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Noll's argument is strongest for the antebellum years and the civil rights generation. The evidence is a bit sketchier for the postbellum period of Redemption—when, as Noll himself acknowledges, secular notions of citizenship and free labor were dominant and religious voices more muted than in the enthusiasms of antebellum America. In the civil rights years, by contrast, the pattern of transformation Noll identifies is clear and compelling, as the freedom movement for black Americans "precipitated a thorough realignment in national political power and a dramatic alteration in the nation's public ethos." In particular, the African American religion that propelled the civil rights movement was "rooted in the activist religion of nineteenth-century revivalistic evangelicalism," even while it was also imbued with progressive religious thought from the likes of Howard Thurman and Benjamin Mays. Unlike white evangelicalism, black religious thought built a tent big enough to accommodate conservative, liberal, and radical Christians; the civil rights agenda provided plenty for all of them to do. Noll compares white evangelical activism in the antebellum era with the civil rights religion of African Americans; both decisively shaped the nation's life in their respective eras. Their respective failings also developed in parallel: antebellum evangelical activism faltered before the moral dilemma of slavery, while the civil rights movement "has not yet successfully addressed the economic, social, moral, and educational problems of a society persistently divided between black and white."

In the end, Noll concludes in some theologically based reflections, "reliance on the Bible" has produced "spectacular liberation alongside spectacular oppression." Thus, properly understood in all its complexity, "historic Christian faith," Noll suggests, offers the best standpoint "from which it is possible to see how much believers themselves have done to promote the evils of racism in American politics while at the same time recognizing how often they have offered hints of redemption as well."

God and Race in American Politics is more reliant on secondary literature (including, most notably, David Chappell's Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow) than some of Noll's other work; for that reason, scholars in the field may find much of this book a helpful summary of notions already well-woven into the literature. But thoughtful Christian readers will find this work indispensable in understanding the big picture of race, religion, and politics in American history.

Paul Harvey is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, and the author of Freedom's Coming: Religious Cultures and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press).

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