father Divine.

When we further remember that a large majority of the members of African-American churches are women, perhaps as high as 80 percent in some cases, we are apt to suspect that the community now encompassed by the independent black churches is less broad than the authors indicate. This study is complete with a comprehensive bibliography of literature on the black experience in religion. Funding for the ten-year survey was made possible by the Lilly Endowment and the Ford Foundation.

Lincoln and Mamiya have compiled the results of a massive year study, using surveys, interviews, and other research techniques, on the state of the black church urban and rural in the U. The authors echo Durkheim in their assertion that religion among black Americans particularly is a social i. They propose a dialectical model of the black church, examined with a grounding in the history of the seven principal black denominations and then by topic. The respective situations of rural versus urban churches are examined in detail, both their structure and dynamics as well as the varying role of the clergy in them.

The authors discuss who has--and has not--been affected by liberation theology, as distinct from politics and the civil rights movement.

They touch on the economics of black churches, and chapters address the issues of women clergy, the relationship of the black churches to modern youth the first "unchurched" generation of young blacks and the multiple consequences stemming from that lack of affiliation , the evolving role of music as a unifying or isolating force, and the challenges facing the black church. Although the book is necessarily heavy on sociological data, the general reader as well as the scholar will find a wealth of history, information, and insight on a pivotal American phenomenon. This is a comprehensive resource book developed from a ten-year field study that investigated the black church as it relates to the history of African Americans and to contemporary black culture.

The information listed is a powerful and extremely useful tool in giving researchers an in-depth look into the church's relationships to politics, economics, women attitudes of clergy as pastors , youth, music, civil rights, and trends for the next century. The study contains an extensive bibliography. Highly readable, well written, and researched, this book is a necessary purchase for scholars and specialists in the field. Unfortunately, the cost may limit its audience to them alone.

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