Taking the influential work of Arthur Huff Fauset as a starting point to break down the false dichotomy that exists between mainstream and marginal, a new generation of scholars offers fresh ideas for understanding the religious expressions of African Americans in the United States. Fauset's 1944 classic, Black Gods of the Metropolis, launched original methods and theories for thinking about African American religions as modern, cosmopolitan, and democratic. The essays in this collection show the diversity of African American religion in the wake of the Great Migration and consider the full field of African American religion from Pentecostalism to Black Judaism, Black Islam, and Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement. As a whole, they create a dynamic, humanistic, and thoroughly interdisciplinary understanding of African American religious history and life. This book is essential reading for anyone who studies the African American experience.
Author(s): Edward E. Curtis IV, Danielle Brune Sigler
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 288
Contents......Page 7
Foreword......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 14
Introduction......Page 18
Part 1. New Religious Movement(s) of the Great Migration Era......Page 30
One Fauset’s (Missing) Pentecostals: Church Mothers, Remaking Respectability, and Religious Modernism......Page 32
Two ‘‘Grace Has Given God a Vacation’’: The History and Development of the Theology of the United House of Prayer of All People......Page 48
Three ‘‘Chased out of Palestine’’: Prophet Cherry’s Church of God and Early Black Judaisms in the United States......Page 66
Four Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple: Toward a New Cultural History......Page 87
Five ‘‘The Consciousness of God’s Presence Will Keep You Well, Healthy, Happy, and Singing’’......Page 108
Six ‘‘A True Moslem Is a True Spiritualist’’: Black Orientalism and Black Gods of the Metropolis......Page 133
Part 2. Resurrecting Fauset’s Vision for African American Religious Studies......Page 160
Seven Religion Proper and Proper Religion: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions......Page 162
Eight The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography......Page 188
Nine Turning African Americans into Rational Actors: The Important Legacy of Fauset’s Functionalism......Page 209
Ten Defining the ‘‘Negro Problem’’ in Brazil: The Shifting Significance of Brazil’s African Heritage from the 1890s to the 1940s......Page 226
Eleven Fauset and His Black Gods: Intersections with the Herskovits-Frazier Debate......Page 243
List of contributors......Page 266
Index......Page 268
