Books in the Religion and Race series

This book is a theo-historical account of race in the United States. It argues that white supremacy is a religion that functions through the Protestant Christian tradition.

As mental health is a critical but often neglected issue, especially among Black men, this book examines that sensitive topic in conjunction with reflections on race, gender, sexuality, and class to offer a hopeful and constructive framework for care and counseling and to point the way forward to integrating mental and spiritual health.

This book examines how Black Atheists conceive of themselves, how they perceive, internalize, and manage stigma, how they view in-group belonging, and how they understand their experiences as Atheists to be racialized. The author argues these unique circumstances have produced a distinctive identity at this intersection of race and religion.

This book explores the roots and relevance of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s approach to black suffering. King's conviction that ';unearned suffering is redemptive' reflects a nearly 250-year-old tradition in the black church going back to the earliest Negro spirituals. From the bellies of slave ships, the foot of the lynching tree, and the back of segregated buses, black Christians have always maintained the hope that God could ';make a way out of no way' and somehow bring good from the evils inflicted on them. As a product of the black church tradition, King inherited this widespread belief, developed it using Protestant liberal concepts, and deployed it throughout the Civil Rights Movement of the 50's and 60's as a central pillar of the whole non-violent movement. Recently, critics have maintained that King's doctrine of redemptive suffering creates a martyr mentality which makes victims passive in the face of their suffering; this book argues against that critique. King's concept offers real answers to important challenges, and it offers practical hope and guidance for how beleaguered black citizens can faithfully engage their suffering today.

Method as Identity considers how social identity shapes methodological standpoints. With a refreshing hip hop sensibility, Miller and Driscoll reorient the contemporary academic study of religion toward recognition of the costs and benefits of manufacturing "critical" distance from our objects of study.

This book uncovers and examines the contributions made by black Pentecostals in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) to civil rights struggles in Memphis during the 1950s and 1960s. This book provides detailed description of prominent Memphis COGIC activists' engagements with local civil rights organizations.