This probing work examines how African-American slaves, through their appropriation of Christianity, found a resource that affirmed their sense of self-worth and identity, and a spirit of community that offered psychological and spiritual resistance to oppression. White evangelists extolled the benefits of converting slaves to Christianity, but the slaves discovered in the Bible a different message, shared among themselves in "dark symbols and obscure signs".

Examines the ethnocentric salutary expressions of African Americans that dominate their ritualistic moments of social encounter, and argues that these expressions show how black Americans have lived with the challenge of having to prove their sisterly or brotherly capacities, and with the desire to be treated as equal siblings in the family of God.