Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison (review)

In Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South, Elizabeth L. Jemison adds much to our understanding of how Jim Crow took shape in the post–Civil War South. She does so by emphasizing religion's place in the formation of the region's definitional laws and statutes, political initiatives, educational policies, and broader political landscape. The scholarly notion that Black and white Christians referenced competing and, at least in the case of white southerners, racialized theological understandings in shaping their cooperative postwar objectives is not new. However, few have documented and delineated such applications of doctrinal principles with Jemison's level of exactness, especially in considering white southerners' efforts to "legitimize the creation of segregation as a modern paternalistic social order" (p. 3).

Presented in five chapters that span the years between emancipation and the end of the nineteenth century, Christian Citizens is at its core a study of how white Christians in the lower Mississippi River Valley pursued an assumed biblically paternalistic order to replace their still-revered "Old South" and the ways Black Christians, conversely, resisted such maneuverings. Essentially, white southerners before and after emancipation equated Christianity with submission, while Black southerners deemed "true" Christianity the most egalitarian force in history. Immediately after the Civil War, when African Americans presumed that their redemption as a people had at last been delivered by God, white southerners felt compelled by their faith not only to defend the memory of slavery but to rhetorically (and in short order, violently) attack Black freedom as well.

As Reconstruction's promise gave way to the violent realities of the 1870s, African Americans held fast to their understanding of citizenship as an entity inextricably linked to the egalitarian power of Christianity. As a result, southern whites soon coupled their opposition to Black citizenship with an assault on the legitimacy of Black Christianity itself. Thus, when white Christians reclaimed the intrinsic paternalism of slavery as the remedy for the chaos of the postwar age in the 1870s and 1880s, they concurrently convinced themselves that African American effrontery spared whites from the restraint God had required of them in the prewar age. As Jemison makes clear, Black southerners recognized the revisionist nature of such an argument, as well as the ugliness it legitimated in the form of lynchings and other abuses, which they forcefully resisted. Even when segregationists celebrated their ultimate accomplishment as a victory for Christianity and the Christian family order, Black Christians maintained their sacralized campaign against Jim Crow as an affront to God and a violation of the spirit and letter of the Christian faith they ostensibly shared with southern whites.

There are a few elements of Jemison's impressive study that warrant further development. For instance, some readers might look for a more thorough historiographical consideration of the persistence of proslavery thought in the postwar age. Likewise, the author's contention that in an "abrupt shift from their Confederate loyalty" white southerners claimed a new (and manifestly self-serving) identity as "model U.S. citizens and Christians" in 1865 is too important an assertion to go without elaboration (p. 19). But these are small concerns, especially given the author's larger achievement. In a meticulously researched and well-argued monograph, Elizabeth Jemison reminds us of Christianity's central role in America's tortured racial history. Indeed, these volatile decades preceded another century's worth of Black and white battles over the meaning of African American citizenship and political rights, battles that continued to see each side grounding their claims in their divergent concepts of Protestant Christianity, and unfortunately, battles that are still perceptible, if one looks hard enough, in American life today.