Abstract
To be American is to be the people of God. This idea has animated the studies of Israelitic themes in American religion. From being the American “city on a hill” to the decidedly white supremacist notions of Manifest Destiny to black antislavery themes of Exodus toward freedom, the social forms of participation in American religious identity have been overwhelmingly contingent upon self-understanding tied to the Israelitic narrative of being people of God—God’s Israel.1 This does not, of course, mean that every single American throughout history has subscribed to the identity. The point, rather, is that the Israelitic myth, as a cultural narrative, has sustained in the West a dominant form of “narrative knowledge.”2 It has encoded and transmitted foundational ideas about reality and identity. Israelitic appropriations, in this manner, have exerted the most enduring narrative influence upon the American religious imagination.3
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Notes
Homi Bhabha’s description of narrative knowledge has become very important for understanding how popular narratives constitute “knowledge” and organize meanings. See his “Introduction,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London/New York: Routledge, 1990), 3. See also Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
See Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Schwartz, The Curse of Cain; Martin Marty, Modern American Religion, 3 vols. (Chicago: , 1986–96)
Schwartz, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970)
Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans, 3d ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998)
Sydney Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1963)
Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus!: Religion, Race and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic, 1985)
Albert J. Raboteau, “African Americans, Exodus and the American Israel,” in Religion and American Culture, ed. David Hackett (New York: Routledge, 1995)
Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel.
Perry Miller, The New England Mind, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961)
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Raboteau, “African Americans, Exodus and the American Israel”; Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones; Glaude, Exodus; Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America from the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 143–153.
James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990)
James H. Evans, We Have Been Believers: An African American Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992)
Dwight Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1999)
Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000)
Garth Baker-Fletcher, Xodus: An African American Male Journey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).
David Howard-Pitney, The Afro-American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990)
Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Moses’ studies, although erudite and complex, conspicuously ignore the insights and hermeneutics arising from many theorists in poststructuralism and cultural studies. One result of this is a minimal, underdeveloped assessment of American whiteness or whiteness as Americanness. More generally, Moses works the social histories of black Americans into a Millerian grand narrative. At no point does he identify the problems of this narrative, which stem primarily from making performative whiteness the normative category for explaining social circumstances that comprise many peoples and a variety of conflicts.
Among theologians, Anthony Pinn has produced a unique response to the normalization of Christian identity in Varieties of African American Experience (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998); Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986)
Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Judith Weisenfeld, “Difference as Evil,” in The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption, ed. Quinton H. Dixie and Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999)
Schwartz, The Curse of Cain; Vincent Wimbush, “Introduction,” in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, ed. Vincent Wimbush (New York/London: Continuum, 2000)
Forrest G. Wood, The Arrogance of Faith. Randall Bailey, “What Price Inclusivity: An Afrocentric Reading of Dangerous Bible Texts,” in Voices from the Third World 17 (June 1994): 133–150
Randall Bailey and Jacquelyn Grant, eds., The Recovery of Black Presence: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995).
Vine Deloria, Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969; reprint, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988)
Deloria, God is Red: A Native View of Religion, 2d ed. (Golden, CO: North American Press, 1992)
Robert Warrior, “A Native American Perspective: Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians,” in Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (New York/London: Orbis/SPCK, 1995)
George Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993).
Elizabeth Davis, Lifting As They Climb (New York: G.K. Hall & Company, 1996)
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1993)
Beverly Washington Jones, Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrell, 1863–1954 (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1990)
Anne Meis Knupfer, Toward a Tenderer and a Nobler Womanhood: African-American Women’s Clubs in Turnof-the-Century Chicago (New York: New York University Press, 1996)
Dorothy Salem, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890–1920, Black Women in United States History (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing Company, 1990).
Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999).
John David Smith, ed., The Biblical and “Scientific” Defense of Slavery, Anti-Black Thought, 1863–1925 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993)
Thomas Virgil Peterson, Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1978)
Donald Matthews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1977)
Samuel Hill, Jr., On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Religion in the South: A Southern Exposure Profile (Atlanta, GA: Mercer University Press, 1983)
Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause (1865–1920) (Atlanta: Atlanta University of Georgia Press, 1980). Scholars frequently regard racism, in its vilest and most cruel forms, as a Southern phenomenon and thus as atypical of Northern religion. Paul Griffin has devoted a full study to counter this misrepresentation in his Seeds of Racism in the Soul of America (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1999). Griffin demonstrates, for instance, that Northern religious forms, primarily through Puritan religion, were a potent ideational source of American racism.
Stephen Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Haynes’ is a cogent analysis of white religionists who argued for slavery as a divinely sanctioned institution. He devotes little attention to African Americans due to the scope of his project, but he does indicate clearly that black Americans participated in Hamitic rhetorics.
See Robert Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).
Griffin, Seeds of Racism (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1999).
George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1988)
Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York/London: Norton & Company, 1981).
Lewis R. Gordon, Africana Existentia: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000).
William Haller, in his The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), provided a fine analysis of how white New Englanders imagined themselves to be God’s Israel during the early settlement period. Claims to this identity were conditioned by persecution, particularly that directed against Protestants during the Reformation and counter-Reformation. Hall suggested, for example, that John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which narrated a genealogy of the people of God culminating in the rise of (English) Protestants, was likely as common an object in New England homes as the Bible. Also helpful is Haller’s The Rise of Puritanism, Or, The Way to the New Jerusalem: As Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643 (1938; reprint, New York: Harper, 1957).
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 47.
Benjamin Tucker Tanner, The Descent of the Negro; Reply to Rev. Drs. J.H. Vincent, J.M. Freeman and J.H. Hurlbut (Philadelphia: A.M.E. Publishing House, 1898), 9.
George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, 1619–1880 (1883; reprint, New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1968), 1, 12. A few nineteenth-century ideologues denied that Ham was the progenitor of the Negro, namely “Ariel” (Buckner Payne) and Charles Carroll—at the turn of the century, the latter published The Negro a Beast (1902). Williams, familiar with the work of Ariel, refers repeatedly to his work and indicates that Ariel’s was patently a minoritarian position; most Americans dismissed Ariel. I will develop this point later.
Rufus Perry, The Cushite, or The Descendants of Ham as Found in the Sacred Scriptures and in the Writings of Ancient Historians and Poets from Noah to the Christian Era (Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1893), 12.
See Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Gay L. Byron, Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference in Early Christian Literature (New York: Routledge, 2002). Byron is careful to avoid the anachronism of reading modern race and racism back into antiquity. In fact, she avoids using the terms. She does, however, clearly recognize the veritable semiotic antiblackness to which Hood was attentive.
Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993), 21, 231–234.
Hood, Begrimed and Black. See Byron, Symbolic Blackness; David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003)
Cottrel R. Carson, “‘Do You Understand What You Are Reading?’: A Reading of the Ethiopian Eunuch Story (Acts 8.26–40) from a Site of Cultural Marronage” (Ph.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1999).
Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus (Winter 1967): 1–10.
Charles H. Long, “Civil Rights—Civil Religion: Visible People and Invisible Religion,” in American Civil Religion, ed. Russell E. Richey & Donald G. Jones (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Stow Persons, American Minds: A History of Ideas (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1958).
Several studies provide an apt overview of these racial diatribes. Among these are William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960)
George Fredrickson, The Black Image in The White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)
August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963)
and John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971).
Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge/London: Belknap Press, 1995), 39.
See Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993)
Homi Bhabha, “Introduction,” in Nation and Narration; Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994); Schwartz, The Curse of Cain.
Schwartz, The Curse of Cain, 5. See especially Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History (New York: Routledge, 1996). Whitelam examines the ways the West has been imagined through configuring ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans as Western peoples— arbiters of monotheism, white values, and high culture—vis-à-vis the decadent contemporaries of those ancient Western peoples.
Of course, many publicists such as Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and David Walker took great exception to this signification. They radically disagreed with equating the views and values of white racism with Christianity. See Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845), 77–82, 118–125
David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizen’s of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (Boston: D. Walker, 1829; reprint, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2000)
Henry Highland Garnet, The Past and the Present Condition and the Destiny of the Colored Race; A Discourse Delivered at the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Female Benevolent Society of Troy, N.Y., Feb. 14, 1848 (1848; reprint, Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969).
Samuel Morton, Crania Aegyptiaca; Or, Observations on Egyptian Ethnography, Derived from Anatomy, History and the Monuments (Philadelphia: J. Penington, 1844).
George R. Gliddon and Josiah Nott, Types of Mankind: Or, Ethnological Researches Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History: Illustrated by Selections from the Inedited [sic] Papers of Samuel George Morton and by Additional Contributions from L. Agassiz, W. Usher, and H. S. Patterson (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, Grambo, & Co., 1854).
Arturo de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915). De Gobineau wrote that all accomplishments of human civilization were due to the white race, even in Africa. See de Gobineau, 210–211.
See Paul Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997).
Smedley, Race in North America, 262–263; John S. Haller, Jr., “Civil War Anthropometry: The Making of a Racial Ideology,” Civil War History 16 (1970): 309–325; Haller, Outcasts from Evolution.
John Van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination; Or, Negroes a Subordinate Race, and (So-Called) Slavery Its Normal Condition, with an Appendix, Showing the Past and Present Condition of the Countries South of Us, 2d ed. (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1868).
Edward Wilmot Blyden, The Negro in Ancient History (Washington City: McGill & Witherow, 1869).
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© 2004 Sylvester Johnson
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Johnson, S.A. (2004). The People(-ing) of God. In: The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-7869-1_1
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