Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (review)

Paul Harvey’s well-researched book provides a welcome overview of a complex subject that has been as important for national public life as for American religious history. Continuity in the volume is maintained by Harvey’s focus on “theological racism,” “racial interchange,” and “Christian interracialism” in the South from the time of the Civil War to the early twenty-first century. At one level, Harvey offers a relatively clear history of causes and effects, with widespread “theological racism” being undercut by “racial interchange and leading on to “Christian interracialism.” Yet most of the book does not dwell on this large-scale narrative; rather, it features a great deal of insightful local history, many telling personal vignettes, careful attention to institutional development, and probing denominational history in which the three main themes are interwoven more as recurring leitmotifs than as links in a causal chain.

The book begins with a review of southern postbellum conditions that parallels recent insightful works by Daniel Stowell (Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863–1877–1998) and Edward Blum (Reforging the White Republic: Race. Religion, and America Nationalism, 1865–1898–2005): northern military victory gave way to the political triumph of white racist regimes; emancipation offered African Americans a welcome opportunity to form their own churches; southern whites hypocritically maintained an antipolitical ideology described as “the spirituality of the church” while working mightily to “redeem” the South from the control of northern whites, southern blacks, and the Republican Party; and white use of the Bible to re-impose racist inequality advanced alongside a secular commitment to scientific racism. The result by 1900 was a religiously infused “American apartheid” (8, 41) that was culturally and ideologically stronger than the slavery regimes of the antebellum decades. Harvey’s special contribution in treating this period is to show how much the race thinking that drove mainstream politics was connected to the churches and how much it spilled over to color broader movements like temperance, populism, women’s suffrage, and the Social Gospel. Harvey also demonstrates convincingly that the racist Southern culture that was put together in the 1870s and 1880s remained largely in place until after World War II.

The most innovative part of the book comes next as Harvey draws attention to the formal and informal levels on which “racial interchange” took place as a countervailing force against the racism so strongly set in place after the end of Reconstruction. The reservoir for this interchange was constituted by common evangelical elements in black and white religion, the agency was supplied by creative and courageous organizational innovators. On the informal level, Harvey describes the strong supernaturalism of the postbellum black churches, whose reliance on visions, dreams, conjuring, and unexpected conversions survived efforts by leaders like Bishop Daniel Alexander Payne of the African Methodist Episcopal Church to sanitize religious practices. He then shows how much these characteristic black emphases resembled the Holiness strands that toward the end of the nineteenth century gathered strength among whites and then burst forth into Pentecostalism during the early years of the new century. An especially interesting discussion charts the many parallels, and even points of contact, between “black gospel” and “southern gospel” music. Harvey’s discussion of the parallel religious practices of non-elite white and black churches is consistently illuminating. Yet how these interchanges function in the book’s larger plot is not as clear, since by the 1920s the early hints of “racial interchange” between Holiness and Pentecostal movements had not led on to “Christian interracialism” but to racially separated denominations.

Connections between early protests against the racist regimen and later breakthroughs of “Christian interracialism” are clearer for Harvey’s account of what might be called civil rights initiatives before the Civil Rights Movement. These initiatives took many organizational forms and were...