| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Burden of Black Religion. By Curtis J. Evans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xx, 372 pp. Cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-0-19-532818-9. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-19-532931-5.)
African American religion has been the focus of numerous studies by scholars from a range of disciplines over the last half century. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, folklorists, cultural theorists, ethicists, and theologians have explored the subject from different angles, giving considerable attention to the critical role of religion in the shaping of black life, thought, and culture. The Burden of Black Religion, written by Curtis J. Evans, an assistant professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School, builds on this scholarship while offering rich insights on the intersection of race and religion.	1
Evans treats black religion in the larger framework of cultural and intellectual history. His treatment of slave religion mostly draws on sources from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, many of which simultaneously afford both negative and positive assessments of this phenomenon. Much of the focus is on the widely held view that blacks were "naturally religious," a conception examined from different perspectives in the volume (p. 10). The discussion is instructive and provocative, but "the meaning of slave religion," as Evans labels it, gets lost at times in what is essentially a recitation of different ideas on the subject (pp. 17–63).	. . .

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