1 of 2
As one of the foremost American religious and intellectual historians of the last generation, Mark Noll is known most recently for his magisterial work of synthesis America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, and a shorter series of lectures published recently as The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. This newest work, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History, comes from a series of lectures given at Princeton in 2006. Here Noll addresses a topic that has long been implicit, and sometimes explicit, in his previous work: the role of race in American religion and, by extension American politics. Here, Noll takes on that devilishly difficult subject head-on. In the process, he has produced yet another admirable synthesis of a huge body of American history and historiography.
|
|
Race and slavery, Noll suggests, came to the forefront of American religion and politics in the 19th century. The nation's founders certainly did not foresee this. They believed slavery could be compromised away enough to forge a constitution, and the resulting political fallout could be dealt with later. Moreover, while "moderate and conservative Founders hoped for the continual influence" of established (Congregational and Episcopalian) and quasi-established (Presbyterian) churches to establish "order, decorum, and social control" in the New Republic, and while radical Founders (Thomas Jefferson and others) assumed that an enlightened religion of rationalism would spread through the nation, the facts on the ground emerged very differently: "Instead, religion in America was coming to be dominated by evangelical sects that featured supernatural faith, precritical reading of the Bible, and an aggressive exploitation of the democratic deeds and rhetoric of the American Revolution."
Moreover, as commonsense evangelical readings of the Bible spread during the age of the Second Great Awakening, many Americans found that "the defenders of slavery could quote many more texts that simply took the institution for granted, or even regulated its operation, than there were passages that, even by implication, questioned its propriety." As the Civil War approached, sectional ideas took on an increasingly millennialist cast, allowing both sides, North and South, to set aside "republican scruples" and praise their armies as doing the work of the Lord. The irrepressible conflict thus became a religious one as well.
The Civil War solved the problem of slavery but not of race, Noll emphasizes, leaving a harvest of grapes of wrath for future American generations. African American churches—and what Noll refers to as "African American religious agency"—created new religious formations after the Civil War. Noll parallels the story of evangelical Protestantism from 1789 to 1865 with the story of black religion from the Civil War to the 1960s. In both cases, "small beginnings" created "active and self-controlled institutions," followed by a period of consolidation and a tentatively growing public presence (from about 1920-45, for black churches), and finally a period of "widespread public influence" during the civil rights years.
The confluence of religion and race vitally influenced American politics during three critical periods of political realignment: the antebellum years (1830 to 1860), when "slavery came to overwhelm all other issues on the political landscape"; the postbellum years (1865 to 1900), when the nation "left African Americans unprotected in the civil sphere"; and from the 1950s to the early 21st century, when the civil rights movement ,and the reaction against it, again shook up and reconstituted American political coalitions. Indeed, Noll points out, of the four major periods of political realignment since the antebellum era, only one—the New Deal—lacked a strong element of religion and race. In the New Deal era, economic crisis fostered political realignment, with religion and race playing only a marginal role. In all the other cases, religion, most especially combined with race, was key to political transformations, and "the successive combinations have constituted a single continuous narrative" from Nat Turner's revolt in 1831 to George W. Bush's re-election in 2004.
share this page
RSS Feed
