Beyond Binaries: A Genealogy of Nineteenth-Century Black Religious History

Focusing on agency, paternalism, interracial cooperation, separation, accommodation versus protest, uplift ideology, and respectability, the present article explores binary paradigms in scholarship about Black religious politics since slavery and emancipation. Since 2015, this field of inquiry has expanded beyond past focuses on enslaved religion and the formation of separate Black churches, but scholars still have not grappled fully with the conceptual underpinnings of such paradigms. By highlighting some of the historical and historiographic contexts that shaped the early literature, scholars’ thematic and narrative selections, and constraints that the paradigms have fostered, this article exposes how white supremacist logics have suffused the paradigms, how binary analyses have obscured the complex contexts and political strategies Black people developed, and how Black religious history affords new interpretive insights.