Conclusion: Black Artistry and Religious Culture

Abstract

The conclusion reviews the book’s exploration of the work of African American jazz musicians as racial and religious representatives in the twentieth century, tracing how jazz artists’ emergence as a new kind of representative helped to locate religious authority for African Americans outside of traditional Afro-Protestant institutions. All four major jazz professionals provide examples of the religious aspects of race representation through their unique performances of religious and racial identities for public consumption, whether crafted intentionally or the result of social and cultural constructs. The conclusion offers a conceptual reorientation of Afro-Protestantism in light of this jazz landscape. Uncovering the ways in which jazz professionals leveraged their celebrity into a type of religious authority situated beyond institutional church life allows us to reconfigure Afro-Protestantism according to artistry that shaped understandings of theology, religious practice, and public engagement. Through artistry, we may conceive of Afro-Protestantism in relative terms: rather than as a religious establishment, it represented one strand of theological articulation, religious practice, and mode of public engagement alongside other significant religious movements in African American life. In the lives of jazz professionals, artistic expression reveals black practices of reciting, improvising on, and even drowning out conventional religious thought and practice.