Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), presents the results of a lifetime of research in the rise of slavery and antislavery thought in the Western world. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000) examines the slow and contested process of emancipation in the North. A wonderful collection of primary documents articulating black responses to antebellum American racism may be found in Patrick Rael, et al., eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African American Protest Literature (New York: Routledge, 2001). See also Rael’s monograph Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). For a broad survey of African American social and cultural institutions in the antebellum era, see John Ernest, A Nation Within a Nation: Organizing African American Communities Before the Civil War (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2011). Eddie Glaude, Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), is a profound theological study.

  For a compelling study of California, see Douglas Monroy. Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), which insightfully discusses interaction of religious worldviews of California Indians, Spanish missions, and incoming Yankee Protestants. On Nativism, the older classic is still vital: John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955).

  Study of missionaries has taken off in recent historiography. One particularly compelling recent study of the conceptions of the first generation of American missionaries is Emily Conroy-Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). A few other studies of particular analytical acuity include Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), and Joel Martin, “Almost White: The Ambivalent Promise of Christian Missions among the Cherokee,” in Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity, edited by Craig R. Prentiss (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 43–60. Much of the material about the conceptualization of “Oriental religions” in this chapter comes from the primary source compilation Asian Religions in America (cited above) and from Mike Altman, “Imagining Hindus: India and Religion in Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2014; forthcoming from Oxford University Press under the title Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu).

  Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), is the seminal text on Native American religion in the New Republic, based on “revitalization” theory in anthropology. Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), is an older but still essential work on that topic.

  CHAPTER 4

  James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), surveys the rise of the most important African American religious institution in the nineteenth century. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), is a pioneering work of African American women’s religious organizations in this period. Derek Chang’s Christians of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) is an important comparative work looking at missions among African Americans in the South and Chinese Americans in California in the later nineteenth century. Josh Paddison focuses specifically on California, in his work American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Charles Reagan Wilson’s memorable work Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1980) is the indispensable source for white southern “Lost Cause” religion.

  Race, religion, and the Civil War and Reconstruction era has been a key theme of much recent scholarship. A thoughtful short analysis of the inability of American Christianity to resolve the problem of slavery is explored in Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and the postwar turn toward white American nationalism in Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Religion, Race, and American Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). See also the essays on race, religion, and Reconstruction collected in Edward J. Blum and W. Scott Poole, eds., Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2005). Emily Clark’s A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016) is a wonderful study of the conjunction of radical religion and politics in postwar New Orleans, through the venue of Spiritualism. See also James Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003); and Claude F. Jacobs and Andrew J. Kaslow, The Spiritual Churches of New Orleans: Origins, Beliefs, and Rituals of an African-American Religion (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).

  On religion and race in the postwar South, Paul Harvey’s Freedom’s Coming: Religious Cultures and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) is a broad study, as is William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South 1865–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), while John Giggie’s After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) provides an analytical focus on religion and the marketplace. Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), is a crucial study of that subject. James Melvin Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Black Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1986), was a pioneering narrative of black Baptists. A wonderful compilation of primary documents may be found in Stephen Angell, ed., Social Protest Thought in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1862–1939 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000); accompanying it is Angell’s indispensable biography Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African American Religion in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994). Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), surveys the historical writings of educated African American religious leaders. For broader studies and surveys, reliable works include Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Religion and Society in Frontier California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 1994); Joe Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); and Joseph O Jewell, Race, Social Reform and the Making of a Middle Class: The American Missionary Association and Black Atlanta, 1870–1900 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

  More excellent recent works on African American Christianity, missions, and popular culture include David Wills and Richard Newman, eds., Black Apostles at Home and Abroad: Afro-Christians and the Christian Mission from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall & Co., 1982); Lerone Martin, Preaching on Wax: The Phonograph and the Shaping of Modern African American Religion (New York: New York University Press, 2014); and Edward R. Crowther and Keith Harper, eds., Between Fetters and Freedom: African American Baptists Since Emancipation (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2015). Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the
American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Pres, 1986), is a condensed and more reader-friendly form of his longer Crucible of Race and provides a searching study of diverse varieties of racial thought among whites and blacks in the postwar South. Stephen Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: Andre Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), and Peter Hinks and Stephen Kantrowitz, eds., All Free Men and Brethren: Essays on the History of African American Freemasonry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), provide histories of alternative African American religious institutions (such as the Masons) and some white allies (as in the case of the white radical priest Claude Maistre).

  On Natives, Wovoka, and the ghost dances, the best academic account is Gregory Ellis Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). It can be compared to much older ethnography from the time done by the pioneering scholar James Mooney, such as The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee (repr. ed. New York: Dover Books, 2011). For a compilation of primary documents from Indians in the Progressive era, see Frederick Hoxie, ed., Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era (Boston: Bedford Books, 2001).

  CHAPTER 5

  A fine compilation of essays exploring issues of religion, race, and nationalism in this period can be found in Elizabeth McAlister and Henry Goldschmidt, ed., Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  The black social gospel and conceptions of “black religion” more generally have been the subject of much fine recent scholarship. Ralph Luker’s The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel Movement (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015) remain two central and complementary studies showing the close relationship of the social gospel movement to race. They should be read alongside the older classic by Ronald C. White, Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel, 1877–1925 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), and Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), which shows how much of the concept of there being a “black religion” in the first place was a construct of twentieth-century sociologists. For a provocative interpretation religion and race in the 1920s and the Great Depression, see Kelly J. Baker, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2011), and Alison Greene, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Issues surrounding religion, race, and labor movement are explored provocatively in Ken Fones-Wolf and Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul of the Post-War South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1015); Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2011); and Jarod Roll, Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010). Mary G. Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in the Rural South, 1920–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), finds a religious enthusiasm for the ideas of Marcus Garvey extending out into the southern countryside.

  Black urban religion, and the making of new religious traditions and sounds, emerges as a major theme in Nick Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2005), and in Bernice Johnson Reagon ed., We’ll Understand It Better By and By: Pioneering African American Gospel Composers (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). A classic older study of black religious life in the urban North in this period is St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, eds., Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945). Their study is updated and black urban religions and the quest for identity given entirely new meanings in three more recent works: Milton Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2016). A parallel cultural study may be found in Suzanne Smith, To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). On race, religion, and film more specifically, see Judith Weisenfeld, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). On music, particularly black gospel music, start with Michael Harris, The Rise of the Gospel Blues: Thomas Andrew Dorsey and the Music of the Urban Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Randal Maurice Jelks, Benjamin Elijah Mays: Schoolmaster of the Movement, A Biography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), is a biography of a man who eventually became a key tutor and mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr.; this may be compared with the story told in Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope: Black Southern Reformer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).

  Explorations of alternative black religious identities and racially progressive institutions in the urban North have been a staple of recent scholarly studies. See Jacob S. Dorman, Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Jill Watts, God, Harlem, U.S.A.: The Father Divine Story (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). For African Americans and the YMCA/YWCA, see Nina Mjagkij, Light in the Darkness: African Americans and the YMCA, 1859–1946 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994); Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1904–1946 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Nancy Robertson, Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007).

  Religion, race, and politics in the Depression and World War II era come alive in Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), and Kevin Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  On the rise of Holiness and Pentecostalism in this era, see Cheryl Sanders, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Gaston Espinosa, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Randall Stephens, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Anthea Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

  The American missionary movement from the Civil War era to World War II has received close attention in much excellent recent scholarship, much of which emphasizes the connections of missionaries and the literature they produced to changing racial attitudes at home. See Patricia Hill, The World Their Household: The American Women’s Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870–1920 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985); Brian Masaru Hayashi, For the Sake of Our Japanese Brethren: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism Among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); John King Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterpr
ise in China and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974); William Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Clifton Phillips, Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half-Century of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, MA: East Asian Research Center at Harvard University and Harvard University Press, 1969); Sylvia Jacobs, ed., Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982); Lian Xi, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in China, 1907–1932 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). For a broader intellectual history, see Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Other important studies include Eliza F. Kent, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Susan Haskell Khan, “From Redeemers to Partners: American Women Missionaries and the ‘Woman Question’ in India, 1919–1939,” in Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812–1960, edited by Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Kish Sklar, and Connie A. Shemo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 141–63; Karen Seat, Providence Has Freed Our Hands: Women’s Missions and the American Encounter with Japan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Brian Stanley, “From ‘the Poor Heathen’ to ‘the Glory and Honour of All Nations’: Vocabularies of Race and Custom in Protestant Missions, 1844–1928,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 34 (2010): 3–10; and Yumi Yasutake, Transnational Women’s Activism: The United States, Japan, and Japanese Immigrant Communities in California, 1859–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2004).