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.

The first part of her story treats African American leaders, some religious and others secular, who sought to mobilize black churches in the early 20th century, when the infrastructure of black life was lacking in so many other areas. All of these leaders were deeply critical of black churches for many reasons: otherworldliness, outdated theology, lack of a social program, ecstatic or "emotional" religious practice, and overchurching seemed to be the most consistent. What they primarily wanted from black churches, they did not get. Savage concludes her first chapter with the apt point: "So beneath all their complaints [here she especially refers to Du Bois, Woodson, and Mays] about the churches and their hopes for reconfiguration lay the sad reality that these small local institutions could not bear the enormous political responsibilities being laid upon them."

Although Savage knows why black leaders fastened on the church as an instrument in need of reformation and called on it to help in the uplift of the race, her straightforward narrative and her eagerness to criticize these leaders for what they failed to see (from our contemporary vantage point) reveals a lack of appreciation for the pressing weight that segregation and racial oppression placed on the shoulders of blacks and the existential pain of living in a society that denigrated blackness. As I try to explain in my book The Burden of Black Religion (2008), any discussion of black religion by black leaders has to take into account broader cultural images of black religion held by whites and also the demands that were placed on religion as a distinctive expression of blacks' potential contribution to American culture.

The book's middle section, devoted to the lives of Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Benjamin Mays, emphasizes the ways in which these individuals combined a deep Christian faith with political and social work. Savage suggests that their involvement in educational reform in black communities and their critiques of churches and their leaders grew directly from their Christian commitments. She argues that Bethune, Burroughs, and Mays "combined a missionary impulse with a public ministry founded on sacrifice and service, in education and politics, both within and outside black religious institutions," a model of religious conviction and political engagement that prepared the way for Martin Luther King, Jr. and his younger followers. Since none of these individuals was representative of black Christians as a whole, however, Savage's larger message at this point is not evident. Doubtless, their stories do require telling in any narrative of black religious history, but in what way do they destabilize a persisting notion of "the black church" and in what way do they provide evidence of diversity within black religious communities?

Most disappointing, in my view, is Savage's treatment of the civil rights movement. She reads the memoirs of the movement as a "collective biography" and asserts that these works were as much spiritual as political. While religion does figure in many civil rights memoirs, the narratives do not support what Savage sees as "compelling evidence" for calling the "civil rights movement … itself a religious movement and a religious revolt." By contrast, recent local studies of the civil rights movement, such as Charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom and John Dittmer's Local People, are more cautious. They undermine broader generalizations such as those made by David L. Chappell's A Stone of Hope (which Savage cites in a footnote to support her argument) that the civil rights movement was a grand religious revival. Precisely this kind of overly general assessment is what Savage's work should question in view of her underlying critique of our received notions about "the black church." Savage's use of the memoirs inadvertently proves her point that we tend to view the history of black religion through the "haze of a post-civil rights consciousness."

Savage's consideration of Wright's relationship with Obama is compelling, particularly in evoking the tensions in this fraught and very public dispute between two prominent African Americans. Savage uses the controversy to show "how the tensions between black religion and black politics have been exacerbated in the four decades since the civil rights movement ended." She astutely points out how Obama found in Wright's church the kind of religious culture and political activism that earlier critics of the black churches saw as lacking. Ironically, it was precisely because Wright's church was rooted in a history where "race men" had excoriated racism and condemned the American nation for its treatment of blacks that Obama's membership at Trinity United Church became a problem once he began campaigning for the presidency. Obama's public espousal of post-racialism ultimately put him at odds with Wright, as Savage notes, because the latter defended his political activism and religious beliefs by rooting them in a history of "the black church." That history evoked images of a heroic past for blacks, but it was deeply troubling for many whites and for significant numbers of both blacks and whites too closely tied to a painful past of racial oppression. Thus Wright's unapologetic conjoining of a black politics and religion became an embarrassment from which Obama had to distance himself.

Savage has provided a helpful historical analysis of the exaggerated demands and expectations that have been placed on African American churches. If her work is taken seriously, we will gain a better understanding of the unique way in which black churches became politically active during the civil rights movement, but also of how that very uniqueness has distorted our understanding of the complicated and changing relationship between black churches and politics. We will also be compelled to rid our vocabulary of that non-existent behemoth, "the black church," and realize instead that there are only black churches, local and diverse Christian institutions that are trying to make this world a better place and preparing their members for a world to come.

Curtis J. Evans is assistant professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford Univ. Press).

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