Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham (review)

Reviewed by: Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham Jeannine Hill Fletcher (bio) Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church. By Christopher Alan Graham. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2023. Pp. 232. Cloth, 95. 00; paper, 29. 00. ) In the last decade, significant volumes have interrogated the role Christian churches played in cultivating the American embrace of chattel slavery and the enduring anti-Blackness of the nation. Joseph Barndt's End Page 412 Becoming an Anti-Racist Church: Journeying toward Wholeness (2011), Jim Wallis's America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America (2016), Jemar Tisby's The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church's Complicity in Racism (2019), and Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson's Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair (2021) all undertake a common strategy of revealing a national history as an important moment of truth-telling about the project of white supremacy and the possibilities of resisting it. In Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause, Christopher Alan Graham charts a new direction. Instead of a nationally framed history, Graham offers an intimate accounting of a singular congregation as the focal point for reckoning with our past. The book presents a spectacularly specific history of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, providing a fascinating account both for the historian looking back on our past and for those of us hoping to chart a different future. Following a historical arc from the era of enslavement to the age of Black Lives Matter, Graham introduces readers to the workings of a predominantly white, politically connected, and wealthy Christian community at an epicenter of everyday racism in ideology and practice. Graham's account helps us to see the logic by which white congregations embodied the patterns we have come to recognize in the slaveholding era: Christians who supported the evil of slavery for the sake of salvation and the casual choices that embody an enduring paternalism that has been a feature of internalized white supremacy. He also paints the scene of lived religion with a plethora of details that give a textured picture of white Christian life amid slavery. From guidance in becoming "proper Christian slaveholders" to the resistance toward religious autonomy for enslaved Christians who sought alternatives to St. Paul's (21), Graham's personalized account presents the very human details of how white supremacy and resistance is manifest. When Black resistance, refusal, and rejection of St. Paul's was met with puzzlement by white congregants over why Black enrollment was so low, the reader sees how white Christians believed they had all the answers and how they could not see their own blind spots. From these more commonly identifiable patterns and practices (that is, the opening chapter could describe many Christian churches in the ante-bellum era), chapter 2's fascinating specificity provides a vivid account of the unique texture of St. Paul's as it became the "Church of the Confederacy. " Notable congregants such as Confederate president Jefferson Davis— "spiritually mentored" (35), baptized, and confirmed at St. Paul's—were elevated as "exemplary Christians, " and through a careful reconstruction of sermons, celebrations, and remembrances, Graham unveils the logic End Page 413 of a patriotism that wedded Christianity and the slavers' cause. With Confederate heroes memorialized in the sanctuary's built environment, St. Paul's emerged postemancipation as an enabler of Christian-inspired Lost Cause romanticizing and cemented its identity as a historic site of pilgrimage that kept the Confederate past ever present. The Reconstruction story at St. Paul's saw its well-connected congregants politically reinforcing paternalisms in new social configurations, paralleling the refusal of shared power in priesthood and pew. As the Social Gospel emerged on the scene and gave way to the movements of civil rights (chapters 3 and 4), the tenacious white Christian practices of control subtly sustained white interests (echoing into the twenty-first century). Old white supremacies invented new forms of disenfranchisement in the afterlife of slavery as congregants mobilized their connections to protect white interests in residential housing and through the "massive resistance" to integration. . .