Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South. y Elizabeth L. Jemison

Extract

Elizabeth Jemison’s Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South is a powerful, convincing, and timely book. It offers an important and engaging exploration of religion during Reconstruction and the early Jim Crow and lynching era. Jemison illuminates the importance of religious ideology and its direct connection to political action, both black and white. Black Christians developed churches and read the Bible in ways that promoted civil equality and democratic political participation. Black Christians understood the Bible as promoting the value of all God’s children. This insight provided the basis for condemning as sinful and unchristian all racism, let alone the vicious racist violence faced by blacks in the nineteenth century. During Reconstruction, Black Christians organized, voted, and ran for office in order to make their vision a reality. Blacks “argued that they deserved equal status with white southerners because they were both fellow Christians and fellow citizens” (p. 3). White Christians read the Bible as rejecting this vision.