It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to reflect on Jon Butler’s influential “Jack-in-the-Box Faith” article, which I have assigned on the first day of a graduate seminar, “Religion in Modern American History and Culture,” that I teach regularly. Alongside “Jack-in-the-Box Faith,” students read several other essays, some published before Butler’s and some after, that propose variously that religion has been “recovered” as a factor in American history or is a “problem” for narrating American history, or aim to show how foregrounding the religious history of certain groups sharpens or challenges broader narratives.Footnote ¹ These and other historiographic essays that chart the transformation of the field from church history to American religious history and consider various organizing themes focus primarily on the challenge of synthesis and coverage in narrating the history of religion in the United States. Taking a different approach, Butler’s essay highlights the question of what it means to locate the story of religion in modern America within “the interpretive mainstream” of U.S. history.Footnote ²

For those students in the course specializing in African American (religious) history, Butler’s identification of the modern civil rights movement as demonstrating the social power of religious motivations offers some encouragement regarding the possibility of integration of religion in broader narratives. Butler argues that, despite the tendency of dominant accounts at the time of his writing to render the movement’s politics as secular, civil rights activism illustrates “religion’s capacity to link seemly privatized personal faith with near revolutionary social change.”Footnote ³

In the years since the publication of Butler’s piece, scholars of the long civil rights movement have engaged religious figures, institutions, and ideas as contributing to historical change, with renewed focus on major figures, foregrounding of lesser-known religious actors, and attention to local and international contexts. Randal Jelks’s biography of Howard University’s Divinity School Dean and Morehouse College President Benjamin Elijah Mays, for example, offers an account of Mays’s influence on Martin Luther King Jr.’s religious approach to civil rights and social justice, and elevates Mays as a significant figure in his own right at the intersection of Black religion and politics. Also in the realm of biography, Jennifer Scanlon’s recuperation of the civil rights activism of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, a Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) worker and prominent figure in New York City politics, brings to the fore one of many understudied Black women who, in Scanlon’s words, challenged “common assumptions about race, gender, and Christian ethics” in her life’s work. Ansley Quiros turns our attention to the local context of Americus, Georgia, attending carefully to “lived theology” and competing interpretations of Christian imperatives for social action. Sara Azaransy’s work charts the influences of international travel, movements, and figures on Black religious activists, including theologian Howard Thurman and historian Sue Bailey Thurman and activist Bayard Rustin.Footnote ⁴ The portrait of religion that emerges from these studies has added texture to the broader history of the civil rights movement by attending to Christian theologies—liberal, conservative, Baptist, Quaker, Methodist, and more—as animating African American activism.

At the same time, conventional renderings of “the Black church” as a unified institution, and the conflation of Black religion, in all its variety, with “the Black church,” has resulted in what we might think of as a “Black church box” that has tended to inhibit consistent attention to religion across African American history. Barbara Dianne Savage has shown in her influential history of the politics of Black religion that the concept of “the Black church” as a unified platform that might serve as the basis for social protest was in fact contested by Black religious and political leaders alike from the early twentieth-century through the modern civil rights movement.Footnote ⁵ And yet, the story of religion and the Black freedom struggle seems a comfortable one for the field, told through the lens of “the Black church.” The activist civil rights minister and the church women in the pews who march in the streets are familiar images that often remain flat and uninterrogated. Savage’s call to recognize considerable debate and tension over African American Protestant identity and the role of Black religious institutions in public culture remains an important one for the field.

Moreover, in many ways, attention to religion in the modern civil rights movement appears as an exception in the context of a broader sense in the field of African American history that religion is indexed by private belief and that religious institutions are, in the main, socially conservative forces. In a field that emphasizes accounts of Black agency and resistance, religious thought, institutions, and individuals are often quickly dismissed and set outside the bounds of struggle against racial oppression and white domination. And, indeed, some Black churches have cultivated political, economic, and social postures aligned with conservative culture. Scholarship on Black religious commercial culture reveals some of these trends. Lerone A. Martin’s work on early-twentieth-century Black phonograph preachers traces the circulation of sermons on wax as promoting a range of social perspectives including enforcing “traditional” gender norms and endorsing consumer capitalism. The rise of Black televangelism and the embrace of the Prosperity Gospel by some Black Christians in the late twentieth century extended these conservative theological and social impulses, as Jonathan Walton and Marla Frederick show in their work.Footnote ⁶ In the face of these historical trends, there may be as much investment among scholars of African American religious history in demonstrating the progressive influence of Black churches as there has been in the broader fields of African American history in viewing African American religion as conservative or, at the very least, a private matter, and largely inconsequential. Both postures ultimately reinforce the jack-in-the-box trend that Butler decried.

But, as Kathryn Lofton argues, the study of religion in American history and, in this case, African American history is not about finding ways to reveal the influence of private and hidden belief or locating “religion” as an independent progressive or conservative agent in history. Rather, she emphasizes an approach to religion as “that by which distinctions are named, sociality is explained, and relationship to power (natural and supernatural) is managed.”Footnote ⁷ What can we learn from recent scholarship in African American religious history about how attending to the distinctions, sociality, and power religion manages shifts, deepens, or expands interpretive possibilities in African American history beyond the Black church box? I highlight themes in two significant periods that have been of interest to me in research and teaching: religion, racialization, and nation in the post-emancipation period, and religion and Black cultural creativity in the interwar period.

For the period of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction America, several recent works reveal how religious actors and ideas about religion contributed to the reshaping of the nation and the maintenance of racial hierarchy after the end of slavery. Edward Blum and Joshua Paddison highlight connections between racial and religious conceptions of the American nation that predate the rise of what has been framed as “white Christian nationalism” in contemporary American culture. While not focused exclusively on African American religious history, both historians locate negotiations about the place of people of African descent in the reunited nation as central to racialization in this period that solidified the association of white Protestant manhood and American citizenship.Footnote ⁸ Other works examine religion, race, and post-emancipation politics in a comparative landscape of racialization and attend to African American Protestants’ theological arguments and institutional work to make religious claims for civic participation. Derek Chang explores the American Baptist Home Missionary Society’s engagement of newly freed African Americans in North Carolina and Chinese Americans in Oregon to consider contestations over religious and social authority. Elizabeth Jemison juxtaposes the religious politics of Black and white Protestants as central to the struggle to reconfigure regional politics after Reconstruction.Footnote ⁹

The relationship between African American religion and politics within Black churches and denominations has been a productive focus of recent work on this period, with scholars like Nicole Turner and Matthew Harper arguing that the making of Black freedom has been shaped by religious thought and institutions. Harper examines Black churches in North Carolina and attends to the power of religious narrative and theology to shape political positions. Turner focuses on Virginia and Black Christians’ pursuit of religious freedom, conceived as both spiritual and political, and she explores how churches, schools, and political conventions served as venues for this work.Footnote ¹⁰ Sylvester Johnson and Christiana Cecelia Davidson underscore that considering the Black quest for freedom in international contexts highlights how African American religious actors have sometimes contributed to colonialism and the maintenance of empire.Footnote ¹¹

Taken together, these works accentuate the power of ideas about race and religion and the significance of Black religious institutions to the post-Civil War reconstitution of the nation in ways that set the political and social context for articulations of Black freedom. Black churches, their leaders, and their members are prominent in these works, but the authors’ attention to the multiplicity of Black churches at play and to how theological and institutional differences matter offers tools beyond the Black church box for understanding Black religion as a site of differentiation and power at critical historical turning points.

In the second period of interest to me, scholarship on African American religious innovation and culture in the interwar period has challenged representations of a generic and unified Black church, demonstrating how the development of new theologies and institutional formations set the stage for dynamic forms of sociality. Notwithstanding the considerable attention scholars have paid to the rise of Gospel music in this era, the interwar period has typically been rendered a secular age in African American history, with accounts of the Great Migration looming large. Notably—and fortunately—several recent works by scholars of religion demonstrate the religious vibrancy in African American life at this time and argue for the significance of religious motives and institutions to Black mobility and urbanization associated with the Great Migration. Wallace Best’s study of Black churches in Chicago, for instance, creatively charts the significance of multiple forms of Christianity to the migration and the cultural transformations it produced in southern migrants’ new urban landscape, including in the development of the storefront church and the shifting of authority and power from older Black church denominations.Footnote ¹² Best argues that understanding how Black southern migrants situated themselves economically, politically, and socially in new urban landscapes requires attention to the religious cultures of a broad range of Black churches.

Transformations in religious culture during the Great Migration were not limited to Protestant churches. Several works, including my own on new religious groups that have long been marginalized as “sects and cults,” point to contests within African American communities over the relationship of religion to Black identity. With texts by Jacob S. Dorman, Leonard McKinnis, Ula Taylor, and others, we see the religious creativity of members of groups who envision themselves as Black Jews, Black Muslims, or Black Copts, as well as how members of these groups made new kinds of political claims in light of the religious, historical, and geographic connection these identities furnished. Understanding the emergence of Malcolm X as a political actor in the 1960s, for example, requires situating the development of his religious and political consciousness, in part, in the period of interwar Black religious creativity that birthed the Nation of Islam.Footnote ¹³ Importantly, this recent body of scholarship makes it possible and necessary to locate the Nation of Islam in a broader field of Black religious creativity and to resist a tendency to view it as a political organization rather than a religious one.Footnote ¹⁴

Alongside rich new scholarship on African American religions in the interwar period, historians have turned attention to arenas beyond churches or even new religious movements to explore the influence of African American religion in U.S. history. Scholarly engagements with a variety of fields, including the arts, medicine, and public policy, point to fruitful avenues for breaking out of the Black church box. Studies of religion in Black arts and culture counter renderings of the Harlem Renaissance and other twentieth-century cultural developments as animated by processes of secularization. Craig R. Prentiss’s examination of Black theater reveals significant religious themes in productions that shaped Black cultural life, as Wallace Best demonstrates similarly for Langston Hughes’s writings and Josef Sorett in the work of other Black writers of the interwar period. Vaughn Booker and Richard Brent Turner explore the complex religious sensibilities of prominent jazz musicians who emerged as “race representatives” and engaged in political activism.Footnote ¹⁵ These texts challenge the dominant narrative of secular Black artistic production in this period and highlight cultural workers as influential contributors to debates about the place of religion in African American life. Bringing a range of artistic forms into the story broadens our view of the sources that have shaped African American religious life, just as surfacing religious currents outside of or intersecting with Black churches moves us beyond the Black church box.

In addition to the arts, scholarship at the intersection of religion and medicine and public policy models how moving beyond a focus on Black church institutions can help to overcome the jack-in-the-box problem in African American history. In my recent work, I chart how the psychiatric theory about race and mental normalcy that late-nineteenth-century white Protestant southern physicians developed foregrounded and pathologized Black religion as excessively superstitious and emotional. These ideas about Black religion as psychologically disabling became solidified in American psychiatry in the interwar years, adding the notion of excessive susceptibility to “cult” leaders. Influential psychiatric theory not only shaped treatment and care but also contributed to arguments in favor of political marginalization of formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants.Footnote ¹⁶ Research at the intersection of the histories of psychiatry and religion reveals white psychiatrists as religious actors as they embedded conceptions of socially acceptable religious expression within psychiatric theory. It also highlights how the pathologizing of African American religion helped to support psychiatric authority. In a similar vein, Jamil Drake’s study of early-twentieth-century liberal social scientists’ engagements of African American religious expressions shows the centrality of assumptions about “the folk” and folk religion to the literature these researchers produced. Drake traces how the social scientific emphasis on disordered religion in rural Black communities contributed to the development of discourses of racial backwardness and a culture of poverty that, in turn, shaped public policy in significant ways.Footnote ¹⁷

The Black church box problem has fed the jack-in-the-box problem in African American history, limiting approaches to religion as an arena for negotiating multiple forms of power. This is not to say that Black church life should not receive continued scholarly attention, but it should be situated within a broader set of religious sites and sources. Perhaps the success in spring 2025 of Ryan Coogler’s film, Sinners, indexes an appetite for a fuller rendering of African American religious history that exceeds the Black church box.Footnote ¹⁸ Set in 1932 Mississippi, Sinners features a rural southern Black church; but it also references the cultural transformations of the Great Migration, represents Hoodoo practices as more than a relic of slavery, invests in multiracial cultural engagement, and depicts the Blues guitar as imbued with spiritual power, not to mention the vampires.