Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History by Paul Harvey, and: Christianity and Race in the American South: A History by Paul Harvey (review)

Paul Harvey is one of the most prolific authors on race and religion in American history. One thinks of the pathbreaking works of Donald G. Mathews on evangelicalism and slavery, which led to trenchant and provocative analyses of various aspects of religion and violence in the South. Similarly, Harvey's trajectory of scholarship began with detailed work on race and Southern Baptists from the Civil War years to the early 1920s. Then he ranged more broadly by examining race and religion in the South from the Civil War to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The two books that are the subject of this review, Christianity and Race in the American South: A Historyand Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History, have more of the feel of overviews. Noting this characteristic is not meant to diminish the value of the books. Both have a very broad range of topics in view. For my part, I found Christianity and Race in the American Southto be the more compelling, especially the chapters on slavery, the Reconstruction period, and the civil rights years. There is significant overlap in each book, but that is not surprising, given that the same author is covering some of the same material.

Bounds of Their Habitationtakes its title from Acts 17:26, which argues that "God made 'of one blood' all nations" (a "favorite verse" of abolitionists, religious liberals, and pluralists) and that then God "determined the 'bounds of their habitation'" (the "favored fragment" for those who argued for religious order, hierarchy, and racial separation among diverse peoples) ( Bounds,p.4). In developing this latter point, Harvey points out the contorted ways that proslavery proponents appealed to scripture that supposedly mandated the segregation of the races when southern slavery thrust black and white people together, albeit in radically unequal relations where white supremacy reigned. It is the question of how Americans have sought to maintain these boundaries and how these boundaries were challenged and undermined by religious beliefs and communities that Harvey attends to in this book.

Harvey emphasizes the paradoxes of southern religious history in both books. But especially in Christianity and Race in the American South, he looks at the ways the South has maintained a "tribal provincialism" with hostility to outside ideas and agitators even as it has a played a central role in shaping a "globalized world economy," which has involved the circulation of people and goods ( Christianity, p. 3). The region's religious culture has been "defined by its Biblicism and piety" while sacralizing and sanctioning "astonishing levels of human cruelty" ( Christianity, p. 3). The South has also produced a "blues sensibility of struggle, despair, and pain" that existed alongside "a transcendental religious culture that transformed the region and fundamentally influenced American ways of spiritual expression" ( Christianity, p. 2).

The style of Christianity and Race in the American Southis very different from that of Bounds of Their Habitation. The latter reads more like a textbook, as it summarizes a great deal of previous scholarship and has a bibliographical essay at the end. There is no clear sense of which primary sources are being used to ground certain assertions, though a close reading of both texts indicates that much of the material is repeated in both books, and it seems obvious at points that Harvey is drawing on the same sources. There is a more spirited and thesis-driven character to Christianity and Race in the American South. In both works, Harvey argues that the American South "has never been parochial...