Faith and Race in American Political Life Edited by Robin Dale Jacobson and Nancy D. Wadsworth (review)

Since the emergence of the “intersectionality” paradigm twenty-five years ago, scholars from across the humanities and social sciences have steadily expanded the horizons of what began as a project interrogating the co-constitutive natures of race and gender. Perhaps due to 9/11 and its aftermath, the last ten years have seen a surge of studies focusing on intersections of religion and race in U.S. history and culture. Numerous monographs and anthologies—including Craig Prentiss’s Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity (2003) and Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister’s Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (2004)—have begun mapping America’s religio-racial terrain, showing how religion and race have always been central to changing definitions of citizenship and identity. Faith and Race in American Political Life, edited by Robin Dale Jacobson and Nancy D. Wadsworth, contributes to this emerging field by demonstrating how interwoven categories of religion and race have shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century politics. Its twelve essays, mostly written by political scientists, track how religion and race have operated together in a variety of political contexts, including Supreme Court decisions, voting patterns, the demographics of party affiliation, civil rights activism, immigration debates, battles over the Confederate flag, and inter- and intra-church controversies.

For readers working in American Studies, the editors’ introduction is likely to be the most useful portion of the book. In addition to providing a brief but provocative overview of America’s religio-racial political history from the colonial period to Barack Obama, Jacobson and Wadsworth attempt to explain why religion has only recently been seen as important to intersectionality scholars. They note that religion “is not easily situated in respect to power” and that scholars have viewed religion as fundamentally different than race, class, gender, and sexuality because they have naively seen it as a “choice and not (at least not permanently) externally inscribed on the individual” (12, 14). By stressing the complexities of religion, the way it “crosscuts every other identity category” and can act as a “source of privilege, status, disadvantage, or resistance,” the editors make a compelling case for why religion must be moved to the center of our understanding of American racial politics (17).

The essays themselves are divided into three sections. “Foundations” contains historical case studies; “Acting Out” focuses on contemporary voting trends, party membership, and policy questions; “Possibilities and Limits” looks at how specific religious groups—the Nation of Islam, Mennonites, South Asian Hindus and Muslims, conservative evangelicals, and mainline Protestants—have confronted the nation’s post-1960s racial landscape. Two essays stand out as particularly significant for American Studies scholars. In “What Would Robert E. Lee Do?,” Gerald R. Webster and Jonathan I. Leib demonstrate how religion has been a crucial though overlooked component of debates over public displays of the Confederate battle flag in the South. The authors demonstrate how both white and black Southerners have framed the issue in terms of not simply race and public memory but also Christian duty. In “Ambivalent Miracles,” co-editor Wadsworth explores evangelical Protestants’ recent attempts at “racial reconciliation” and multiracial church building. While most scholars have viewed such attempts as fatally flawed neoconservativism strategically avoiding any substantive systemic change, or even as self-serving “purification rituals that fantasize liberating a (white evangelical) community from its particular sins,” Wadsworth highlights how black and white evangelicals have together striven to create “organic, culture-based conversations” intended to decenter white privilege through “rituals of apology, witness, and repentance” (250, 268–69). These intriguing essays, together with the excellent introduction, make the anthology a welcome addition to an important and expanding field.