These days are filled with social unrest. Lack of compassion from elected officials, police brutality, unjust laws that create poverty through minimal wages but soaring profits for capitalists, benign neglect of blighted neighborhoods, and crime within the cities and in governments create a landscape of oppression that directly diminishes the quality of life, especially for African Americans. What is the role of the Black church and Black Christians in light of these realities? Just to save souls is not enough! Memoir of a Black Christian Nationalist: Seeds of Liberation is a poignant personal story of the author’s thirty-year experience of being a Black Christian Nationalist. The theological framework, program, and organization re-establishing the Black church’s relevancy to the liberation struggle are eloquently and informatively interwoven in . . . * The DNA Research about the Race of Jesus * The Powerful Leadership of Reverend Albert B. Cleage Jr., Founder of the Shrines of the Black Madonna * The Transformation of Black People * The Seeds of Liberation—Answers for the Black Church * Practices That Create Freedom, Power, and a More Humane World

Using Savannah, Georgia, as a case study, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition tells the story of the rise and decline of Black Christian Nationalism. This nationalism emerged from the experiences of segregation, as an intersection between the sacred world of religion and church and the secular world of business. The premise of Black Christian Nationalism was a belief in a dual understanding of redemption, at the same time earthly and otherworldly, and the conviction that black Christians, once delivered from psychic, spiritual, and material want, would release all of America from the suffering that prevented it from achieving its noble ideals. The study's use of local sources in Savannah, especially behind-the-scenes church records, provides a rare glimpse into church life and ritual, depicting scenes never before described. Blending history, ethnography, and Geertzian dramaturgy, it traces the evolution of black southern society from a communitarian, nationalist system of hierarchy, patriarchy, and interclass fellowship to an individualistic one that accompanied the appearance of a new black civil society. Although not a study of the civil rights movement, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition advances a bold, revisionist interpretation of black religion at the eve of the movement. It shows that the institutional primacy of the churches had to give way to a more diversified secular sphere before an overtly politicized struggle for freedom could take place. The unambiguously political movement of the 1950s and 1960s that drew on black Christianity and radiated from many black churches was possible only when the churches came to exert less control over members' quotidian lives. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

Using Savannah, Georgia, as a case study, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition tells the story of the rise and decline of Black Christian Nationalism. This nationalism emerged from the experiences of segregation, as an intersection between the sacred world of religion and church and the secular world of business. The premise of Black Christian Nationalism was a belief in a dual understanding of redemption, at the same time earthly and otherworldly, and the conviction that black Christians, once delivered from psychic, spiritual, and material want, would release all of America from the suffering that prevented it from achieving its noble ideals. The study's use of local sources in Savannah, especially behind-the-scenes church records, provides a rare glimpse into church life and ritual, depicting scenes never before described. Blending history, ethnography, and Geertzian dramaturgy, it traces the evolution of black southern society from a communitarian, nationalist system of hierarchy, patriarchy, and interclass fellowship to an individualistic one that accompanied the appearance of a new black civil society. Although not a study of the civil rights movement, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition advances a bold, revisionist interpretation of black religion at the eve of the movement. It shows that the institutional primacy of the churches had to give way to a more diversified secular sphere before an overtly politicized struggle for freedom could take place. The unambiguously political movement of the 1950s and 1960s that drew on black Christianity and radiated from many black churches was possible only when the churches came to exert less control over members' quotidian lives. A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication.

The inspiration for the documentary God & Country For readers of Democracy in Chains and Dark Money, a revelatory investigation of the Religious Right's rise to political power. For too long the Religious Right has masqueraded as a social movement preoccupied with a number of cultural issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In her deeply reported investigation, Katherine Stewart reveals a disturbing truth: this is a political movement that seeks to gain power and to impose its vision on all of society. America's religious nationalists aren't just fighting a culture war, they are waging a political war on the norms and institutions of American democracy. Stewart pulls back the curtain on the inner workings and leading personalities of a movement that has turned religion into a tool for domination. She exposes a dense network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and pastoral organizations embedded in a rapidly expanding community of international alliances and united not by any central command but by a shared, anti-democratic vision and a common will to power. She follows the money that fuels this movement, tracing much of it to a cadre of super-wealthy, ultraconservative donors and family foundations. She shows that today's Christian nationalism is the fruit of a longstanding antidemocratic, reactionary strain of American thought that draws on some of the most troubling episodes in America's past. It forms common cause with a globe-spanning movement that seeks to destroy liberal democracy and replace it with nationalist, theocratic and autocratic forms of government around the world. Religious nationalism is far more organized and better funded than most people realize. It seeks to control all aspects of government and society. Its successes have been stunning, and its influence now extends to every aspect of American life, from the White House to state capitols, from our schools to our hospitals. The Power Worshippers is a brilliantly reported book of warning and a wake-up call. Stewart's probing examination demands that Christian nationalism be taken seriously as a significant threat to the American republic and our democratic freedoms.

In this collection, black religious scholars and pastors whose expertise range from theology, ethics, and the psychology of religion, to preaching, religious aesthetics, and religious education, discuss the legacy of Albert B. Cleage Jr. and the idea of the Black Madonna and child. Easter Sunday, 2017 will mark the fifty year anniversary of Albert B. Cleage Jr.’s unveiling of a mural of the Black Madonna and child in his church in Detroit, Michigan. This unveiling symbolized a radical theological departure and disruption. The mural helped symbolically launch Black Christian Nationalism and influenced the Black Power movement in the United States. But fifty years later, what has been the lasting impact of this act of theological innovation? What is the legacy of Cleage’s emphasis on the literal blackness of Jesus? How has the idea of a Black Madonna and child informed notions of black womanhood, motherhood? LGBTQ communities? How has Cleage’s theology influenced Christian education, Africana pastoral theology, and the Black Arts Movement? The contributors to this work discuss answers to these and many more questions.