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Armchair Historian
From Uncle Tom's Cabin to "I Have a Dream"
Together, race and religion have been the driving forces in American political history.
Interview with Mark Noll | posted 11/06/2008 08:07AM
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God and Race in American Politics: A Short History
by Mark Noll
Princeton University Press (2008)
232 pages, $22.95
American political history is marked by four great transformative periods, says American religious historian Mark Noll in his new book, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton University Press). And in three of the four periods, "potent combinations of race and religion were the engines that drove political change."
The three periods when race and religion worked together so powerfully were (1) the decades leading up to the Civil War (1830-60), when slavery came to overwhelm all other issues on the political landscape; (2) the years after the Civil War (1865-1900), "when the nation gave up on the project of equal rights for all and left African Americans unprotected"; and (3) the recent past (from the 1950s on), "when the battle for civil rights was finally won … with ironic consequences."
So what was the exception? The 1930s, when the economic forces that flowed from the Great Depression radically altered the American political landscape with little reference to race and religion.
You may already know about the Abolitionist movement and great Christian activists like Charles Finney and Harriet Beecher Stowe. You may already know about the Reconstruction period and the efforts to resist the new legal realities through repressive Jim Crow laws. You already know about Martin Luther King Jr., and perhaps you can even recite whole paragraphs from his "I Have a Dream" speech.
But until you read Noll's new book, you probably won't be aware of the degree to which the combustive combination of race and religion drove the major political currents of each era. The history of America is, in many ways, the history of God and race.
Christian History executive editor David Neff recently chatted with Mark Noll about his new book. They began their conversation by talking about a uniquely American set of religious beliefs and attitudes that made radical social change seem both possible and imperative—from the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of alcohol through the Civil Rights movement right on down to the formation of the New Christian Right.
You cite a French observer from the 1920s named André Siegfried, who saw among American Christians a particular Calvinist sense of mission. What was it that Siegfried noticed?
It was the belief that the Bible has a message for daily life as well as for eternal salvation. It was a stress on personal redemption and then on the life of holiness that would make people active in society.
How was that Calvinist attitude different from other Christian groups?
The contrasting alternatives would be Catholic, Anabaptist, and Lutheran. In the 19th century, Catholics would have hierarchical assumptions about approaching life in the world. Anabaptists set up alternative Christian communities. Lutherans made a distinction between two "kingdoms" or ways in which God rules the world: by grace (through the gospel) and by law (through the government).
But the Calvinists believed that when people read the Scriptures and develop a strong Christian conviction about something, their proper task is to implement that conviction in society as a whole. In those narrowly defined terms, you can see that the Civil Rights movement and the new Christian Right are cut from the same cloth.
Didn't Roman Catholics eventually come to an approach very much like the Calvinist one?
Right. That transition began in the 1930s with some Catholic supporters of Franklin Roosevelt. They noticed that some elements of New Deal reforms fit well with some elements of Catholic social teaching as articulated by Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum. This has intensified as the effects of the Second Vatican Council have magnified the role of laypeople.
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