In this short, crisply argued book, Mark Noll traces the influences of religion and race on American politics. The main argument is that race and religion have interacted to produce the “broadest and most enduring political influence” on the nation's history and also to define its essential moral problem (1, 12). With the self-assurance of a skilled painter, Noll applies a series of brushstrokes that define five political alignments, each influenced by the comparative strength of the state, the market, and religion. The specific constellations of power in a given period influenced the discourse on the problems of slavery and race and thus the political resources—local and national—for mobilizing on behalf of African Americans.
Noll's thesis is that from the late eighteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth, “virtually all debates about the exercise of national political power in American political history were arguments in which either slavery or race were central” (23). At critical times, the religious component in American political culture raised the intensity of political debate and thereby influenced the character and prominence of the issues that drove controversy. Prior to the Civil War, for example, believers on both sides of the slavery issue cited scripture that supported their views. Religiously inspired certitude intensified and hardened opposing views and prolonged the war for a year or more. The passions have not abated as illustrated by the numerous controversies borne of the “culture wars,” sharp differences of opinion on the relevance of scripture for guiding public policy.
Noll's book is based on a synthesis of recent scholarship—his own included—as well as classic works. It may be contrasted with James Morone's Hellfire Nation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), a broader but similarly conceived work that studies the imprint of Puritan culture on the nation's reform movements. While Morone's Janus-faced model specifies a society vs. sinner posture on assigning blame for social ills, Noll crafts a more subtle story of the interaction of religious beliefs—Calvinist-evangelical in black and white congregations alike—with regional party alignments and their influence on the use of centralized and local power. Calvinism did not distinguish between matters of personal or public salvation and thus focused politics on the here and now, more readily achieved in a political culture free of the cynicism that paralyzed European politics.
Three periods are crucial in the account: (1) the ante-bellum, (2) Reconstruction, and (3) the Civil Rights era (1950s through present). Noll crafts a compelling narrative with sharply drawn examples that lend detail to the broad strokes and concludes with a meditation on the imperfections of human nature that litter accounts of the nation's racial history. In the antebellum era, for example, the authority of scripture was compromised by the conflation of slavery with race. After the war, a philosophical split among Protestants as well as regional divisions weakened the salutary influence of religion. In the South, religion turned inward to the domestic side of life and may have inadvertently contributed to the lynch mob mentality that derived its moral luster from protecting white women from black sexual assault. Meanwhile in the North, a desire for national reconciliation trumped concerns over unchecked racism in the South. Even such prominent abolitionists as Harriet Beecher Stowe advocated white racial supremacy to advance national unity. As civil rights reform took hold, southern religion shed its reputation of condoning racism and gradually restored its political influence. Its longstanding opposition to the intrusion of centralized power and its growing number of adherents would make it an influential component of the GOP coalition. Republican candidates for office would thereafter give voice to the panoply of values issues that mobilized white evangelical voters who chafed under what they perceived as the intrusion of the federal government into their private spheres.
The strength of Noll's argument is also its weakness. His agnosticism on the ultimate cause of the intractability of the race problem steers him away from familiar ports of call such as false consciousness, hegemony, and class theory. Avoiding the gravitational field of a grand theory has its advantages. It allows Noll an admirable sense of fairness as he examines the complex interactions of religiously inspired idealism and hypocrisy, self-interested delusion, and the rise and fall of opinion in favor of central authority for policing the worst instincts of humankind. But it also fosters a sense of despair as Noll falls back on his religious conviction that the contradictions, paradoxes, and conundrums that arise in the analysis are a function of inherent human weakness: “redemption never equals perfection; the redeemed must always recognize their own shortcomings and be filled with gratitude for all the gifts of creation” (180). Noll's is a tragic vision but one that nevertheless brings welcome clarity to the nation's primary moral dilemma.
