Methodism occupies a central place in American religious history, and continued reexaminations suggest that there is still much to learn from Methodism's development. It is exactly Methodism's centrality that makes it an important site for exploring the intersections of religion, culture, and politics in America, suggests Morris L. Davis in The Methodist Unification. Positioning the Methodist Church as the self-described “custodian” of American Christian civilization, and closely analyzing the deliberations of the Joint Commission on Unification of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in a series of meetings held between 1916 and 1920, Davis's book aims to show “the ways in which the language of race is both a sign of and an integral presence in the broader, more public, and more pervasive language of Christian nationalism” (8).

The story that Davis unfolds is a fascinating one. The primary problem that the Joint Commission needed to deliberate concerned how to deal with race in the newly unified church. Race was a source of the church's split in 1844, and reorganizing required reopening the question of race in a new era. The members of the Joint Commission were highly aware of public perception. Thus, they felt an urgency concerning the goal of unification, which could serve as an example to a nation trying to overcome the wounds of Reconstruction, while they also were concerned with presenting an appropriate model for racial relations to a white American public. Here discourses of doctrine, theology, nation, and race came together in complicated ways. The Joint Commission's deliberations reveal that social concerns about race held sway over doctrinal and theological ones, but that those social concerns had to be “explained in terms of some kind of acceptable Christian discourse” (128).

What is perhaps most intriguing about Davis's analysis is the way that talk about race seldom centered on issues of spiritual equality, instead focusing on the on-the-ground social implications of ecclesiastical equality. Drawing his evidence almost completely from the Proceedings of the Joint Commission's six meetings (the book is organized around these moments), Davis traces discourses on race through a variety of transformations. In the first meeting of the Joint Commission, the language of institutional unity and national space overcame theological and doctrinal issues in the name of expediency. The discourse focused on the morality of a racially divided union, based on the then-current concept of “racial consciousness” that asserted the distinctiveness of different races and the importance that each develop fully its own integrity without dilution through miscegenation or cultural assimilation. Both the MEC and the MECS, and the majority white and minority black members of the Joint Commission, participated in the discourse of race consciousness. However, by the end of their second meeting in 1917, new tensions emerged over differences concerning how to reorganize the church and where African Americans would fit in the “unification.”

By the third meeting in 1918, “social equality” became the dominant frame. Both black and white members of the Joint Commission agreed with theoretical and scientific arguments that the social equality of the races would be a danger to both the church and America. But by the final three meetings, as the terms of the debate shifted to the languages of nationalism, patriotism, and mission activity, the two black delegates were no longer in agreement with the white membership. Having sacrificed in the recent war, they argued, African Americans were full members of the nation and should be recognized as such. White representatives, meanwhile, called on blacks to accept, as their patriotic duty, a “separate but equal” relation to the primary white Central Jurisdiction of the united church. In the end, black Methodist conferences in the United States were categorized in the same way that foreign mission conferences were, as an Associate General Conference, separate from the white conferences. This final proposal was not acted on for another decade, but it was finally approved by both the MEC and MECS in 1935 as the “Plan of Union.” The MEC and MECS, along with the Methodist Protestant Church, finally merged in 1939.

Davis's study convincingly shows how “the Methodist Church, one of the largest, wealthiest, and most powerful religious institutions in America, was born as a fully racialized Christian institution” (128). The institutional organization of the church incorporated the racial politics of Jim Crow America even as it sought to overcome racially based division. Davis notes, in the epilogue, that the malleability of the concept of race was, perhaps ironically, the reason for the reification of racial structures. If the meaning of race was fixed, it would have had to be faced head-on instead of slipping away into other discourses. Race was most powerful in its silence, as racial discourse was shaped by structures of implied whiteness. Here is where Davis's story potentially has the most to lend scholars outside the realm of Methodist history, yet Davis does not explore these wider topics as thoroughly or creatively as he might. His limited range of sources allows for interesting insight into the particular discourses on race in the unification process, but it would have been a more widely compelling story if he expanded his view beyond the purely discursive realm into the social history that frames so much of his argument. But perhaps it is unhelpful to ask an author to write a book that he did not set out to write. The Methodist Unification underscores the immense power that race has held in American, and Methodist, consciousness, and its ability to shape the politics of both church and state.