As Powdermaker found, many of the families she examined and all the families in my work—working black poor, landed farmers, and Jack -- professed Christian faith. All were actively engaged in church and all desired marriage. Like the sharecropping poor, the landed Byrd patriarch, the quasi-croppers and the mule-renter’s son highly valued marriage, Christian faith, savings and a comfortable home. Often, the black poor and the non-poor shared the Sunday morning religious spaces, some sang in the same choirs and served on the usher board, not because they were members of the same caste, but because they were first and foremost Americans and Christians---imbued with a sense of American’s promise, not just their own. Faith and faith discourses allied them as a community—as a people—with the nation.