The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation by Matthew Harper (review)

Matthew Harper has written a persuasive, interpretively fresh, and historiographically necessary book, and he has managed to do all of this with admirable clarity and concision. While political historians like Steven Hahn have unearthed a welter of grassroots political activity in the religious institutions of nineteenth-century African Americans, and while scholars of religion have long debated whether African American religious beliefs stoked resistance or undermined it with otherworldly distractions, Harper fills a puzzling gap in our understanding of how freedpeople's faith conditioned their politics. Previous accounts of the "intersection of religion and politics" in African American history have overlooked how biblical narratives "shaped political means and ends" (62). Harper, by contrast, builds on earlier insights into black Protestant biblical narratives to argue that their theology had concrete political effects.

Eschatology, the specific theological focus of Harper's study, here means "anytime Christians speak of what is to come" (4). This is a much broader definition of eschatology than is typically found in histories of nineteenth-century white Protestant millennial thought, yet with respect to the freedpeople of postbellum North Carolina, such conceptual breadth is appropriate. Eschatology in this context encompasses several interconnected beliefs: a confidence in God's providential interventions in human history, tempered by a pessimism about human sinfulness; a sense of sacred time, with the specific conviction that emancipation was a spiritually momentous turning point; a reliance on biblical narratives as not only meaningful in the present but predictive of the future; and expectations of a literal day of judgment to come. Harper notes that African American eschatology also presumed a notion of "racial essentialism" (5), insofar as freedpeople pondered their history and future as a distinct race with a common identity and destiny.

Although Harper relies disproportionately on ministers to piece together this theological worldview, he includes the voices of ordinary freedpeople whenever possible. His sources demonstrate, most obviously, that black North Carolinians did indeed rely on biblical narratives to make spiritual sense of their lives after slavery. To anyone familiar with the seminal work of Albert Raboteau, this is not surprising. Yet Harper breaks new ground by examining how freedpeople also used biblical narratives to expand their political imagination and plot specific political strategies under impossible circumstances. For instance, ministers drew parallels between the 1870 impeachment of North Carolina's Republican governor and the biblical story of Esther, and accordingly advocated fasting and praying as a self-consciously political act—one that Bible-believing whites could not dismiss out of hand. Similarly, when hope for landownership faded and many former slaves contemplated westward migration as their own version of the Hebrew Exodus, ministers touted a countereschatology in the narrative of Jubilee—one that supported the strategy of staying put and advocating for opportunities at home. By taking theological beliefs seriously, Harper also offers a new angle on why some African American Protestants embraced the cause of temperance: they did so not simply as a bid for respectability, but because temperance was the divine moral standard set for a special, chosen people.

Harper is attentive to how black eschatology changed over time. As the buoyant optimism of emancipation gave way to political malaise and the onset of Jim Crow, it was more difficult for African Americans to locate themselves in biblical narratives of ultimate triumph. Yet equipped with their hard-won certainty in God's provision amid injustice, they innovated: they were suffering like Jesus on the cross, but with the certainty that his death was redemptive and followed by a triumphant resurrection. Here the contrast with white liberal Protestants is striking: when confronted with extreme evil during the two world wars, these Protestants promptly abandoned their belief in human progress. The eschatology articulated by the last generation of American slaves, by contrast, was far more nuanced in accounting for evil.

No book is perfect; it...