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James Baldwin's God: Sex, Hope and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture. By Clarence E. Hardy III. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. xvi + 150 pp. $30.00 cloth.
Clarence Hardy III has written an extremely thoughtful study of African American religion as witnessed in the writings of one of America's most ardent social critics, the late James Baldwin. Baldwin's complex relationship to black holiness culture is the vehicle for asking questions that are concerned with oppression, identity, sexuality, and the body as they relate to black Christianity. Although it is one of the largest and most vibrant branches of black Protestantism, theologians and historians know woefully little about the religious world of black holiness, a sectarian wing of Christian revivalism that emerged in the late nineteenth century, partially in response to a diminishing folk religiosity and partially in response to a new emphasis on the social gospel and ideologies of respectability that prevailed in many mainline churches. With its emphasis upon the proximity of the divine in every aspect of a believer's life, the necessity for an experiential, ritualized conversion, and its promotion of a staunch, moralistic piety, the black holiness tradition preserved the purest impulses of Christian evangelicalism as...