Mission, Race, and Empire is an ambitious overview of the origins and missional activities of the Episcopal church, beginning with seventeenth-century colonization of North America and ending in the early 21^st century. Jennifer C. Snow defines “mission” as “the church incorporating others beyond its current boundaries” and early establishes a cohering theme: the tension between, on the one hand, mission’s complicity “in cultural destruction and colonial expansion” and, on the other hand, the ways that mission has also been a way to “challenge the limits of race and empire in human relationships and political life” (2). This interdisciplinary work engages “American history, missiology, and global Christianity” and contributes richly to all three, as well as furthering our understandings of American imperial expansion and the complex relations among religion, politics, and race (3).

Despite tracing these concerns over five centuries, Snow maintains argumentative consistency as she steers the reader securely through the book’s impressive chronological and geopolitical span. Snow matches the breadth of her coverage with a depth of research in this well-written and well-structured book. Divided into three parts, its 14 chapters each have instructive introductions and conclusions. Part I Christianizing the Colony (1600–1800) comprises three chapters that cover English colonization and Anglican efforts in seventeenth-century Chesapeake and the American revolutionary-era split between the Anglican church and the new Episcopalian denomination. Part II Church Planting, Civilizing and Christianizing (1800–1920) spans the post-revolutionary era through the Civil War and emancipation in the mainland U.S. and finishes with missional/imperial endeavors in the Philippines, Hawai’i, Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Part III Missio Dei (1920–2019) delineates a new model of mission that rests on “the idea that the mission of God was in the world, not the Church” (7). Missio Dei brought to a head simmering tensions between fundamentalist versus modernist missional approaches and between “establishmentarian” emphasis on conversion and Christianizing in symbiotic relationship with politics, versus a more ecumenical approach (224). This new “God in the world” ethos also exposed internal and global controversies over “issues of race, gender and sexuality” (7).

For this reader, Part I was the least exciting, perhaps because that ground has been so well-traveled, especially in Virginia and New England. I was also surprised there was not more engagement with Black Christianity in the latter years of Part I’s concerns – both the Anglican and later Episcopalian practices on the plantations and the early Black churches in the cities (such as Absalom Jones’s African Episcopal Church in Philadelphia). Not that Snow ignores these developments, but in a book self-consciously examining the relationships between race and religion, I found myself wanting more about the interplay and tensions and contrasts between early Black and white Episcopalian faith practices.

Part II, by contrast, does explore the frictions between the African American community and the Episcopalian Church in the years leading up to the Civil War. Snow also examines the challenges of Episcopal missional activities in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Asian Pacific. Snow highlights, for example, the tensions between “white allies and racial paternalism” and the second-class status within the Episcopal missional church experienced by some Black missionaries like James Holly in Haiti, Black Episcopal clergy like George Freeman Bragg at St. Stephen’s in Petersburg, Virginia, and even white clergy ministering to Black congregations, like Calbraith Petter in Baltimore. I thought, however, that the discussion of the development of scientific racism in Part II, situated largely in the 1850s onward, could have come sooner chronologically as a contextual lens through which to understand these realities. Some theories of racial taxonomies dated back to the late eighteenth-century, and in the United States craniology and phrenology, resting on the assumption of a gradation of races with different innate intellectual capacities reflected in skull size and shape, were prevalent by the 1830s. Similarly, the context of colonization schemes was given somewhat short shrift. Snow’s brief discussion of the American Colonization Society and Liberia contains little on the relationship of the Episcopal Church of Liberia, founded in 1836, and that of the United States, and the section on James Holly’s mission to Haiti pays scant attention to the Black colonization schemes and emigration to Haiti that predated his mission.

Part III takes us into the twentieth- and early 21^st centuries, with brave discussions of schismatic breaks over women’s ordination, sexuality, and gender and how these grew out of the conflicts galvanized by the Missio Dei model. This analysis seems especially crucial, given that the global Episcopalian and Anglican Churches are still riven by these conflicts. I will note that, like Snow, I am not neutral: my late father was an Episcopalian priest in Chicago before joining the Anglican Church after we moved first to Great Britain and then to South India, where my parents were missionaries with the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. My father, as early as the late 1960s, was part of an Anglican clergy group that fought for women’s and gay ordination. The Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson’s consecration in 2003 as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church and 9^th bishop of New Hampshire was cause for familial celebration. However, the establishmentarians and fundamentalists are still loud voices. As Snow concludes, “The theological work of truly grasping a full sense of mission, reconnecting the sense of mission as God’s work with a love of invitation, incorporation, and sharing across difference, is still incomplete” (319).

The quibbles I expressed above are just that: quibbles. A book with this vast span of time periods, contexts, and academic bodies of scholarship cannot possibly cover everything. This rewarding book will be an invaluable addition to graduate seminars on global religion and politics, and makes salient contributions to mission studies, global imperial history, and the convoluted relationships between race, gender, religion, and politics.