American History: 19th Century

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration. It argues that Delta blacks, who were overwhelmingly rural sharecroppers and tenant farmers, developed a rich and complex sacred culture during this era. They forged a new religious culture by integrating their spiritual life with many of the defining features of the post‐Reconstruction South, including the rise of segregation and racial violence, the emergence of new forms of technology like train travel, the growth of black fraternal orders, and the rapid expansion of the consumer market. Experimenting with new symbols of freedom and racial respectability, forms of organizational culture, regional networks of communication, and popular notions of commodification and consumption enabled them to survive, make progress, and at times resist white supremacy. The book then evaluates the social consequences of these changes and shows in particular how the Holiness‐Pentecostal developed in large part as a rejection of them. It ends by probing how this new religious world influenced the Great Migration and black spiritual life in the 1920s and 1930s.

This book examines how numerous northern civilians understood the Civil War as a contest permeated with religious significance. From the war's outset, many religious Northerners asserted that God was directing the conflict to chasten his chosen nation and bring about the destruction of slavery. Convinced that the Union was sacred and had to be preserved so that America could fulfill its God‐ordained purpose in world history, many ministers and laypersons wholeheartedly supported the northern war effort and broadcast their political views at church. Overflowing with Christian patriotism, individual congregations and entire denominations frequently alienated members who disagreed with them politically. Some disgruntled Democrats formed their own assemblies where they could avoid political preaching, but these churches oftentimes suffered from partisanship as well. A minority of churchgoers lamented that war and politics had caused people to lose interest in spiritual matters, and some feared that the church had forsaken its divine calling to preach the gospel. The enthusiasm of clergy and laity to sanctify the Union and fuse religion and politics during the Civil War demonstrates that religious Northerners tended to look to the American nation rather the church as the primary means through which God would accomplish his will in the world. Ultimately, this consuming desire to Christianize the Union by infusing it with spiritual significance contributed to the secularization of religion rather than the transformation of the state into a Christian republic.