Christian Citizens
Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
With emancipation, a long battle for equal citizenship began. Bringing together the histories of religion, race, and the South, Elizabeth L. Jemison shows how southerners, black and white, drew on biblical narratives as the basis for very different political imaginaries during and after Reconstruction. Focusing on everyday Protestants in the Mississippi River Valley, Jemison scours their biblical thinking and religious attitudes toward race. She argues that the evangelical groups that dominated this portion of the South shaped contesting visions of black and white rights.
Black evangelicals saw the argument for their identities as Christians and as fully endowed citizens supported by their readings of both the Bible and U.S. law. The Bible, as they saw it, prohibited racial hierarchy, and Amendments 13, 14, and 15 advanced equal rights. Countering this, white evangelicals continued to emphasize a hierarchical paternalistic order that, shorn of earlier justifications for placing whites in charge of blacks, now fell into the defense of an increasingly violent white supremacist social order. They defined aspects of Christian identity so as to suppress black equality—even praying, as Jemison documents, for wisdom in how to deny voting rights to blacks. This religious culture has played into remarkably long-lasting patterns of inequality and segregation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Jemison debuts with a thorough exploration of how Black and white Christians drew on their faith in the aftermath of the Civil War to make radically divergent claims about an ideal political order. According to Jemison, Black Christians asserted that racial prejudice was a sin and Christian practice demanded religious, social, and political equality. White Southerners, on the other hand, drew on antebellum proslavery and patriarchal theologies to justify their campaign of white supremacist terror. They also constructed false histories of their own Christian benevolence toward the Black Southerners whose autonomy they so fiercely opposed. Jemison charts the theological and political arcs of Black and white Christian practice from emancipation to 1900, arguing that both groups understood their "Christian identity formed the contours of social and civic belonging" and "demarcat the boundaries of what was possible." Jemison's enlightening investigation will be of interest to both scholars and readers with a more general interest in the nation's religious history.
