Reconstruction, Religion, Politics, and Race: A Historiography

Reconstruction, Religion, Politics, and RaceA Historiography Nicole Myers Turner (bio) Historians of religion and Reconstruction, particularly those who have centered African Americans in the post-emancipation South, have sharpened and enriched interpretations of the Reconstruction period by demonstrating churches' centrality to the larger struggles of the period. Since these scholars have focused largely on religious institutions in the aftermath of the end of slavery, they have necessarily examined the issues of racism, interracial interactions, and racial identity formation. Further, their attention to churches as gendered spaces has generated important insights into the construction of men's and women's roles both in and outside of churches. As is a characteristic approach in the study of African American history, these scholars have also innovated in the creative use and reading of archives. Recent scholarship on the history of religion and Reconstruction constitutes a vital emerging field but one that faces challenges given mentorship structures and disciplinary divisions within the academy. Though the history of Black religion and politics after emancipation extends back to at least the early twentieth century, scholarship since the 1980s has centered the Reconstruction period as a particular point of interest. James Washington's Frustrated Fellowship (1986) marked a significant shift from civil rights–era studies that centered enslaved religion.1 Those civil rights–era studies answered calls to provide more Black history by centering enslaved people. In so doing, they broke a nearly three-decade-long silence around Black religious history.2 By the 1980s, scholars like Washington pushed forward in time to explore religion and race after emancipation. This period was particularly ripe for study and analysis because missionary organizations played prominent roles in providing aid to the freedpeople. In this context, Washington's work reflected the melding of denominational history and political history that came to characterize scholarship on religion and Reconstruction. This vantage End Page 360 point also fostered gender studies that considered the unique experience of Black women and constructions of blackness. While this first generation of scholarship mapped the landscape, the second generation of studies, which emerged in the twenty-first century, began to dig deeper into the intersections of religion, race, and politics. Three key developments distinguish recent scholarship in the field: greater sensitivity to the multiplicity of political aspirations and factors shaping them; innovations in interpretive approaches to archival sources; and a more forthright historicization of the object of study in many twentieth- and twenty-first-century studies—"the Black Church." Scholarship on religion and race after emancipation has centered religious institutions in ways that have allowed the important theme of racial power to come to the forefront. The interventions proffered by early twenty-first-century intellectual historians, joined with a revivifying of religious history through considerations of politics, have brought the construction of whiteness and white supremacy into focus. This development might seem an unlikely trajectory for studies anchored in Black people's experiences, but historians of religion's attention to the construction of race expands the aperture for viewing race beyond blackness to include whiteness and the religious and political systems that shaped both. Recent scholarship has developed more complex understandings of race as not just Black, or even Black and white, particularly as historians turn their attention westward. This has implications for understanding the enduring impact of longstanding racialized interpretations of Reconstruction as "Black people run amok," popularized by the Dunning school.3 New attention to the importance of religion and religious communities in the production of racial binaries reveals how they were used to forge a corrosive and potent strand of white supremacist thought. As such, recent historiography on religion and Reconstruction, in part by reconsidering earlier assumptions about "the Black Church as a political formation, has expanded our understanding of how Americans engaged in politics during this period. By taking seriously how open-ended the nature and terms of political engagement were in the postwar, post-emancipation era, recent scholarship on religion and Reconstruction has revealed a more complex spectrum of political objectives and strategies for achieving them. At the same time, the field's insights into the relationship between religion and race help explain the limits of postwar, post-emancipation transformations. To continue...