The attraction of some African Americans to the Soka Gakkai movement from Japan has already been noted. Black Christianity, which continues by far the majority force in African-American religious life, has itself been touched in many ways by the changing realities of the global age. So have the number of blacks identifying with the Eastern Christian tradition. The great black Baptist and Methodist denominations have been rivaled and sometimes eclipsed by Holiness and Pentecostal churches, most especially by the Church of God in Christ. Founded as a Holiness church in 1897 and aligning itself with Pentecostalism a decade later, it is well on its way to becoming the largest and most important African American Protestant denomination.
Blacks are also to be found across the entire spectrum of other Christian groups.
In the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993, for example, one third of those killed were blacks. Beyond their own increasing diversity, black Christians in the United States have increasingly been affected in a myriad of other ways. In the 1930s, for example, Howard Thurman and Sue Bailey Thurman, Benjamin Mays, and Channing Tobias, four influential African-American Protestant leaders, all met with Mahatma Gandhi. In the late twentieth century, leaders of the Black Theology movement began an extended dialogue not only with African Christian theologians, but with proponents of Christian liberation theologies from around the globe. D.C. It concerned the influential Japanese Christian and social activist Toyohiko Kagawa and is available on this website.