Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Black Church is a celebratory tour of American history

Salon.com

Gates' four-hour PBS documentary The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song, airing Tuesday and Wednesday, "may be his most important" work in his ever-expanding study of the Black American experience," says Melanie McFarland. "Immediately you can sense what a personal experience it is for him, but he also makes the viewer part of that by tying American history to the evolution of the Black church," says McFarland. "The Black Church is a celebratory tour of American history, examining the regional contributions to the larger culture of worship, and the churches themselves. Some of my favorite moments in the documentary series are the pensive views inside churches across the country interspersed throughout, with the camera work ensuring that even the most modest praise houses glow. In this way Gates presents individual churches as distinct personalities evocative of the community history from which they sprang." ALSO: The Black Church is almost certainly the finest primer on Black religion in the United States to air on television in a generation.