422 Omar McRoberts
church affairs. Studies situated within world/otherworld frameworks risk overlooking,
or underanalyzing, such richly significant cases.
Social scientific research should be open to thesimultaneityof world and otherworld
in black religious thought and practice, and in all of organized religion. Promising in
this regard are some recent studies that show how the religious ideas and practices
generally associated with black church culture can fuel worldly engagement (Pattillo-
McCoy 1998; Harris 1999; McRoberts 1999). By thinking about religion as a cultural
resource instead of a set of polar oppositions, these studies point in the right direction.
They take beliefs and practices seriously, but do not assume that these effect actions
in a linear causal fashion. This perspective reveals how institutions creatively combine
worldly and otherworldly, instrumental, and expressive elements to form unique modes
of religious presence. Only when sensitive to simultaneity will social scientists appreci-
ate fully the dizzying diversity of institutions that make up the deceptively euphemistic
“Black Church.”