At the root of scholarship on the politics of the black church is an ongoing and salient debate about the extent to which African American churches are either opiates or catalysts. Adolph L. Reed, Jr. (1986), Gunnar Myrdal (1962), and E. Franklin Frazier (1974) have contended that, as opiates, African American churches are antidemocratic, out of touch, and ineffective. Fred Harris (1999), Allison Calhoun Brown (1996), Katherine Tate (1993), and others have argued, to the contrary, that as catalysts, churches are a viable part of the African American civic tradition, facilitating protest movements and electoral participation. The rich theoretical and empirical contributions offered by Michael Leo Owens and Eric L. McDaniel, respectively, engage the aforementioned debate in creative ways and add clarity to our understanding of the role of African American churches in American political life.
Owens begins his analysis where much of the research on activist AfricanAmerican church politics typically concludes. Instead of focusing on the role of these churches in protest movements and electoral politics, he offers a deft analysis of how black clergy and their congregations who participate in activist African American churches use resources to engage politicians and political processes after the elections are over and elected officials have assumed their positions. In complementary fashion, McDaniel refocuses attention on the concept of “activism” in the church by offering an intriguing theoretical framework to explain why some churches are active and others are not.
In his interrogation of partnerships between churches and local governments, Owens focuses on the following questions: Why is it that activist African American churches collaborate with government rather than working apart from it? Why do African Americans tend to support partnerships with government? What is the political process by which African American churches partner with government? What are the products of their partnerships as well as the broader implications of these collaborations?
Owens shows that activist church-cum-local-government collaboration flows from a complex mixture of the career-development goals of pastors as professionals, the resources as well as desires of church congregations, and the needs of impoverished communities that have not sufficiently been transformed with the election of black politicians in metropolitan areas. The author's analysis of the products and implications of activist African American church partnerships with government is among the study's most important contributions. In his case study of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlem, Morrisania, and South Jamaica, Owens shows how churches chartered community development corporations (CDCs) in an effort to address neighborhood needs, manifest their faith, and seek public as well as private funding to support and expand social service opportunities. During the 1980s and 1990s, partnerships thus moved African American churches from the relatively outsider stances of protest and electoral mobilization tactics to the relative insider position of supporting and providing social welfare services under the city's ten-year plan.
Owens's analysis also uncovers the ways in which the church partnerships served as stepping stones, producing affordable housing and commercial facilities that, in turn, fostered enterprise, employment, and youth development in some of New York's most beleaguered black neighborhoods. The author reasons that although the church–state partnerships provide limited capacity to improve current social and economic realities, they do have the ability to affect the physical trajectory and future of black neighborhoods.
Owens also attends, however, to the costs associated with church–government partnerships, contending that they limit a sense of autonomy among African American churches. In particular, insofar as CDCs are quasi-public institutions, political engagement through them renders certain political tactics less accessible. Such limitations may pose long-term problems, especially since activist African American churches have always benefited from the use of wide-ranging tactics of political engagement in their attempts to elicit governmental responsiveness on behalf of the poor. Unfortunately, Owen misses an opportunity to engage directly the important scholarly debate regarding the civic utility of African American churches by showing how his findings strike a middle ground between those who see the church as a catalyst and those who see it as an opiate. His book nonetheless represents an important contribution. In fact, as government continues to rely on churches to facilitate the purposes of Section 104 of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, scholars will invariably refer to this trendsetting work.
While Owens and others readily apply the term “activist” as a crucial adjective in describing the status of African American churches, McDaniel argues that it is important to unpack the terminology and offer an explanation of why some churches are activist and others are not. He convincingly argues that church-based political activism is often treated like a constant, even though it is better understood as a contextually based process.
McDaniel argues that a church becomes politically active when four conditions are met: i) when the pastor is interested in involving his or her church in politics; ii) when the members are receptive to the idea of having a politically active church; iii) when the church itself is not restricted from having a presence in political matters; and iv) when the current political climate necessitates and allows political action. Failure to negotiate agreement among all four of the factors inhibits a church's ability to enter into the political arena and sustain political activism over time. McDaniel provides a much more holistic analysis of the inner workings of African American church politics than previous scholarship on this topic. He effectively tests the viability of his theory by using quantitative and qualitative data that analyze political activism among black church clergy and congregants in Detroit, Michigan, and Austin, Texas. As a result, his novel approach for investigating activism sheds light on how churches, with long histories of involvement, socialize members and pastors accordingly. The analysis examines the ebb and flow of political activity in contemporary black churches, as they adjust to the changing internal and external environments in which they exist.
McDaniel also demonstrates how the political contexts of churches shape the activism of their congregations. Most enlightening and informative are his efforts to conceptualize the factors that lead to activism among clergy and congregation, respectively, as well as the manner in which the factors related to activism are interactive and mutually reinforcing. His efforts to unpack the assumptions often held by scholars of the black church about what constitutes activism are impressive, representing important contributions to the continued development of scholarship on the African American church.
Together, these two books go a long way to explain the factors that lead to activism at the individual and collective levels of the African American church community and the advantages and disadvantages of such activism. To the extent that any weaknesses exist in the two studies, they result from an unwarranted assumption about the racial homogeneity of African American church communities. Over the last two decades, a new literature has explored the impact of black ethnic diversity in expanding the agenda of black church politics. Neither of these books addresses this important diversity and its implications for the study of African American politics. Future analyses will be enriched by greater attention to the new literature on African American heterogeneity. At the same time, both Owens and McDaniel greatly contribute to the scholarship on African American churches and church activism as it moves forward.
