This book is about the crucial role that black religion has played in the United States as an imagined community or a united nation. The book argues that cultural images and interpretations of African American religion placed an enormous burden on black religious capacities as the source for black contributions to American culture until the 1940s. Attention to black religion as the chief bearer of meaning for black life was also a result of longstanding debates about what constituted the “human person” and an implicit assertion of the intellectual inferiority of peoples of African descent. Int ... More

This book is about the crucial role that black religion has played in the United States as an imagined community or a united nation. The book argues that cultural images and interpretations of African American religion placed an enormous burden on black religious capacities as the source for black contributions to American culture until the 1940s. Attention to black religion as the chief bearer of meaning for black life was also a result of longstanding debates about what constituted the “human person” and an implicit assertion of the intellectual inferiority of peoples of African descent. Intellectual and religious capacities were reshaped and reconceptualized in various crucial historical moments in American history because of real world debates about blacks' place in the nation and continuing discussions about what it meant to be fully human. Only within the last half century has this older paradigm of black religion (and the concomitant assumption of a genetic deficiency in “intelligence”) been challenged with any degree of cultural authority. Black innate religiosity had to be denied before sufficient attention could be paid to actual proposals about black equal participation in the nation, though this should not be interpreted as a call for insufficient attention to the role of religion in the lives of African Americans and other ethnic groups.