In the United States, the subject of long-standing racial disparities between blacks and whites has received much attention from scholars in various disciplines. However, there has been much less attention paid to how these racial disparities shape religious beliefs and how religious beliefs shape understandings of racial disparities. In Blacks and Whites in Christian America, sociologists Jason Shelton and Michael Emerson examine the intersection of race and religion among black and white Protestants. Relying on findings from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, the 2006 General Social Survey, 14 in-depth interviews with high-ranking clergy, and focus groups with 30 Christians from the three largest African American Protestant denominations, Shelton and Emerson argue that racial group membership has a profound influence on how black and white Protestants think about and practice Christianity. While black and white Protestants are nearly identical in their belief of core Christian tenets (i.e., belief in God, Jesus Christ, Heaven and Hell), Shelton and Emerson argue that is where the similarity ends. According to Shelton and Emerson, the explanation for these differences lies in the thesis of their study, the ‘‘five building blocks of black Protestant faith.’’ These building blocks are: experiential, survival, mystery, miraculous, and justice. The five building blocks of black Protestant faith provide support for C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya’s black sacred cosmos thesis which argues that black Protestants have developed a racially specific approach to Christianity that can be found in most black churches regardless of denomination. According to Shelton and Emerson, black Protestant faith is more experiential than academic, meaning they are more concerned with action than strict doctrine. The authors argue that this is a result of the legacy of slavery and segregation where the words and deeds of white Protestants often did not match, as well as the structural barriers black Protestants faced when they tried to achieve an