Abstract: In this project, I closely read fiction and drama in which oppositions between sacred and secular people and interests are established, and, subsequently, dismantled, because I wonder why the authors are continually staging such scenes. I find that Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker repeatedly stage disputes in order to reveal that resistance to religion merging with reason, sex, or politics most frequently and significantly threatens effective black leadership. My analyses of Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Gaines' 'The Sky is Gray' (1963) and In My Father's House (1978), Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953) and The Amen Corner (1968), and Walker's Meridian (1976) emphasize how anxieties which inspire confrontation between sacred and secular issues, and the importance of reconciliation, change in relation to Great Migration, Civil Rights Movement, or Black Power Movement history. Each of four chapters corresponds to one or several of these historic turning points. In chapter one, I argue that Hurston's protagonist preacher operates as figure for the townspeople's ambivalences about the Great Migration. At the same time, the novel is a cultural critique of the sexual politics of black religious life. In chapter two, I argue that Gaines includes reconciliation of the sacred and the secular intellectual to show that this collaboration is necessary for black community development before and during the Civil Rights Movement, and that its absence impedes social progress. In the third chapter, I read Baldwin's references to sacred and secular music in order to show the sanctity of sexuality and to warn against the consequences of failing to recognize these sacred aspects. Finally, in chapter four, I show that Walker implores the black community to merge sacred and secular political interests in order to achieve personal and professional goals. Dream images allude to these future days, and her descriptions of poor relationships between a mother and daughter as well as men and women participating in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements represent the desperate need for this collaboration of interests.