In August of 2017, neo-Nazis, the KKK, and other white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia for a Unite the Right rally to defend a confederate statue of Robert E. Lee and a white nationhood. The protesters courted and engaged in violence in the ongoing war over American racial identity while they struggled to redefine the confederacy in American history. President Trump, in attempting to explain why he saw evidence of danger “on all sides” and some “very fine people” among the white nationalists, wondered aloud about the meaning of removing confederate memorials: “This week it's Robert E. Lee. I noticed Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really have to ask yourself, where does it stop?” (“The Whole Point of Confederate Monuments is to Celebrate White Supremacy,” Washington Post, 16 August 2017). In doing so, he was attempting to connect figures whose reason for recognition was defense of slavery over and above the nation with leaders who are honored today for the founding of the nation despite a recognition of, not because of, their participation in the slave system. At the center of this violent battle over American identity is a fight over how we understand Southern history and its relationship to U.S. history more broadly. National interpretations and meanings have long been layered on top of the history of the region as rebel flags appear on houses and trucks in the Northwest or confederate memorials are established as late as 2010 in Arizona.

Paul Harvey's book, Christianity and Race in the American South, shows us that the construction of what constitutes “the South” has long been politically contested and nationally vital, a struggle over race and religion and the meaning of “American.” Through his history of the South, he illuminates paradoxes embedded in the regional identity and experience as well as the multiple ways religion gets used collectively and individually in the political contestation and personal struggles around slavery and racial hierarchies. Harvey starts his story with the earliest settlements by Europeans in the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a time he wants to note as having many competing religious influences including native, Christian, Islamic, and African spiritual traditions as well as religious indifference or rejection. Harvey claims this early Southern plurality mirrors the most recent period he describes as a global South, one with multiple religious influences such as Hispanic Catholicism and Hinduism. Bookended in between is a period where the national image of the “the South” emerges as a conservative, evangelical, racial binary Bible belt. Harvey wants to show that such a regional identity was neither a reflection of the “true” nature or the transhistorical character of the South but was a nostalgic construction after the Civil War, a time of economic struggle, “relative cultural stasis” (120), and one-party and one-religion rule. This nostalgic rebranding elides the central role of brutal racial supremacy, something one cannot ignore in the history as Harvey tells it. This long history, from the colonial era to today, Harvey believes illuminates the shifting and often contradictory identity of the region, contradictions such as the key mutually constitutive role of the South and the global economy side by side with the “tribal provincialism” of the South or the artistic dynamism of a region with an often repressive religious code of personal conduct and thought (3). Southern history is made as people and organizations grapple with tensions generated at the intersection of race and religion, such as between Christian teachings and inhumane practices or between growing religious freedom and racial oppression (50).

Harvey traces out pathways through which Christianity creates, accommodates, or pushes back against racial hierarchies. He looks at variation in the relationship between Christianity and racial equality, across people and organizations, and even across an individual's life. While other work has illuminated that religion has been used on both sides of the debates on slavery, segregation, and civil rights (e.g. Gerald Webster and Jonathan Leib, “Political Culture, Religion, and the Confederate Battle Flag Debate in Alabama” Journal of Cultural Geography 20, no. 1 [2002]: 1–26; Jane Daily, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown,” The Journal of American History 91, no. 1 [2004]: 119–144; Mark Noll, The Civil War as Theological Crisis [University of North Carolina Press, 2006]; and Robin Jacobson and Nancy Wadsworth, Faith and Race in American Political Life [University of Virginia Press, 2012]), Harvey's history shows that Christianity was not able to be used equally on both sides at all times and that the uses of Christianity has specific historical and regional constraints on the types of arguments that can be made or that will find resonance. For example, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Baptist organizations and leaders articulated opposition to slavery as a “violent deprivation of the rights of nature” and defensed the institution as condoned in scripture (55). Toward the end of the century, however, “the bulk of southern Baptists” drew on the separation of church and state to argue that questions about slavery were a civil matter and not one for the church, drawing connections to “the broader themes of republicanism” of the time (55). Methodists followed a similar trend in this same time period, moving from condemnation to accommodation of slavery. Harvey illuminates how a dominant religious approach to racial orders emerges and how some fall out of favor. Individuals' worked to reconcile Christian teaching with slavery within the context of these political and religious tides. Methodist leader Francis Asbury moved from arguing for freeing slaves to attempting to convert them without freedom (56–57). Throughout, we see white religious leaders beginning with arguments against slavery and then bending to the political and economic systems in which they were embedded, in the end turning against their original, more racially egalitarian stances, such as happened with Presbyterian leaders Charles Jones and Robert Breckinridge (73–76).

Harvey shows how these trends connecting race and religious practices and beliefs are situated within and help create the broader political and economic structures. Attention to the political and economic constraints at critical moments could help further illuminate the unique power and the limitations of religious interpretations, traditions, and practices connected to race. For example, integrating the national political context of the demise of Reconstruction could help us understand the religious and racial transformations on the ground in the South. Lurking in the background of the rise of “explicit racist reasoning” among white Southern theologians and the demise of interracial churches after the Civil War are allusions to shifts in national politics, such as forces that led to the end of the “radical” Republicans and federal interventions in support of racial equality. With Harvey's history, we have the fodder for further explicit theorizing of how federal political winds interact with what happens in the South.

Harvey covers a lot in a compact volume; he examines white and black Christian responses to racial orders from a range of denominations, considers the history of interracial worship, the role of religion in social movements, rhetoric, daily life, and art from the colonial period through the civil rights movement, and concludes with a brief chapter that takes us right up to the contemporary moment. He seems to effortlessly weave this grand tapestry with a range of primary and secondary sources, including sermons, personal letters and diaries, denominational publications, and oral histories. As one of the most distinguished historians of religion and race in the United States, Paul Harvey is well situated to write this sweeping history and does so with narrative grace and compelling stories at a vital time for understanding race, religion, and the South.