In this lucid and engaging book, Elizabeth Jemison examines how three different groups—newly free African Americans, their northern missionary allies, and proslavery white Confederates—drew on scripture to construct and defend competing visions of citizenship, the social order, and politics in the decades following the Civil War. Black Christians, she argues, insisted that the Bible prohibited racial discrimination in church, state, and society. With the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, African Americans could also assert their claims to equal citizenship under the law. Although they denied that education and moral propriety were prerequisites to exercising their God-given civil and political rights, black Christians invested heavily in schools, churches, and reform movements such as temperance, hoping their accomplishments in these areas would convince skeptical white citizens of their inherent status as intellectual and ethical equals.To help fund their educational and religious enterprises, African Americans sought support from northern Christian denominations. Most missionaries and aid workers who traveled south to join in the work of reconstruction, however, failed to endorse black claims for equality. Instead, the vast majority of white northerners criticized African American religious practice as overly emotional and worried that without access to education, formerly enslaved persons were ill-equipped for citizenship. Although they agreed that the Bible taught the equal humanity of all believers, white missionaries maintained that black Christians were far from ready to serve as leaders in the church or to participate safely in the nation's political life. Only with steady guidance from educated white teachers would African Americans eventually embody true Christianity and become eligible to exercise their rights as citizens.The limited racial imaginations of these supposed allies, Jemison contends, left black citizens vulnerable to increasingly virulent attacks from white supremacist southerners seeking to regain power after the Civil War. Rather than recognizing that their support for slavery had been sinful and seeking forgiveness, former Confederates reiterated their belief that race-based bondage was a divinely ordained institution. The Bible, in this view, prescribed obedience to a paternalistic, racialized social order that placed husbands over wives, fathers over children, and white masters over black servants. According to southern ministers who championed this interpretation, emancipation was an attack on true Christianity carried out by proponents of heretical Enlightenment ideals. Faithful Christians, therefore, must reject racial equality in all spheres and actively work to “redeem” the South by restoring the God-given hierarchies mandated in scripture by whatever means necessary. Discriminatory legislation to prevent black voters from exercising their rights, segregationist policy that separated white and black citizens, and even extra-legal violence were all, from this perspective, legitimate weapons in the southern Christian crusade against infidelity.Throughout Christian Citizens, Jemison pays particular attention to the gendered dynamics that shaped competing interpretations of the Bible and race relations. As white southerners increasingly upheld the patriarchal family as the biblical model for a properly ordered society, African Americans faced mounting pressure to embody norms of “independent manhood and virtuous womanhood” in order to defend their identity as Christian citizens. Although they could not vote, black women engaged politically by striving to represent the race as sexually pure, morally upstanding, theologically orthodox, and therefore deserving of all the civil rights granted them by God and the US Constitution. The ferocity with which white supremacists attacked black religious practice and sexuality, Jemison argues, reveals the extent to which they perceived African American claims to Christian citizenship as a threat to their dominance. To help shore up white male power, she maintains, white southern women enthusiastically embraced their role as pious, submissive wives whose virtue required protection. Jemison also highlights the central role white women played in forming Confederate memorial organizations that romanticized slavery, celebrated southern values of honor and chivalry, and erased the violence of the Jim Crow South.Jemison's expertly researched, clearly argued study contributes to a growing literature on religion, race, and politics in the post–Civil War South. Alongside scholars such as Ed Blum (Reforming the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898, 2005) and John Giggie (After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875–1915, 2007), Jemison demonstrates the centrality of churches as sites for political activity in the South during the late nineteenth century. Her work, which examines interactions among white and black Christians from a wide variety of Protestant denominations across the Mississippi River Valley, also complements and extends several excellent but more narrowly focused denominational histories, including Reginald Hildebrand's The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (1995); Clarence Walker's A Rock in a Weary Land: the African Methodist Episcopal Church during the Civil War and Reconstruction (1981); and Derek Chang's Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (2010), which focuses on Baptists.Christian Citizens is an essential read for scholars of American religion and race, but the book also has important implications for understanding contemporary debates about the legacies of slavery and segregation, family values, gender norms, sexuality, and civil rights in the United States. Jemison draws these connections clearly in the book's introduction and conclusion. In lucid and accessible prose, Christian Citizens illumines the longstanding and deeply troubling connections between conservative theology, patriarchy, and white supremacy in American history.