While modern observers likely recognize the religious inflections that often accompany discussions of race and American politics (from all across the religious and political spectra), we would do well to also understand that such rhetorical landscaping is by no means unique to our day. In this vein, Elizabeth L. Jemison’s Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South constitutes a helpful contribution, illustrating how both black and white southerners after the Civil War leveraged biblical and theological language to support their polar opposite views of citizenship, race relations, and proper social order. Black and white southerners offered starkly contrasting visions for the South’s future, but both framed their arguments around contested ideas of “Christian citizenship” (2). Focusing on the lower Mississippi River Valley from 1863–1900, Jemison contends that “black and white southern Christians framed their Bible reading toward their communal self-interest, resulting in diametrically opposed theological arguments” (4).
A major strength of the book is Jemison’s conscious effort to evaluate black and white communities side-by-side. Jemison notes that other books in this arena tend to focus on one side or the other, whereas her approach of evaluating white and black rhetoric in parallel illuminates how both sides “were responding to one another’s claims to authentic Christian citizenship” (162). She shows how white southerners constantly adapted and refashioned their antebellum paternalistic proslavery theology, which foregrounded a purportedly biblical “system of natural hierarchies” that included slaves’ “natural” subordination to masters, in order to recover or reify white supremacy in the postemancipation era (20). In white southerners’ minds, emancipation did not eliminate the divinely prescribed hierarchical racial order, and so their postbellum Christianity adapted the “core logic” of proslavery theology to affirm “white Christian citizenship” as the rightful and godly organizing principle of society (27). This logic also undergirded white southerners’ justifications of horrific racial violence, like lynching, by framing black freedom itself as a violent threat to the “family values” that structured a properly ordered society.
Black Christian southerners, on the other hand, used their Christian identity to pair their spiritual and civic claims in a unified argument for racial justice and equal treatment. Biblical injunctions regarding impartiality and Christian unity mandated black Christians’ full equality as fellow believers, which in turn guaranteed the equal rights and protections that were their due as true Christian citizens of the United States. Not only did the nation’s Constitution guarantee “their equal civil and political rights,” but “true Christianity forbade racial discrimination” as well—a direct divine repudiation of white southerners’ theology of white Christian citizenship (90). Drawing on biblical passages about equality and impartiality, black Christians thus argued for a citizenship ideal that recognized their full spiritual and political equality with whites. The success of black Christians in linking their religious and civic identities in this fashion spurred southern whites to continue adapting their paternalistic theology in different ways. From creating fictional tales of antebellum harmony to attacking black Christianity itself as a deficient religion, as well as constructing new forms of segregation as a supposedly godly social order, southern whites sought to perpetuate a regime of white dominance into the 20th century.
The strengths of Jemison’s volume are numerous. The chronological unfolding of the story allows for a sense of historical context, and each chapter’s parallel consideration of white and black southerners’ arguments shines a light on how both sides appealed to Christianity and the Bible to make irreconcilably different claims. She also includes in the first two chapters some consideration of white northern missionaries, who offer yet a third perspective, sympathetic to many of the black southerners’ plights and arguments but nevertheless purveyors of their own brand of paternalism based on their own racial prejudices. Furthermore, even in her consideration of black southerners’ approaches to Christian citizenship, Jemison offers a nuanced approach that recognizes “a range of religious and political strategies” from black Christians in this era (11).
For instance, throughout the book she compellingly returns to the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in America (CME) as an example of a church body that was reliant on a paternalistic relationship with a white denomination and was less politically vocal than the more independent black denominations, but nevertheless found ways to challenge more subtly the white supremacy of the surrounding culture. At the same time, one might wish that Jemison spent more time examining specific examples of direct biblical interpretation. The instances when she delves into this sort of analysis—such as exploring a white preacher’s comparison of white southerners during Reconstruction with the persecuted Jews in the book of Esther—are utterly fascinating, and the expectations raised by the book’s subtitle (“Reading the Bible in Black and White”) may leave the reader wishing for more consideration of the Bible itself in this historical accounting.
In all, however, Christian Citizens does an admirable job of demonstrating not only the centrality of “Christian” claims within these 19th-century debates over citizenship, but also more broadly the ways that religious interpretation can be subject to the winds of cultural and political self-interest.
Daniel R. Bare is assistant professor of religious studies at Texas A&M University.
Daniel R. Bare
Date Of Review:
October 31, 2022