Preaching with sacred fire6/15/2023 ![]() Martin cautions, “chronicling the rise of professionally trained ministers and scholars, black institutional churches and schools, and the artistic musings of the black literati on ‘the folk’ does not tell the whole story,” because these unlettered African Americans were “busy crafting their own ideas and practices of religious revitalization.” (4) As Martin claims in his introduction, the “renaissance” of African American Protestantism in the emerging urban America was the work of “the folk” and their consumption of wax sermons, not the lettered black religious elite (which Martin refers to as the “Black Protestant Establishment”). It is through the phonograph, a medium and messenger more economically accessible than radio for many black consumers, that Martin’s central claim for rethinking African American Protestantism in the interwar period is made apparent as a challenge to centering the scholarly discussion on the religious work of the “black literati”. Martin describes phonograph religion in six chapters: a discussion of the phonograph’s rise in modern domestic culture black mainline Protestant reactions to urban leisure culture and blues music the recorded sermons of Calvin Dixon (popularly known as “Black Billy Sunday”) and William Arthur White the “folk” sermonic forms that male and female wax preachers (and their staged audiences) performed for the buying black populace, across denominational lines, to enjoy in their own homes and small worship communities the use of commercial success by black ministers in the “New Negro” era to chart a path to social prominence, where the conspicuous consumption of luxury vehicles and homes in elite neighborhoods signaled racial respectability and the evaluation wax preachers and consuming black audiences in light of the emerging “chain store” economy that threatened employment opportunities and the financial stability of local communities. However, Martin produces an engaging microhistory by using Gates’s religious production to illuminate the consuming habits and economic access of African American Protestants in the interwar period. The career of the African American minister and successful phonograph preacher James M. Martin provides a portrait of “phonograph religion”, the preservation of an “old-time style” preaching by black (mostly male) preachers who articulated on wax records an evangelical morality for modern urban living (3). Martin’s Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion refashions the study of twentieth-century black Protestantism according to the commodification of religious practices for mass consumption. New York: New York University Press, 2014. ![]() Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion.
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