The Church and Slavery - Plus - Religion and American Democracy

All we need to do is think about, for example, that extraordinary moment in November of in St. Later on, we see the African-Methodist Episcopal Church founded in the early part of the 19th century. And this tradition, in some significant way — remember, we have to understand African-American religion or African-American Christian churches in some substantive way as the site of black civil society because they are locked out politically, locked out economically, locked out demographically.

African-American religious institutions become the site whereby the infrastructure of black communities begins to take shape, the germ of them. So education institutions — my own beloved Morehouse was founded in a Baptist church in Augusta. We begin to think about voluntary associations, burial societies: So white supremacy cuts so deep that it even went to the grave. Right behind the picture of the pastor at the pulpit, or the preacher, are these African-Americans engaged in ecstatic worship as well. Even though they are seen, they are not known.

It proceeds on the assumption that white Christianity is idolatry. This tradition begins to define in interesting sorts of ways the African-American church that was once an invisible institution and in post- Reconstruction becomes a visible institution. It is then transformed with the Great Migration as these folks move from rural countrysides to urban spaces in the south: It was becoming in interesting sorts of ways this unique American expression.

And we see African-American religion informing African-American struggle in interesting sorts of ways. And what do you see? You see people like James Cone in beginning to translate the prophetic black church tradition into the idiom of black power. So he publishes a text in entitled Black Theology and Black Power.

He publishes it a year before Gutierrez publishes A Theology of Liberation. And what happens is that Cone takes the prophetic dimensions of black Christianity, and he places it in the language of black power where God is on the side of black people.

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There is a sense that this particular iteration of the black church tradition takes on a particular kind of life in light of the kind of register of African-American politics at the moment. Jeremiah Wright comes out of this tradition, and so I want to make a turn to him for a brief moment. Obama appeals to pluralism as a way to allow for religious belief, but then he sanctions, he cordons it off.

He constrains it by appeal to public reason. You tell a story about religious toleration and pluralism in the United States; that story reveals a highly racialized religious landscape in which blackness and Christianity are disciplined in particular sorts of ways. We tell a story about how that particular form of Christianity erupts in the public domain to challenge the state in light of the second-class status of black folks.

And so here we have Obama claiming in the beginning the power of the black church, and then here we have Jeremiah Wright coming back on the backside. This is just simply the shakedown politics of black power. He, that is Obama, unlike his marketed image, is really black. And is therefore a candidate only for them, because black candidates can only be niche candidates. We can only represent black people, right? In this instance, the theological orientation of Wright stands in for African-American Christian communities as such.

And what is obscured by such broad strokes, it seems to me, is the amazing religious diversity of African-American communities. Jakes , that accounts for folks like Creflo Dollar — people you might not know— for example, Carlton Pearson. Some of you might know him. Reverend Ike actually lifted particular dimensions of his biography from Oral Roberts. There is much more diversity, even in the story that I told earlier. There is much more diversity there.

And folk are trying to figure out how could these black folk vote for Proposition 8 given this particular understanding of black Christianity? So we have to begin to disrupt a certain kind of narrative. Now, we see, I think a similar logic — and of course, all of this kind of just gestures to what we should talk about. Will he join a black church or not, and what might it suggest if he does or does not? Such questions, I believe are freighted with the weight of our current national malaise, not just our economic woes.

But there is the fact — and a dangerous fact it is — that we can no longer without fear of recrimination talk about race explicitly, at least when it comes to President-elect Obama. So the choice of place of worship, its cultural locus, becomes a critical site for the continued interrogation of his identification. Is he really black after all? But if he decides not to attend a black church, learning the so-called lessons of his Trinity experience, is this an indication that we have truly arrived at a post-racial moment?

The somewhat manic character of this hand wringing bears the burden of a historic neurosis: It is like a boil bursting forth from impurities in the bloodstream of democracy. Just to follow up on what you were just talking about: But if you look at the exit polls from Prop. So I guess my question is, do you see any of that changing under Obama? Will he be able to move the black church on these issues at all? Will he even want to or try to? That frames how the discussion takes place in interesting sorts of ways within African-American religious communities.

I think I can make a counterargument on Christian grounds to her as to why she ought not to hold that position. Professor, thank you for challenging us. And I was — I was very intrigued by what you said about the former customs about burials. And I wonder if you could talk about other —.

You pointed out that it used to be that African-Americans would not be buried in white — by white congregations. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about other remnants that we still see of practices like that. Well, I mean, there are remnants of it — there are senses in which burial grounds are often associated with particular religious institutions, yes? And those institutions bear the characteristics of a legacy of racial segregation. And so the very ways in which Americans, to this day, recognize their dead — the various rituals that we engage in — are often rituals that take place within very segregated physical spaces.

And then, more broadly, are there other customs like that, other practices where we still see the remnants of segregation — the customs and practices of our churches? I suspect that there probably are but I would say less so. I have to think a little bit more about so I can give you an example.

It will come to me in a minute. Okay, Rachel Martin is next. I have a couple of questions. I hear you saying —. And we need to be able to engage in a kind of conversation about those reasons. And I think there are resources available to folks who are not Christian and folks who are Christian. We just have to deal with it, it seems to me. If this country is to ever get to a point where it has made peace with its past and its present, when it comes to racial divides, what is the role of religion and in particular the black church.

In order for racism to not exist, can the black church exist, if it is premised upon this division. If it came about as a result of white supremacy, does it need to go away before we can become something different and better hopefully. It just seems to me that part of what we have to be very careful of as we aspire to a genuine post-racial moment, is that we not lose sight of the cultural differences that matter.

It offers me a certain set of moral vocabularies in order to understand the world and my interactions with my fellows. So I could still make the case for culturally specific institutions that are valuable — that are treasures — but are not reproductions of a certain kind of racist logic. We need to stop using language of black, white, color and these sorts of things. And beyond portraying a kind of peculiar sense of the way in which language works, in some significant way, you rob yourself of the kinds of tools to specify the specific conditions under which you live your life.

We need to begin to think about how these can be valued apart from the hierarchical arrangements that white supremacy instantiates. If we can do that, then I could be black and proud without that being interpreted in a particular sort of way. Does that make sense? We have to — this is the fantasy of a black-less America that Ellison was talking about.

Let me tell you where we are real quickly because there are a lot of you that have got your hands up: I want to get everybody in, and I know a lot of people have got a lot to ask, so — yeah, meaning interrupt the speaker. But also the long-winded questions too, if they get that way. I have a long-winded question.

Bush is asked for the political philosopher or thinker he most identified with. He says Christ because he changed my heart. Apparently in these debates, they do some wool-gathering. He said, well, what do you mean? And Bush said, when you turn your heart and your life over to Christ and you accept Christ as your Savior, it changes your heart. But this electrified evangelical Christians — they talked about it.

But it alienated Libertarian conservatives and mainstream Protestants and alarmed Jews because it seemed exclusive. And he was extolled by Bono and former President Clinton and by Barack Obama in these testimonials for saving or extending the lives of 2 or 3 million people in sub-Saharan Africa. And then he was asked why he did it. And Bush allows that there was: He said, having these thriving African economies would help our country and theirs.

But then the third reason he said, the biggest is morality. And he started to — he sort of did this flight of fancy that Bush does. He said a higher calling, and then he just goes — God. Nobody would be offended by that. I submit to you that in the public square, the Bush in has this about right and the Bush in alarmed people. Right, part of the question I would have to ask is how — what are we to do with the earlier Bush. What are we to say to him? And on what grounds can we say that?

And then what happens when we make that move? There is an interesting way in which the religious right coalesced around how it was characterized. Our exclusion constitutes a violation on the lines of civil rights exclusions. What follows from that for the meaning of democracy? No, okay, all right. Great — I just wanted to make sure. The question becomes now, what do we do? What then do we do? Does the president, though, as the president, abdicate his right to do that? I just keep hearing you say that people are being kept from saying something.

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I think Christians are free to say whatever they want. Muslims are free to say whatever they want. In fact, we have no-fault divorce throughout the country. I could go through a lot of other things that happen in the Bible. They come out and just announce, we have to have laws against this; we have change the constitution because I believe this.

This is precisely the kind of response I think is requisite. He put some constraints on it. Neuhaus says very clearly that one cannot rely on the authority of revelation as a way of making certain kinds of public claims. The initial problem is religious difference — religious plurality, religious claims bumping up against each other. We have to create a much more vibrant deliberative space so that we can begin to interrogate those sorts of claims to ask for further reasoning. I thought I heard then-Senator Obama say the same thing.

He was speaking to a group of liberal religious leaders and he was saying, what is the place of your views? And the way to do that is to generalize the plan. That weaker claim was there but I think a stronger version of the claim was actually in the — inaudible, cross talk. Are the black churches — are black people black first or are they Christian first? And I pose that even to the white churches. Are they white first or are they Christians first? Is their main vent to preach the gospel or is their main vent to preach the gospel of whiteness or blackness? I tried to make the argument that the adjectives matter —in the sense that there is something called African-American or black Christianity.

It, in its particulars, stands as a refutation of white Christianity. To the extent to which we can begin to flesh out theological positions, to begin to flesh out liturgical kinds of differences and the like, we could. But the basic claim is that historically, African-American Christianity emerges within the context in which they are literally expelled from the ecclesia of white Christianity — of white Christian institutions.

But do the blacks just run the risk of doing the same thing, of creating —. Matt is next and then Jackie. What are some of the precedents leading into black liberation theology? What else was in the political mix when he wrote his book in the middle of the 20th century? Then, speak to the larger black church today, besides the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. So what are some of the alternative options? Those are my two questions. And what I mean by secularization is not the privatization of religious belief, but the kind of pluralization of belief.

So these new rituals of blackness that were emerging at the time that, in some significant way, called into question the relevance of a certain kind of Christian witness — black preachers as hucksters, as hustlers and the like. I hope you remember that. Oh good, well, I can, too. So there are these different kinds of traditions of black Christianity that are coming. I think the context is this really interesting moment where we have to begin to ask where black Christianity is being de-centered. The second question was, what are some of the alternatives?

Remember, I said that one of the interesting things about the Jeremiah Wright instance is that not only did he say that he was defending the black church, in which there was an identity established between him and the black church as such, he became a stand-in for the black church — a shorthand among those of us who were writing about this moment. What happened as a result was a kind of a flattening of all of the differences within black church life.

So the fact is that we have black televangelism, the black electronic church — folk like T. The point was, Senator Obama was a member of one church, not all those churches. In both instances, his claim led to a flattening. There was this, in terms of the framing, of just how the worship service was taking place and how that was then characterized in interesting sort of ways: These folks are speaking tongues and doing all this other stuff —. And others are on there, I promise — Cathy, Barbara, E. I wanted to circle back around to your discussion of the stories that were done about what church Obama was going to go to.

As someone who wrote one of those stories, I was curious about something. We called — we must have called probably 16 or 18 churches in Washington, D. The white churches responded. They showed us the letters they were sending him; they really wanted him to come to their church, made a pitch. They did not return our phone calls. But I wanted to know, given your background, whether you had any insights on this.

Why were they uncomfortable with this? My intuition is a kind of suspicion about the motivation driving the question. That is to say there is a certain characterization of black church practice that can — that could have easily fallen into a certain characterization, of President-elect Obama, of the church itself, and black communities generally. And start, you know, looking at, you know the bulletin and showing up to funerals.

Yeah, you know, these sorts of things. If I could get back to the beginning of your talk, when you were presenting Romney and Obama in the same group — this notion that religiosity and revelation can be separated in the public sphere. During the campaign, I talked to a lot of both liberal and conservative evangelicals after those speeches.

And, the liberal evangelicals said, yes absolutely right. The conservative evangelicals, by and large, were very cynical about both of them. How would you respond to their response? No, I think at that point it becomes the occasion to begin to have an argument, to begin to have a conversation.

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On what grounds would you say — that their revelation is not your revelation. Both of you identify as Christians. How would you then differentiate your view from theirs? If not, then what role might their understanding of revelation play? In other words, it becomes the occasion for a substantive and hopefully nuanced discussion. Now, the assumption is that, typically, folks who hold that view are not up to nuanced discussions.

At that point their views, as the late Richard Rorty would say, constitutes a conversation stopper. Maybe I, naively perhaps, am not committed to that notion. Those moments of marking hard differences for me become moments for democratic deliberation, not moments to shut down democratic deliberation — even though our typical response is that those moments are actually shutting down deliberation. And let me just make an advertisement for strong democratic deliberation. If you go to pewforum. That was a very civil moment of democratic deliberation. I do want to say that we did a whole session on Mormonism with Bushman.

Yeah, at this point. At lot of the folks I spoke to said it was really just a play for votes. And they were deeply cynical about it. But for me — I said this at lunch today — if your interest is not about who wins the White House but rather about democracy as such. My interest has always been throughout this process: And part of what I want to say is that my sister — she would be so angry with me right now — but my sister and I have heated discussions —. We have heated discussions, and I think many of us have those sorts of discussions in our families, in our personal relationships.

And then Richard Starr and Cathy Grossman. I read that speech a lot. I read it again about two weeks ago. I read it because I thought it was at the time pitch-perfect. It was like the Republicans owned religion and the flag. It seemed to me that that was more or less the simple message. We will accept everybody, and he specifically talked about believers and non-believers.

I think tolerant is sort of an arrogant word: I thought it was completely embracing of everyone and totally pluralistic in a way that I have never heard anybody speak about religion — any sort of public personality speak about religion in this country. Certainly — I felt that way when I listened to it. That was my perception.

Not only that, but certainly not people who were secular in any way. Did he not make a statement that there is no —. I thought that was appalling. By the way, I would say quickly, Sally. Governor Romney did come out about three months ago and say, I made a big mistake in that speech. Also, I just want to ask you one more question. Where do you think Obama should go to church? These stories mean so much to me. They orient me to the world. They become the source of what I take to be the beautiful.

They allow me to understand myself as an ethical and moral agent as well. But I understand how religious vocabularies provide us with the languages requisite to weather the storms. I can concede that. But my thinking is that the stronger claim is that religious claims in public spaces must be subjected — must be accessible to public reason. I mean, both of you being Jewish and E.

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I remember thinking about that — inaudible — speech was brilliant for a bunch of reasons. I mean, it was —. It took back the political ground that liberals have conceded to conservatives, and it — the point of it as I understood — was trying to give liberals a way to talk about religion and politics.

I thought it did that very effectively. You know, in a way that I would find persuasive, that we could enter into a dialogue on sort of neutral terms as it were. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.

I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. I agree with what Jacob said about his speech. Because what was on his mind was, how do I get through the Iowa caucuses? And he was right — as it turned out — he was right to worry about getting through the Iowa caucuses. Okay, back to — did we finish? It may complicate the discussion, but it is short-winded. Is it not the case that the strong claim is not simply something that pastor Neuhaus and candidate Obama are making but is in fact embedded in modern jurisprudence?

Your answer is yes? Sure, I actually am sympathetic to your point about believers coming clean on the reasons for their arguments. But by doing so, they may in fact be guaranteeing that they will lose the argument in the public square. They may win it democratically. They may persuade a majority of their fellow citizens, but they may have guaranteed a public policy loss by winning it in that way.

I think that may have been part of the motivation for — certainly for Neuhaus and his book. We actually got into some of this last night. Jumping off some of your comments today — my questions have changed as the day has progressed, in the last half hour — on the subject of black churches. He was a theological — it was a theological, Malcom X -esque religious movement that is very recent from the other discussion about the black church.

But there was also immediately a cultural component. They have vestiges of early pagan religions that they formed out of, like Easter has it, Passover. These — and by pagan I should say animist or polytheistic. And therefore, as we become more integrated and if a white person goes to these churches. I thought my answer to Rachel in some ways echoed this point, when she said that should we see the disappearance of —. But those denominations are also reflective of an increasing maturation of black communities within the United States.

Because in fact it is that context which calls it all into being. So black churches provide in interesting sorts of ways the first public space for African-Americans to engage in the kind of deliberations around the circumstances of their conditions of living. And to that extent it becomes a site for a certain kind of exercise of citizenship, a certain kind of democratic participation. If you accept that there is a cultural component to these churches certainly that came out of racial segregation, they are not that today.

Though visually they are, as you point out — the most segregated hour. Right, it — absolutely. I would prefer that he did that. That hard distinction has to be called into question. So we have to begin to see this as much more continuous, as opposed to discontinuous. And I actually think and I wonder if you agree or disagree, that people react very differently when a politician says Jesus Christ than they do when they say God. Because virtually something-plus America has some idea of God, but not everybody agrees about Jesus.

People react very differently to those terms. The people who opposed Proposition 8 , the people who did not want to see Proposition 8 pass, and did not manage to recognize with the clear onrush of black vote, Hispanic vote, Mormon vote in various corners that there needed to be some communication with those communities — was their failure to reach out to these communities just ignorance?

Or was it racism or just incompetence on their part that they did not speak to these concerns and make their case to the evangelical block and Hispanic communities? I think there was a sense in which the proponents for Proposition 8 out-organized the opponents. Thirdly, there was and there remains a decidedly conservative dimension to African-American evangelicals and African-American churchgoers who came out in dramatic numbers in support of Obama and that extended to their position on Proposition 8. Part of what needs to happen, of course, is a kind of vibrant debate among African-American Christians who opposed Proposition 8 and their friends, with their fellow citizens on this issue.

I think they were out-organized. Really, really interesting talk — thank you so much. Well, they may or not — they may be brief and they may not. You know, Obama casts himself as kind of a Joshua generation. So how big is the Joshua generation versus the more liberation theology Moses generation? Go ahead — and do you mind if I follow up after that? That was something I thought would never really happen, except in the mind of Jim Wallace , which was the rise of the religious left.

You heard about the Matthew 25 Network and you saw white Protestants, many of them white evangelicals, organizing around this notion of social gospel — which is huge in the black church. Then on the other side we have seen in the last couple elections conservative black leaders, religious leaders, siding with more of the evangelicals — mainly on the gay rights issue and on abortion. Are we actually seeing a kind of realignment or a more powerful knitting together of progressive black and progressive whites — motivated by social gospel ideas on the one side — and then the knitting together of conservatives on the other?

Just really quickly I think, you know, in just a shameless plug for my book In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America , the last chapter of that —. Yeah, In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism — laughter — and the Politics of Black America. The book actually came about as a result of my work with Tavis Smiley on the Covenant with Black America.

I went around the country — really having town-hall meetings with folk all around the country trying to create a deliberative space for African-Americans to reflect on their condition. It was a really fascinating moment. I mean I grew up in a household with my mom who had her first baby in the eighth grade and my dad never graduated — graduated only from high school and delivered mail.

Now I have an endowed professorship at the age of 40 at Princeton. Or you talk about Michael Nutter or Adrian Fenty or you talk about all of these folk — these Harvard folk — who are behind the scenes of Obama — the Harvard black cabal, as it were. When Obama talked about Jeremiah Wright as not acknowledging the progress, he was in an interesting sort of way marking — however deliberately and strategically — marking a generational divide that is confounding black communities right now. Black folk, particularly Obama, are now using the language of governance as opposed to the language of struggle.

This is a really fascinating —. Byron you were next and I think —. I remember — I visited Trinity and —. I called in June, I think, the person who I had worked with arranging my visit. A couple of weeks later, I called. This was the first person that Reverend Moss had hired, and I call her on her cell phone not at the office. I do know that there was an interesting tension there. We know that the voting trends have shown that African-American voters when you control for race tend to actually trend to the right in interesting sorts of ways around issues — around capital punishment, around, shall we say, core social value issues.

African-American communities tend to trend towards the right in terms of ideological spectrum. There is an interesting alignment — I actually blog when I can on Beliefnet. You know, Robert Thurman , the Buddhist scholar at Columbia blogs on there as well. It has led to an interesting kind of alignment. We must begin to have these kind of internal arguments as to what we mean by Christian witness, as to what we might mean by living the life of Jesus in public.

This is a conversation that is beginning to be had, and I hope that the substantive outcomes will be to the benefit of democracy in the U. I remember after the race speech as they were filing out of the room in Philadelphia, I asked a number of black ministers, what their reaction was —. And on the other hand you had Obama kind of declaring that this stuff was beyond the pale. And I think I heard you earlier making a little reference to them being, you know, pulled out of context.

What is it in your view? When we look at that speech — that sermon in its entirety, that moment is a particularly powerful and incendiary moment, of course. That suspicion can find itself articulated in the pulpits in very powerful ways. Part of what I was trying to suggest at that moment is that, first give folks in the pews a little more credit. And suspicions about the state emanate from pulpits that are black and white all the time. And I remember this question — I forget who said it — are we going to — it was in the media — are we going to start vetting all of the things said in American pulpits?

And then suddenly it went silent. What was your personal reaction — what was your first reaction when you first saw the sound bites of Reverend Wright like all of us saw them? My first reaction was a political one: I was just wondering why was this so late in the game? And secondly I thought —. You remember it was the Senator Clinton campaign that helped get it going. If it is the case — and Jeffrey said it. If our nation is a purveyor of evil in the world — if one is a believer — it is not, shall we say, oblivious to the judgment of God — no matter how we tell the story of America being the shining city on the hill, it seems to me.

No, my point is simply this: I think those are qualitatively different theological claims, that America is suffering the judgment of God because of its culture of sin has defined —. And maybe — am I wrong in — I think those are two different sorts of claims. The Second Great Awakening originated on the frontier. Preachers were adept at arousing emotional fervor, and women in particular responded to the evangelical message of spiritual equality open to all who would accept Christ into their lives.

Evangelical Christianity promoted by the Second Great Awakening emphasized personal, heartfelt experience that would produce a spiritual rebirth. Preaching became a form of theater, as a preacher and audience acted out scenes of damnation and salvation. The emotional force unleashed at the mass revivals known as camp meetings astounded observers. Salvation was no longer simply bestowed by an implacable God, as taught by the Calvinist doctrine of individual predestination.

Ordinary people could now actively choose salvation, and this possibility was exhilarating. They hymns borrowed melodies from popular music and were accompanied by fiddles and other folk instruments. Evangelicalism was a religion of the common people, and it appealed especially to women and African Americans. The revivals converted about twice as many women as men. Excluded from most areas of public life, women found strength and comfort in the evangelical message of Christian love and equality.

By thus defying social convention, these women offered a model of independent action. Other women organized their own institutions within denominations still formally controlled by men. Women activists founded and largely directed hundreds of church-affiliated charitable societies and missionary associations. Evangelicalism also empowered black Americans. African American Christianity experienced its first sustained growth in the generation after the Revolutionary War.

As a result of their uncompromising commitment to convert slaves, the Baptists and Methodists led the way. They welcomed slaves at their revivals, encouraged black preachers, and above all else, advocated secular and spiritual equality. Many of the early Baptist and Methodist preachers directly challenged slavery. First African Baptist Church in Richmond. The black church was the center of African-American urban life. Although most black churches were founded after the Civil War, some, such as this church founded in , traced their origins to before Courtesy of the Granger Collection, New York.

But for all its liberating appeal to women and African Americans, evangelicalism was eventually limited by race and gender in much the same way as American democracy remained incomplete. Denied positions of authority in white-dominated churches and resentful of white opposition to integrated worship, free black northerners founded their own independent churches. As increasing numbers of planters embraced evangelicalism after the s, southern evangelicals first muted their attacks on slavery and then developed a full-blown religious defense of it based on the biblical sanctioning of human bondage.

They similarly cited the Old Testament patriarchs to defend the unquestioned authority of fathers over their households, the masters of slaves, women, and children. Many popular religious sects in the North also used a particularist reading of the Bible to exalt the independence of white males at the expense of everyone else. Still, the Second Great Awakening removed a major intellectual barrier to political democracy. Traditional Protestant theology, whether Calvinist, Anglican, or Lutheran, viewed the mass of humanity as sinners predestined to damnation and hence was loath to accept the idea that those same sinners, by majority vote, should make crucial political decisions.

In rejecting this theology, ordinary Americans made a fundamental intellectual breakthrough. A friend and fellow attorney consigned the manuscript to the flames admonishing Lincoln to keep such thoughts to himself if he ever fancied a political career. His wife, Mary Todd, was a devoted evangelical, but Lincoln himself never joined a church.

Occasionally, Mary would drag him to a sermon, but it was not something he especially relished. But it was commonplace at the time for Americans, even during casual conversations, to quote freely from Biblical texts or allude to Biblical themes. In an era when many homes had few books, everyone had at least one Bible, and its words and cadences became a lingua franca. The death of a son in and the escalating sectional crisis over slavery played major roles.

But prior to the s, Lincoln eschewed connections between religion and politics, and especially opposed American foreign adventures in the name of Manifest Destiny. He viewed the connection between evangelical religion and evangelical democracy with grave concern, especially as it seemed to give white Americans license to covet the lands of Mexicans and Native Americans. After settling the area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, the American West of the early nineteenth century, migrants headed beyond the Mississippi River in the s.

The edge of settlement pushed into the Louisiana Purchase territory and across a huge area of plains, desert, mountains, and ocean coast that had seen few American settlers before The broad expanse of the trans-Mississippi region stretching from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Coast had become the new American West by mid-century.

The West became a meeting ground of people from diverse cultures as Anglo-Americans came into contact and conflict with the Indians of the Plains and the Mexicans of the Southwest. Convinced of the superiority of their political and cultural values, Anglo-Americans asserted a God-given right to spread across the continent and impose their notions of liberty and democracy on peoples whose land they coveted. In the process, they defeated and subjugated those who stood in their way. The Spirit of Manifest Destiny. Indians retreat westward as white settlers, guided by Columbia, spread the benefits of American civilization.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Manifest Destiny became the popular name for this impulse. Protestant missionaries, as in Oregon, were often in the vanguard of U. What distinguished the special U. Between and , the term Anglo-Saxon, originally loosely applied to English-speaking peoples, acquired racial overtones, in keeping with the then-current interest of European and American scientists in defining, classifying, and ranking human races with themselves, of course, at the top.

Caucasian Anglo-Saxon Americans, as the descendants of ancient Germanic tribes that had purportedly brought the seeds of free institutions to England, were now said to be the foremost race in the world.

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The superior racial pedigree they claimed for themselves gave white Americans the natural right to expand westward, a chosen people carrying the blessings of democracy and progress. Only they, it was argued, had the energy, industriousness, and innate love of liberty to establish a successful free government. Advocates of Manifest Destiny insisted that U. They were not warmongers calling for conquest. Still, the doctrine was undeniably a self-serving justification for what other peoples would see as territorial aggrandizement.

Certainly, this was true of the Mexican Americans and Native Americans who lost land and cultural independence as they were brought under American control. Manifest Destiny and popular stereotypes lumped Indians and Mexicans together as inferior peoples. Plus, they were Roman Catholic, another indication of weakness, this of the mind as their religion compelled them to slavishly follow a foreign authority to the detriment of their national interests.

The historic Protestant animus against the Roman Catholic Church heightened in the s with large-scale Irish Catholic immigration to the U. Although few questioned the right of Catholics to emigrate and to practice their religion in the U. From , when a Protestant mob burnt a convent to the ground outside Boston, until the beginning of the Civil War, sectarian strife periodically erupted into violence on the streets of urban America.

Rival Protestant and Catholic gangs fought over turf and politics, Catholics supporting Democrats and Protestants Whigs and later Republicans. Irish Catholics bore the brunt of this persistent anti-Catholic sentiment. The desertion of Irish Catholic soldiers to Mexico during the Mexican War, the competition with Catholic missionaries in the West, and the aggressive stance of the Vatican toward conversion and placing limits on Protestant access to worship in Rome, fueled evangelical prejudices.

Another Thomas Nast attack on the Catholic Church.

Religion and Race: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective

The millennial idea of cleansing the world of sin meant extending the reign of the Protestant faith across the globe as the true religion of Christ. For many northern evangelicals, the Catholic faith was just another form of slavery, and slavery in any guise was abhorrent. By the late s, as Irish immigration accelerated in the wake of the Irish potato famine, bloody election day clashes became commonplace. As sectarian strife polluted the political arena, slavery grew as an equally important political issue with equally strong religious overtones.

In an era of evangelical fervor it was inevitable that slavery would assume a religious meaning, and when it intruded into the political process, it became less a political issue than a matter of theology. Once that occurred, it was difficult to compromise or temporize the issue, for how do you parse sin?

Slavery polarized politics because it became infused with religious connotations. Southerners invoked the Bible to defend slavery, and northern evangelicals condemned the institution as a violation of Christian ethics if not the literal word of the Bible. The most emphatic word in this debate came not from any divine, but from the pen of a woman with a broken heart.

Eventually, slavery would eclipse the sectarian conflict as the focus of evangelical concern. I had two little curly headed twin daughters to begin with and my stock in this line has gradually increased, till I have been the mother of seven children, the most beautiful and the most loved of whom lies buried near my Cincinnati residence.

It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her. In those depths of sorrow which seemed to me immeasurable, it was my only prayer to God that such anguish might not be suffered in vain. I allude to this here because I have often felt that much that is in that book had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrow of that summer.

It has left now, I trust, no trace on my mind except a deep compassion for the sorrowful, especially for mothers who are separated from their children. Her beloved son had died of cholera in ; that wrenching event, coupled with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act a year later, galvanized Stowe to pour her grief and indignation into a novel about plantation slavery.

Slavery was an abstract concept to most white northerners at the time. Stowe personalized it in a way that made them see it as an institution that did not just oppress black people but also destroyed families and debased well-meaning Christian masters. Stowe had grown up in a family of evangelical Protestant ministers and abolitionists. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a prominent evangelical reformer. He had taken his family west from New England in the early s to save the new territories from the Roman Catholic Church.

Anti-Catholicism and anti-slavery often went hand-in-hand among northern evangelicals. Both, in their view, represented unnatural limits on human endeavor and reason. Personal and societal salvation were closely connected.

Religion and Race in America

And the depiction of southern masters struggling unsuccessfully with their consciences focused public attention on how slavery subverted Christianity. The book created a sensation in the United States and abroad selling 10, copies in its first week and , within a year. By the time of the Civil War, it had sold an unprecedented 3 million copies in the U. Here, Tom dies following a savage beating. It was not yet clear, however, whether evangelicals would precipitate a sectional war or a sectarian conflict.

A new political party emerged, the Know-Nothing Party in response to the flood of Irish immigrants into cities in the northern and border states after Its name derived from the reply that members gave when asked about the party: In several states and cities, they passed legislation barring Catholics from public office and unsuccessfully sought to increase the time required for an immigrant to become a citizen from one year to 21 years. The Know-Nothings also fostered anti-Catholic violence, such as the bloody election day riot that erupted in Louisville, Kentucky, in A few Know-Nothings called for drastic measures to restore order and preserve the integrity of the ballot box.

Though he was polite, Lincoln eventually turned down their invitation to join the new party. He felt that once the government singled out one religious group for persecution, other religions were at risk as well. Besides, such religious prohibitions violated the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Know-Nothings eventually disintegrated as a party. Nevertheless, this was a constituency that Lincoln would have to deal with as many former Know-Nothings moved over to the new Republican Party. Although Lincoln left politics after his term in Congress in The Kansas-Nebraska Act of , which repealed the Missouri Compromise, brought him back into the political arena.

For Lincoln, slavery was always a moral issue, though he kept most of those thoughts to himself. As a constitutionalist he remained opposed to tampering with the institution where it already existed.