| Introduction: Towards New Visions and New Approaches in African American Religious Studies | xi |
| Part 1. | Prehistory of African American Religious Studies | |
| 1. | Of the Faith of the Fathers | 3 |
| 2. | Origins of the Church | 14 |
| 3. |
| The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death | 29 |
| Love | 49 |
| 4. | The Negro Church and Assimilation | 62 |
| Part 2. | Theorizing African American Religion | |
| 5. | American Africans in Conflict: Alienation in an Insecure Culture | 77 |
| 6. | Authority, Alienation, and Social Death | 99 |
| 7. | The Racial Factor in the Shaping of Religion in America | 156 |
| 8. | The Black Church: A Gender Perspective | 187 |
| 9. | The Central Themes of American Religious History: Pluralism, Puritanism, and the Encounter of Black and White | 209 |
| 10. | Assessment and New Departures for a Study of Black Religion in the United States of America | 221 |
| Part 3. | Slavery and a Black Religious Imagination | |
| 11. | Death of the Gods | 239 |
| 12. |
| The Christian Tradition | 285 |
| Black Conversion and White Sensibility | 291 |
| Religious Foundations of the Black Nation | 301 |
| 13. | Exodus | 309 |
| 14. | Of the Black Church and the Making of a Black Public | 338 |
| 15. | "Doers of the Word": Theorizing African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the Antebellum North | 366 |
| Part 4. | Black Destiny and the End of the Nineteenth Century | |
| 16. | "Ethiopia Shall Soon Stretch Forth Her Hands": Black Destiny in Nineteenth-Century America | 397 |
| 17. | The Making of a Church with the Soul of a Nation, 1880-1889 | 414 |
| 18. | Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom | 435 |
| Part 5. | The Interwar Period: Migration, Urbanization, and Black Religious Diversity | |
| 19. | Racial Christianity | 477 |
| 20. | Religious Diversification during the Era of Advanced Industrial Capitalism | 495 |
| 21. | Chosen Peoples of the Metropolis: Black Muslims, Black Jews, and Others | 534 |
| 22. | Religious Ethos of the UNIA | 550 |
| 23. | Marcus Garvey, Father Divine, and the Gender Politics of Race Difference and Race Neutrality | 572 |
| 24. | Charles Manuel "Sweet Daddy" Grace | 605 |
| 25. | The Black Roots of Pentecostalism | 616 |
| 26. | "Together and in Harness": Women's Traditions in the Sanctified Church | 629 |
| 27. | Reverend George Washington Woodbey: Early Twentieth-Century California Black Socialist | 651 |
| Part 6. | Black Religion and the 1960s | |
| 28. | From The Luminous Darkness | 679 |
| 29. | Martin Luther King, Jr., and the African-American Social Gospel | 696 |
| 30. | The Religion of Black Power | 715 |
| 31. | Integrationism and Nationalism in African-American Intellectual History | 746 |
| Part 7. | Black Theology and Its Critics | |
| 32. | A Sense of Urgency | 765 |
| 33. | Black Spirituals: A Theological Interpretation | 775 |
| 34. | Slave Theology in the "Invisible Institution" | 790 |
| 35. | Black Theology and the Black Woman | 831 |
| 36. |
| Divine Racism: The Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology | 849 |
| James Cone: God, Champion of the Oppressed | 854 |
| 37. | Black Theology and Marxist Thought | 874 |
| 38. | Ontological Blackness in Theology | 893 |
| Part 8. | African American Religion and Cultural Criticism | |
| 39. | Jesse Jackson and the Symbolic Politics of Black Christendom | 921 |
| 40. | The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited: Vodou and Haitian Catholicism in the Age of Transnationalism | 942 |
| 41. | Rethinking Vernacular Culture: Black Religion and Race Records in the 1920s and 1930s | 978 |
| 42. | Homophobia and Heterosexism in the Black Church and Community | 996 |
| 43. | For Rent, "Cabin in the Sky": Race, Religion, and Representational Quagmires in American Film | 1019 |
| 44. | The Prophetic Tradition in Afro-America | 1037 |
| Permissions Acknowledgments | 1051 |
