This article explores the ways rural followers of Marcus Garvey crafted and adapted a theological understanding of African redemption in the South during the 1920s and early 1930s. Members of the Universal Negro Improvement Association rarely spoke in concrete terms about the process of redemption or African state-building. Rather, when rural members talked of African redemption, they did so in eschatological terms, that is, as a theory of the end of the world. Above all else, they understood “redemption” to mean both their own individual salvation and the collective deliverance of black people. Their interpretations ranged from postmillennial visions of a climax of the history of the race bringing earthly peace and prosperity to a premillennial interpretation that plotted sudden, often violent, deliverance of the most race-conscious. These variant and seemingly contradictory readings of African redemption reveal an ontological shift among black Christians in the rural South during these years. African redemption provided rural Garveyites an existential language for reappraising notions of redemption, retribution, and the fate of the race in this world and the next that had profound implications for ongoing efforts to seek political and economic justice. This struggle over meaning and purpose lay at the very heart of rural black politics in this period as both an ideological constraint and a vehicle for innovation.

This article employs an in-depth examination of 1950s confessional Lutherans and Congregationalists in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to argue that the roots of the late-twentieth-century “culture wars” can be found at the local level in Americans’ response to the international and domestic challenges that arose during and after World War II rather than in the 1970s rise of a politically active Religious Right. The fight against Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, along with the postwar struggle for racial equality, forced Americans to redefine the moral principles for which their nation stood. The result was the development of broad-based, intradenominational divisions between those who argued that individuals should accommodate themselves to prevailing religious, political, and socioeconomic structures and those who urged the accommodation of these structures to the needs of diverse individuals. This new religious alignment turned less on denominationally specific tribal, liturgical, and theological differences than on polarized understandings of the sacred and the secular.

This realignment operated on two planes. On the right, the Missouri Synod joined other denominations, such as the founders of the National Association of Evangelicals, in attempting to overcome sectarian strife among orthodox believers and to inject their religious faith into the public discourse. On the left, as Congregational proponents of faith-based social action and ecumenism helped to lay a foundation for liberal religion's leading role in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they alienated more traditionalist members who viewed these activities as inappropriate for a religious institution.

In 1987, two women hatched a business plan that became Creative Memories, a direct-marketing company that sells scrapbook materials and techniques to a mostly female clientele through a worldwide network of sales consultants. By the beginning of the new millennium, millions of people had participated in Creative Memories workshops. Many successful imitators also flooded the crafting market with specialized publications, Web sites, tools, and materials, creating an industry worth $2.55 billion by 2004.

As significant as the economic impact of scrapbooking is, however, the claims of importance made by its practitioners rate closer examination. Promising to keep photos safe from deterioration, Creative Memories also sold a worldview, reflected across the industry, that such preservation is essential to human flourishing. Such a claim invites considerations both of how the promoters of memory-keeping envision its working and how memory-keepers themselves distinctively shape their practice. This article takes the view that album-making constitutes a kind of innovative female meaning-making (that is, religion) shaped, in part, by American-style Common Sense epistemology while also reflecting what we might call a sidelong feminism, in which a woman expresses agency, claims her voice, and declares the complexity of her full humanity, all by using modes that, on the surface, appear compliant with patriarchy. This article also uses certain notions of religious testimony to gauge the space between the Common Sense project of the album-making industry and the results produced by album-makers themselves.