Bounds of Their Habitation

Paul Harvey is professor of history at the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs, and the author of Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (R&L 2011).

Harvey’s contribution to the American Ways series is a compact overview of his scholarly specialty, race and religion in America, from the English colonial period to the present. The operating assumption is that race and religion are 'categories invented in the modern world' and used to shape 'social hierarchies, cultural expressions, and political power.' They were earliest applied to deal with the Native Americans of New England and Virginia and, soon after, the black Africans forcibly impressed into slavery and, in time, other non-white and non-northern-European migrants, including Chinese and Japanese, South Asians, and Latinos. Among the products of this application were Christian apologies for slavery; Jim Crow; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; legalized segregation; Know-Nothingism; the Ku Klux Klan and its anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic spawn; and denial of First Amendment protection to Native American religion. The reactions included slave uprisings, the NAACP and minority-rights advocacy, the 1950s and ’60s civil rights movement, liberation theologies, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and Black Lives Matter. A magisterial précis.

• Introduction: Religion and Race in American HistoryChapter 1. Red, White, and Black in Colonial American ReligionChapter 2. Religious Freedom and Religious Intolerance in the Early United StatesChapter 3. Religious Ways of Knowing Race in Antebellum AmericaChapter 4. Religion, Race, and the Reconstruction of CitizenshipChapter 5. Religion, Race, and ImmigrationChapter 6. Religion and Civil Rights: The Color of PowerChapter 7. Liberation Theologies in a Conservative AgeEpilogueA Note on Sources