Paul Harvey begins his survey tracing the interaction of race and religion in America by alerting readers that both categories are “co-constituting” and “worked in tandem to create deeply held notions of where people came from . . . [and] who they were as a people” (4). He goes on to explain the myriad of ways in which these two classificatory schemes interacted from the colonial period to the present, focusing on African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, whites, and Asian Americans throughout. Harvey's study complements The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), coauthored with Edward Blum, by widening the lens and providing his readers with something akin to a grand narrative that will be of interest to scholars and non-scholars alike.

Bounds of Their Habitation synthesizes an ample collection of monographs and articles (chronicled usefully at the end of the book in an over twenty-page outline of sources). There are no footnotes or endnotes in the study. Though not primarily a work of original research, Harvey brings his immense storytelling skills to bear. His arrangement is largely chronological, opening with a chapter on colonial missionary encounters with indigenous Americans, highlighting Kateri Tekakwetha, Metacom, and the political conflicts that assured Europeans would count themselves distinct from those whose land they co-opted. Christian discourse helped to draw social boundaries. Harvey illustrates that while Christianity sanctioned the notion of being fully human, it therefore posed a challenge to baptizing enslaved Africans, ultimately prompting the production of multiple narratives clothed with the sanction of Divine Will to authorize the exploitation of black labor.

Chapter 2 gives special attention to Euro-American interaction with Native Americans during the rise of the Evangelical movement. William Apess, a Pequot convert to Methodism, proves especially noteworthy in Harvey's treatment of resistance to “white Christian ethnic cleansing” (54). Harvey illustrates the manner in which the “universalist” language of Christian evangelization laid the foundations for mobilizing African Americans in their struggle for freedom. Soon, nearly all appeals for abolition and ending social exclusion were presented through the medium of a Christian lexicon.

In chapter 3, Harvey contends that biblical literalism not only posed an impediment to the abolitionist movement but forced those convinced of the immorality of chattel slavery to develop a spiritualized reading of the text. Avoiding biblical slave references, antislavery activists appealed instead to “what Jesus would think about slavery, and what slavery did to families” (83). Though Harvey neglects the role of European theological responses to Enlightenment critiques of Christianity in fostering theological liberalism, he astutely identifies abolitionism as a key handmaiden in popularizing claims of “progressive revelation and the historicization of morality” as well as the notion of “organic sin” understood as “so interwoven with society's institutions that individuals themselves were not morally culpable” (84). The same chapter introduces Asian and Latino encounters into the narrative with an eye toward explaining the role of Protestant thought in contextualizing these populations within a theologically grounded social hierarchy.

Chapters 4 and 5 are built around conflicts over the rights of full citizenship for non-whites and the challenges immigration posed to white Protestant hegemony. Yet, Catholicism also participated in the hegemonizing of Euro-American norms, and Harvey's treatment of Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy's “Americanization” of Latino styles of Catholicism in New Mexico is particularly informative on this score. Protestant fear of immigration, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the racial unity turned disunity of the Pentecostal movement, the assimilationist tendencies of Sherman Coolidge—an Arapaho Episcopal priest, and Roman Catholic strategies for incorporating Latino Catholics while stripping them of their customs rounded out these two chapters.

African Americans, as well as Latino laborers led by Cesar Chavez, were bound by their utilization of Christian rituals and symbols, as documented in chapter 6. These movements laid the foundations for the theological liberation movements described in chapter 7. Native American customs, often seen as foreign from Christian and Jewish perspectives, challenged U.S. Supreme Court definitions of “religion” and prompted public dialogue on the boundaries of the term.

Harvey concludes the book with an epilogue—written before Trump's ascension to the White House—presenting cultural pluralism's never-ending struggle to hold sway as a model for American life. The racialization of Islam, as well as post–9/11 suspicion toward Muslims (regardless of race), points to a future where the categories of “race” and “religion” will continue to serve as boundary markers employed to negotiate questions of power and status.

Given that Harvey opens the book with the “co-constituting” nature of the categories of religion and race, I would have liked him to have identified this process more explicitly throughout the book. Though most of his examples lend themselves easily to marking this co-constitutive interplay, it is precisely the fluid, constructed nature of these categories that readers are less likely to have grappled with, retreating instead to naturalized conceptions of both terms. These are hard habits to break, and while the book moves in the right direction, Harvey could have taken us further with more frequent strategic insertions to illuminate mechanisms by which these categories come to seem natural. My other concern has nothing to do with Harvey but rather with the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield. Within minutes of opening the book, large sections of the text came unbound, leaving this reviewer in a continuous game of reinserting multiple, disconnected sections into their proper places. While the shoddy binding was a nuisance, it is a major disservice to the author whose hard work deserves higher quality packaging.

Bounds of Their Habitation is engaging and easy to read. It succeeds in bringing together multiple lines of scholarship that are often operating in parallel universes. Scholars, students, and the general interested reader will find much to value in this book, and it deserves a wide audience.