The book is more than a scholarly study. Although anchored in thorough research in relevant primary and secondary sources, the author is motivated and passionately expresses profound disappointment and denunciation of ecclesial participation and collusion in the ugly realities of racism and enslavement aimed against peoples of African descent. Recent interdisciplinary scholarship about empathy and emotions may undergird the author's unvarnished assessment and judgment of the history of American Presbyterianism and African Americans. The author charges Calvinist adherents with crucially important roles in maintaining and defending black enslavement and subjugation through scriptural and theological distortions that perverted Christianity and drafted it into the service of black dehumanization.

The author nuances if not outright rejects the conventional scholarly wisdom concerning the leading Protestant denominations and their split over slavery in the 1840s. He eschews the uncomplicated binary of an anti-slavery northern branch of Presbyterians and a pro-slavery southern sect. Although northern Presbyterians included abolitionists within their clergy and membership, notwithstanding their minority presence, they hardly populated any pulpits and pews in southern Presbyterian parishes. Calvinists in the North generally viewed blacks as inferior and countenanced racist biblical interpretations and advocated the expatriation of free blacks to Africa. The seeming middle ground of colonization backed by some Presbyterians in both regions was premised on the idea that African Americans occupied the lowest rungs of the racial hierarchy. Whether in the North or in the South, Presbyterians submitted their ecclesial organizations, said the author, to “the captivity of American slavery” and agreed that African Americans, based on biblical texts, were a servile people unworthy of equality with whites.

Although the author did not cite the older historical findings of Philip S. Foner and Thomas O'Connor in their respective monographs on Business and Slavery (1941) and Lords of the Loom (1968), he is mindful of their still unshakable argument that northern merchants and manufacturers depended on southern slave-based commerce and were not generally identified as slavery opponents. The author correspondingly asserts that northern Presbyterians expressed either ambivalence or indifference to black enslavement. These Calvinists, including 50,000 to 75,000 southern Presbyterians who were slaveholders, comprised a solid phalanx of Presbyterians, despite different sectional loyalties, adhered to a racist consensus about the necessity of black subordination to whites.

The author juxtaposes the concrete realities of the slave trade and the dehumanizing operations of slavery to Presbyterian perspectives about the several facets of black enslavement. The author overlooked no aspect of the brutal treatment of blacks in bondage from their treatment as human cargo on slave ships to the forced working conditions as unpaid labor. Family separation, physical punishment, and the insult of a “corrupted Christianity” conveyed to the enslaved in a racially comprised catechesis are broadly discussed. Pronouncements from denominational assemblies, synods, presbyteries, and individual treatises, sermons, and letters revealed how the callous views of the clergy and laity and an occasional, but feigned sympathy for blacks were placed in proximity to the author's lengthy roster of wrongs perpetrated against the enslaved.

Interwoven throughout the book are extensive references and commentaries from African American Presbyterian clergy. Whether the minister was J. W. C. Pennington, Samuel E. Cornish, Theodore S. Wright, or Henry Highland Garnet, these abolitionist-pastors attained greater notice and influence than most of their white counterparts. Because some of them were ex-slaves and all were leading voices against black bondage, their presence in pulpits, public platforms, and in the black press, provided them with a wide visibility in ante bellum America. Although they generally interacted with white Presbyterian abolitionists, these outsized black Presbyterian ministers articulated a distinct sectarian perspective. Although the author focused on the northern and southern Presbyterian bodies, a third aggregation of Calvinist blacks, as the author observed, articulated a major, contrarian voice. Although they affiliated with northern Presbyterians, their special denominational identity also was nurtured in the Convention of Ministers of the Presbyterian and Congregational Churches in the United States. This association of black Presbyterian and Congregational clergy, though hardly a denomination, functioned as a formal organization whose black ecclesial defense and advocacy for the enslaved stood as a para-church counterpart to the racist position of the white dominated northern and southern bodies.

The author, notwithstanding his careful chronicle of Calvinist calumny against the humanity of blacks, infused his narrative with denunciations of ecclesial complicity in black enslavement. He argues, somewhat unconvincingly, that the greater class diversity of Presbyterian churches in comparison to other mainline Protestant sects, meant that they gave more support to the slave system. That seems to be an incredible claim when Baptists and Methodists, denominations that split over slavery along sectional lines, are considered. To buttress this observation, he notes that foreign observers spoke of Presbyterians, whether in the North or South, as more notorious in their views about maintaining blacks in a servile condition. Whatever the veracity of the author's argument, Protestants, whether they were American Presbyterians or not, were deeply implicated in their nation's regime of anti-black racism.

The author laments that the Presbyterian founded seminary at which he teaches inherited the church's tradition of anti-blackness. Reckoning with this history of Calvinist compromise on race defines this book and drives the author's fervent determination to turn Presbyterianism toward a different trajectory. Although grounded in an impressive bibliography, there is a tone of personal anguish about a religious history that shaped surviving Calvinist institutions like the one to which he is attached. For him an honest encounter with this unsavory past contains within it the seeds to construct a different future that regards the full humanity of African Americans. The personal and utilitarian purpose in writing this book, however, highlights for the author the genesis of a different Presbyterianism that lies within his own narrative about those ante bellum African American clergy who preached about the inclusive possibilities that they envisaged and which Calvinist whites can now embrace.