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Barbara Savage's book appears at an opportune moment. In the wake of the 2008 presidential election, most Americans will have only one thing in mind when they hear a reference to "the politics of black religion." It will be, of course, the relationship between a prominent black preacher, Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church in Chicago, and his most famous parishioner, Barack Obama. During the campaign a great deal of public talk emerged about the politics of black religion, though even a moment's thought should have raised questions about the unhelpful assumptions at play concerning a singular black religion or a singular politics practiced by black churches. The superficiality of those assumptions opens the door to what this book wants to say.
Although Savage devotes a chapter to the Obama/Wright controversy, her book is primarily about how the civil rights struggle distorted our understanding of the relationship between black churches and politics. She argues that we have come to see the past "through the haze of a post-civil rights consciousness." By examining the dominant narrative of black churches and their political work, which in the decades before 1960 was viewed overwhelmingly as a failed project, Savage shows how better history might provide more modest expectations about what churches can contribute to the political sphere.
Savage makes three main points to demonstrate that the "nexus between black religion and politics" has necessarily been a strained one. First, she notes that the choices that people make about their religious lives are the most privately informed and freely made, thus making it very difficult for black churches to "provide the ideological cohesion needed for collective political mobilization." Second, black churches, as overwhelmingly Protestant institutions, are among the most local, decentralized, and idiosyncratic of social organizations. Therefore, Savage convincingly claims that there is no such thing as "the black church." The term is rather a metaphor that has taken on a life of its own (one needs only to witness how commonly the expression is used to represent what is actually a great diversity of black Christian churches, not to mention non-Christian groups). The "black church" implies an entity with organized power, but in reality it is a political, theological, and intellectual construction that proclaims unity and homogeneity while masking diversity and independence among black religious institutions and believers.
Third, Savage contends that to call black churches into political duty to uplift African Americans is to rely on an institution that was and remains largely male-led and female-dominated. Although Savage notes that this is the case with most religions, she believes that the male-female dynamic creates special problems for blacks, aggravating in particular "persisting sensitivities about the strength and substantiality of black women and black male authority and masculinity." Here I presume she means the acute worries of black men about wielding authority in black-owned institutions in light of a long history of black men having little control over various aspects of their lives because of slavery and Jim Crow segregation (what James Baldwin called the emasculation of black manhood, particularly in the South with its history of lynching).
Most of the book is a straightforward chronological narrative of 20th-century interpretations of the role of black churches, beginning with the early studies of black religion by W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Benjamin Mays and ending with a discussion of Obama and Wright. Savage writes in an accessible and dispassionate style. She uses mostly formal studies of black religion, although she sometimes adds newspaper and journal articles from black communities to flesh out various figures' reflections on black religion. She also draws on memoirs and autobiographies, especially in her chapter on the civil rights movement, to convey some of the personal religious convictions and inclinations of various individuals.
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