Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present explores 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 individuals in this story. By demanding rights of religious expression, creating independent religious institutions, and nurturing religious communities, historically subjugated groups have redefined American freedom and citizenship. American notions of freedom often have been formulated from within ethno–religious communities, and through struggles defined by the participants as deeply spiritual ones. By putting religious thought and practice at the center of the narrative, and covering a broad expanse of time and a wide array of peoples socially ranked by racial tags, this work retells the story of American freedom.

Taking as its point of departure native–European contact and the early religious debates about slavery and freedom, this work focuses particularly, although not exclusively, on the experiences of African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos in North America and the U.S. The American nation–state guaranteed constitutionally protected religious freedoms, but white Americans also created a racially exclusivist and religiously restrictive culture that severely limited the freedom of those defined outside the ranks of the free and the citizen. American religious history fundamentally has been about this dialectic of religious freedom in the dominant nation–state, the racialization of peoples, and the resulting struggle to forge spaces of freedom and autonomy, often through the creation or preservation of religious customs and institutions. As a result of these battles, Americans have shaped, contended over, fought for, and reshaped into constitutional/legislative law ideas of freedom and citizenship.

The currently dominant narratives of freedom and citizenship are secular ones. Eric Foner's The Story of Freedom in America, to cite one recent seminal work, clearly articulates the social history of freedom, the ways in which excluded groups demanded the freedom seemingly promised, but often denied, by the American polity. For Foner, the contests over slavery and Reconstruction and the twentieth–century civil rights movement are paradigmatic quests for inclusion in the American idea of freedom. A second major genre of work, exemplified by Akhil Amar's The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction, examines "freedom" and "citizenship" as constitutional concepts, focusing especially on the creation and reinterpretation of the Bill of Rights and the 14^th Amendment. Amar and others also analyze the way in which over two hundred years of constitutional wrangling over the First Amendment has shaped the religiously neutral American polity.

Both volumes, however, pay relatively little attention to the formative role of religious ideas and discourse in shaping ideologies and practices of freedom. Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom, by contrast, argues forcefully that American conceptions of freedom have been, at very fundamental levels, religious ones, and often defined by those socially excluded from the ranks of the free or the citizen.

This work interlaces topics from a variety of scholarly fields, approaches, and periods. For example, few books collectively address issues such as the relationship between religion and the slave revolts; the rise of African-American denominations; religion and the civil rights movement; folk Catholicism and liberation theology among Latinos; religious resistance among Native Americans (from King Philip's war of the 1670s to the last gasp at Wounded Knee); the resurgence of neo-native religious expressions in recent years; and current constitutional debates arising from Native American and Afro–Caribbean religious practices. These subjects have been rendered as distinct historical narratives. By connecting these stories in a coherent analysis, Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom proposes a new narrative of freedom in America.

Introduction:

Throughout American history, religious belief has been central to quests for freedom, while paradoxically it also has blocked and resisted such movements. The religious pluralism present from the early years of the North American colonies, the First Amendment, and the increasing pluralization of American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries all created a context of official (if very partial) religious freedom and unofficial competition between religious groups. In some respects, Americans fostered an intense religious democracy, depicted by Nathan Hatch in The Democratization of American Christianity. At the same time, however, many of their religious ideas sanctioned social hierarchies––as exemplified in the subjugation of Native Americans from the seventeenth century, or in the rise of proslavery theology in the nineteenth century. As a religious culture (as opposed to a legal polity), Anglo–American Protestantism was hegemonic. Euro–American Christian theological traditions, moreover, conjured up a mytho–religious framework that racialized, and thereby subjugated, peoples––such as the "son of Ham" fables, which biblically sanctioned black enslavement.

Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom starts from this intensely paradoxical interplay of religious freedom/equality and religiously sanctioned unfreedom/inequality. In this dialectic, subjugated groups employed the American tradition of religious liberty as well as their own religious practices and sacred writings to compel redefinitions of freedom and citizenship. The discourse of American freedom thus could lead to ends very different than could have been envisioned by the Anglo–Protestants who authored the classic texts on religious freedom. Ethno–religious communal sacred narratives—such as the spirituals, the songs of the Longhouse, or the Virgen de Guadalupe sacralizing a farm workers’ procession, to cite three of many examples to be discussed in the book—gave sustenance to these struggles by resisting and counterbalancing the dominant social, theological, and racial hierarchies.

In the seventeenth century, anxious white Virginians declared that conversion and baptism, spiritual freedom, would not lead to manumission from slavery, temporal freedom. The old justification for slavery––Christians vanquishing heathens––vanished. In its place came the gradual creation of ideological justifications for slavery that foregrounded race, religion, and hierarchy. This thought reached its summa in the great Charleston Presbyterian theologian James Henley Thornwell, who intoned the basic axioms of proslavery theology: God created the world. If inequality exists, then God must have a reason for it. Without inequality—without rulers and ruled, without hewers of wood and drawers of water—there could be only anarchy. Men cannot govern themselves on a plane of equality. Realizing this, God sanctions Himself to head the church, men to lead women and children, slave owners to direct the lives of slaves, and white people to guide the destiny of black people. In counterpoint, African Americans articulated a very different notion of freedom. Enslaved Christians might have attended white-supervised services and listened to ministers advise obedience and humility. But the theological ideas expressed in slave spirituals, ring shouts, and chanted sermons rejected any such sanctification of inequality.

Native Americans also had a tortured relationship with Christianity. On the one hand, Christianity was the religion of the colonizers, the exploiters, often used as a justification for the displacement and genocide of Indian peoples. On the other hand, Christian missionaries––from the Franciscans in sixteenth-century New Mexico and John Eliot in seventeenth-century New England forward––made significant inroads among Native Americans, both by coercion and by enticement. In some cases, notably including missionaries to the Cherokees in the 1820s and 1830s, Christians defended Native American rights against the encroachments of the United States government. In responding to the coming of the colonizers, and later to the rise of the Anglo–American nation-state, Native Americans chose various courses of accommodation, resistance, acculturation, and revitalization. In no way could the Christian tradition become their ally in the way it eventually did for African Americans. Yet in no way could it be rejected, either, for it had become too much a part of Indian life, both internally (in the evolution of native religious customs) and externally (in the dominant world of the nation–state).

In the antebellum era, Anglo-Americans moved westward, defeated Mexico in a war for empire, and took over lands that other peoples had claimed for decades or centuries. Mexican-Americans found themselves as Catholic believers in a largely Protestant republic, and now racialized as brown in a white man’s world. The Church Universal now appeared as weak and relatively ineffectual vis-à-vis the expansive Protestant empire that came with Anglo settlers, including numerous missionaries who began making converts of natives and Latinos in the West. Mexican-Americans gradually recognized themselves as la raza, a "race" with distinct religious ideas. Through the early twentieth century, significant discrimination against Mexican-Americans (including in the Catholic Church) awakened their struggle for rights. U. S. Latinos (a category still largely composed of Mexican–Americans, but over time gradually made up of Central and South Americans and Spanish–speaking Caribbeans as well), largely worshipped in a Church that deliberately excluded them from positions of authority, but one to which they swore deep allegiance, against the encroachments of Anglo–American Protestants. Latinos, then, faced their own dialectic within Catholicism, one that rendered their sacred narratives of freedom at once distinct from those of African Americans, Native Americans, and Anglo–American Protestantism.

Religious thought and practice, so much a part of racial hegemony throughout American history, could turn against the reigning systems that theologically justified white supremacist power. From the 1860s to the 1970s, the ethno-religious communities discussed in this book learned new ways to sanctify their quests for freedom.

After the Civil War, newly organized black churches and independent black denominations, freed from the constraints of slavery, organized vigorously among the freedpeople. Even as black Christians created institutional forms to celebrate religious and temporal freedom, white southern (and sometimes northern) believers elaborated a theology of apartheid that sanctified temporal racial strictures. Religion played a key role in the ideological maintenance of Jim Crow. By World War Two, however, religious progressivism threatened the increasingly shaky segregationist order.

It is sometimes said that the civil rights movement emerged from "the black church" a falsely singular term for what was in fact a multifarious set of beliefs and institutions. Historians cite evidence such as the number of ministers in the struggle and churches that served as gathering points for mass meetings. At the same time, movement leaders constantly contended with the fact that "the black church" actually was not, by and large, behind the movement. Whether because of indifference, fear, theological conservatism, or coercion and terrorism, many congregations simply avoided involvement. Thus, the relationship between religion, race, and rights during the 1960s is considerably more complicated than often portrayed, particularly in the recent deification (and consequent oversimplification) of King's life and work. Still, a movement based on secular ends (the extension of citizenship rights in the American nation–state) drew its sustenance from spiritual understandings, language, and motivations. It was a fundamentally Protestant imagery--of Exodus, redemption, salvation--that inspired the revivalistic fervor of the movement. And it was ministers and church activists--most visibly Martin Luther King, Jr., but also men such as Fred Shuttlesworth and John Lewis, and women such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Bernice Johnson Reagon--who lent their moral passion and steely commitment to the quest for freedom.

African–American Protestantism empowered the most important social struggle in twentieth–century American history, the civil rights movement, which fundamentally redefined citizenship for disfranchised peoples. Civil rights activists employed multiple kinds of arguments, many of them secular ones involving civil and constitutional rights. But beneath that ran the powerful stream of black Protestant ideas (translated sometimes through Gandhian and Catholic Worker notions of civil disobedience and active resistance) that spoke to everyday folk and carried forward a leadership that otherwise remained cautious and circumspect in its demands.

The same held true for Latino farm workers, who articulated an American–style liberation theology for Latino groups historically denied full citizenship rights. Yet unlike the African-American freedom struggle, which emerged within a deeply Protestant (especially Baptist) context, Latino/a theologians mostly inhabited the realm of the Church universal, Catholicism. While African Americans enjoyed a long tradition of independent churches and a distinctive religious culture, Hispanos contended with a Church historically dominated by Euro-American (especially Irish-American) priests. "Why do many want to de-Hispanicize and to Americanize us," one Latino theologian asked. "What crime is there in being Hispano?"

In the mid–twentieth century, inspired by the activism of Cesar Chavez and the Chicanismo movement, Christians of Spanish-speaking descent invented their own theological traditions. Chavez pieced together the high theology of Thomas Merton and others, the Catholic Worker writings of Dorothy Day, and the folk Catholic mysticism of his own Mexican-American community. Chavez experienced resistance from the Catholic establishment (paralleling what Martin Luther King famously condemned in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail") but knew that the Church could be a powerful moral and spiritual force. For Chavez, as for liberation theologians in general, the Church was spiritually mandated to side with the poor. Mexican American Catholic activists, organized as Catolicos por la Raza, charged that the Church continued to approach Mexican Americans "with the same colonialist, missionary attitude which motivated the Franciscan friars in their evangelization of the Indians during the mission era."

For Native Americans in the post-Civil War era, religious resistance appeared increasingly futile, as most memorably displayed at Wounded Knee. Yet in the contemporary United States, more Native Americans claim Christianity than any other religion as their belief. Deliberately modeling his work on James Cone’s notion that "God is Black," Vine Deloria, a scholar of Native American history and religions, produced his classic work God is Red in 1973. The work appeared during a standoff between the American Indian Movement and federal authorities at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. U.S. army personnel had butchered hundreds of Indian ghost dancers at that very site in 1890, a massacre sometimes referred to as the last of the "Indian wars." In his work, Deloria thoughtfully explored what it means for Indian people to look for meaning in their tribal religions, given their Christian educations and the secularization and techno-rationalism of the modern world. "As they search for religious experiences to make them whole again," he concluded, Indians would "discover the fascination and familiarity of tribal religions," just as whites, unsettled by the social revolutions of the 1960s, were seeking spiritual wholeness outside of a Christianity which could "no longer provide a comprehensible picture of either man or the world." Native American attempts to exercise religious freedom have compelled a rethinking of the First Amendment, as well as a revitalization of Indian religious traditions.

Theologies of religion, race, and freedom have blossomed in contemporary America in the work of black, Latino, and Indian writers and religious practitioners. The influential "black theology" school, pioneered by James Cone, set the agenda. Black Christian theologians, including those such as James Cone who received first-class seminary training in white institutions, attacked the unspoken assumptions and practices of white racism that pervaded churches and the western theological tradition. Along with these theological developments came radical acts and public displays that shocked white Christians who had become accustomed to nonviolent direct action. As "Black Power" replaced "Freedom Now" as the reigning slogan, militants such as James Forman ascended pulpits and demanded reparations for centuries of racist oppression. Forman's act, and the resulting document the "Black Manifesto," expressed in street theater form the arguments made by the academic black theology school. In part because of these actions of the years, the Catholic Church, too, moved considerably in the direction of ethnic diversity, embracing (if still reluctantly) a Latino constituency that was overtaking rapidly the relatively declining white ethnic base of the Church in America. Meanwhile, many Latinos themselves, especially Central and South Americans, moved out of the Church, often embracing enthusiastic forms of Protestantism (especially Pentecostalism). Latina theologians articulated a mujerista theology that paralleled the womanist approach developed among black female theologians.

Among Native Americans, historical accounts of resistance grounded in religious ideas began in the seventeenth century and continue through present-day struggles over religious practice, the remains of the dead, and land use and custodianship. By making compelling constitutional arguments for their religious practices, Native Americans have forced expanded notions of religious freedom onto the national constitutional agenda. Practitioners of Indian religions complained of being forbidden to collect eagle feathers, purchase peyote, and acquire other objects needed for religious ceremonies. Government regulations that sought to protect the environment or restrict drug trafficking proscribed activities Indians deemed essential for religious practice. The Supreme Court's conservative interpretation of the First Amendment left little recourse in the courts. Advocates for religious freedom took up the cause of protecting and extending religious freedom, resulting in new congressional legislation in the early 1990s that built on the Indian Religious Freedom Act first passed in the 1970s. Again, religion was intimately involved with racial consciousness and the definition of citizenship rights.

Since the recent Indian renewal movement, Native American believers and ministers have balanced the demands of their faith with what they know of the history of Indians and Christianity. Steve Charleston, a Native American Presbyterian minister from Oklahoma, asks whether there can be a "Native People's Christian theology," or an "indigenous theology." He finds his answer in the parallel myths of Indian tradition and the Old Testament. The truths of the Bible and of Indian oral tradition, he concludes, complement one another.

Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom integrates historical research and analysis with historically informed reportage of events and court cases, anthropological explorations of religious customs and practices, original research in primary archival documents, and contemporary discussions of the interaction of religion and civil rights in contemporary American politics and social life. In bringing together such disparate materials, the study constitutes a new scholarly synthesis of religion, race, freedom, and citizenship rights in colonial America and the United States.