Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia

In Soul Liberty, Nicole Myers Turner analyzes the relationship between Black religious institutions and Black political participation in Virginia during the post-emancipation period. Her study is based on an ambitious reading of, among others, the records of the Baptist, Zion Union Apostolic, and Episcopal churches; church convention minutes; and the manuscript collection of political magnate William Mahone. Turner also creatively deploys maps as a method of analysis to demonstrate the complexity and expansiveness of Black religious networks. Using ArcGIS mapping, Turner created original maps based on details gleaned from these archival sources to “visualize the political landscape” (p. xii). Grounded in the “particularities” of post-emancipation Virginia, Turner enters the historical conversation alongside scholars such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Martha S. Jones, and Elsa Barkley Brown by emphasizing the contingent nature of Black religious leadership (p. 58).The book upends the accepted understanding of Black churches as always politically engaged and reveals that the Black religious experience in antebellum Virginia evolved to be this way by churches advocating for political and religious liberty. The early chapters of the book reveal the extent to which norms of gender and sexuality were also incorporated into Black religious spaces. In chapter 2, Turner shows how freedpeople extended the political acumen honed within their antebellum organizations to the project of freedom in post-emancipation Virginia. Turner finds that, alongside the Freedmen's Bureau, “Black run communal organizations played an important and understudied role in shaping and informing Black ideas about marriage and family” (p. 39). Turner underscores how the antebellum, Black religious experience was diverse and far more “fluid” and “flexible” regarding leadership and decision-making than scholars have previously recognized (p. 58). In chapter 3, through careful reading of Gilfield Baptist Church's bi-weekly meeting minutes, Turner illuminates the processes involved in the transformation from community-based decision making (among congregations) to lionized Black ministerial power by 1877. According to Turner, communal support was far more “indicatives of a pastor's power than any political office or occupation he might have held” (p. 58). As community decision making broke down, a “leadership laity hierarchy began to emerge” (p. 65). Not until the early twentieth century would ministerial leadership become central in the Black church. Pastors established their authority, Turner writes, within the context of gender roles and norms in Virginia's post-emancipation Black community.Particularly transformative is chapter 4, in which Turner calls attention to “contested narratives” and power dynamics at the center of Reconstruction-era Black religious politics (p. 81). Through an immersive reading of extant church reports, fragment records from the Zion Union Apostolic Church (ZUA), and interpretation of oral histories, Turner traces the tensions surrounding the 1878 vote by members of ZUA to unite with the Episcopal Church—at least as recorded by white missionaries in their report to the Annual Council of the Virginia Diocese. While it is unclear if ZUA members truly did vote this way, the internal dispute led to the creation of the Branch Theological School (BTS, later Bishop Payne Divinity School) by the Virginia Diocese. It is here, in the fragmented record, that Turner locates demands for Black teachers as well as some of the forces that led to the gendering of Black religious spaces (pp. 83–84).Turner refines Barkley Brown's characterization of the post-emancipation Black church as inevitably a “democratic space” of debate and exchange and political engagement—where men, women, and children all participated. Turner emphasizes that the democratic nature of “Black church spaces was more varied” (p. 69). Even within a framework of community-based decision making, Turner shows how Black women's roles were restricted. Church leadership banned women from holding public meetings and limited their participation in church governance. Moreover, the involvement of deaconesses in church governance illuminates a deep investment in “respectability politics of policing Black sexuality,” Turner writes (p. 71). Her analysis also brings balance to studies that cite a range of diverse factors—such as education, opportunity, spiritual authority, circumstance, and individual ability— that contributed to Black ministers’ advancement without a sustained exploration of the contexts in which these leaders emerged (p. 58).Moving away from individual characteristics and looking to church meetings as a site for the emergence of pastoral leadership, Turner expands the range of actors who participated in political processes by centering the life histories of people like Mother Howard, a black missionary from Philadelphia whose worship services sparked complaints by agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, and Sister Emily Rodney of Staunton, Virginia, who sought to establish an African Methodist Church—two women who have been “lost in the historical narratives” (p. 30). Indeed, church meetings offered critical context for the transformation and development of pastoral advancement—and places where Black women refined and expanded their leadership.Finally, Turner offers a fresh reading of William Mahone's Readjuster campaign and patronage politics. Whereas Mahone's use of patronage dominates historians’ analysis of the Readjuster movement, Turner emphasizes the significance of Black churches. She observes that Mahone, the Confederate general turned US senator, attempted to exploit Black religious and political networks in the months and weeks leading up to the 1883 election campaign. Turner shows that Mahone viewed Black churches as the primary vehicle through which to secure Black political support, and he attempted to “map” his political reach through lists and attempted to convert those lists into Readjuster Territory (pp. 124–27). On this point Turner extends historian Harold S. Forsythe's analysis of the relationship between kinship networks and Black political mobilization. “One of the most critical aspects of the Readjuster movement's brief success,” she insists, “was not the politics of party but of the churches.” (p. 118)Soul Liberty's energizing foray into post-emancipation Virginia significantly revises historians’ understanding of the relationship between Black religious institutions and politics, challenging us to understand Black religious spaces as divergent sources of conflict, change, and leadership.