**2. Clear Creek M.B.C**

Clear Creek M.B.C. is, in many ways, a typical, Southern, African American, fundamentalist and evangelical church. While not all members of Clear Creek M.B.C. would embrace the labels fundamentalist and evangelical, they stress that they believe in Biblical inerrancy, and that they are an evangelical church. It is worth stating, however, that as Southern historian Charles Reagan Wilson has remarked "Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism are two quite distinct categories, although believers frequently hold both concepts. […] Evangelicals and Fundamentalists in the South share the belief that right behavior is essential to 'being religious'" ([1], p. 9). If fundamentalism is, therefore, frequently defined as militantly anti-modernist Protestantism, this is not how these congregations define it, and it is within the context of their definitions that I situate explication here.

Embedded in the seemingly simple identification of Clear Creek outlined in the previous paragraph (as typical, Southern, African American, fundamentalist and evangelical), is a plethora of historically documented facts, statistics, and assumptions, ranging from definitions of the nature of Southern religion—meaning "of the American South"—to the statistical and numerical supremacy of the (several) Baptist denominations, to assumptions about what constitutes a "typical" African American church. Each of these labels must be examined as they simultaneously delineate identities and resonate with the social and cultural spaces that surround them.

#### **3. African American Christianity**

While it is true that African American Christianity has its origins in the Christianity of the colonists, this is not to say that African American Christianity or religious expression is but an imitation of what might be termed Anglo American antecedents or counterparts. As explored by Black theologians in the 1960s and 1970s in particular [2–5]1 , African American Christianity is itself a unique expression, developed by the slaves and carried by their descendants into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The musical expressions that African Americans used to encode and express that interpretation of the Christian message were similarly reinterpreted to encapsulate a comprehension and elucidation of life that is uniquely African American.

I have chosen Christianity as the religion of study for the reasons stated above, but also because, as a consequence of distinct cultural and historical configurations, it is the religion where the exegesis of cultural transfer and reinterpretation is most concretely documented [6,7], and because the majority of contemporary African Americans who profess affiliation with an organised religion nominate Christianity. Similarly, I have chosen the Baptist church as the specific locus of study because it was one of the foremost denominations in the evangelisation of the slaves and their descendants, and because it holds today the largest African American membership of any Christian denomination [8–11]. In order to ground the discussion in the particular, rather than confine it to generalities, I will refer to my field recordings of services from fieldwork that I conducted in such churches in Mississippi in the 1980s and 1990s ([12], pp. 169–205), and re-contextualise these with

<sup>1</sup> This is not, of course, to imply that Black theological production has attenuated since that time but, simply, that in terms of academic scholarship, this was a new departure that had particular impact in the 1960s and 1970s.

field recordings from my fieldwork in 2012. Comparison over time is, of course, an intriguing possibility in this instance but, as I have explored the earlier services quite extensively in my 2004 monograph [12], the reader is referred there (and to the accompanying CD) for detail about those. For this article, therefore, I will ground discussion in 2012.

A number of critically important factors confound fruitful comparison in this article across the decades. Most critically, perhaps, Clear Creek M.B.C. has a new, full-time, and very different pastor (see heading 7 for more detail on this). Similarly, while some key officers of the church have remained, others (Deacon Lee Earl Robinson, and Deacon Sam Jones, for example) have moved on. Both the church membership and the church building have increased roughly fourfold in size, so that this is no longer the small, primarily familial church it once was, but a large evangelical church. It is still true, however, that when I attended service in 2012, I and the couple with whom I was staying (who graciously offered to drive me out to service, as I no longer have a valid American driver's licence) were the only white people in attendance. The "parent" Clear Creek Southern Baptist Church (organised 12 August 1834 by settlers from Virginia and the Carolinas) from which the African American population split in 1877, is but a few hundred yards up the road from Clear Creek M.B.C., and maintains a white congregation (see heading 7, below, for further detail).
