Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison

Abstract

Reviewed by: Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison Johanna I. Mueller Elizabeth L. Jemison, Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020) After reading over the manuscript of his 1845 autobiography, Frederick Douglass noted that he had “spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion.” In an elaborate appendix, Douglass clarified his position. His condemnation of religion and religious actors in the foregoing pages, he explained, applied strictly to the “corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land,” which he perceived as entirely separate from the “pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ.”1 To Douglass, American Christianity had two distinct faces, which appeared to be irreconcilable. Throughout US history, different groups of Christians have used the Bible to make competing political claims. Whether Christianity has been a source of liberation and empowerment or a tool of continuous racial oppression in US [End Page 145] history has been debated by both historical actors like Douglass and subsequent historians. Elizabeth L. Jemison’s monograph Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South adds to this conversation. Examining the discourse on religion and citizenship among Black and white Protestant Christians in the lower Mississippi River Valley between 1863 and 1900, Jemison demonstrates that both groups believed that the Bible should govern society and politics during and after Reconstruction. “Religious arguments,” she explains, “laid the foundation for a new South” (2). But, as the book shows, with Black Christians demanding equal civil rights and white Christians calling for a continuation of a “biblical organic hierarchy” (10), these competing claims of Christian citizenship were ultimately “mutually exclusive” (79). Sticking strictly to the 1863–1920 time period in the main body of the text, Jemison relegates larger historiographical claims about the framing of American religious history to her introduction (“Afterlives of Proslavery Christianity”) and her conclusion (“Family Values and Racial Order”), in which she argues that the divergent concepts of Christian citizenship articulated by white and Black southerners in the post-emancipation period would shape debates about US politics and society in the twentieth century and indeed into the present day. Drawing on a wide array of archival and published materials such as sermons, religious newspapers, diaries, letters, and denominational meeting minutes, Jemison’s five chapters move chronologically with each representing a different phase in late nineteenth-century southern history (“Emancipation,” “Reconstruction,” “Redemption,” “Paternalism Reborn,” and “Segregation”). Tracing the evolution of religious claims about citizenship, she argues that proslavery theology, which Douglass and others had so forcefully rejected, “had a long afterlife to justify racial hierarchy and Jim Crow segregation” (11) and did not disappear with emancipation as other historians of religion in the Civil War period such as Mark Noll, Harry S. Stout, and George Rable have suggested. White southerners, Jemison proposes, merely transformed theological justifications for slavery into a benevolent and seemingly race-blind model of biblical paternalism. They appealed to an invented “version of antebellum history as a peaceful paternalistic order” (155) after emancipation to argue that a Christian society, just like a Christian marriage, necessitated a hierarchical organization with white men at the top. Both during slavery and after emancipation, white southern Christians legitimized racial violence as an indispensable tool to uphold this supposedly biblical social order. They positioned themselves as the true Bible-believing Christians while claiming that Black southerners and white northern Christian allies prioritized “fashionable extra-biblical notions of human rights and political activism over biblical truth” (162). [End Page 146] As they had done under slavery, Black southern Christians after the Civil War used the Bible to argue for autonomy, self-determination, and equal civil rights, stressing that racial prejudice and oppression were incompatible with Christianity’s liberating message. Positioning themselves as fellow pious Christians, Black southerners argued that they deserved equal citizenship, insisting that “both the law and true Christianity [were] on their side” (90). With increasing disenfranchisement, legal segregation, and escalating white...