The Other Black Church: Alternative Christian Movements and the Struggle for Black Freedom

Abstract

In The Other Black Church: Alternative Christian Movements and the Struggle for Black Freedom, Joseph Tucker Edmonds advances a position that through alternative Christian movements African Americans have historically expanded opportunities for protest and self-actualization. This volume, which also includes revisions from his 2018 journal article in Religions “The Canonical Black Body: Alternative African American Religions and the Disruptive Politics of Sacrality,” arrives as many are again seeking to understand the potential of extra-Christian movements in the fight for justice. Tucker Edmonds's work is inserted within an ongoing sub-field of black religious and theological studies that center the material body for the purpose of framing new possibilities and understandings drawn from black religious experience. His analysis attempts to centralize the active nature of faith-influenced movements that actively foreground the task of black freedom, wholeness, and advancement within social and political engagement.The monograph situates Tucker Edmonds within the broadening field of African American religious studies in general and Black Church studies in particular. A timely work, Tucker Edmonds's text astutely takes on notions that the Black Church and contemporary activist movements function on separate intellectual and ecclesial poles. Some arguments all too cleanly place contemporary activist movements at odds with the church, as if each side's agendas can never overlap. What results from many studies are assessments of two disparate movements that seem unable to connect around a common cause related to black socio-political advancement.The general premise of Tucker Edmonds's argument is not a new one in African American religious studies. For instance, the Black Panther Party during the late 1960s and 1970s, to which this book makes nominal reference, has been assessed for its often-contentious relationship with the Black Church. Yet, the two entities also found ways to work together around a common cause of feeding poor black children through the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast Program. Such an example is important to highlight in an era where black-led activist movements are being externally and internally scrutinized. Studying these separate entities in terms of potential ideological alignment, even as some in popular press understand them to be at odds, therefore remains a critical intervention to the broader scholarship. Such an intervention can help younger contemporary activists better grasp the historical role of churches and non-church activist groups. What I have found most clear in these debates is the extent to which folks on either side lack a clear and contextualized understanding of this complex history. Tucker Edmonds's book therefore falls within this important frame of discourse at a time when such an examination is most needed. It advances as a centralizing thrust the argument that “sacrality is deeply important to both” Christian and non-Christian groups (3). While not necessarily new, this argument remains relevant in our current age of activism. Tucker Edmonds's offering therefore keeps the flame lit on a critical conversation.The strength of this work lies within an examination of the ways the church and alternative movement groups reconcile suspicions of each other. Rather than engaging in an assessment of the Black Church in terms of its perceived diminished impact, Tucker Edmonds's book reckons with the reality that outspoken figures within alternative “Christian” activist movements draw from institutional, practical, and prophetic elements associated with the church. These connections, as I draw from the reading, are most prominent when the concern is associated with the thriving and survival of black bodies. What the book seeks to highlight is that adjacent institutional movements do more than share concerns with the church regarding the advancement of black life; they are also philosophically connected to them. Tucker Edmonds's book also requires us to account for issues related to class within Black communities. Critically, he displays potential class divisions between factions of the formalized church and alternative movements. The actual lines may be more blurred than what Tucker Edmonds's work identifies. However, he does well to deal with the black middle class/working class divide and the complex ways these debates impact the public discourse of churches and activist groups that seem to be in tension with each other. Those divisions aside, the book reveals the extent to which alternative movements fighting for the protection of black bodies draw from the “formalized” Christian church.At the heart of Tucker Edmonds's text are historical accounts of the Church of God in Christ under Charles Mason, Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, and Albert Cleage's Shrine of the Black Madonna. In each case he investigates their function as forebearers of modern alternative “Christian” activist movements. Each of these alternative Christian movements adhere to their own method of accounting for and promotion of the black body. Even in the case of Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, which shunned the use of the term “black” to describe “darker” bodies, the motivation to create opportunities for black people's social advancement was clear. Tucker Edmonds attempts to point out how these alternative “other black church” movements functioned as potent Christian-derived traditions that in their own ways sought to reframe the public discourse and understanding of black bodies. If I am correctly reading the book's ultimate premise, alternative Christian movements gave rise to and influenced the theological thrust we find in contemporary activist movements. These historical alternative movements are able to influence contemporary leaders who draw from their religious and intellectual complexity in responding to issues related to black suffering. Within such a framework Tucker Edmonds may have missed an opportunity to more broadly link contemporary positions against respectability politics within black Christian and (especially) non-Christian social movements to the historical assessment of Charles Mason herein. Tucker Edmonds critically notes that black respectability for Mason had two interrelated aims: “upward mobility” and “fitness to participate in the democratic system” (58). More directly connecting this point to contemporary respectability politics debates would strengthen the tie between the historical and modern-day in helpful ways.Ultimately, Tucker Edmonds's sustained argument successfully sheds light on the ways alternative movements, sharing a deep sacrality with the formal Christian church, re-imagined the black body in public discourse. His already strong query may have been enhanced by extending the argument to more substantively include post–Civil Rights/Black Power era activist efforts to rearticulate the black body politic through the “Black is beautiful” component of their movement. Tucker Edmonds's use of Harold G. Lawrence's poem “Black Madonna” could have been a nice entry point to a deeper analysis of Black Power era efforts to reimagine the black body politic.Nevertheless, what I might find as missing elements in the analysis in no way diminishes the importance or adversely impacts the overall quality of Tucker Edmonds's work. This book is a significant contribution to a conversation that needs to be sustained in the field of religious studies. Even more critically, this work helps to sustain paths between historical and cultural analysis and the impact of protest work on the ground, so to speak. One may be left with lingering questions about how to best connect historical alternative Christian movements to some contemporary methods. However, Tucker Edmonds's effort makes clear the complexity of the black freedom struggle and, by extension, the necessity of varied approaches to eradicate black suffering. This work gives me hope that conversations about movements that struggle for black freedom will continue to be prioritized.