The Church in the Southern Black community

Traces how Southern African Americans experienced and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of community life, beginning with white churches' conversion efforts, especially in the post-Revolutionary period, and depicts the tensions and contraditions between the egalitarian potential of evangelical Christianity and the realities of slavery. It focuses, through slave narratives and observations by other African American authors, on how the black community adapted evangelical Christianity, making it a metaphor for freedom, community, and personal survival.