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Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952. By Wallace D. Best. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005. xxii + 251 pp. $39.95 cloth.
Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago 1915-1952 is a valuable monograph that makes an important contribution to the study of African American religion in Chicago during the Great Migration. Up to now, this fertile ground of religious experience in Bronzeville, the historic black section of Chicago, has been defined by the limited insights of the Chicago School of sociologists, namely Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake. Although their extensive work, chronicled in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace), was published in 1945 and still is an important study of black life in Chicago, it was hampered by their biases regarding religious practices of African Americans, especially black southern migrants. Drake's and Cayton's characterizations of die lives of storefront worshipers and spiritualists were infused with what Best terms a "rigid binarism" (31). The binarism, Best argues, allowed the sociologists to interpret urban religion as progressive, while the rural religion of migrants was primitive and premodern. For scholars of African American religious history, the binarism is most apparent in Black Metropolis and continues to influence certain areas of scholarship on the African American religious experience. Best has done the field a major service by reclaiming this history, using stories of the established middle-class black churches as...