Elizabeth Jemison’s Christian Citizens expertly shows how proslavery ideas morphed and were redeployed alongside Christian theology to justify white—and particularly male—supremacy in the decades after the Civil War. In considering the social, political, and theological struggles of Black and white Christians from 1863 to 1900, Jemison tells a story that historians of the period have heard before in varying and perhaps piecemeal ways, but her thesis is meticulously and brutally articulated. Jemison drives home the resilience of white supremacy, especially in white spaces, and shows how the ideological foundations of white supremacy were mobilized to justify and innovate forms of racial and political violence throughout the period.

Proceeding chronologically, Jemison’s five chapters cover emancipation, Reconstruction, redemption, the reforming of Southern histories, and segregation. While the time spans of most of these topics are well-known, the work within these chapters elevates the experiences of Black and white men and women as they articulated and fought for their understandings of Christianity and citizenship. For Black men and women, as the terms changed, the battles changed as well. Contrary to the assumption of hegemonic whiteness that religious liberation and political freedom were distinct phenomena, during the period of emancipation, Black men and women hoped that the language of citizenship would be seen as deeply compatible with Christianity. After emancipation, the terms and stakes had shifted. White southerners doubled down on their understanding of Christian citizenship being reserved only for them. Jemison precisely narrates these thoughts and words while also clearly delineating the inherent incongruities and contradictions that went unnoticed by those who spoke them. For example, in considering arguments about white Christian citizenship in the 1870s, Jemison notes the absurdity of a population claiming to defend stability and order while simultaneously instigating the violent overthrow of democratically elected governments, as during Mississippi’s 1875 local elections. Such contradictions were many, and Jemison does not miss a beat in exposing them. But such a story does not end in 1900, and the longevity of patriarchal proslavery ideology is signaled well in the conclusion.

But the scholar of lynching knows these things. What, then, is Jemison’s addition to the public and scholarly discourse? Frankly, Jemison’s significant contribution lies not only in the genealogy that she gives readers access to but also in the intentionality of her methods. Firstly, within this text, the reader is treated to an expert weaving of race, class, and gender—a necessary work considering the mobilization of race in late nineteenth-century America. While the plight of poor whites takes up little space in this book, Jemison outlines starkly and consistently the ways in which Southern elite white men and women mobilized their faith, resources, and social power to maintain hegemonic whiteness. Secondly, this book is a strong and coherent reminder that white supremacy is not dead. It is not even past. To the contrary, racial narratives are resilient precisely because of their social construction. What binds the chapters of Christian Citizens together is that racial paternalism rearticulates itself in different terms in different periods in order to maintain particular power structures. Northern white Christians are taken to task for their racial paternalism along with Southern white Christians, and Jemison pierces the narratives that they each formed to distinguish themselves from one another. Fundamentally, this is a helpful work in parsing the extent and diverse manifestations of white supremacy in this period. But it is Jemison’s third major contribution that is the book’s greatest asset.

At its core, this is a work of just scholarship, scholarship that seeks to holistically give its subjects their due. Such a commitment is clear in Jemison’s work with sources. She notes the relative paucity of Black sources during this period, but she is nevertheless relentless in listening to each of her sources for the Black voices. It is the focus on Black men and women that enables Jemison to be so incisive and holistic in her analysis. She is doing the just work of the historian: allowing past actors to speak for themselves but also not allowing those actors’ self-perception to be uncritically normative. To be more precise, the scarcity of Black sources could lead the historian to center whiteness and white actors purely because of the assumption that that is all the historian has access to. Jemison shatters that assumption. She listens and sees behind the words and bodies of white women and men to hear and see the voices and bodies of Black women and men. In so doing, she affirms that the lack of sources does not indicate that Black men and women were silent. Rather, they were silenced.

In the framing of an American political order, Black and white men and women had radically different assumptions. In recovering and interrogating those assumptions, Jemison reminds the reader that the work of silencing was not entirely successful.