Slavery’s Long Shadow: Race and Reconciliation in American Christianity explores race and religion in the history of American Christianity with a primary focus on black-white race relations in the United States. Beginning with the founding of the United States and extending to the Trump era, this anthology repeatedly asks, “How have race relations and Christian unity interacted and shaped both the church and the larger American culture?” (3). Each author reveals that at the heart of the history of American Christianity, there is an indivisible and complex link between race relations and Christian unity.
Both race relations and Christian unity, or the interaction between white and black individuals in a Christian community, are fundamental aspects that generate different forms of racial unity. In their analysis of American Christian history, the authors consider peculiar forms of racial unity, such as attempts to foster race reconciliation between black and white communities as well as the overall resistance to black-white race relations.
In “Evangelical Revivalism and Race Relations in the Early National Era,” James L. Gorman examines unsuccessful attempts of race reconciliation through the lack of biracial unity in evangelical revivalism. Gorman explains that biracial unity, a genuine unity among black and white evangelicals, was never truly created due to segregation of churches and meeting spaces. Though the revival opposed slavery and permitted biracial churches, biracial unity was only somewhat achieved through these efforts.
Many additional authors continue examining racial unity as an effort to foster race reconciliation. In “The Civil Rights Movement and Interracial Unity within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ),” Lawrence A. Q. Burnley analyzes interracial unity in relation to Protestant expressions of the Christian faith. Brown views this form of unity as a result of interracial relations, founded on the gospel, that intentionally oppose all manifestations of racism. For both Burnley’s definition of interracial unity and Gorman’s definition of biracial unity, the genuine intention to reject racism is a key component of achieving unity among black and white Christians.
Resistance to black-white race relations created different forms of racial unity, such as white racial unity and its connection to white supremacy. In chapter 5, Joel A. Brown examines the cultivation of white racial unity among white Christians during the current era of the second redemption, in which white Christianity resists the achievements of the civil rights movement in the United States today. Brown asserts that well-intentioned white Christians reinforce structural racism and white nationalism by opting for “white Christian color blindness” (111). This color blindness perpetuates white racial unity through an insidious rejection of civil rights for black Americans.
Through black racial unity, resistance to black-white race relations did not create subtle harm like white Christian color blindness within white racial unity, but created welcoming spaces for black Christians. In “Racism and Division in Christianity during the Antebellum and Reconstruction Eras,” Wes Crawford alludes to black racial unity in his quantitative analysis of the growth of independent black denominations during the Reconstruction era. According to Crawford, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church gained more than 173,000 members between 1860 and 1872, with black Americans in the South as the majority of new members. As independent black churches grew, many black Americans left white-led congregations in the South in order to join black-led churches. Crawford’s quantitative analysis of black denominations during Reconstruction reveals that black racial unity within Christian communities did not always signify fostering black-white race relations, but rather cutting ties from race reconciliation.
In this volume, analysis of racial unity is overt in certain discussions, such as Gorman’s concise definition of biracial unity, and is tacit in other investigations, such as Brown’s critical examination of white Christian color blindness. The balance between evident analysis and inferred examination of racial unity signifies one of the main purposes of the book: “to synthesize and present scholarly consensus and debate for the student, teacher, and lay reader” (3). By providing decisive conceptualizations of important ideas while acknowledging the complexity of certain concepts, this collection of scholarship emphasizes the expertise of the authors while still respecting the reader’s own thoughts on the history of American Christianity.
The greatest strength of this anthology is its ability to reach a wide audience through its ambitious intellectual intervention. Slavery’s Long Shadow is not solely for those interested in the history of American Christianity. This work intellectually intervenes on the general history of the United States, illustrating how the history of American Christianity exemplifies racial reconciliation and oppression in the United States. In “The Role of Religion in the Lynching Culture of Jim Crow America,” Christopher R. Hutson exemplifies this academic intervention as he explores segregation laws in the Jim Crow era: “It is impossible to understand the Jim Crow era without taking stock of the role religion played in America to justify segregation in both North and South” (63). Slavery’s Long Shadow introduces the importance of religion and race in American history to novel scholars and lay readers, while reminding experienced academics of the significance of facilitating discussions about race relations and Christian unity.
Kimberly Diaz is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of California Riverside.
Kimberly Diaz
Date Of Review:
July 26, 2021
