Race and the History of Christian Nationalism
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Race and the History of Christian Nationalism
Christian nationalism in the United States developed within a much broader history of religion, race, colonialism, national identity, and political power. The relationship has never been simple or uniform. Christianity has been used at different times to justify racial hierarchy, slavery, territorial expansion, segregation, and exclusion, while Christian beliefs and institutions have also provided important resources for abolitionism, Black freedom movements, civil-rights activism, Indigenous resistance, interracial organizing, and opposition to racial nationalism.
Modern scholarship therefore generally distinguishes Christianity itself from Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism refers to attempts to link national identity, political authority, and a particular understanding of Christianity. In the American context, some historically influential forms of Christian nationalism have also been connected with ideas about racial hierarchy and with assumptions about which religious, ethnic, or racial groups most authentically belong to the nation.
Race has consequently become an important part of historical and sociological research on Christian nationalism. Scholars have examined how ideas about Christianity and American identity developed alongside colonial expansion, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, segregation, immigration restriction, racial conflict, and debates over citizenship. Contemporary researchers also study how Christian-nationalist beliefs interact with racial identity and racial attitudes today.
Colonial Christianity and the Development of Racial Categories
The roots of the relationship between Christianity, race, and nationalism extend into the European colonization of the Americas. European political and religious authorities frequently understood expansion through concepts of Christian civilization, conversion, sovereignty, and providence.
The Doctrine of Discovery became one important element of this history. European Christian claims to authority over non-Christian lands helped provide religious and legal rationales for territorial acquisition and Indigenous dispossession. Papal declarations and subsequent European colonial practices contributed to a worldview in which Christian powers claimed special rights over lands occupied by Indigenous peoples.
In British North America, Christianity also became entangled with emerging racial classifications. Colonial societies distinguished among Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous peoples through changing combinations of religion, ancestry, legal status, culture, and physical appearance.
Conversion sometimes complicated racial boundaries because Africans and Indigenous people could become Christians. At the same time, Christian conversion did not necessarily erase social inequality. Colonial legal systems gradually developed forms of racial slavery in which African ancestry became increasingly associated with permanent hereditary enslavement.
Puritan New England provides another example of the interaction between religion and racial formation. Puritan theology emphasized covenant, providence, conversion, and the belief that communities could possess a special relationship with God. These ideas did not automatically constitute modern Christian nationalism, but later narratives of American chosenness drew upon some of the religious language developed in colonial society.
Ideas about providential mission could also coexist with warfare against Indigenous nations, territorial acquisition, missionary activity, and assumptions about European cultural superiority. Over time, these themes contributed to larger narratives portraying European settlement as part of a divinely significant national story.
Slavery and Christian National Identity
Slavery became one of the most consequential intersections of Christianity, race, and American national development.
Christian responses to slavery were deeply divided. Some Christians condemned slavery and became active in abolitionist movements. Others defended slavery using biblical interpretation, theological arguments, paternalism, and claims about the proper organization of society.
In the antebellum South, proslavery ministers and theologians developed detailed religious defenses of slavery. Biblical passages were cited to argue that slaveholding was compatible with Christianity and that abolition represented a dangerous challenge to biblical authority and the established social order.
Arguments over slavery eventually divided several major Protestant denominations. The creation of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845, for example, emerged from disputes that included whether slaveholders could serve as missionaries.
The Civil War intensified conflicts over Christianity and national identity. Both Union and Confederate Christians frequently interpreted the war in providential terms. Confederate religious leaders often portrayed the Confederacy as a Christian society defending a divinely ordered civilization, while antislavery Christians increasingly interpreted emancipation as a moral and religious cause.
The conflict demonstrated that appeals to Christianity could support sharply contradictory political and racial visions. Christians who shared commitments to biblical authority nevertheless reached fundamentally different conclusions about slavery, equality, citizenship, and national destiny.
Reconstruction, Redemption, and the Reconstruction of Racial Order
Emancipation transformed the relationship between race, Christianity, and citizenship.
Black Christians established and expanded independent churches that became central institutions in African American political, educational, social, and religious life. Black churches provided spaces for leadership, community organization, education, mutual assistance, and political participation.
During Reconstruction, Black Christian leaders often connected Christianity with freedom, equal citizenship, political participation, and human dignity.
White Christians developed competing interpretations. Some supported Reconstruction and racial equality, while others defended white political authority and paternalistic racial arrangements.
Following Reconstruction, the overthrow of Black political participation across much of the South was accompanied by the emergence of Jim Crow segregation. Religious ideas were frequently incorporated into arguments for racial separation and social hierarchy.
Some white Christians described segregation as part of a natural or divinely sanctioned social order. Biblical interpretation, traditions of paternalism, concepts of family authority, and regional identity could all be incorporated into defenses of racial inequality.
At the same time, Black churches remained major centers of resistance and institution-building. Competing Christian interpretations of freedom and racial hierarchy therefore continued long after slavery ended.
Jim Crow and Segregated Christianity
American Christianity itself became highly segregated.
White and Black Christians frequently attended separate churches, belonged to separate denominations or denominational structures, attended separate schools, and participated in different religious institutions.
Segregation was not limited to the secular political system. Churches could reproduce the racial boundaries of their surrounding communities even when Christian theology formally emphasized spiritual equality.
During the twentieth century, conflicts over segregation increasingly entered churches, seminaries, colleges, and denominational organizations.
Some white religious leaders defended segregation explicitly. Others criticized segregation but argued that racial change should occur through personal conversion rather than through government intervention or structural reform. Still others became active supporters of integration and the civil-rights movement.
These differences became especially visible following Brown v. Board of Education and the growth of the civil-rights movement.
Religious institutions faced disputes over whether Black worshippers could attend white churches, whether Christian colleges should integrate, whether denominations should endorse civil-rights legislation, and whether racial inequality constituted primarily an individual moral problem or a broader institutional problem.
Black Christianity and the Civil Rights Movement
African American Christianity developed a very different historical relationship to race, nationalism, and political freedom.
Black churches frequently served as institutions of survival and resistance under slavery and segregation. Biblical narratives of liberation, particularly the Exodus story, became important religious resources for interpreting African American struggles for freedom.
During the civil-rights movement, churches provided organizational networks, meeting spaces, leadership, communication systems, and moral language for campaigns against segregation and racial discrimination.
Figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. drew explicitly upon Christianity while arguing that American political institutions should fulfill principles of equality and citizenship.
Black religious nationalism also developed in several forms. Some Black Christian traditions emphasized the special historical mission or collective destiny of African Americans. Scholars caution, however, against treating Black and white Christian nationalism as interchangeable.
For historically marginalized communities, religious nationalism could sometimes function as a language of liberation, self-determination, collective dignity, or resistance rather than as a justification for preserving an established racial hierarchy.
This distinction remains important in contemporary survey research. Similar responses to questions about Christianity and national identity may have different historical meanings among different racial groups.
White Evangelicalism, Desegregation, and the Religious Right
The relationship between race and the rise of modern conservative Christian politics remains an important subject of historical debate.
Some scholarship emphasizes the role of opposition to racial integration, particularly controversies surrounding segregated Christian schools and federal tax policies, in encouraging conservative evangelical political mobilization during the twentieth century.
Other scholarship stresses that the Religious Right emerged from several overlapping issues, including education, secularization, feminism, abortion, sexuality, religious freedom, anticommunism, and concerns about cultural change.
Race nevertheless formed part of the political environment in which modern conservative evangelical activism developed.
Many white evangelical institutions had histories of segregation or resistance to integration. Christian schools and colleges became important sites of controversy. As explicit defenses of racial segregation became less socially acceptable, some religious discourse shifted toward concepts such as individual freedom, parental rights, local authority, religious liberty, and colorblindness.
Scholars disagree about how particular issues should be weighted in explaining the rise of the Religious Right, but research on race demonstrates that battles over desegregation formed part of the broader transformation of conservative Christian political activism.
From Segregation to Colorblind Religious Language
Following the civil-rights era, explicit theological defenses of racial segregation declined significantly within mainstream American Christianity.
Many evangelical organizations formally rejected racism and increasingly promoted racial reconciliation.
However, researchers have examined whether newer approaches sometimes emphasized interpersonal prejudice while paying less attention to institutional or structural inequality.
This approach has sometimes been described as colorblind Christianity. It emphasizes treating individuals without regard to race and often interprets racism primarily as a problem of individual attitudes or personal relationships.
Supporters may understand this framework as consistent with Christian teachings about individual dignity and equality.
Critics argue that a strictly individual approach can overlook historical and institutional factors that continue to influence racial inequality.
Debates over individual versus structural understandings of racism therefore became an important feature of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century American Christianity.
Christian Identity, the Ku Klux Klan, and Explicit White Supremacy
Some religious movements connected Christianity and racial nationalism far more explicitly.
The Ku Klux Klan periodically incorporated Protestant symbolism into its ideology, especially during its major twentieth-century resurgence. Klan rhetoric presented white Protestantism as central to American national identity while targeting Black Americans, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, and other groups.
Christian Identity developed into an even more explicitly racial theology.
Emerging partly from British-Israelism, Christian Identity taught that white Europeans were the true descendants of biblical Israel. Some versions portrayed Jews and nonwhite populations through conspiratorial or dehumanizing theological narratives.
Christian Identity became influential within portions of the American white-supremacist movement.
These movements represent extreme forms of racialized Christianity and should not be treated as representative of Christianity generally or of all people who express Christian-nationalist beliefs.
They nevertheless demonstrate how religious language can be incorporated into explicitly racial definitions of nationality and citizenship.
Indigenous Peoples, Expansion, and Christian Assimilation
Race and Christian national identity also intersected with American expansion across Indigenous lands.
Religious language sometimes accompanied nineteenth-century ideas of Manifest Destiny, which portrayed territorial expansion as providential or historically inevitable.
Christian missionary activity took many forms. Some missionaries defended Indigenous peoples or criticized government abuses, while others participated in efforts to replace Indigenous religions and cultures with Euro-American Christian practices.
Government and church-operated Indian boarding schools became important instruments of assimilation. Indigenous children were often separated from their families and pressured or forced to abandon Indigenous languages, names, religious traditions, clothing, and cultural practices.
The Dawes Act and related policies further encouraged assimilation while contributing to enormous losses of tribal land.
These histories broaden the study of Christian nationalism beyond Black-white racial relations. They demonstrate how ideas about Christianity, civilization, citizenship, land, and national expansion could interact in the construction of American identity.
Immigration, Whiteness, and Religious Belonging
American racial categories changed significantly as immigration transformed the population.
Catholics, Jews, Asian immigrants, Latino communities, Muslims, and other religious minorities encountered shifting definitions of race and national belonging.
Groups that were once portrayed as culturally or racially outside mainstream American identity could later experience changing levels of acceptance.
Religion therefore interacted with the historical construction of whiteness. Protestant identity was especially influential in earlier definitions of American national culture, while later demographic and political transformations produced a more religiously plural society.
Contemporary Christian nationalism exists within this pluralistic environment. Debates about immigration and national identity often raise questions about whether being American is primarily civic and constitutional or whether American identity should also incorporate a particular religious or cultural heritage.
Contemporary Christian Nationalism and Race
Modern social-science research examines Christian nationalism through surveys measuring beliefs about Christianity's relationship to government, national identity, history, public institutions, and political authority.
Research consistently demonstrates that Christian nationalism is not limited to a single racial group.
White, Black, Hispanic, and other Americans can endorse statements associating Christianity with the United States. However, the social and political meanings of those responses may differ substantially because communities possess different historical relationships to Christianity and American nationalism.
Among white Americans, researchers have found associations between stronger Christian-nationalist attitudes and measures involving white racial solidarity, perceptions of racial inequality, immigration attitudes, and beliefs about who represents the American national community.
Other studies caution against assuming that Christian nationalism is inherently or uniformly racial. Religious belief, political ideology, partisan identity, education, geography, biblical interpretation, and other factors can independently influence Christian-nationalist attitudes.
Contemporary scholarship therefore increasingly examines Christian nationalism as an intersection of religion, politics, race, national identity, and social boundaries rather than treating it as a single uniform ideology.
White Christian Nationalism
The term white Christian nationalism is often used when researchers specifically discuss the historical fusion of Christian identity, American national identity, and whiteness.
The concept emphasizes that some versions of American nationalism historically imagined the country as belonging most authentically to white Christians.
Such narratives can draw on idealized interpretations of the past in which the United States is portrayed as having been founded as a culturally unified Christian nation.
Historical research complicates this picture. American religious history has always included disagreement among Christian denominations as well as Indigenous religions, Judaism, African-derived religious traditions, religious dissenters, skeptics, and later expanding religious diversity.
The concept of white Christian nationalism therefore refers not simply to Christian political participation but to a particular way of defining national identity through overlapping religious and racial boundaries.
Distinguishing Christianity from Christian Nationalism
The historical record also demonstrates why Christianity and Christian nationalism should not be treated as synonymous.
Christians have participated on opposing sides of nearly every major American conflict involving race.
Christian arguments were used to defend slavery, but Christian arguments were also used by abolitionists.
Churches supported segregation, while other churches and religious leaders fought segregation.
Christian institutions participated in Indigenous assimilation, while some Christians defended Indigenous rights.
White supremacist movements adopted Christian language, while Christian clergy and congregations participated in movements opposing racism and white supremacy.
Christianity therefore contains a wide range of theological, ethical, and political traditions.
Christian nationalism is better understood as one particular relationship between religion and national identity rather than as a description of Christianity as a whole.
Historical Memory and the Idea of a Christian Nation
Historical memory plays an important role in modern debates over Christian nationalism.
Supporters of Christian-nationalist ideas may emphasize the importance of Christianity in colonial settlements, revolutionary-era culture, American institutions, abolitionism, reform movements, and the country's moral vocabulary.
Critics emphasize religious pluralism among the founders, constitutional restrictions on religious establishment, the participation of non-Christian and dissenting traditions in American history, and the use of Christian language to defend racial hierarchy and exclusion.
The historical record contains elements relevant to both discussions.
Christianity profoundly influenced American society and political culture, but American Christianity was never politically, denominationally, or racially uniform.
Understanding Christian nationalism therefore requires examining not only whether Christianity influenced the United States, but also how particular groups defined Christianity, citizenship, race, and national belonging at different historical moments.
Race and National Belonging
A recurring issue throughout this history concerns the definition of who belongs to the nation.
Colonial distinctions between Christians and non-Christians gradually interacted with racial slavery.
Nineteenth-century expansion raised questions about Indigenous sovereignty and citizenship.
Slavery and Reconstruction produced conflicts over whether African Americans possessed equal political membership.
Immigration generated disputes over whether Catholics, Jews, Asians, Latinos, and other communities could become fully American.
Segregation restricted equal participation even after formal citizenship had been established.
Contemporary debates about Christian nationalism continue to engage many of the same underlying questions: whether national identity should be primarily civic and constitutional or whether religion, ancestry, culture, or historical tradition should also define belonging.
Race therefore matters to the history of Christian nationalism because ideas about religious identity have repeatedly developed alongside changing boundaries of citizenship and national membership.
A Complex Historical Legacy
The relationship between race and Christian nationalism cannot be reduced to a single organization, denomination, political movement, or historical period.
It developed through several centuries of changing relationships among Christianity, colonial settlement, slavery, Indigenous dispossession, immigration, segregation, citizenship, political activism, and national mythology.
Different racial and religious communities also experienced these developments differently.
For some white Americans, Christian national identity historically overlapped with assumptions about racial hierarchy or white cultural dominance.
For many Black Christians, Christianity became an important source of resistance to slavery and segregation as well as a foundation for struggles for citizenship and equality.
Indigenous peoples encountered Christianity through both missionary relationships and coercive assimilation.
Immigrant religious communities negotiated changing definitions of race, citizenship, and American belonging.
These differing histories explain why apparently similar religious or patriotic language can carry different meanings across communities.
Conclusion
Race has been deeply intertwined with the historical development of American ideas about Christianity, nationhood, citizenship, and belonging. Colonial religious concepts interacted with racial formation and Indigenous dispossession; slavery generated competing Christian arguments about hierarchy and freedom; Reconstruction and Jim Crow produced conflicting religious visions of citizenship; and twentieth-century struggles over segregation and civil rights transformed American religious politics.
Modern Christian nationalism inherits elements of this complicated history, but it should not be treated as identical to Christianity or as a single uniform racial ideology. Contemporary research shows important differences across racial, religious, political, and regional groups.
The history is therefore best understood as a continuing struggle over the meaning of Christianity and American identity. Religious ideas have been used both to draw boundaries around national belonging and to challenge those boundaries. Studying race and Christian nationalism together reveals how debates about religion often intersect with larger questions about citizenship, equality, historical memory, political authority, and who is understood to belong within the American nation.
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Contemporary Christian Nationalism, Race, Identity, and Public Opinion
Examines progressive Christian responses to white Christian nationalism and how religious communities contest racialized understandings of American Christian identity.
Studies relationships among Christian nationalism, political identity, ethno-racial identity, and distrust of immigrants in the United States.
Examines how Americans interpret the phrase Christian nationalism and how race, religion, political identity, and other factors shape those interpretations.
Provides demographic data on white Christian populations in the United States and places contemporary white Christian identity within broader religious and demographic change.
Examines the relationship between Christian-nationalist beliefs and attitudes toward immigration, an issue historically connected with changing racial and religious definitions of American belonging.
Maps Christian-nationalist attitudes by state and examines differences involving race, religion, political affiliation, education, and other demographic characteristics.
Provides state-level evidence about Christian nationalism and demographic differences, useful for comparing contemporary racial and regional patterns.
Examines the partisan and racial sorting of Christian-nationalist attitudes from 1996 through 2022, tracing changes among the religious right, secular left, and white Americans over time.
Examines education, Christian nationalism, and racial inequality within American evangelicalism, helping explain how racial and religious identities interact within contemporary evangelical institutions.
Uses survey experiments to investigate when Christian nationalism functions as a racialized form of in-group protection and when its effects differ across racial groups.
Studies how political and religious elites influence Americans' willingness to identify explicitly with the Christian-nationalist label.
Examines experimentally how Christian-nationalist political rhetoric can affect Black and white Americans differently and cautions against assuming identical meanings across racial groups.
Identifies differing patterns of engagement with Christian nationalism and explores their connections with spirituality, identity, and social attitudes.
Examines Christian nationalism and racial stereotypes, focusing on whether the ideology elevates white Americans as the perceived prototypical national group.
Compares relationships between Christian nationalism and authoritarian attitudes among racial groups and emphasizes differences in how similar survey responses may function politically.
Examines how race moderates relationships between Christian nationalism and progressive political or social identities.
Investigates Christian nationalism as a religious component of white identity politics and finds strong associations with measures of white racial solidarity among white respondents.
Provides nationwide data on Christian nationalism and examines differences involving race, religious tradition, political affiliation, education, and geography.
Examines how nationalist forms of Christianity can subordinate shared religious identity to ethnic and national boundaries.
Challenges the assumption that all Christian nationalists are white and examines how race, religion, ideology, biblical literalism, and political identity independently relate to Christian-nationalist attitudes.
Examines resistance to Christian nationalism across racial, religious, political, and geographic groups and provides context for understanding who does and does not embrace the ideology.
Examines how racial attitudes, religion, and Christian-nationalist beliefs interact with views about government assistance and racial inequality.
Compares Black and white Americans classified as Christian-nationalist adherents or sympathizers and demonstrates that similar survey responses can accompany different racial and political outlooks.
Examines how racial attitudes affect support for Christian nationalism and American civil religion, including the role of ostensibly colorblind racial beliefs.
Maps Christian-nationalist support nationwide and provides racial, religious, partisan, educational, and regional comparisons.
Examines how Christian nationalism relates to exclusion, assimilation, and cultural membership among white, Black, and Hispanic Americans.
Presents national survey data on Christian nationalism and examines relationships with white identity, anti-Black attitudes, immigration, religious prejudice, and political behavior.
Presents research and expert discussion on white Christian nationalism, including its intersections with racial identity, anti-Black attitudes, immigration, antisemitism, and American political culture.
Reviews psychological and social dimensions of Christian nationalism, including identity, hierarchy, perceived threat, race, and national belonging.
Examines racial differences in perceptions of injustice and finds that Christian nationalism is associated with different understandings of racial inequality among white and Black Americans.
Examines Christian nationalism, race, and blind patriotism, finding that the association between Christian-nationalist beliefs and unconditional support for the nation is especially pronounced among white respondents.
Investigates Christian nationalism surrounding January 6 and includes historical discussion of slavery, white supremacy, racial politics, and the development of Christian-nationalist narratives.
Examines associations between Christian nationalism and support for restricting voter access, with particular attention to racialized narratives surrounding voting and election fraud.
Surveys multiple manifestations of white Christian nationalism and discusses how racial identity and Christian identity became intertwined in American political culture.
Examines Christian nationalism, perceived threat, and attitudes toward immigrants, connecting religious-national identity with judgments about who belongs within the national community.
Examines how Christian nationalism creates social boundaries defining who is understood to belong within the American nation and who remains outside it.
Finds that connecting Christianity with American identity can operate differently among Black and white Americans, complicating attempts to treat all Christian-nationalist beliefs as racially identical.
Examines religion, race, and immigration in contemporary America and how religious communities negotiate national belonging and racial classification.
Examines racial differences among evangelical voters and demonstrates why white evangelical political behavior should not automatically be generalized to Black, Latino, or Asian American evangelicals.
- | Samuel L. Perry, Andrew L. Whitehead, and Joshua T. Davis | Sociology of Race and Ethnicity | 2018
Examines how Christian nationalism shapes perceptions of police treatment of Black Americans and racial inequality in law enforcement.
Finds an association between Christian nationalism and stronger white racial boundaries as measured by opposition to interracial marriage.
Historical Roots, Christian Nationhood, Chosenness, and Racial Formation
Surveys historical roots of American Christian nationalism and discusses connections among religion, national identity, racial hierarchy, and political power.
Examines competing historical claims about America's Christian identity and compares modern Christian-nationalist narratives with the religious diversity of the founding era.
Discusses the long history of the belief that the United States has been specially chosen by God and how that narrative has interacted with race, expansion, and national identity.
Traces evangelical racial thought and practice from 1700 through 1964, including slavery, denominational division, Reconstruction, segregation, and the civil-rights era.
Traces white Christian nationalism from Puritan ideas about chosenness through slavery, expansion, racial conflict, and contemporary American politics.
Traces white Christian nationalism to colonial-era Christian doctrines that helped justify European conquest, Indigenous dispossession, and racial slavery.
Reviews John Fanestil's American Heresy, a historical study tracing white Christian nationalism from colonial settlement and racial hierarchy into contemporary America.
Discusses the historical formation of race within Western Christianity and the religious ideas that helped connect Christianity, colonial expansion, land, and national identity.
Reviews the history of white Christian nationalism and considers its implications for religious and racial minorities in the United States.
Examines modern claims that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and compares them with historians' assessments of founding-era religious diversity and church-state arrangements.
Explains scholarship on white Christian nationalism and its historical connections with ideas about race, religion, American identity, and political belonging.
Introduces white Christian nationalism as a historical narrative combining religion, national identity, racial boundaries, social hierarchy, and competing interpretations of American history.
Examines the idea that the United States belongs primarily to a particular racial and religious people and traces how such claims became embedded in narratives of American nationhood.
Examines connections among freedom, racial hierarchy, political order, violence, and white Christian nationalism in American historical narratives.
Interviews sociologist Philip Gorski about the historical development of white Christian nationalism, including Puritan chosenness, Indigenous dispossession, slavery, and racial boundaries.
Examines nostalgic narratives about a supposedly Christian American past and how stories about religion, race, and national history shape contemporary Christian nationalism.
Concludes Butler's historical analysis of evangelicalism, whiteness, political nationalism, and the persistence of racial inequality in American religious life.
Traces relationships among white evangelicalism, slavery, Jim Crow, racial politics, and conservative political activism across American history.
Surveys the American church's history with race from colonial race-making and slavery through Jim Crow, the civil-rights movement, the Religious Right, and modern racial-reconciliation debates.
Examines relationships among religion, racial formation, territorial expansion, and American empire.
Examines religion and race in the Greater South from 1500 to 1800, including colonial Christianity, slavery, Indigenous peoples, and the development of racial categories.
Examines Puritan religious culture and the construction of racial differences among colonists, Africans, and Native Americans.
Examines religion and racial violence in the nineteenth century, including religious interpretations of expansion, racial conflict, and coercion.
Examines John L. O'Sullivan's Manifest Destiny rhetoric and shows how providential nationalism, expansion, Anglo-American identity, and ideas about civilization became intertwined.
Examines seventeenth-century Virginia and argues that Christian ideas about conversion, heathenism, ancestry, and slavery contributed to the creation of enduring racial categories.
Examines how Puritan New Englanders developed racial distinctions through religious ideas about redemption, conversion, social authority, Native peoples, Africans, and colonial identity.
Examines Puritan covenant theology, colonialism, warfare, bondage, and the construction of distinctions between white settlers and peoples considered culturally or physically different.
Examines how Puritan understandings of physical appearance, cultural difference, and human capability contributed to emerging racial categories in colonial New England.
Examines conversion narratives, sermons, and representations of Native and African Christians within Puritan religious culture.
Examines authority over servants and other New Englanders of color and the relationship between religious hierarchy, labor, bondage, and racial status.
Examines Puritan attempts to convert racial and cultural outsiders and how the language of Christian redemption could simultaneously cross and reinforce social boundaries.
Examines how European and American Christians attempted to reconcile developing racial classifications with biblical accounts of common human ancestry.
Examines different forms of racialized religion and how theological arguments, biblical interpretation, ethnicity, and nationalism interacted in the development of modern racial thought.
Examines how religion participated in constructing racial categories and white American identity during the nation's development.
Surveys religion in the early American republic, including the expansion of denominations, church-state relations, reform movements, slavery, and competing ideas about the nation's religious identity.
Indigenous Peoples, Colonialism, Doctrine of Discovery, and Assimilation
Reviews scholarship on the Doctrine of Discovery and its significance for understanding Christianity, colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, race, and sovereignty.
Provides primary-source-based teaching material on American Indian history, including the Doctrine of Discovery, European Christian assumptions about land, and federal policies toward Indigenous peoples.
Examines the nineteenth-century loss of Indigenous land, cultural traditions, and political autonomy within a broader history of American expansion and assimilation.
Explains the 1493 Inter Caetera papal bull and its connection with European Christian claims to territory, Indigenous conversion, colonization, and what later became known as the Doctrine of Discovery.
Examines race and religion in the early modern Iberian Atlantic, providing background for Christian colonization and racial classification in the Americas.
Examines American missionaries and the ways missionary work interacted with racial assumptions, colonial power, conversion, and ideas about civilization.
Examines Native peoples, Christianity, conversion, colonization, and racial formation in colonial America.
Examines race, gender, missionary Christianity, colonialism, and Native Hawaiian society through the history of the Hawaiian Islands Mission.
Surveys Native American religions in the twentieth century, including federal assimilation policy, missionary Christianity, religious suppression, and Native religious survival.
Examines the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and federal attempts to replace Indigenous languages, religions, identities, and cultural practices with dominant American norms.
Examines the Doctrine of Discovery and how ideas of Christian and European superiority were used to justify sovereignty claims over Indigenous lands and peoples.
Examines government- and church-operated Indian boarding schools and their efforts to replace Indigenous languages, religions, names, clothing, and cultural practices with Euro-American Christian culture.
Explains the Dawes Act and the federal policy of dividing tribal lands and encouraging assimilation into dominant American society, resulting in large-scale Indigenous land loss.
Slavery, Proslavery Theology, Civil War, and the Confederacy
Examines Africans, slavery, Catholicism, religious sanctuary, race, and freedom in Spanish Florida, offering a useful comparison with racial systems developing in British North America.
Examines Confederate theologian Robert Lewis Dabney and the theological legacy through which defenses of slavery and racial hierarchy survived beyond the Civil War.
Surveys evangelical Christianity and slavery, including evangelical religious life among enslaved people and the ways white evangelicals debated, accommodated, defended, and challenged slavery.
Shows how proslavery and antislavery Christians appealed not only to scripture but also to Christian history when debating slavery and racial hierarchy before the Civil War.
Examines nineteenth-century evangelicalism and the ways some white evangelicals used scripture and religious institutions to support slavery and subsequent racial hierarchies while others opposed slavery.
Examines the continuing religious life of the Confederate Lost Cause and the ways sacred memory helped preserve regional and racial narratives after slavery.
Examines slavery and religion in American history and challenges narratives that separate the country's Christian self-understanding from racial slavery.
Examines slavery debates, Christian orthodoxy, political theology, emancipation, Confederate identity, and the reconstruction of white racial power in nineteenth-century Kentucky.
Examines French Catholic missionaries in the American South and documents theological responses to slavery, race, conversion, and the Confederacy.
Examines evangelical religion in the years immediately preceding the Civil War and the process by which Southern evangelicals accommodated themselves to Confederate nationalism.
Examines how proslavery Christian ideology changed after the Civil War as former defenders of slavery increasingly relied on racial arguments to defend the social order of the white South.
Examines the Civil War as a theological crisis in which Christians who shared commitments to biblical authority reached sharply conflicting conclusions about slavery, race, providence, and national destiny.
Examines Confederate interpretations of the Civil War as divine judgment and shows how religious understandings of nation and providence shaped Southern memory.
Examines relations between enslaved African Americans and white churches in Confederate Georgia, showing the tensions between Christian fellowship and racial slavery.
Presents a Civil War-era proslavery argument asking whether racial slavery was sanctioned by the Bible, useful as a primary source for studying religious defenses of racial hierarchy.
Provides a primary-source example of biblical arguments used by a prominent Baptist minister to defend slavery immediately before the Civil War.
Reconstruction, Jim Crow, Segregation, and the Civil Rights Era
Examines Christian-nationalist themes during the Jim Crow era and the ways white supremacy, segregation, religious rhetoric, and claims about Christian civilization reinforced one another.
Uses the Little Rock desegregation crisis to examine how white southern evangelical approaches to segregation helped shape later conservative religious political activism.
Examines congregational resistance to Brown v. Board of Education and conflicts between local white churches and denominational leaders over segregation.
Examines the desegregation of Furman and Wofford and demonstrates how segregationist religious ideas operated within Christian higher education.
Introduces the afterlives of proslavery Christianity and examines how white and Black Christians developed competing understandings of citizenship, race, family, and biblical authority after emancipation.
Examines Christian identity during the end of slavery and the ways emancipation disrupted older relationships among race, religion, authority, and citizenship.
Explores competing Black and white Christian understandings of political equality and citizenship during Reconstruction.
Examines Redemption-era attacks on Black political rights and the use of Christian concepts of family and social order within emerging white-supremacist politics.
Traces the reconstruction of paternalistic Christian racial ideology during the 1880s alongside racial violence and new interpretations of southern history.
Examines segregation as part of a claimed Christian social order in the late nineteenth-century South and contrasts white and Black biblical interpretations of citizenship.
Connects postemancipation Christian arguments about family values with the construction and defense of racial order after slavery.
Examines evangelical responses to Jim Crow and civil rights, including changing forms of racial ideology and the language of Americanism.
Examines white Catholic resistance to school desegregation in Chicago and shows how racial whiteness could become intertwined with religious community identity.
Surveys white Protestant responses to the civil-rights movement and examines both religious resistance to and religious support for racial equality.
Examines Catholic efforts to overcome racial divisions in Chicago between 1930 and 1948 and the institutional limits of interracial Catholic activism.
Introduces the religious history of white Mississippi during the civil-rights era and examines how Christian convictions shaped both resistance to and criticism of racial segregation.
Examines the religious world of white Mississippians and how segregation could coexist with high levels of Christian identification and church participation.
Examines postwar conversations about race among white Christians and the growing conflict between traditional segregation and emerging religious arguments for racial equality.
Examines white church responses to Brown v. Board of Education and the religious and institutional resistance generated by school desegregation.
Documents the revival of biblical arguments for segregation during massive resistance and the competing Christian claim that racial equality was a requirement of the Gospel.
Examines Southern Baptist responses to segregation and the ways biblical authority and denominational structures shaped white Mississippi's racial politics.
Examines conflict within Mississippi Methodism over civil rights, denominational authority, racial integration, and competing interpretations of Christian conviction.
Examines interracial attempts to worship in white Jackson churches and how church-door confrontations revealed the religious dimensions of segregation.
Examines northern Christian criticism of Mississippi segregation and demonstrates that racial segregation in American religious life extended beyond the South.
Examines how the civil-rights struggle reshaped American religious institutions while conservative evangelicals increasingly distinguished evangelism from structural racial reform.
Concludes the study of white Mississippi evangelicalism by examining the theological legacy of Christian resistance to integration and Black civil rights.
Examines civil-rights-era kneel-ins at segregated southern churches and shows how disputes over worship space exposed the racial boundaries of white Christianity.
Examines the religious world of white Mississippi during segregation and how churches participated in debates over racial hierarchy and civil rights.
Investigates relationships between religious organization and lynching in the American South from 1890 to 1929, including the effects of racial solidarity and racially mixed denominations.
Examines white evangelical Protestant responses to the civil-rights movement, including opposition to federal intervention and arguments that racial change should occur through individual conversion.
Surveys Southern Baptist responses to desegregation from 1945 through 1971 and the internal conflicts generated by the civil-rights movement.
Provides a broad history of Southern Baptists and desegregation from 1945 to 1995, connecting denominational history with the politics of race and civil rights.
Provides historical background on Reconstruction, emancipation, Black citizenship, white resistance, and the political struggle over the meaning of freedom after the Civil War.
Evangelicalism, the Religious Right, Desegregation, and Colorblindness
Traces the emergence of the fundamentalist political right in the 1950s, including the role that opposition to racial integration played among figures who later influenced the Religious Right.
Examines relationships between religious traditions and Black-white residential segregation, including regional differences involving evangelical and mainline Protestant communities.
Reconstructs debates over race, biblical interpretation, and desegregation at Dallas Theological Seminary between 1950 and 1980.
Examines fundamentalism, race, segregation, white supremacy, African American Christianity, and fundamentalist responses to the civil-rights movement.
Reexamines why many white evangelicals opposed or remained distant from the civil-rights movement and considers the relative roles of theology, politics, segregation, and individualism.
Traces the development of white Christian nationalism through twentieth-century conservative Protestant politics, school controversies, racial desegregation, the Religious Right, and contemporary political movements.
Surveys the historical development of American evangelical nationalism and discusses segregation, religious schools, the Religious Right, and changing forms of conservative Christian political mobilization.
Traces white evangelical racial-reconciliation efforts after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising and examines why racial divisions within evangelicalism persisted.
Examines evangelical responses to the civil-rights era and the development of colorblind approaches to race within white evangelical institutions.
Traces evangelical racial-reconciliation programs and considers how colorblind theology could acknowledge interpersonal prejudice while leaving structural racial inequalities less examined.
Introduces the history of segregationist Christianity and argues that biblical defenses of racial separation evolved after the civil-rights era into languages of colorblindness, individualism, and family protection.
Traces the movement from explicit defenses of segregation toward colorblind religious rhetoric during denominational integration.
Examines private Christian schools and the ways debates over family, education, religious freedom, and desegregation reshaped white evangelical politics.
Examines the continuing legacy of segregationist Christianity in later evangelical approaches to racial reconciliation, individualism, and colorblindness.
Argues that racial conflict, segregated institutions, and resistance to civil-rights gains formed an important part of the political environment in which the modern Religious Right developed.
Places contemporary evangelical discussions of racism within the longer history of denominational divisions over slavery, segregation, civil rights, and racial reconciliation.
Traces the church-growth movement and the development of white evangelical identity as a distinct American religious and cultural people.
Surveys Southern Baptist history from slavery through Jim Crow and later racial-reconciliation efforts, including the denomination's nineteenth-century origins.
Presents the historical argument that disputes over racial segregation and tax exemptions for segregation academies were important catalysts in the political mobilization that became the Religious Right.
Examines evangelical rap, racial reconciliation, conservative Christianity, and attempts to challenge racial segregation within American evangelical culture.
Examines neoevangelicalism and race in postwar America and the difficulties white evangelical leaders faced in addressing segregation and racial inequality.
Examines progressive evangelical challenges to racism between 1965 and 2000 and the tensions these activists encountered within conservative evangelical institutions.
Reassesses evangelical racial division from 1977 to 2010 and examines the persistence of racial inequality in American Christian communities.
Examines how congregational practices can preserve racial and social homogeneity even when churches verbally support reconciliation or diversity.
Examines individualism, sexuality, racial separation, and the historically segregated structure of twentieth-century American evangelicalism.
Provides the university's institutional account of its history concerning racial segregation and interracial dating policies, making it a useful primary source for studying race and conservative Christian institutions.
Surveys race relations in American evangelical Christianity, including accommodation to slavery and segregation, Black church independence, and later evangelical attempts at racial reconciliation.
Traces the Southern Baptist Convention's relationship with African Americans from its founding in 1845 through World War II, including its origins in disputes over slavery.
White Supremacy, the Ku Klux Klan, and Christian Identity
Traces Christian-nationalist rhetoric within British-Israelism and Christian Identity, showing how explicitly white-supremacist movements connected race, religion, citizenship, and national destiny.
Traces the history and contemporary revival of Christian Identity, an explicitly racist and antisemitic religious ideology that connected white supremacy with claims of biblical and national destiny.
Discusses intersections among white supremacy, religious history, Christian nationalism, racial justice, and American church-state relations.
Examines Ku Klux Klan theology in the 1920s and shows how the organization fused white Protestant identity, racial nationalism, and claims that America was divinely ordained.
Surveys white-supremacist movements and includes a history of Christian Identity, a racist and antisemitic theology derived from nineteenth-century British-Israelism.
Provides a historical survey of the Ku Klux Klan, including the movement's use of Protestant symbolism, racial nationalism, anti-Catholicism, antisemitism, and claims to defend a white Christian America.
Traces the origins of the Christian Identity movement and explains how British-Israelism developed into an explicitly racist theology influential within segments of the American white-supremacist right.
Black Christianity, Racial Justice, and Multiracial Christian Traditions
Explores why some Black Americans endorse Christian-nationalist statements and connects those responses with Black religious history, theology, patriotism, and civil-rights traditions.
Examines how racial identification and religious affiliation intersect with Christian-nationalist attitudes among Hispanic Americans.
Discusses Black Christian nationalism as a historically distinct tradition and explores how Black religious nationalism has sometimes pursued liberation rather than white racial dominance.
Surveys African and African American religions in the early Americas and the religious transformations produced by slavery, migration, and cultural exchange.
- | Emily Suzanne Clark | The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History | March 7, 2018
Surveys African American religious life during the nineteenth century, including slavery, emancipation, independent churches, and community formation.
Examines changing African American religious identities during the twentieth century and their relationships with migration, politics, nationalism, and civil rights.
Examines Black theology and its development in response to racism, segregation, Black freedom struggles, and dominant white Christian traditions.
Surveys African American religion from slavery through independent Black churches, Black nationalism, the civil-rights movement, and later forms of religious and political activism.
Uses a Mennonite congregation to explore interracial Christian fellowship, racial reconciliation, and the practical difficulties of overcoming segregated religious life.
Examines Asian American Christianity and how color-conscious yet structure-blind approaches to assimilation can unintentionally reproduce racial divisions.
Examines identity, relationships, worship, and community formation within a multiracial church as a case study in efforts to cross American racial boundaries.
Explores Christianity among enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans and the ways Black Christians transformed religious teachings into languages of freedom and equality.
Provides a major digital collection on the southern Black church from 1780 to 1925, documenting independent Black Christianity, slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, racial violence, and community institution-building.
Examines religious life among enslaved African Americans at Hampton and the different ways enslaved people and white slaveholders practiced and interpreted Christianity.
Religion and Race: Broader, Comparative, and Non-Protestant Perspectives
Examines how historians identify and analyze race and religion as intertwined categories rather than treating either as a fixed or purely biological identity.
Examines how gender shaped religious constructions of race and racial hierarchy throughout American history.
Explores the intersections of religion, race, sexuality, morality, and social boundaries in American history.
Examines nineteenth-century American Orientalism and how religious representations of Asia and the Middle East contributed to racial classification and ideas about civilization.
Surveys Mormonism and race, including changing teachings and institutional practices involving Black and Indigenous peoples.
Examines Catholicism and race across American history, including slavery, immigration, colonialism, segregation, and changing Catholic racial identities.
- | Jodi Eichler-Levine | The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History | March 7, 2018
Examines American Judaism and race, including changing definitions of whiteness, immigration, antisemitism, and Jewish participation in American racial politics.
Surveys Islam and race in American history and shows how racial categories shaped perceptions of Muslims and Muslim communities.
- | Anne M. Blankenship | The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History | March 7, 2018
Examines Asian American religions from Chinese exclusion through the 1965 immigration reforms, including racialization, citizenship restrictions, and religious community formation.
Examines Latino religious identities and the intersections of Christianity, immigration, ethnicity, citizenship, and American racial categories.
Examines migration and modern religious pluralism, emphasizing how immigration reshaped American ideas about race, religion, citizenship, and national identity.
Compares Christian involvement in racial segregation, Jim Crow, and apartheid while also examining Christian movements that challenged racial hierarchy.
Examines Christian-nationalist thought in South Africa and how theology, culture, racial science, and nationalism were used in intellectual defenses of apartheid, providing a comparative case for American research.
