Book Review: God And Race In American Politics: A Short History
by Mark A. Noll
Publication Date: Apr 04, 2010
List Price: $22.95
Format: Paperback, 224 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780691146294
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Parent Company: Princeton University
Read a Description of God And Race In American Politics: A Short History
Book Reviewed by Kam Williams
"Together, race and religion make up, not only the
nation’s deepest and most enduring moral problem, but also its broadest and
most enduring political influence. Yet, how race and religion have
interacted to shape politics has differed dramatically over time and by
community… An earnest moral concern for how governments should conduct
themselves, a compulsion to sermonize about the duties of citizens and the
state, and a frequent recourse to Scripture for grounding or garnishing
political positions have been consistently present in American history…
Before the Civil War, religion drove abolitionist assaults upon slavery even
as it undergirded influential defenses of slavery in both the North and the
South. After that conflict, Christianity… played a major part in sanctioning
systematic white discrimination against African-Americans. In turn, the
racially defined polity that religious forces helped to create became a
fixed reality of American politics…African-American religion helped spark
the civil rights movement… but also keyed a politically conservative
countermovement inspired by a different kind of religion.
In other words, rather than any specific configuration of race and religion,
it has been the general interweaving of race with religion, along with a
discernibly religious mode of public argument, that have pervaded the
nation’s political history""
— Excerpted from the Introduction (pgs. 1-2)
During the tempestuous decades leading up to the Civil War, both
plantation owners and abolitionists relied primarily on Christianity to
rationalize their diametrically-opposed positions on slavery. As the debate
intensified, you had firebrands like Nat Turner and John Brown using the
Bible as inspiration for insurrections. Meanwhile, self-righteous slave
owners forced their slaves to memorize passages from catechisms based on a
perverted interpretation of the Good Book.
For instance, African-Americans were expected to recite the following
blasphemous responses to questions posed by their white ministers: "Q: Who
gave you a master and a mistress? A: God gave them to me. Q: Who says I must
obey them? A: God says I must. Q: What makes you lazy? A: My wicked heart.
Q: What book tells you these things? A: The Bible."
Given that religion served such different functions for the Founding Fathers
and the slaves upon whose backs this nation was built, is it any wonder that
it has continued to divide the country along color lines? As Don King would
say, "Only in America!" Let’s face it, blacks and whites in general have
very different sets of Christian beliefs, which explains why Sunday morning
at 11 continues to be the most segregated hour in the United States.
This fact was never more graphically illustrated than during the last
Presidential campaign when then candidate Barack Obama had the good sense to
throw the minister who had married him and baptized his children under the
bus, rather than risk alienating the white majority shock by Reverend
Wright’s sermons. Yet, not much was made in the press of Steven Anderson, a
white minister who was leading his lily-white congregation in prayer for
Obama’s death.
God and Race in American Politics is an eye-opening book by Mark Noll which
points out how again and again, from generation to generation, Christianity
has been the most effective political tool employed by both the left and the
right to appropriate the moral high ground. Which side is really right or
who God would agree with is less the author’s focus here than his argument
that the dependency on religion to legitimate political positions is a
peculiarly American phenomenon.
A most curious, enduring state of affairs in a nation supposedly based on
the separation of church and state.