Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform. Andrew Billingsley. Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. X, 226. $26.00, cloth.

Andrew Billingsley has written an unsuccessful book. Mighty Like a River fails not because of some methodological flaw in his collection of the data about contemporary black churches in the United States. Rather, the book is limited because Billingsley fails to take up the more troublesome challenge his account suggest: that the role and place of black churches in contemporary black America's public life have changed dramatically during the twentieth century, precisely because the nature of that public has so dramatically changed. He offers instead a seemingly seamless narrative about the role of activist churches in black communities. As he writes in Chapter One, the question animating this study is whether or not the church activism of the civil rights movement was "an isolated example of the black church as an agent of social reform." The data, he maintains, suggest "that [the church as an agent of social reform] had happened before, is happening now in some places and in some forms, and might well happen in the future on an even grander scale" (12). Indeed, his is a story of relative continuity.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, "Evolution of the Black Church as Agent of Social Reform," provides useful ethnographic case studies of individual black churches and their evolving roles in the lifeworld of black America. Here we get a sense of how churches, particularly in Savannah, Georgia, responded to the different circumstances and problems that confronted their communities. More specifically, Billingsley demonstrates that through the various crises which emerged during the antebellum period, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement, the black church remained a stalwart institution, serving not only the spiritual needs of its members but also addressing the social concerns of the black community at large. For the most part, churches and their ministers emerge from this part of the story as critical sites and important figures in any attempt "to understand the sources and resources of the survival, achievements, and regeneration of the African American people and their communities" (185). In short, the institutional church - what Rev. Timothy Tice describes as "a system of kindness, a congress of industries which, by touching people on physical, social, and intellectual sides, will conciliate them and draw them within reach of the gospel" - existed well before African Americans confronted the challenges of urbanization and remains an important indicator of the current condition of black America.

Part II, "The Contemporary Church Reaches Out to the Community," assesses the extent to which institutional churches continue their community outreach. Through large-scale sample surveys of various churches in different regions throughout the country, Billingsley concludes "that there is widespread recognition among contemporary black churches of the duality of their mission, and large numbers, perhaps a majority of large urban churches, are therefore engaged to some degree in community outreach activities" (88). The data not only suggests, according to Billingsley, that many black churches are engaged in social outreach. The research also indicates "that the nature of that outreach activity is different from the community activity of the civil rights era." In one context, churches' energies were directed towards various forms of social protests against, say, Jim Crow segregation. In our contemporary setting, however, Billingsley found that community outreach tended "more likely [to] be social service or community development" (89). Internal strategies animate the churches' practices. Not simply external ones. This change in focus signals that the nature of contemporary crises has dramatically shifted, and new problems have emerged to occupy our political and social imaginations. To be sure, these new problems pose a significant challenge to activist churches. Not in terms of their importance or centrality to contemporary black life: on Billingsley's account, the black church remains the most important institution in black America. Rather, the new crises (as in other historical moments) pose challenges to what these churches are actually doing: whether or not their outreach programs speak relevantly to contemporary problems. In this account, the paramount importance of the black church seems to be quite secure. I am not so convinced.

Both parts are framed by theoretical considerations that have determined, in some ways, the trajectory of the sociology of black religion. Billingsley acknowledges his debt to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, and C. Eric Lincoln. With Du Bois, he understands the centrality of the black church as a social institution in black America whose influence extends well beyond its religious charge. As Du Bois noted in his classic text, Souls of Black Folk, the black church stood, particularly in the antebellum period, as "peculiarly the expression of the inner ethical life of a people in a sense seldom true elsewhere." So, the institution's public function must be understood more broadly in that black churches were not simply confined to their formal roles.

E. Franklin Frazier deepens somewhat this account by highlighting the expansive role of the church in black communities. The churches' activities covered economic, educational, social, and political concerns and, in some significant sense, provided the vocabularies of agency required to engage the racism of the United States. On Frazier's view, the church was not only a complex institution with a broad range of social functions, it also circumscribed the social activity of black agents and provided the language for moral and ethical judgments. So, again, Billingsley finds in Franklin - like Du Bois - an account of the black church as "a dynamic social institution responding to the changes in its social environment" (8). Frazier, however, complicates this picture by pointing to the processes of secularization (unleashed by the Great Migration) that impacted the church's role and to the social stratification within these institutions that complicate how we talk about them and their importance.

Billingsley draws, then, from Du Bois and Frazier the basic insight that black churches are social institutions whose boundaries are quite elusive and porous. As such, any analysis of the church's social function ought to reflect - or risk misdescription - what C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya describe as a "dialectic between the communal and privatistic" concerns that animate the church's practice. That is to say, many black churches are constantly negotiating their charge to serve the religious needs of its membership and to respond to the social and political realities that shape the conditions of black living in the United States. This particular public function of the black church drives Billingsley's account. For he holds the view that "[d]uring periods of severe and sustained crisis in the African American community, people tend to turn to the church for guidance and support and leadership. When they do, the church typically responds by moving beyond its purely spiritual or religious or privatistic mission to embrace its communal mission, provided that the church, as an organization, is strong, stable, and resourceful and provided that the minister, as leader, is strong, charismatic, innovative, and community oriented" (11).

What strikes me as problematic with this account is Billingsley's failure to give adequate attention to the substantive changes in what can be called a national black public. If we are to study the public dimension of black churches, we have to provide (it seems to me if we are to understand the value of their public practices) an account of what is the public under present conditions. In this book, attention is rarely given to the demographic shifts that impact the role and place of black churches in black public life. We have no sense of the important differences between the geographic sites of Atlanta, Denver, and cities on the eastern seaboard. Surely, the particular histories of race in these specific areas are significant for our understanding of the public role of black churches in these particular places. What does it mean, for example, for places like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York to have a longstanding tradition of institutional churches? How does the formation of these activist churches differ, say, from those in Atlanta (the South) and Denver (the West)? But this level of specificity is obscured by the assumption that something called "the black church" - a national institutional formation - is at work in all three sites.

To my mind, this phrase blocks the way to more substantive analyses of the changes in black life that followed on the heels of the black power movement. Billingsley gives little attention to this period. He does not query its effects on the ideological orientation of ministers (the data doesn't show us whether or not the educated ministers are proponents of black liberation theology). He doesn't see a possible correlation between it and the shift from external to internal strategies of social reform. The period's influence (and any substantive attention to the ideology of the minister) is only covered in his case study of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. And perhaps this is necessary, because the black power phase of the black freedom struggle had an ambivalent relation to the black church tradition. I mean the Black Panther Party was passing out the Red Book for God's sake! And the pieties of black nationalism of various sorts occupied the social and political imaginations of a large segment of the black population.

In the end, Mighty Like River is useful insofar as it provides us with examples of black churches at work in their respective communities. The challenges confronting those of us who study these institutions is to begin to tell better stories about the evolution of the black church from a 19th century institution to a 20th century one. That story must involve, I believe, a shift from descriptions like "the black church and social reform" to something like black churches and their various roles in specific communities across the nation. This change in our descriptive language has a lot to do with the shifting nature of black public life. The impact of globalism and the different ways we understand ourselves in relation to market forces affect the community outreach programs of black churches. We see it in the problematic "gospel of finance" that we hear in the ministry of Rev. T.D. Jakes and others. No critique of the global circulation of capital. No real moral indignation about the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. To be sure, the increasing class division/stratification/differentiation among African Americans, as Billingsley rightly notes, pose a serious challenge to the public role of black churches.

Indeed we live in different times. What does it mean for black churches that we entered the twentieth century predominantly rural, and we left it predominantly urban? What does it mean that we have to compete in a global economy (when we just got real access to the old one)? What are the implications for our quality of life when we are presently living in a technological revolution and our illiteracy rates are jumping through the roof? What does it mean for our churches that our principal identities are that of consumers, that how we even conceive of politics is always already tied up, defined, framed by market considerations? All of this complicates how we talk about the public dimension of black churches. All of this renders old and worn descriptions of "the black church" somewhat irrelevant (or, at least, quite dull). I want to urge a new kind of thinking regarding black religious life in the United States. And in some ways, I want to suggest that if this new thinking is to be emancipated it requires of us a declaration of independence: when - to extend Ralph Waldo Emerson's remarks - the sluggard intellect of this generation will look from under its past successes and efforts and fill the postponed expectation of a people with something better.

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Bowdoin College