Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  Important for theoretical conceptualizations of the constructions of race, Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994) remains a classic. See also Ian Haney-Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 2996), and the collection of essays in Craig R. Prentiss, ed., Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

  For an important and irreplaceable anthology of primary sources from the entirety of African American religious history, see Milton Sernett, ed., African–American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (2nd ed. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998). A quick survey of African American religious history from the slave trade to the present may be found in Paul Harvey, Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). A recent synthesis which proposes a new paradigm for the field is Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Another useful survey may be found in Bettye Collier-Thomas, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion (New York: Knopf, 2010). See also Barbara Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Savage’s work may be read alongside Mark Noll, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), a useful introductory survey to that subject. More specific to the American South, see the synthetic surveys in Paul Harvey, Christianity and Race in the American South: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), and Randy Sparks, Religion in Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001).

  For surveys and interpretations of Native Americans and religion, see James L Sullivan, Native Religions and Cultures of North America (New York: Continuum, 2000), and George Tinker’s more polemical Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). For Natives, a sweeping collection of primary documents may be found in Colin Calloway, ed., First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History (4th edition, Boston: Bedford Books, 2011). For Asian American religions, the outstanding primary source documentary history is Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero, eds., Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  For accounts of religion, race, and politics in African American life, see Frederick Harris, Something Within: Religion in African American Political Activism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1993). Quinton Dixie and Juan Williams, This Far by Faith: Stories from the African American Religious Experience (New York: William Morrow, 2003), is an excellent survey text. For a useful primary source compilation, see Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman, eds., This Far By Faith: Reading in African American Women’s Religious Biography (New York: Routledge, 1995). Advanced scholarly arguments in the field are taken up in Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) and Michael Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The best history of black Catholics in the United States is Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1990). Humanism and alternative religious thought in African American communities has been explored in Anthony Pinn’s African American Humanism: A Documentary History (New York: New York University, 2003), and Humanism: Essays on Religion, Race, and Cultural Production (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). The ways in which African American humanism might function as a religious orientation is presented in Pinn’s African American Humanist Principles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

  Columbia University Press has a series of books on particular religious traditions that are exceedingly helpful introductions, including Jane Smith, Islam in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) and Richard Seager, Buddhism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Peter Manseau’s One Nation, Under Gods: A New American History (New York: Little, Brown, & Company, 2015), is a sweeping reinterpretation of American religious history and pluralism, focusing on lesser-known or forgotten stories.

  R. Marie Griffith, ed., American Religions: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), provides an excellent primary source overview of the entirety of American religious history and Larry Murphy, ed., Down by the Riverside: Readings in African American Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2000), as well as Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, eds., African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1993) do the same in the form of secondary reading essays that anthologize the richness of the scholarship in African American religious history.

  Atlases can provide particular lenses to envision the history of race and religion in America. The classic “big” atlas of American religious history, with loads of information specific to the topic of race and religion, may be found in Edwin Gaustad, ed., New Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For a shorter and more user-friendly version, see Bret E. Carroll, The Routledge Historical Atlas of Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 2000).

  A number of recent collections look at episodes of race, religion, and politics in American life. See, for example, Robin Dale Jacobson and Nancy D. Wadsworth, Faith and Race in American Political Life (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012) and Valerie Martinez Ebbers and Manochehr Dorraj, ed., Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and Religion: Identity Politics in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Jonathan Kahn and Vincent Lloyd, eds., Race and Secularism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) is a pioneering work in addressing race squarely within secularism. See also Anthony Cook, The Least of These: Race, Law and Religion in America (New York: Routledge, 1997).

  A full survey of how American racial preconceptions were literally written “onto” the body and physical appearance of Christ may be found in Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Sage of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). Stephen Prothero, American Jesus, How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2004) and Richard Wightman Fox, Jesus in America: Personal Savior, National Hero, Cultural Obsession (New York: HarperOne, 2005), also both devote considerable attention to race and the formation of ideas about the body and meaning of Jesus in American life.

  CHAPTER 1

  For Puritan New England, this volume relied heavily upon a vast older literature on New England Puritans dating from Perry Miller’s The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (repr. ed., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), and newer classics such as David Hall’s Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For newer perspectives, incorporating more of the histories of Native peoples and of African Americans, see especially Richard Bailey’s Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (New York: Oxford, 2011) and Linford Fisher’s powerful reinterpretation in An Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford, 2013). Much of the thinking about John Eliot and his crusade to translate the Bible into Indian languages comes from Richard Cogley’s John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians Before King Philip’s War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) looks at Puritan-Indian relations from
the perspective of Indian peoples in New England. Jill Lepore, In the Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Knopf, 1999) and Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Norton, 2012) are key recent interpretations of the largest war in seventeenth-century America, and of the Salem witchcraft episode, particularly in terms of its racial implications.

  On the Jesuits in New France, a convenient and user-friendly introduction, a sort of “greatest hits” compilation of the multivolume Jesuit Relations of the seventeenth century, is Allen Greer, ed., The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth–Century North America (Boston: Bedford Books, 2001). On Kateri Tekakwitha, the key work is Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  On the Spanish and their missionaries in New Mexico, the classic work is Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in Northern New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). For Florida, see Daniel Murphee, “Race and Religion on the Periphery: Disappointment and Missionization in the Spanish Floridas, 1566–1763,” in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, edited by Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 35–59.

  For religion, Natives, and multicultural interactions and colonialism in early America, see James Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Julianna Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Andrew Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); David Weber, ed., What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999); and David Roberts, The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion that Drove the Spaniards Out of the Southwest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).

  John Thornton’s works on the connection of Africa and the Americas during the era of the slave trade are vital. See especially, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992). The interpretation of the Stono Rebellion presented here comes from Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion,” The American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1101–13, and the primary documents collected in Mark Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005). The document from 1723 quoted in chapter 1 comes from Thomas N. Ingersoll, “Releese Us out of This Cruell Bondegg: An Appeal from Virginia in 1723,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 51 (October 1994): 776–82.

  CHAPTER 2

  Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), provides a central and sweeping interpretation of the rise of black Protestantism through the Great Awakening and revolutionary period. In Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), Michael Gomez provides a stimulating reinterpretation of the transition from African to African American identities in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including the contested role of religion in that process; James Sidbury provides a complementary analysis in Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the English Black Atlantic, 1760–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  Joel Martin’s work is especially important for Native religions from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. For a more general history, see Martin’s The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001) and “Indians, Contact, and Colonialism in the Deep South: Themes for a Postcolonial History of American Religion,” as well as Laurie Maffly–Kipp, “Eastward Ho! American Religion from the Perspective of the Pacific Rim,” both in Thomas Tweed, ed., Retelling U.S. Religious History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 127–181. More specifically about the Redstick revolt, see Joel Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991). There are a number of excellent recent works on Native writers and thinkers. Laura Murray’s To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–1776 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998) and Joanna Brooks’s The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-Century Native America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) are excellent compilations of key writings, indispensable for future scholarship. For secondary accounts, see Kristina Bross’s Dry Bones and Indian Sermons: Praying Indians in Colonial America (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004) and Rachel Wheeler’s To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) is a critical reinterpretation of the writings of blacks and natives. David Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockton Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), is an excellent social history.

  Christopher Cameron’s To Plead our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2014) shows how African Americans in Massachusetts helped to build an antislavery movement on religious convictions. In Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), John Saillant provides a key study of an early black abolitionist.

  Important studies for race and religion in the South include Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Methodism and the Southern Mind, 1780–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jon Sensbach, A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Allan Gallay, The Formation of a Planter Elite: Jonathan Bryan and the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); and Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). On the Great Awakening, see Thomas Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), and Kidd, The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 2007).

  CHAPTER 3

  Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) has what is still the single best discussion of the meaning of the spirituals in African American life. The absolutely central book in the field of slave religion remains Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Accompanying that would be an older and very much underappreciated classic, Mechal Sobel’s Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1978).

  The list of outstanding works on race, religion, and slavery in the South is long and deep. Notable titles include Erskine Clarke’s Bancroft-prize winning work Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); David Bailey, Shadow on the Church: Southwestern Evangelical Religion and the Issue of Slavery (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985); John Boles, ed., Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740–1870 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988); Margaret Washington Creel, A Pecul
iar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974); Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Walter Pitts, Old Ship of Zion: Afro-Baptist Ritual in the African Diaspora (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Randy Sparks, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1763–1877 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Janet Duitsman Cornelius Slave Missions and the Black Church in the Antebellum South (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997); Michael Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic priesthood in the United States, 1789–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Charles Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Daniel L. Fountain, Slavery, Civil War, and Salvation: African American Slaves and Christianity, 1830–1870 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010) makes the case that Christianity became a dominant force in African American cultural life after, rather than before, emancipation. For a penetrating study of the meaning of the “Ham curse” in American theology, see Stephen Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).