This project will trace how many black people began during the period of the New Negro Renaissance to develop a modern religious tradition that moved beyond the constraints of a fading Victorian culture. New god-talk emerged as black elites and ordinary religionists responded to a new era of possibility even though they continued to be haunted by old questions of whether the biblical god was real and present in the midst of their collective suffering.

Beginning with the intuition that emergent black cultural elites of the 1920s reflected in their public struggles with the inheritance of Afro-Protestantism a broader shift in the architecture of religious language, this project will begin to trace the development of new strategies and god rhetoric used in this period to invoke and convey the direct tangible presence of the sacred. It will consider how newly arrived black people in northern cities began to develop spiritualities that strongly embodied a desire to make the sacred seemingly more concrete and tangible than mainstream religious traditions did. In many northern cities several groups (The Nation of Islam, followers of Father Divine, and black Pentecostals) not only shaped how many black people negotiated the pluralism and burdens of urban life but in so doing they demonstrated that many would no longer be tied to the traditions of decorum, respectability, or traditional Christian identity that seemed to bind institutionally-minded black Baptists and Methodists at the turn of the century. In making these demands members of these black sects actually mirrored the shift in religious language New Negro elites signaled. Their shared new emphasis in direct, tangible god-talk would characterize not only the interwar period but it would also animate the black quest for transcendence in social movements where activists and ordinary citizens pressed for human freedom and equality and form the backdrop for sexual exploration in black expressive culture of the 1960s and 70s.