Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

Abstract

Historians have developed a rich literature on the relationship of slavery to Christianity—showing how Black believers resisted enslavement in Christian terms and also how southern whites' proslavery faith informed the Confederate political project and spurred the Civil War. In what is sure to become a field-defining volume, Elizabeth L. Jemison carries that story forward from emancipation until the end of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the lower Mississippi Valley, Jemison expertly analyzes a wide range of denominational records, religious newspapers, and personal correspondence to show how Black and white Christians staked their actions and aspirations on notions of “Christian citizenship,” a highly gendered concept that each group interpreted differently (p. 2). Southern whites developed their arguments for Christian citizenship from the old logic of proslavery faith. Emancipation did not lead southern whites to question the biblical mandate for slavery. The slaveholding family necessarily excluded Black people, and postemancipation whites followed that model to develop a patriarchal Christian citizenship rooted in racial inequality (because no Black people could achieve independence) and gender inequality (because even white women depended on men). This vision of a God-given white-supremacist social order informed terrorist campaigns that overthrew the Reconstruction era's legally elected, often Black-led, Republican southern governments and replaced them with Democratic regimes. The defense of the family, especially white women from supposedly predatory Black men was, furthermore, the most common rationale for lynching. Despite the illegality of these actions, and despite a professed concern for law and order, southern whites justified them in Christian terms. The white Christian God apparently had a segregationist design for society, and as Jemison shows, later generations of Christian conservatives followed that insight in their Bible-based appeals to “family values” (p. 14).