New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration

Arguably, scholars tend to use two general interpretative paradigms in American religious history to evaluate trajectories of religious identities and institutions over the long twentieth century. In the first, much of modern U.S. religious history is written against a backdrop of slow, steady declension of mainline American Protestantism's primacy in the public square. In the other, black religious traditions in America are more often sidelined as expressions of political defiance or pathological deviancy rather than pietistic diversity. It is delightful to witness how Judith Weisenfeld's New World A-Coming attacks these twin shibboleths in poignant, provocative, and lucid prose. In this meticulously researched and vividly written book, Weisenfeld frames her examination around groups such as the Moorish Science Temple, Ethiopian Hebrew congregations, the Nation of Islam, and Father Divine's Peace Mission as the central foci. The author masterfully provides readers with “the theologies, practices, community formations, and politics of early twentieth-century black religious movements that fostered novel understandings of the history and racial identity of people conventionally categorized as Negro in American society” (p. 3). In this spirit, the author employs the term “religio-racial identity” to discuss the racial transubstantiation vis-à-vis self-definition at work within these particular religious movements “to understand individual and collective identity as constituted in the conjunction of religion and race” (p. 5). Moving beyond the confines of African American Christianity, Weisenfeld strives “to designate a set of … black religious movements whose members believed that understanding black people's true racial history and identity revealed their correct and divinely ordained religious orientation” (ibid.).