Fay Botham's book asserts that religion played a “significant role in American antimiscegenation cases” (xi) and that historians have given very little attention to this important role in their studies of American miscegenation cases or in the history of interracial marriage more generally (5). Her cultural history “advances the view that Christian beliefs about race and marriage exerted a powerful and enduring ideological influence on antimiscegenation law and litigation and on American attitudes toward race, intermarriage, and segregation” (6). The more specific and interesting point that Botham makes about antimiscegenation cases (that is, legal proscriptions against interracial marriage, specifically between those persons defined by courts as “black” and “white”) and interracial marriage is that Catholics and Protestants had different views on the legitimacy of interracial marriage because of their divergent theologies of marriage and race. By examining a wide variety of historical courses, including papal encyclicals, writings by Protestant ministers and Catholic canon law specialists in the post–Civil War period, legal and non-legal documentation of several important cases, especially Loving v. Virginia (1967—which ended centuries of American jurisprudence against interracial marriage), and relevant material from a number of state cases, Botham compellingly makes her case for the importance of religious underpinnings for segregation in the South.

Botham roots her arguments for divergent Catholic and Protestant views on interracial marriage and race in history and theology. She contends that because the Roman Catholic Church alone affirmed the doctrine of marriage as a sacrament—which meant that the “rite of matrimony [w]as an instrument that conferred grace upon a couple”—the Church reserved to itself the “sole authority” to adjudicate marriage law (6). Because the Church refused the state the authority to determine such laws pertaining to marriage, this would have important consequences for American bans on interracial marriage. Catholic couples could not be denied by the state to participate in a sacrament of the Church. Botham adds that the Vatican's “theology of race,” which she argues developed centuries after its theology of marriage, affirmed the unity of the human family, which was “created by God, united in Christ, and subjected to the universal authority of the holy catholic and apostolic church” (7). In these ways, Catholic leaders differed from Protestant Reformers who, Botham contends, granted the state the right to adjudicate marriage law by deeming it a civil institution. Later, among Protestants in the colonial period and in the antebellum American South, it was held that Africans should remain in perpetual bondage as the cursed descendants of Noah's son Ham (in the story of Genesis 9) and deemed a separate race that should not intermarry with whites (based on the dispersion narrative in Genesis 10–11).

For historians of the slave experience and the development of Jim Crow segregation, much of Botham's summary and critical analysis of work on the history of interracial marriage litigation and the biblical and theological justifications for slavery and (later) for segregation will be familiar. In many ways, Botham's work, as she acknowledges, is an extension of already conducted massive research (some of which is quite recent, having been published within the last five to ten years) on the various ideological and social bases of racism, segregation, and legal prohibitions against interracial marriage. She enfolds her claim about divergent Catholic and Protestant approaches to race, law, and interracial marriage in the works of earlier historians such as Carter G. Woodson and Frank Tannenbaum, who argued, respectively, that the Spanish, Portuguese, and French (all Catholic nations) possessed greater tolerance for marriage between whites and blacks than the English (Protestant) and that religious differences had an impact on the relative treatment of black slaves under the regimes of the American South and Latin America (60–66). Of course, Botham brings these works into conversation with recent scholarship and notes their deficiencies and oversights, even while paying homage to their original insights.

In a work of such broad sweep, beginning with the Reformation and ending with a provocative reflection on the similarities between historical religious proscriptions against interracial couples and contemporary debates about same-sex couples, it is certain that some specialists will question some specific details. Even so, I think Botham successfully demonstrates her central argument. She writes: “Far from being a belief system advocated only from the isolated southern pulpit on Sunday mornings, the Protestant theology of marriage as a civilly regulated matter and the theology of separate races constituted a kind of cultural religion that permeated the hearts and minds of attorneys and judges throughout the courts of the South for a hundred years after the Civil War” (156). However, as I read this and other claims, I kept wondering: What is the historical salience of all of this documentation of a theology of separate races? What practical and real-world difference did a theology of separate races make? For example, Botham notes that in matters of private relations—living space, marriage, entertainment, and so on—Catholics in the North, South and Midwest were just as likely to treat blacks as “lower-class citizens” (16). She rightly notes that John McGreevy and others have argued that despite this theology of human unity advocated by the Vatican many years prior to the 1960s, Catholic laity's notions of race, residence, and sacred space fused to such an extent that African Americans were virtually seen as an alien outsider “race” (indeed, even black Catholics were seen in this way). When historians encounter varying and disparate ideological justifications for a similar phenomenon (in this case, racial oppression and fierce resistance to interracial marriage by law and practice), then surely this must incite some speculation about a meta-cause or other factors besides stated reasons, self-reports, and theological justifications. This is not in any way meant to deny the importance of the kind of work that Botham does. I have high praise for the way she treats this important subject matter, though in the end I am not sure what we have learned or necessarily gained from it. Yes, we know more about another “language” in which racial oppression was expressed. Thanks to Botham we have a name for it and detailed description of its underlying structure and syntax, but what singular difference this language made as opposed to others that we have already named is unclear to this author.