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To be clear, African American religious life is not reducible to those wounds. That life contains within it avenues for solace and comfort in God, answers to questions about who we take ourselves to be and about our relation to the mysteries of the universe; moreover, meaning is found, for some, in submission to God, in obedience to creed and dogma, and in ritual practice. Here evil is accounted for. And hope, at least for some, assured. In short, African American religious life is as rich and as complicated as the religious life of other groups in the United States, but African American religion emerges in the encounter between faith, in all of its complexity, and white supremacy.<\/span><\/div>\n

I take it that if the phrase African American religion is to have any descriptive usefulness at all, it must signify something more than African Americans who are religious. African Americans practice a number of different religions. There are black people who are\u00a0 Buddhist<\/a>,\u00a0 Jehovah Witness<\/a>,\u00a0 Mormon<\/a>, and\u00a0 Baha\u2019i<\/a>. But the fact that African Americans practice these traditions does not lead us to describe them as black Buddhism or black Mormonism<\/a>. African American religion singles out something more substantive than that.<\/span><\/div>\n

The adjective refers instead to a racial context within which religious meanings have been produced and reproduced. The history of slavery and racial discrimination in the United States birthed particular religious formations among African Americans. African Americans converted to Christianity, for example, in the context of slavery. Many left predominantly white denominations to form their own in pursuit of a sense of self- determination. Some embraced a distinctive interpretation of Islam to make sense of their condition in the United States. Given that history, we can reasonably describe certain variants of Christianity and Islam as African American and mean something beyond the rather uninteresting claim that black individuals belong to these different religious traditions.<\/span><\/div>\n

Read the rest here<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"