Also by this author: Swing Low, volume 1: A History of Black Christianity in the United States
Series: Swing Low #2
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. In this volume 2, an anthology of readings drawn from primary sources, Strickland and a team of editors uncover the breadth of these historical documents from throughout the centuries of Black history so that we can listen to Black Christianity in its own words.
From a 1776 sermon by pastor Lemuel Haynes to podcasts and interviews with people like Christina Edmondson and Lecrae, these selections illustrate the diversity, creativity, and resilience of the Black church throughout American history. The anthology features familiar names such as Phillis Wheatley, Gardner C. Taylor, and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as authors and leaders who are largely unknown, revealing insights from the church, academy, and beyond.
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 1, a companion narrative history, tells the story of these themes from the 1600s to the present, exploring the crucial ecclesiastical, social, and theological developments.
Swing Low is destined to be the definitive 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 2 is an anthology of Black Christianity in the United States that supports and contextualizes the historical-theological narrative of Volume 1. While it can be read as a standalone endeavor, it was created to be a companion to the first volume and I think you get more from each volume when you read them in tandem. The writings in volume two are wide in scope and selection but mirror the comprehensive look at Black theology in America that volume one gives us.
The volume is divided into six sections:
1) Pre-emancipation: 1619-1865
2) Reconstruction and its Aftermath: 1865-1896
3) Civil Rights Era: 1896-1968
4) Black Evangelicalism: 1963-
5) Black Theology: 1969-
6) Into the Twenty-First Century
Each of these sections are sub-divided into types of literature: sermons and oratory, theological treatises, worship and liturgy, and personal correspondence/autobiography. I appreciate this breakdown because it gives readers a variety of literary contexts and expressions of faith. The result is a holistic anthology that equally elevates preaching, theology, worship, and personal reflection. Each section contains between four to six entries, even further ensuring a balanced perspective.
Each of the sections are introduced with a short narrative—whether it be a one-paragraph autobiography of the author or some other contextualization of the text. By and large, though, Strickland and his associate editors (Justin Clark, Yana Jenay Connor, and Courtlandt K. Perkins) mostly get out of the way to let the text do the talking. It’s enough of an introduction to bring the reader into the world of the text without recreating Strickland’s volume 1 history.
While there are a few selections that I’m not convinced fit the anthology quite perfectly, the only addition that is a bit baffling to me is a selection from Jackie Hill Perry’s Gay Girl, Good God. The early sections are comprised of some of the standards: Lemuel Haynes’ John 3:3 sermon, Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the 4th of July,” Jarena Lee, Leonard Black, etc. Pretty much everything important and extant from the time. As the history moves closer to present day, there’s both the opportunity for more discernment in the selections and the ability to choose lesser-known or overlooked pieces.
The highlight of this volume is how it chooses visually to tie the anthologized works back to the five core principles developed by Strickland. Whenever there is a reference—direct or oblique—to one of the five Anchors, the text includes a visual icon that represents that Anchor. The introduction to volume two explains this system and the book utilizes it liberally throughout.
Altogether, Swing Low is Strickland’s magnum opus. It will be the standard within evangelicalism for decades to come. This will be the textbook in evangelical seminaries for classes on the Black Church or American history broadly. I do wonder how this work would be viewed by the more theologically liberal/progressive factions within Black Christianity in America. The author and editing team of these volumes are all either professors or students/former students of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. The book’s endorsers are almost exclusively from within evangelicalism, mostly from within the Southern Baptist ecosystem. While I have few complaints about what Strickland has offered, I do wonder if the end product would have been different if more folks within the larger corpus of Black Christianity had been a part of developing this work. Ironically, the weakness of this endeavor in creating a comprehensive history of Black Christianity in America and endeavoring to platform a number of disparate voices through the anthology is that there is an almost singular Black Southern Baptist voice driving the narrative—which, it should be noted, is not the majority voice of Black Christianity in the United States. While a good work, I believe some ecumenical endeavors in the creation process could have expanded this endeavor to impact folks beyond the evangelical ecosystem.