Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment by Carolyn Moxley Rouse, John L. Jackson, Jr., and Marla F. Frederick. New York University Press, 2016.

Neither people, nor their experiences, nor our institutions follow single disciplinary or methodological tracks. Yet, most scholarly books about them do just that – using a very specific toolbox to tell what, as a result, can only ever be just part of a story. It makes sense: we are trained with a specific set of skills and we use them to tell stories the best way we know how. But there are costs to this approach; when we follow one track, there are many roads not taken. On the other hand, we can’t do what we can’t know. But maybe our friends can.

Televised Redemption is many things: ethnography, history, psychology, media theory, sociology, and critical race studies, with a dash of political science thrown in. . It’s also, astonishingly, co-written by three authors (Wow. How?), and still maintains a (somewhat) coherent argument and consistent readability. But there are costs to this approach too: it does a great deal, but there is also a great deal that it cannot do. That’s okay; that might even be great. Because this is the kind of book that asks as many questions as it answers, gesturing to the byways and off-road trails that it does not follow. But that others can and will. And that is certain: this is a book that will inspire countless projects to come.

That’s partly because it starts by thinking race and religion together anthropologically, a methodological approach being led by the authors of this volume. It does so under the broad rubric of media (with, surprisingly, rather less focus on television that one might expect from the title), which allows the authors to probe how media is used as a form of racial redemption. Black religious media is centered as a fundamental part of the struggle against racial discrimination and for equality, as in these mediascapes, “blacks are equally the sons and daughters of God.” It’s the story of black religious media, and it’s the story of black resistance as shaped through strategies of representation. As this book insists, you shouldn’t do one without the other.

The book brings together three significant, if differently constituted, black religious communities in the US: Christianity (with a focus on the prosperity ministry); Islam (specifically Nation of Islam and the American Society of Muslims); and the less well-known (and significantly smaller) Black Hebrew Israelites. All three communities have fundamentally different relationships to the notions of The State generally, and to the United States in particular. All three are in constant and productive conversation and tension about their critiques of the State and how to participate in the body politic. And all three leverage religious media in different ways as a path to personal redemption and racial redemption. Those differences are valuable: the diversity of approaches to redemption contributes to the enduring strength of black religious media and its humanizing influence. Black religious media fundamentally insists on the value and equality of blacks to whites even as it speaks to very different ideologies of faith and citizenship.

The book is divided into two parts, each with three chapters. The first is a history of the three religious communities in the US that incorporates close readings of a variety of religious media and their role in ideological formation, while the second offers a media ethnography built on careful and methodologically innovative fieldwork. We learn in the first half about the past thirty years of African American Christian Broadcasting and its role in calling for communal social justice and civil rights, deftly contrasted with more recent prosperity gospels that operate under a logic of capitalistic fairness and individualism. (This is by Martha F. Frederick; if you find it interesting, she expands on the argument and data in Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global.) Carolyn Moxley Rouse offers us an innovative reading of a variety of images in three Muslim newspapers, Freedom’s Journal (1827-1829), Muhammed Speaks (1960-1975), and Muslim Journal (1981-present), and their relationship to a broader rejection of the United States as the primary site of nationalism, as well as excavating important histories of splits within the community. John L. Jackson Jr. applies some of the methodologies he introduces in 2013’s Thin Description Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of the Jerusalem to chronicle the rich range of media approaches employed by Ben Ammi, the founder of the Black Hebrew Israelites. Ben Ammi uses the corner soapbox, newspapers, and DVDs and social media to advocate for African Americans as the true descendants of Ancient Israelites who belong in Israel.

Again: all three have drastically different ideologies shaped by and reflected in their media strategies and representations. And also again: all of these mediascapes are centrally concerned with questions of citizenship, the struggle for inclusion and equal protection, and the relationship between the two.

Which, it turns out, has a lot to do with women. Another important theme across the book is how women use religious media for gender and racial redemption, both personally and for their communities more broadly. Frederick explores that through “prosperity gospels,” which “advance in the hands of women” while Rouse looks at Black Muslim blogs and magazines to think about the “post-postcolonial racialized postracialism within the African American Muslim community” and its implications for gender norms and the search for different forms of community. (Jackson talks rather less about gender; men tend to.)

The second half of the book is for the voyeurs, the storytellers, and the people who read books to imagine worlds that might be different from their own. It offers a series of case studies, fully acknowledging the limitations of this approach, while immersing us in the lives of people like Shonda, who found personal and practical redemption in televangelism’s prosperity gospel; Maryam and Wajda, who prefer the limitations of the United Arab Emirates to the US, finding greater freedom in the Muslim theocracy than in the racist US; and Laura and Michael, the producers of The Green Hour, a weekly Black Hebrew Israelite radio show. These are fascinating stories, and they all show how black religious media works towards a redemption vision, and how that work actually works on the ground. I want to know these people more, and I want to know more people in these communities. But I also want to know more about religious media itself; not just how these communities interact with it and are represented by it, but what kind of system religious media is, and how African Americans have resisted its racialized models of representation as much as they are subject to it. I also want to know how more about the broad range of technologies and whether there are specific stakes to the choices each community makes about their communicative media.

Which is okay, because as I said, I’m sure someone is working on that right now.

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Sharrona Pearl is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.  A history and theorist of the face and body, her most recent book Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other was published by University of Chicago Press in 2017.  A frequent blogger and writer, you can find her work at Kveller.com, Lilith.org, romper.com, Chronicle Vitae, Real Life Mag., and Aeon, among others.  You can find clips and more at www.sharronapearl.com, and say hi on twitter @sharronapearl.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.