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Contact Information Email pharvey AT mail DOT uccs DOT edu Religion in American History Blog Jesus in Red, White, and Black (to be co-authored with Edward J. Blum; under contract with University of North Carolina Press) Jesus in Red, White, and Black examines the central roles played by depictions of Christ in racial battles from the colonial era to the present. It details how whites throughout the nation created a white American Jesus who not only sanctified the exploitation of Native Americans and African Americans, but also blessed materialism, sanctioned colonial warfare, and promoted imperial subjugation. Images of white Christs helped tie whiteness to godliness (and alternatively blackness and redness to profanity) throughout America’s most painful episodes, including the devastation of Native Americans, the slave trade, the rise of American imperialism, and the frequent outbreaks of nativism and racial terrorism. Yet the white Christ has had his share of challengers. Competing images of Christ have been crucial to efforts to undermine white supremacy and racial hierarchies. Various groups fought against the white Christ with countervailing and defiant depictions of the divine. From red and brown Christs imagined by Native Americans and Mexican Americans to black Christs envisioned in African American literature and theology, people of color brought subversive saviors to their struggles. Their Christs offered alternative visions to exploitation, rampant greed, colonial warfare, and racial subjugation. In offering counter Christs, these women and men crafted counter theologies and new and compelling moral visions for the nation. From Malcolm X’s diatribes against the “honky Christ” to native peoples’ incorporation of a messianic Christ, men and women of color found ways to accommodate, assimilate, and subvert the power of the white Christ. Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, scheduled for
publication 2009 (co-edited with Edward J. Blum) Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom: From the 17th Century to the Present. Book project to begin in summer of 2002. Under contract with Yale University Press. Religion,
Race, and American Ideas of Freedom
will explore the long and complex relationship between the struggle for
human and civil rights in American history, the legacy of race and racism,
and the complicated role of religious institutions and
religiously–motivated individuals in this story. By demanding rights of
religious expression, creating independent religious institutions, and
nurturing religious communities, historically disadvantaged groups have
redefined American freedom and citizenship. American notions of freedom
have been formulated, in ways much deeper than we have understood, from
within religious communities and through struggles defined by the
participants as deeply spiritual ones even when they have eventuated in political and
social revolutions or in fundamental shifts in the polity. This work will
focus particularly on three groups––African Americans, Native
Americans, and Latinos in North America and the U.S. I will start in the
seventeenth century, with native–European contact and the early debates
about slavery and freedom (which largely focused on religion), and move
forward through to the present, along the way selecting episodes and
particular figures that illuminate the largest questions of the
relationship between American religious history and American ideas and
practices of freedom and citizenship.
Biographical Information Click here for full curriculum vitae Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1992. Major fields U.S. History, Late Modern Europe, and Anthropology of Religion. Major Professor Leon Litwack B.A. Oklahoma Baptist University, 1983. Summa Cum Laude, with honors Back to top |
