Christianity and Race in the American South: A History by Paul Harvey

Abstract

Reviewed by: Christianity and Race in the American South: A History by Paul Harvey Matthew Harper (bio) Christianity and Race in the American South: A History. By Paul Harvey. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 260. Cloth, $40.00.) Readers will wonder how Paul Harvey fits so much into two hundred pages of text. Harvey calls his survey of four hundred years of southern racial and religious history “a deliberatively selective narrative” (2), but he does not reduce the South to one group of people or one period of time. Nor does he smooth out the region’s complexities. Early Spanish Catholics, Moravian missionaries, slave insurrectionists, proslavery theologians, labor organizers, blues musicians, skeptics, and prosperity gospel televangelists all appear in Harvey’s narrative. Few scholars could have written something so concise, comprehensive, and accessible. Paul Harvey calls this book the capstone of his writing career so far, a career that has led him to write ever broader surveys. In this volume, he does not offer anything surprising to specialists in southern religion, but he weaves decades of scholarship in the field into a concise and compelling story. Harvey frames the book around the region’s paradoxes. The central paradox is that a region of diverse “religious ideas and expressions result[ed] in a dominant establishment at once so productive of extraordinary cruelty and generative of explosively artistic forms” (3). The hegemony of conservative evangelical Protestantism masked, indeed existed because of, the region’s diversity of race, class, and creed. Sometimes Harvey’s description of racial hierarchy and revivalistic evangelicalism sounds like what an older generation of scholars bemoaned as the cultural captivity of southern Christianity. But that is not the impression one gets from reading the entire book. Harvey sees paradoxes everywhere, and he reminds us that southern religion was never as monolithic or parochial as it seemed. The first three chapters try to rescue the early South from our anachronistic stereotypes of the “Bible Belt.” Harvey reminds us of a time when the region was largely not Christian and lacked a regional identity. The early colonial South was a place of diverse Native American religions, Spanish Catholic and Anglican missions, Quakers and other dissenters. The Atlantic slave trade introduced diverse African religions, including Islam and Kongolese Catholicism. In early Virginia and Carolina, Harvey argues, race and Christianity mixed uneasily. “Christian” was a racial identity, and slave owners feared that Christian slaves threatened the racial order. Into that uneasy mix entered evangelical revivalists and American revolutionaries, both of whom introduced a dangerous egalitarianism. The tension between these egalitarian impulses and the region’s desire for social and [End Page 159] racial hierarchy, Harvey says, resolved in favor of the latter. The danger of evangelicalism and republicanism necessitated the creation of the white South’s conservatism, “with its emphasis on order and obedience” (34). Evangelical religion by 1830 became allied with white conquest, Indian removal, and the expansion of slavery. The dominance of proslavery white evangelical Protestantism was never as solid as it seemed, a point underscored when Harvey opens his chapter on the antebellum era with the evangelical preacher Nat Turner. Harvey traces the development of two related but contrasting theologies: proslavery thought and black liberation. Both of these theologies remain in play and in flux in Harvey’s fifth chapter, a quick survey of why theology mattered to white and black southerners’ experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Harvey argues that the way soldiers, preachers, and slaves looked for God’s hand in the war “probably lengthened and worsened the war once it came,” as religion “sacralized distrusts and hatreds” during the conflict and for decades later (99). Harvey also notes how proslavery theology morphed after emancipation into something more explicitly and “scientifically” racist. In Harvey’s telling, there was no wall of separation between churches and bloody conflicts over black political power. Harvey’s theme of paradox comes into clearest expression in his chapter on the Jim Crow era. In the early twentieth century, the South became “a problem”—think lynching, the Scopes trial, rural poverty—and “an idea”— think moonlight, magnolias, and Aunt Jemima. Intellectual critics derided the backwardness of white and black religion. Southern...