The rise to respectability : race, religion, and the Church of God in Christ / Calvin White, Jr.

"The Rise to Respectability documents the history of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and examines its cultural and religious impact on African Americans and on the history of the South. It explores the ways in which Charlies Harrison Mason, the son of slaves and founder of COGIC, embraced a Pentecostal faith that celebrated the charismatic forms of religious expression that many blacks had come to view as outdated, unsophisticated, and embarrassing. While exmaining the intersection of race, religion, and class, The Rise to Respectability details how the denomination dealt with the stringent standard of bourgeois behavior imposed on churchgoers as they moved from southern rural areas into the urban centers in both the South and North. Rooted in the hardships of slavery and coming of age during Jim Crow, COGIC's story is more than a religious debate. Rather this book sees the history of the church as interwoven with the Great Migration, the struggle for modernity, class tension, and racial animosity -- all representative parts of the African American experience."--Project Muse.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

Introduction: the roots of the study -- In the beginning, there stood two: the reconstruction of African American religion and the birth of the Black holiness movement -- We will let the courts speak for us: controversy within the holiness movement and the excommunication of a saint -- Mason told us not to fight: religion, respectability, and conscientious objectorship -- Come over to Macedonia and help: sanctification disguised as racial uplift -- Memphis, the hope of a promised land: the achievement of respectability for the Church of God in Christ -- "Dar he": COGIC and the national civil rights movement -- Afterword: wandering in the wilderness.

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