Also by this author: Swing Low, volume 2: An Anthology of Black Christianity in the United States
Series: Swing Low #1
Published by IVP Academic on October 29, 2024
Genres: Academic, Non-Fiction
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A Groundbreaking Portrait of African American Christianity
The history of African American Christianity is one of the determined faith of a people driven to pursue spiritual and social uplift for themselves and others to God's glory. Yet stories of faithful Black Christians have often been forgotten or minimized. The dynamic witness of the Black church in the United States is an essential part of Christian history that must be heard and dependably retold.
In this groundbreaking two-volume work, Walter R. Strickland II does just that through a theological-intellectual history highlighting the ways theology has formed and motivated Black Christianity across the centuries. Through his original research he has identified five theological anchors grounding African Americans in Christian orthodoxy:
Big God
Jesus
Conversion and walking in the Spirit
The Good Book
DeliveranceIn volume 1, a narrative history, Strickland tells the story of these themes from the 1600s to the present. He explores the crucial ecclesiastical, social, and theological developments, including the rise of Black evangelicalism as well as broader contributions to politics and culture.
Swing Low offers a defining rubric under which to observe, understand, and learn from the diverse and living entity that is African American Christianity. Volume 2, a companion anthology, covers the breadth of these historical developments by presenting primary-source documents so we can listen to Black Christianity in its own words.
Swing Low is destined to be the definitive evangelical history of the Black church in America for decades to come. Written in two volumes, Swing Low gives readers both the historical overview and access to the key original sources. A problem that often occurs in historical works is that they are generalized to provide an overarching narrative that it feels divorced from the original voices of the age or so chock-full of those voices that they drown out any attempts at contextualization. Swing Low solves this problem by being divided into two volumes. Volume 1, written by Dr. Walter R. Strickland III, provides the contextual history. Volume 2, edited by Strickland alongside others, offers an anthology of original texts that tie directly back to the historical-theological narrative of Volume 1. The end result is a robust, comprehensive, layered, and deep exploration of the Black Church in America from its transatlantic beginnings into the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
The core theological structure of Swing Low is built around five Anchors of Black Theology that Strickland sees as emerging organically from the beginning of Black Christianity in America and emphasizes Black Christianity as more than simply a theology of protest against slavery or a history of denominational development. Those five anchors are 1) A Big God, 2) Jesus, 3) Conversion/Walking in the Spirit, 4) The Good Book, 5) Deliverance. Each volume gives readers a short explanation of why this construct was developed and how each of the terms are defined. While there is certainly variation within Black faith traditions on each of these, it’s easy to see how these five elements developed as cohesive themes within the entire corpus of Black theology in America.
Volume 1, written by Strickland—an associate professor of systematic and contextual theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary—tells the story of the development of the Black Church in America in 15-20 page increments from the 1600s to the modern day. I note the length of each chapter just to say that Strickland’s pace is consistent and measured. Often histories of this nature will offer very little on the foundational developments (as not as much history remains known) and instead bulk up on the more recent history of the last century. Swing Low avoids this, meaning that it provides a lot of a lesser-known history in its early chapters and sets the foundation of Black Christianity in America more firmly within its nascent African beginnings than in the more well-known Civil Rights period of the mid-1900s.
That leads to probably the most contentious part of Swing Low, which is its emphasis on Black evangelicalism as a contrast to Black liberation theology. In particular, Strickland offers a rather stringent critique of James Cone, saying that his emphasis on liberation (the fifth point in Strickland’s core principles of Black Christianity) caused a major redefinition or abandonment of the other four points. Indeed, the last part of the book details how Black Christianity in America branched into broadly evangelical and mainline/progressive streams with an often implicit but occasionally explicit bias toward evangelicalism. This, of course, brings up the current tension between primarily-white conservative evangelicalism and the more socially progressive if theologically conservative elements of Black evangelicalism. Strickland does not opine much on this, but rather ends the book with the rather pointed observation that Black Christianity in America—particularly within evangelicalism—is at a tipping point and the future is uncertain.