In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Ritual in an African American Church, and: Against All Odds: The Struggle for Racial Integration in Religious Organizations
  • Larry L. Hunt
Every Time I Feel the Spirit: Religious Experience and Ritual in an African American Church By Timothy J. NelsonNew York University Press, 2005. 222 pages. $65 (cloth), $19 (paper)
Against All Odds: The Struggle for Racial Integration in Religious Organizations By Brad Christerson, Korie L. Edwards and Michael O. EmersonNew York University Press, 2005. 199 pages. $19 (paper)

The books covered in this review have the same publisher, examine features of evangelical Protestantism, utilize an ethnographic approach, and focus on the interplay of race and religion. Beyond these commonalities, the two books are radically different endeavors.

Readers interested in the place of religious experience in social life will find Every Time I Feel the Spirit an ambitious undertaking. It is at the same time a detailed descriptive ethnography and a complex theoretical exercise. The author aims at revising the way social scientists think about the African-American experience, especially one aspect of African-American religious experience – emotionally expressive forms of worship. He reports on his one-year sojourn in the life of an African-American congregation in Charleston S.C., an AME church with strong Pentecostal leanings. As a white, middle-class researcher, trained in the folkways of anthropologists and sociologists, he confronts in a personal way, the meaning of unfamiliar religious experiences and highly emotional styles of worship to gain insight into the collective dimensions of ritualized activity. Nelson is not interested in the usual debates surrounding African American religion: e.g., how much is a reflection of an African heritage; how much is generated by America's subordination and segregation practices. Instead, he develops an attribution theory, seeing religion as defined by the practice of attributing events in everyday life to spiritual agents rather than to natural events or social forces.

Nelson enjoins fellow social scientists to take more seriously the lived experience present in some emotional styles of worship, rather than dismissing them as compensatory, escapist or symbolic recognition of subordination. He focuses on the lived experience, recording in considerable detail the words people use to describe their religious experiences and how these experiences operate in daily life. His analysis proceeds on two levels: personal beliefs and collective ritual. It is especially the analysis of the Sunday morning worship service and the normative dimensions of emotional worship that is original and creative. He shows how what an outside observer might view as disorganized and chaotic – members of the congregation interrupting the worship service with shouts, spontaneous dancing in the aisles to the point of losing consciousness and falling down – is a normatively patterned ritualized occasion, generated and regulated by the collective congregation. [End Page 1461]

Especially important is the chapter on Race, Class and Religion wherein Nelson links the congregants' religious experience to the church's social setting in an area of high poverty, crime and drug use. He effectively articulates the relationships between the church and the street by developing parallels between the religious experiences found inside the church and the outside chaos of the street, showing how church members experience and value the difference between "religious highs" from those offered by "the devil's candy."

Nelson, a self-described "quantitatively challenged ethnographer" has written an excellent ethnography. The book shows a keen awareness of issues in the sociology of religion, is firmly grounded in history and sociological theory and is a well-written insightful case study about an important aspect of the African American religious experience. Every Time I Feel the Spirit is an intellectually challenging work and should be read by all interested in understanding what is often termed "black religion." Against All Odds has a more general focus and looks at the dynamics of religious organizations attempting to build on the value of racial equality and maintain racial diversity in their membership. The authors frame their study by locating religious organizations as mediators between private and public life, in the context of American civic society, that is, a special kind of voluntary association.

Six case studies of evangelical Protestant religious organizations...

pdf

Share