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 Pearl J. Young (bio) Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South. By Elizabeth L. Jemison. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 242. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $29.95.) Many scholars have considered the reluctance of white southerners to come to terms with emancipation and the efforts by freedpeople to exercise political and social power after the Civil War. Few, however, have considered the shadow of proslavery theology and the extent to which southerners, both Black and white, continued to wrestle over the theological assumptions at the heart of American slavery in the postemancipation era. In Christian Citizens, Elizabeth Jemison argues that the mind-set of proslavery theology—particularly its outlooks on patriotism, the past, and the norms surrounding family, gender, and sex—played a significant role in the trajectory of racial hierarchy and segregation in the postemancipation South. Using published political and denominational records together with sermon notes, curated narratives, and private writings, Jemison offers compelling evidence that Black and white Protestants in the lower Mississippi valley embraced Christian citizenship in their political and social endeavors after emancipation, eventually creating two distinct communities in conversation and debate with one another. Jemison argues for ideological continuity between the antebellum southern world of slavery and the postemancipation reality of violence and racial suppression, a continuity often discounted by scholars focused on the Civil War as a turning point rather than a point of inflection. If the proslavery mind-set endured beyond 1865, then the narrative that abolition triumphed through the Civil War is less meaningful. Additionally, its endurance suggests that proslavery Christianity was about much more than defending slavery, something scholars, such as Charles Irons and [End Page 589] Mitchell Snay, have suggested. What distinguishes the postemancipation era is that Black Christians had a political and religious voice in debates over belonging and power and challenged the fundamental assumptions of white southerners and their theology. As a result, the white "Redemption" of the South, a project to restore the racial status quo of the antebellum era, focused on suppressing the voices of Black men, convincing white northerners to abandon their support of freedpeople, and returning the control of politics, society, and narratives of the past to white southern men. Importantly, Jemison's study restores Black Christians as equal players in the postbellum world and demonstrates repeatedly that, as much as white southern Christians promoted paternalism and the dependent status of freedpeople, they were forced to debate and engage with Black Christians who challenged them by advocating for their own self-interests. Jemison, in particular, prompts historians of American religion to confront their assumptions of evangelicalism and Christian behavior by subtly suggesting that these norms are themselves grounded in assumptions of white supremacy. For example, she juxtaposes white southern Christians, who argued for the separation of religion and politics and the place of men in public debates, with Black Christians, who argued that Christian piety qualified them for citizenship and eventually celebrated women who fought against lynching. To interpret Black Christians as departing from orthodoxy erases the fact that both sides used religion to justify their political action and that legal disenfranchisement and extralegal violence impeded Black men in their activism against racial injustice. Furthermore, Jemison challenges the narrative of the Black church fighting an uphill battle toward legitimacy; she highlights Black citizens' accomplishments following the Civil War and the systemic efforts of white southern Christians to unseat their fellow Christians and erase their voices and actions from the narrative. In her introduction, Jemison makes an unusual comment about the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, stating, "I argue against an accepted reading of CME Church history as complicit amid white supremacy" (7). The notion that a Black denomination sponsored by the white southern Methodist church endorsed white paternalism seems so obvious as to be tedious, particularly in contrast to the Black-founded, abolitionist-leaning African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. While seemingly significant only to those mired in the minutia of denominational histories, this methodological choice demonstrates Jemison's willingness to reject traditional interpretations of the...