Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia by Nicole Myers Turner (review)

In Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia, Nicole Myers Turner turns an incisive eye to the formation of Black political and religious networks from the last years of slavery to the last years of Reconstruction in Virginia. Turner not only surveys an array of sources—from Freedmen’s Bureau records and the minutes of African American Baptist, Zion Union Apostolic, and Episcopal Church conventions to the papers of a Virginia political magnate—but also deploys the mapping software ArcGIS to reveal “how church networks. . . suffused the political culture of black Virginians” (p. xii). Throughout her clearly written, tightly structured monograph, Turner rejects facile depictions of Black Christianity as either “an opiate or an inspiration” (p. 2). Instead, Turner delves into a case study of Petersburg, Virginia, and its adjacent counties to chart the evolution of Black churches and postemancipation political organizing in Black Virginians’ pursuit of “soul liberty,” a seventeenth-century Protestant concept that African Americans adapted for their journeys toward “religious freedom, righteousness, equity, and justice” (p. 2).

In chapter 1, “Making a New Religious Freedom,” Turner examines the fraught relationship between formerly enslaved Virginians and the Freedmen’s Bureau as African Americans sought to lay claim to their own churches or negotiate their positions within predominantly white denominations and congregations. Turner argues that in this “first stage of the formation of black religious politics,” African Americans drew strength from an antebellum “religious terrain” (pp. 13, 14). In chapter 2, “Independent Black Church Conventions, 1866–1868,” Turner illustrates how Black Virginians conceptualized their “political rights in terms of religious freedom and independence” as they formed their own church conventions (p. 33). These church conventions, she argues, were “theaters for the construction of black male identity” to prove African Americans’ fitness for citizenship, and they relied on the financial savvy of African American women (p. 43). In chapter 3, “Religion, Race, and Gender at the Congregational Level,” Turner focuses on the congregation of Gilfield Baptist Church. There, she shows how African American churchgoers “helped forge community norms and ideas of gender and sexuality” (p. 57). This process was not simple, though it ultimately settled on “a model of minister-centered leadership” that constructed acceptable norms of family and behavior and isolated Black women from leadership positions (p. 57).

Chapter 4, “Theological Education, Race Relations, and Gender, 1875–1882,” examines the purpose of education among African Americans, which frequently adhered to a “Victorian ideal”: on the one hand, education allowed Black men to “distance” themselves “from the limitations of slavery,” and, on the other, education “incorporated producerist, bourgeois values of manhood” for the purposes of uplift (p. 99). In chapter 5, “Politics of Engagement,” Turner dives into the fascinating Readjuster movement, a coalition of white and Black Republicans who successfully passed a number of political reforms in the late 1870s and early 1880s, reminding the reader why Virginia is a valuable case study. Famous Readjuster William Mahone recognized the value of tapping into robust Black church networks to rally support for the Readjusters. Rather than Black churches being “representations of black political acumen,” they were now “vehicles for participation and self-determination” (p. 143). Here, Turner’s use of mapping to shape the “intellectual architecture” of her argument comes into focus, and she uses Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping to its best advantage (p. xiii).

“Politically engaged black churches have a history,” Turner writes with her characteristic clarity, and her book effectively proves why scholars of Black political life should not ignore the complex history of Black churches (p. 144). With three versions of the book—in print, as a verbatim open-access e-book, and as an enhanced open-access e-book with interactive maps—Turner has provided many options for scholars to explore her exciting integration of digital humanities with a traditional monograph.