4/29 @ 6:00PM

Labyrinth Books

122 Nassau Street

In the decades after the end of slavery, African Americans were committed to southern state mental hospitals at higher rates as white psychiatrists listed “religious excitement” among the most frequent causes of insanity for Black patients. At the same time, American popular culture and political discourse framed African American modes of spiritual power as fetishism and superstition, cast embodied worship as excessive or fanatical, and labeled new religious movements “cults,” unworthy of respect.

As Judith Weisenfeld argues in Black Religion in the Madhouse, psychiatrists’ notions of race and religion became inextricably intertwined in the decades after the end of slavery and into the twentieth century, and had profound impacts on the diagnosis, care, and treatment of Black patients. This book charts how racialized medical understandings of mental normalcy pathologized a range of Black religious beliefs, spiritual sensibilities, practices, and social organizations and framed them as manifestations of innate racial traits. Importantly, these characterizations were marshaled to help to limit the possibilities for Black self-determination, with white psychiatrists’ theories about African American religion and mental health being used to promote claims of Black people’s unfitness for freedom.

Drawing on extensive archival research, Black Religion in the Madhouse is the first book to expose how racist views of Black religion in slavery’s wake shaped the rise of psychiatry as an established and powerful profession..

Judith Weisenfeld is Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. Her books include African American Women and Christian Activism: New York's Black YWCA, 1905-1945, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American film, 1929-1949, and New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration. Nicole Myers Turner is Assistant Professor in the Princeton Department of Religion. She specializes in African American religious, political and gender history in the nineteenth century and mobilizes Africana Studies and Black Digital Humanities methods in her research. Her book Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Post-Emancipation Virginia has been widely reviewed and was a finalist for the 2021 Library of Virginia Literary Nonfiction Award.