The Black Church in the American Protestant Christian Experience
This excerpt is part eleven of our summer series, How Shall We Live in the Digital Age?—a collection of short pieces and excerpts from the June 2025 Ex Fonte, exploring how Christians can and should navigate the ever-changing digital landscape.
A review of Swing Low: A History of Black Christianity in the United States, Vols. I and II, by Walter R. Strickland (InterVarsity Academic, 2024).
Nicholas Rowe
Walter R. Strickland’s Swing Low: A History of Black Christianity in the United States is a timely contribution to the body of textbook treatments of the Black Christian experience. The title choice is not incidental. Prior textbook treatments (or studies commonly deployed as textbooks) of the Black Christian experience work through a structural lens.[1] These have their strengths as introductions to the Black Christian experience and, as Strickland acknowledges, he similarly restricts the limits of his inquiry to Protestant communities and denominations. But by exploring the Black Christian experience as a history of Black Christianity, Strickland deploys a different narrative frame to show Black Christianity as expressions of faith, life, and meaning in contexts that questioned their humanity, such as slavery, the downfall of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and state-sponsored segregation, economic disinvestment of Black urban communities, and racial health disparities.
To cite a common truism, the Church is not simply the congregation of saints in a building on Sunday morning, but those same saints showing up in life the other days of the week. Black Christianity is also about how such faith shows up in Black bodies that were circumscribed and defined by White supremacy from their arrival in the Americas in 1619. Because of these social conditions, the story of Christian faith expressed in Black bodies must include how the image of God persists in its expression in the lives of Black folk, despite cultural, social, religious, and economic forces—often using the language of Christianity—seeking to erase it. Strickland’s narrative contribution employs a theological framework to discuss this story based on the Black experience and the attempts to give meaning to it.
According to Strickland, five theological anchors resonate with the historical commonalities of Black Christianity. These include: 1) A big God, who is not a spiritualized abstraction, but a powerful presence in the material lives of believers and who had the last word on all things; 2) Jesus as the expression of identification of this big God with his suffering people; 3) conversion and walking in the Spirit as signs of explicit commitment to the new life in Christ and its expression of Lordship in the believers life; 4) the centrality of the Scriptures, colloquially referred to as the Good Book, as the commitment to God’s revealed Word as the authority for right living and understanding; and 5) deliverance—God’s role as liberator, a critical interpretive frame to understand his actions in history, and especially within a community whose existence was defined by imperial bondage. Strickland also makes it a point to include African American voices that have easily been overlooked by scholars in the past—especially the voices of African American Christian women and those whose lack of formal education leaves them marginalized in these assessments. The five anchors also demonstrate, in Strickland’s words, “whether their doctrinal commitments lie within or extend beyond the orthodox faith that African Americans have historically affirmed” (p. 8).
This framing allows Strickland to incorporate post-Civil Rights era Black Christianity into the ongoing narrative of the Black Christian experience. The Civil Rights era has been a significant historical milepost in the Black imagination because of the emergence of Black Consciousness, a movement among persons of African descent to define their identity and purpose on their own terms instead of being determined by the dominant White cultural understanding. The title of Martin Luther King’s last book, Where Do We Go From Here?, is also an apt question to describe the historical developments of Black Christianity over the last 50 years, which Strickland answers by inserting an interlude to introduce and theologize Black Consciousness. It also provides an explanatory frame for Black Christianity’s two chief expressions in the movement’s wake: Black Evangelicalism and Black Liberation. This is a great service for readers to see the big picture of Black Christian developments and to understand contemporary expressions of Black Christianity.
Another strength is Strickland’s anthology of primary sources accompanying the narrative. These are intentionally chosen to illustrate the thematic anchors. They are also arranged to highlight the array of cultural expressions that convey Black Christian understanding, including sermons, theological treatises, liturgy, and personal testimony. This approach makes the work useful for Black Christianity studies at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Strickland’s effort addresses an essential dimension of Christian history as part of the tapestry of the global expression of the faith. It also is a historical treatment of the Black Christian experience that must be essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the American Christian context.
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