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From Hate to Hallows intervenes in the public discourse surrounding the burning of Black churches in the United States—conversations largely dominated by white, conservative political imaginaries—to provide a critical account of the anti-Black racism and economic exploitation animating these acts of violence. Todne Thomas centers an ethnographic examination of a Knoxville, Tennessee, church that was burned in 2015 as the primary case study of this intervention. By exploring the congregants’ experiences and perspectives on the event, Thomas privileges Black meaning-making as a primary source of social and political analysis. She draws on their explanations for the arson to explore the social, historical, and religious contexts of white supremacy, vandalism, gentrification and urban redevelopment, and the End Times as each relate to church burning. From Hate to Hallows challenges the dominant picture of Black church arson as episodic and aberrant events and instead foregrounds them as central moments in the construction of a twenty-first-century United States steeped in racial and economic domination.

In Kincraft Todne Thomas explores the internal dynamics of community life among black evangelicals, who are often overshadowed by white evangelicals and the common equation of the “Black Church” with an Afro-Protestant mainline. Drawing on fieldwork in an Afro-Caribbean and African American church association in Atlanta, Thomas locates black evangelicals at the center of their own religious story, presenting their determined spiritual relatedness as a form of insurgency. She outlines how church members cocreate themselves as spiritual kin through what she calls kincraft—the construction of one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. Kincraft, which Thomas traces back to the diasporic histories and migration experiences of church members, reflects black evangelicals' understanding of Christian familial connection as transcending racial, ethnic, and denominational boundaries in ways that go beyond the patriarchal nuclear family. Church members also use their spiritual relationships to navigate racial and ethnic discrimination within the majority-white evangelical movement. By charting kincraft's functions and significance, Thomas demonstrates the ways in which black evangelical social life is more varied and multidimensional than standard narratives of evangelicalism would otherwise suggest.