Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow (Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication)
Adele Oltman
Using Savannah, Georgia, as a case study, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition tells the story of the rise and decline of Black Christian Nationalism. This nationalism emerged from the experiences of segregation, as an intersection between the sacred world of religion and church and the secular world of business. The premise of Black Christian Nationalism was a belief in a dual understanding of redemption, at the same time earthly and otherworldly, and the conviction that black Christians, once delivered from psychic, spiritual, and material want, would release all of America from the suffering that prevented it from achieving its noble ideals.
The study’s use of local sources in Savannah, especially behind-the-scenes church records, provides a rare glimpse into church life and ritual, depicting scenes never before described. Blending history, ethnography, and Geertzian dramaturgy, it traces the evolution of black southern society from a communitarian, nationalist system of hierarchy, patriarchy, and interclass fellowship to an individualistic one that accompanied the appearance of a new black civil society.
Although not a study of the civil rights movement, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition advances a bold, revisionist interpretation of black religion at the eve of the movement. It shows that the institutional primacy of the churches had to give way to a more diversified secular sphere before an overtly politicized struggle for freedom could take place. The unambiguously political movement of the 1950s and 1960s that drew on black Christianity and radiated from many black churches was possible only when the churches came to exert less control over members’ quotidian lives.
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About Adele Oltman
Reviews for Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow (Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication)
Paul Harvey
author of Freedom's Coming: Religious Cultures and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War Through the Civil Rights Era
Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition is a provocative book. Through its persistent sleuthing and its careful and sensitively modulated scholarly gaze-ing it gives a people back to us, makes them come alive as complex, layered agents striving to make sense of their lives, struggling, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, to respond with integrity and effectiveness to the structures of the society and culture in which they found themselves, working hard to reshape and improve their local worlds. I recognize the people Oltman researched and wrote about. Scholarly gaze-ing of and reporting on Black peoples and their religious orientations rarely bring about this effect. An impressive and fascinating project.
Vincent L. Wimbush
editor of African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures
Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition describes an engrossing world of persistence and change within Savannah's African American community in the 1920s and the 1930s. Oltman's recovery of a fascinating union of business and religion, in rise and decline, illuminates the history of Savannah and underscores the complexities, opportunities, and tensions that typified early twentieth-century African American communities across the nation. Clearly written and skillfully researched, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition leaves indelible impressions of struggles that mattered to communities and individuals alike.
Jon Butler
author of Awash in a Sea of Faith
In a wonderfully crafted historical argument, Oltman carefully examines the history of the black church as a political organ. . . . This is Oltman's first book, and a shining example of how history can be written and re-written depending on the available data and perspective of the researcher. In this debut, Oltman shines via her ability to examine the complexities often hidden by mere glances at history, and her impressive collection of far-reaching source material. . . . Sacred Mission Worldly Ambition is a treasure of information and knowledge wrapped around a profound argument worthy of spirited debate and discussion.
Jason E. Sumerau
Augusta Metro Spirit
Well written, deeply researched, and compellingly argued, Oltman has recreated the world of black Savannah during the Jim Crow era with verve and imagination.
Georgia Historical Quarterly A groundbreaking work . . . a compelling narrative for the concurrent lives of those African Americans who did not migrate [north] and who indeed, within a few short years, would provide the main force for a new transformative southern freedom movement. Every scholar who studies twentieth-century African American history and religion needs to read this book and to weigh Oltman's arguments.
Stephen W. Angell