During the world war years of the early twentieth century, new African American religious movements emerged that emphasized black heritage identities. Among these were Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew's Congregation of Commandment Keepers (Jewish) and “Noble” Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple of America (Islamic). Unlike African American religions of the previous century, these religious communities distinctly captured the ethos of ethnicity (cultural heritage) that pervaded American social consciousness at the time. Their central message of salvation asserted that blacks were an ethnic people distinguished not by superficial phenotype but by membership in a heritage that reached far beyond the bounds of American history and geography. The academic study of these religions has largely moved from dismissal and cynicism to serious engagement with African American Jews and Muslims as veritable forms of religion. Despite this progress among scholars, some recent studies continue to deny that Matthew’s and Ali's communities were authentically Jewish and Islamic (respectively). When scholars dispense with theological or racial biases that bifurcate religions into ‘true’ and ‘false’ forms, the study of these black ethnic religions might best yield important insights for understanding the linkage among ethnicity, the nation-state, and religion. The religious reasoning of Matthew and Ali produced resourceful, complicated challenges to dominant colonial and racist paradigms for understanding agency and history. Their theology is appropriately discerned not as illusion, hybridity, or confusion but as thoughtful anticolonial expressions of Judaism and Islam that sought inclusion and honor through black ethnicity. At a time when African Americans were viewed as cultureless and without any legacy of inheritance except the deformities of slavery, the rise of black ethnics introduced religious traditions that demonstrated blacks were indeed a people with heritage.

Between 1890 and 1920 in the United States, Protestant ministers demonstrated increasing concern for boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen. In particular, they described a two-fold “boy problem,” defined both in terms of heightened juvenile delinquency and passive effeminacy. This essay analyzes one of the chief ways in which church leaders attempted to combat these issues: the development of Christian boy ministries rooted in the stories and themes of medieval knighthood. Looking at the use of such themes in Protestant literature and in new church organizations such as the Knights of King Arthur and the Knights of the Holy Grail, this article reveals why medievalism had such power and resonance in this era. In part, the symbolic use of the Middle Ages fit well with emerging psychological theories of adolescent development. According to G. Stanley Hall and other proponents of racial recapitulation, adolescent boys were instinctually driven by a need to join their medieval forebears in fighting battles, worshiping heroes, and forming romantic relationships marked by love and chivalry. In addition, the medieval knight emerged as the ideal exemplar for dealing with both aspects of the early twentieth-century boy problem. While boys struggled with moral decadence and effeminate weakness, knights were both morally refined and confidently virile. In the end, I argue that the proliferation of medieval themes in this period reflected a growing consensus regarding the “ideal Christian man.” While uncontrolled masculine expression produced the violent man, and the suppression of masculine expression produced the weak man, carefully channeled masculine expression would produce the “knightly” man, the ideal “Christian gentleman” capable of pursuing purity and virtue through manly and aggressive means.

As one of the first nonessential commodities marketed to African Americans, the race record industry provides historical insight into the cultural ethos and competing ethical values of black communities during the interwar period. Both ethnomusicologists and historians have discussed the ways race records articulate intraracial conflicts that were exacerbated by social factors such as migration and urbanization. But like all forms of mass culture, religious records served multiple purposes and were interpreted by listeners at varying registers. For many, religious recordings were spiritually edifying and liberating, just as they were wildly entertaining. And some may feel that these religious recordings contested the aesthetic values of the black middle class even as they reinforced prescriptive bourgeois behavioral codes. While the purpose of this essay is not to give voice to the listeners of religious race records, this essay does offer an initial attempt to illumine the broader cultural contexts in which these records, namely, recorded sermons, were both produced and consumed toward providing tenable interpretations of these recordings based on resonant religious beliefs and meanings of the historical moment. This essay is concerned with such questions as: What theological and political discourses were these preachers participating in on wax? What cultural symbols, explicit and implicit, did these preachers commonly reference? And what were the possible ideological implications of these cultural significations? Despite the many interpretive possibilities of recorded sermons and even the “folk” aesthetic that defines them, this essay suggests that the religious race record industry served as a productive force in encouraging systems of social control over raced, classed, and gendered bodies during the interwar era. And the industry’s decision to focus on theologically conservative sermons stressing personal piety cast a powerful ballot in the cultural debates concerning the style, content, and purpose of black preaching in the previous century.

Based on ethnographic research conducted in Pittsburgh, this article examines the experiences of American-born intermarriage converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. Long characterized as a variety of Christianity fundamentally ethnic in its orientation and insular in its relationships to American religious and cultural mainstreams, Eastern Orthodoxy has attracted increasing numbers of American-born converts over the last thirty years. While the motives and perspectives of more overtly theologically driven conversions have garnered attention, intermarriage conversions are often dismissed as the natural outcomes of entering into marriage and family life. Significantly, intermarriage converts frequently stress their decisions to enter the Orthodox church as autonomously made apart from external influences.

By gauging the ways intermarriage converts are depicted in parish life as well as the motives and perspectives they themselves convey in interviews, I argue that the language and assumptions of the American spiritual marketplace profoundly influence Orthodox Christian understandings of family and religion today. Personal choice and individualism rather than the expectations of traditionally ascribed identities have come to be highly valued and valorized means of counting Orthodox identity in the United States. Yet, the prevalence of marketplace values does not diminish the emotional and social impacts of family and community for intermarriage converts. Rather, I observed a general elevation in the importance of both and a frequent substantiation of their roles as the transmitters of shared values among these individuals. Thus, this article provides a case study of how individual and familial concerns further religious choice-making.