Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (review)

Increasingly social science scholars are exploring culture's role in facilitating social activism. Marla Frederick's Between Sundays: Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith, contributes to this effort through an examination of religiosity's effect on African American women's experiences and actions. Women's expressions of faith reflect what Frederick refers to as "spirituality" — the understanding of God and God's work in their everyday lives. Constructing religiosity in this way allows Frederick to conceptualize the agency religion inspires in a way that illuminates how multiple political and ideological meanings interact within the church's domain to frame action in both political and social relief terms (a point of view contemporary sociologists of religion generally accept). This nuanced construction of agency makes it possible for Frederick to think of the church as a "public sphere" in which women are encouraged to build community in ways that inspire social activism. Data for the study was drawn from participant observation and ethnographic research conducted in Halifax County, North Carolina, between 1997 and 1998.

Borrowing from the resource mobilization social movement theory, Frederick maintains that contexts and cultural processes influence how women interpret and act on their religiosity. She empirically explores how eight religious women's faith moved them to construct meanings about the inequality they confronted in their daily lives. Frederick found that two organizations, the Concerns Citizens of Tillery, North Carolina (CCT), and the church were pivotal "public spheres" for transforming religious meaning into social action. Specifically, she documents how the CCT's and the church's institutional settings nurtured interpersonal bonds, meanings, confidence and obligations that engendered in women political efficacy. Similar to Higginbotham (1994) and Payne (1995), Frederick argues that institutions are cultural reservoirs used by women to construct meanings to shape their moral and political views about the kind of society that should exist. According to Frederick, the CCT's and the church's support of women's movement in to public discourse encouraged women to interpret their involvement in the "public sphere" as missionary work and "to pursue acts of faith that are both highly public and highly personal . . . with the aim of improving themselves and their communities." Frederick's demonstration of how the personal translates into confrontations with injustice, however, is tedious and inconsistent. For instance, though her exploration of televangelism is interesting, its contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of African American women's activism is limited. This aspect of her analysis simply reveals that multiple interpretations of religiosity exist, some of which can be construed to discourage sociopolitical action. Since multivalent religious points of views are common among religious adherents Frederick's analysis of televangelism would have been more illuminating if it had explicitly dissected how women's involvement in CCT and church activities influence their interpretations of televangelism's message of individual prosperity message. Do some women view personal transformation as a tool for confronting injustice? Why or why not? Addressing these questions may disclose how participation in CCT and church activities exposed women to various social networks and interpretations of religiosity that can encourage or discourage social action.

Frederick's contention that personal transformation leads to advocating political and economic change is the most empirically troubling portion of her examination of religiosity in African American women's everyday lives. Frederick argues that women's faiths are expressed in two forms of personal activism: tithing and redefining intimacy, both of which lead women to constantly critique their behavior. Tithing, Frederick contends, leads to tension between the desire to spend and the obligation to tithe, thus inclining women to interrogate their own consumerism. The data regarding this process is problematic since it does not demonstrate how women's religious critiques of consumption and materialism translate into political and economic activism. This same empirical disconnect applies to Frederick's examination of African American women's sexual politics. Frederick begins her analysis of sexual politics suggesting that her data indicate that...