In his 1971essay, “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States,” Charles H. Long once observed that the field of Black religious studies at that time largely featured two kinds of studies: “those arising from the social sciences, and an explicitly theological apologetic tradition.” Long argued, “This limitation of methodological perspectives has led to a narrowness of understanding and the failure to perceive certain creative possibilities in the black community in America.” In his critique of Black theologians and social scientists interested in the religions of the African diaspora, Long also criticized the field’s Christian hegemony and called for more expansive approaches to the study of Black religion. He wrote, “I have felt the need for some time to present a systematic study of black religion—a kind of initial ordering of the religious experiences and expressions of the black communities in America. Such a study should not be equated with Christianity, or any other religion for that matter. It is rather an attempt to see what kind of images and meanings lie behind the religious experiences of the black communities in America.” 

 

In his pluralizing of “Black community” to be understood and regarded as diverse “Black communities,” he also continued to outline what he described as “perspectives for a study of black religion from the point of view of a historian of religion,” perspectives which Long noted, “constitute symbolic images as well as methodological principles.” The first of these situated “Africa as historical reality and religious image.” The second noted, “The involuntary presence of the black community in America,” and the third, “The experience and symbol of God in the religious experience of blacks.” These three perspectives when read as “symbolic images” and interpreted as “methodological principles” expanded the field of Black religious studies in productive ways. Long’s critique helped to usher in a plethora of newer approaches to studying the religions of the African diaspora and in the years following its publication, Long in conversation with his many colleagues ironed out the field’s post-Civil Rights era commitments in such spaces as the Afro-American Religious History and the Black Theology Units at the American Academy of Religion and in the Society for the Study of Black Religion. In these spaces, they debated the characteristics, ethical imperatives, political implications, and methodological approaches for the study of Black religions, and through these gatherings they were able to build community, support each other’s writing projects, and formally institutionalize Black religious studies in conversation with the Black Studies and Black campus movements. Through their interventions—along lines of gender, class, socioeconomic status, institutional and denominational affiliations, and religious orientations—they collectively developed the field of Black religious studies that we have come to know and respect today. 

 

“To Tell Our Story: The Founding of Black Religious Studies and the Role of Its Founders” is an oral history project led by Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Ph.D., and funded by the Crossroads Project at Princeton University that endeavors to narrativize snippets of this rich history in light of the ancestral transitions of many of the field’s forebears. Just in the last five years, for instance, the field of Black religious studies, and the academy and church more broadly, have lost several influential figures in the study of Black religions, including but not limited to the Rev. Dr. James Hal Cone (1938-2018), the Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon (1950-2018), Dr. Charles H. Long (1926-2020), Dr. Albert J. Raboteau (1943-2021), the Rev. Dr. J. Deotis Roberts (1927-2022), and the Rev. Dr. Delores Williams (1934-2022). Each of these scholars and practitioners of Black religions contributed to the shaping of the guild and left indelible marks on their respective subfields and did so as comrades and co-laborers in joint struggle. For Cone and Roberts, it was Black Theology; for Cannon and Williams, it was Black Womanist Theology and Ethics; for Long, it was the study of the History of Religions; and for Raboteau, it was African American religious history. “To Tell Our Story” is an oral history project dedicated to collecting the narratives of the students and peers of these trailblazing scholars and their contemporaries to chart and archive intellectual genealogies in the study of Black religions, across methodological approaches, but most explicitly, as it relates to the subfields of theology, ethics, philosophy, and history. 

 

This project uses “students” here, not to reify patriarchal and academic hierarchy, but rather to suggest that we have benefited greatly from these scholars’ contributions and are still learning from them as their written works allow them to speak quite literally from the grave as archival ancestors. This project, then, attempts to tell only part of the story of how Black religious studies was founded in the post-civil rights era. Each of the oral history participants included in this iteration of the project describes the founding of the field of “Black religious studies” in distinct ways based on their own social location, intergenerational engagement, the nature of their methodological foci, and their own personal, political, and spiritual commitments. Those who engage their stories should pay close attention to how “the field” was shaped by a network of communal griots, teachers, advisors, mentors, and peers who each benefitted from each other in ways that are not fully explored here, but beckon more critical consideration. Indeed, they debated each other, broke bread at national conferences and challenged systems of power and domination in both the academy and the church, and through their interventions the field as we have come to know it was ultimately made possible.