The Long and Shifting Shadow of ‘Negro’ Religion: A Critical Reappraisal of E. Franklin Frazier’s *The Negro Church in America* on Its 60th Anniversary

Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s *The Negro Church in America* framed the study of African American religion as a reflection on the issue of social cohesion among African Americans. Frazier’s analysis followed the narrative arc of the history of Africans in the Americas, with attention to the effects of the transatlantic slave trade, the formation of independent Black churches, and the effects of the Great Migration on the development of Black churches. Published as the Civil Rights Movement was cresting and the Black Power Movement was just gaining its footing, this important work framed decades of scholarly research about African American religions. Its publication in 1964, two years after Frazier’s death, reflected the changing political landscape of the Black freedom struggle and the role of Black religion within it. The Rev. Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, then-president of Morehouse College, wrote in his review of *The Negro Church in America,* “This book, as all others written by Dr. Frazier, is scholarly, brilliantly, and ably written and is full of shocking statements which a less discerning person may be inclined to cast aside as untrue. But in this book, as elsewhere in his writings, one cannot treat lightly the analyses and conclusions which Dr. Frazier lays bare before his readers.” Looking back on this text after 60 years, the narrative and interpretive claims remain as guides and constraints against which the field contends. This roundtable explores some of these elements and extends the conversation about the study of African American religions with new insights inspired by this work, including but not limited to how contemporary interventions help us to read Frazier’s *The Negro Church* with greater clarity; what new analyses we gain from this hindsight; and how this all informs our current work and moves the field in new directions. The first presenter’s remarks will address the first chapter of Frazier’s classic study, “The Religion of the Slaves,” by examining the cosmologies, theologies, ethics, rituals, and material realities of enslaved Africans and African-Americans beginning with the establishment of New World slavery and ending with the culmination of the U.S. Civil War. While situating Frazier's "assimilation" model of Black Church history within a larger discourse on Africana religions, the themes and topics to be covered in this paper will also include: the world-historical context at the onset of New World enslavement; the varieties of religious worldviews within the early modern Atlantic world; how and why Africa became entangled as source of New World enslaved labor; the complicity of the Church and the consequent rise of Christian supremacy during the Transatlantic Slave Trade; the eventual rise of abolitionism, resistance, and emancipation in the circum-Atlantic world; and the afterlife of chattel slavery and its impact on post-slavery societies. The second presenter engages “The Institutional Church of the Free Negroes” and its importance to understanding Frazier’s emphasis on how the development of the Black community was directly tied to the emergence of new religious needs and forms of worship. Frazier documented the conundrum religious leaders faced over conflicting ideas about who and what they should model their church organizations after given the complicated history of slavery. This paper builds on Frazier’s analysis, exploring the theological ruptures that occurred within and outside of mainline denominations. These ruptures will be considered in their relationship to regionalization, an increasingly multiracial society, and the role of independent churches in advancing Black autonomy. The third presenter engages “The Negro Church: A Nation within a Nation” and Frazier’s argument that the fusion of the “invisible institution” with the institutional church organized the social life of the Negro masses post-Emancipation. Frazier details the role of the church and its leaders as surrogates and models of family life, economic cooperation, educational attainment, and political engagement amid the social realities of nascent freedom, Reconstruction, and the reestablishment of white supremacy. This paper explores the assumptions that underpin Frazier’s understanding of the church’s role in the social development of the Black community, and considers how his attention to the “authoritarian personality” and influence of the Black male preacher conceals the social life work of a wider community of faithful Black women. The fourth presenter examines “Negro Religion in the City,” and will reflect on Frazier’s observations about how the Great Migration transformed the study of Black religion. It will also contend with Frazier’s theories regarding “the secularization of the churches” and the rise of storefront churches and “cults,” while also critically assessing his rich engagement with such archival sources as the letters of religious migrants, Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph W. Nicholson’s *The Negro Church* (1933), and Arthur Huff Fauset’s *Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North* (1944). The paper will ultimately raise questions about how the chapter offers an expansive theoretical framework for “Negro religion,” despite its masculinist citational politics and its focus largely on Northern cities. The fifth presenter revisits Frazier’s discussion of the “The Negro Church and Assimilation.” Frazier asserts that early 1960s gospel singers represented an “accommodation” between traditional religion and more assimilated religious views and practices among black Americans. This presentation uses contemporary gospel music performance as a lens to critically engage Frazier’s articulation of the relationship between socioeconomic status and religious practice, and to determine whether Frazier’s theories concerning mid-twentieth-century assimilation and religious expression maintain today. Further, this presentation reflects on Frazier’s taxonomy of “Negro” institutions and their influence as more black Americans assimilate into mainstream American culture and commerce. The roundtable is composed of participants who reflect diverse gender identities, methodological orientations, institutional locations, and ranks including tenure track professors, a postdoctoral fellow, and a tenured professor. Each panelist will also reflect on Frazier’s work through the lens of their own social location and area of expertise in African American religious history, endeavoring to provide theoretical and thematic diversity in their assessments of this foundational text.