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Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South . By Albert J. Raboteau. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. xi + 382 pp. $14.95.

As an important dimension of the new historiography on slavery, a fresh look at the religion of black slaves in the United States has emerged. And with this book a new interpretive synthesis has been achieved. Combing slave narratives, black autobiographies, and folk literature as well as ecclesiastical records and reports of white observers and missionaries, Professor Raboteau has crafted a carefully researched monograph. A dozen illustrations embellish the text: sketches of the symbolic and ritual life of Afro-American religion and portraits of some leading figures in its history. Throughout, Raboteau has exercised a judicious perspective. He probes his way imaginatively through the tangled debates over the presence and absence of African religious survivals; the paradoxical motivations of white missionaries who taught slaves, sought their conversion, and perpetuated their bondage; the visible institutional and invisible folk aspects of slave religion; and the doubleness of slave Christianity in accommodating to and rebelling against slavery. In the first part he portrays a vivid sense of a dynamic African heritage, its history of adaptation and change before the slave trade, and its continuation as living traditions in the New World. Fully understanding that religion is a human phenomenon which is always in the process of becoming or dying, Raboteau makes his case for the religious transformation of slaves into Christians by recalling that cultural contact is not always conflictual, even, ironically, under the conditions of enslavement. Along the way he lays the groundwork for comprehending the slaves as actors, religiously as elsewhere, and for appropriating the inner significance of Christianity for them. For the first time since Carter G. Woodson's The History of the Negro Church (1925), he has retold across denominational lines (though emphasizing Baptists) the story of the birth of the first black congregations in the South and of their struggle within Dixie's slavocracy. In the process, he sharply delineates what could and what could not be shared between white and black Christians.