It's the Maxwell Institute podcast.

I'm Blair Hodges.

What do you know about African American religious history?

Julius H. Bailey joins us in this episode to talk about his new introduction to the subject.

It's a book called Down in the Valley.

And the book operates on a few different levels.

Its ground floor is sort of a general history that begins with African traditional religions and moves through slavery and religion,

the rise of black churches and other religious movements like Islam, through the civil rights movement, and up to the present time.

Another level of the book focuses on how that historical story has been told by different people at different times.

This episode is about the diverse history of African American religions and the diverse histories of that history.

Send questions and comments to MI Podcast at BYU.edu.

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It's Julius H. Bailey on African American Religious Traditions

on this episode of the Maxwell Institute podcast.

We're speaking today with Julius H. Bailey. He's a professor of religious studies at the University of Redlands in California. He joins us via Skype this morning. Welcome to the show.

Good morning. I'm excited to talk about your new book, Down in the Valley, an introduction to African-American religious history.

When I first hear that phrase, African-American religious history, when I saw this book, my mind instantly went to Christianity in particular.

And I think a lot of people, a lot of listeners are probably thinking the same thing. So I thought we should start off by talking about some of the reasons

why that's the case. And we can obviously consider my own white middle class background.

But I'd also like to hear more about people like W.E.B. Du Bois and other scholars, many of them

Black, who've kind of talked about the histories, why people think of African-American religious history as Christianity begin with?

Well, that's a great question to start with. Yeah, there is this, and I guess one important

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