Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ," wrote Frederick Douglass in 1845, "there is the widest possible difference." He referred, of course, to the enmeshment of American Christianity with slavery. That deep complicity, encompassing not just slavery but also churches' participation in de jure segregation and in racism more broadly, has long been of interest to historians of religion in America, especially historians of religion in the South. Three recent books illuminate how slavery shaped Christianity in early America; how white Christians, North and South, helped scuttle a postbellum politics of equality; and how white and black Christian advocates of interracialism in the early 20th century were drowned out by advocates of segregation.

Too often our received notions of "religion in the South" are limited to Baptists in South Carolina, Methodists in Virginia, and their close kin. In her innovative and carefully researched monograph Masterless Mistresses , a study of the Ursulines who arrived in New Orleans in 1727, Emily Clark opens up the world of Gulf Coast Catholicism. Clark's title encapsulates some of her central concerns: to what extent were these women, indeed, masterless? What did a Francophone vowed femininity look like? Mistress denotes not only their femininity but also the Ursulines' adoption of the "custom of the country" (as one 18th-century novice put it). Until the Civil War, the community owned slaves, and the Ursulines' dealings with slavery constitute a third major theme of Clark's study.

Clark pays welcome attention to the piety and devotional lives of the Ursulines, exploring, inter alia, the relationship between Ursuline sacramental and devotional practice and slaveowning. The Ursulines had brought with them from France a devotional imagination in which suffering drew women closer to Christ. The hardscrabble colonial context transformed pious abstractions about bodily suffering into everyday realities, as the Louisiana Ursulines undertook all manner of physical labor they wouldn't have even contemplated in France. And slavery supplied the Ursulines an analogy to use when describing their labors. As Clark explains, "The presence of enslaved Africans in Louisiana offered Ursulines another yardstick by which to measure their piety." Hard-working, self-sacrificial nuns who chopped wood, ground rice, and boiled laundry, all in order to support their mission, were doing "what our most lowly slaves did." Clark sums up the point neatly: this embodied service would have been both "unimaginable" and "indescribable" in "the fine stone cloisters of France."

If slavery reshaped the Ursulines' devotional idiom, so too did the Ursulines' religious commitments shape the lives of the bondspeople in their midst. For example, the Ursulines' slaves were more likely than other slaves to be married. This reflected, argues Clark, both the nuns' sacramental sensibilities and their understanding of social control—their sense that slaves were more likely to be reliable workers if knit into stable families. At the same time, slaves used these sacramental rites to their own ends. For example, bondspeople used godparentage to create and solidify community. Sometimes, aunts and uncles served as godparents, but far more often, bondspeople chose non-relatives to serve as their children's godparents. Clark convincingly suggests that the ties of Christian consanguinity forged through godparentage bridged "the gaps in kinship created in the first generation of enslavement." Clark's careful attention to the multiple meanings of sacramental and pious practice is one of the many rewards of Masterless Mistresses.

In Reforging the White Republic , a pioneering study of the intersection of racism, religion, and national identity, Edward Blum examines how Americans, northern and southern, black and white, put together race and citizenship in the years after the Civil War. How did Americans of various regional and religious stripes proceed with the task of either punishing the erstwhile Confederacy or moving toward national reconciliation? To whom would citizenship be extended? In his most original contribution, Blum argues that the end of Reconstruction and the national abandonment of Afro-Southerners to sharecropping and disenfranchisement was "authorized and even sanctified by northern religious leaders and ideologies." Denominations that had split over slavery began to reunite. Prominent white Christian leaders turned their backs on African-Americans. For example, Henry Ward Beecher, arguably the nation's most influential postwar clergyman, called for, in Blum's phrase, "immediate sectional forgiveness." Beecher had been an advocate of emancipation, but he was now, in Frederick Douglass' formulation, "in the forgiving and forgetting mood" and preached "the gospel of forgiveness," advocating that Northerners embrace ex-Confederates, ignore their treasons and their slaveowning, and let bygones be bygones. Rather than hold the federal government accountable for the protection of ex-slaves, Beecher argued for labor arrangements favorable to Southern white lites: if lites prospered, he argued, money would eventually trickle down to the newly emancipated African Americans. Beecher was not alone. Many Christian writers used biblical imagery to argue for a speedy reconciliation. Magazines were filled tendentious poetry: as the crucifixion reconciled Christians to God, so the deaths of the Civil War would lead to peace. White Christians thus deployed Scripture and theology to betray the promises of Reconstruction.

James B. Bennett's pathbreaking Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans takes us back to the Gulf Coast, and shows how Blum's story played out in the Crescent City at the turn of the century. This astute study may be seen as a religious riff on C. Vann Woodward's point that segregation was not a given: before segregation became fixed in Southern law books, there was a period of tentative interracialism, and some denominations resisted segregating the church more than others. Bennett focuses on Methodists and Catholics. Both communities sustained interracial practices longer than did other denominations. But in neither case can we find examples of an interracialism that was especially radical or thoroughgoing. (The very term "interracialism" suggests these limitations—not justice, not the beloved community.) And in neither case did the interracialism last.

In Crescent City Catholicism, interracial worship, underwritten by antebellum precedent, continued into the early 20th century through "neglect rather than active support of equality." Some clergy opposed the creation of all-black parishes for pragmatic reasons: they thought the churches would never be financially self-supporting, and they worried that there were too few priests to keep new all-black churches staffed. Bennett makes clear that these interracial Catholic parishes were no bastions of equality. He recounts instances of a priest's refusing communion to a black soldier, and of children segregated for religious instruction, First Communion, and holiday parades. Church leaders began to chip away at even this decidedly flaccid interracialism by 1895, when they opened an all-black parish, St. Katherine's. Despite the protests of many black Catholics, New Orleans Catholicism was thoroughly segregated by 1920. (Bennett's examination of the shift from interracial to segregated parishes is marred by occasional lapses into analytical fuzziness. He is fond of employing metaphors such as the "rising tide of Jim Crow," a phrase that appears in the book at least 16 times. Such metaphors obscure more than they reveal, since precisely what needs to be explained is why the "tide" rose with such force.)

The Methodist story is similar. Most congregational life was segregated, but until the 1890s (by which point "the rising tide of Jim Crow was beating harder and harder against an increasingly fragile wall of resistance"), Louisiana Methodism was integrated at the conference level. During annual conference meetings, pastors dined together and white people stayed at black people's homes. This selective integration was not unique to the church: labor unions with segregated locals were often integrated at the top; some women's societies, like the Women's Christian Temperance Union, were integrated at the state level while the chapters remained segregated.

Louisiana Methodists articulated their racial politics in theological terms, arguing (as Bennett summarizes) that "racially separate denominations fell short of essential tenets of the Christian faith." To practice segregated worship, wrote one presiding elder, was to "loose [SIC] the image of Christ and become schismatic beside." Methodist leaders hoped that the church's anti-segregationist stance would spill over into the rest of society; occasionally, it did. In 1879, for example, the New Orleans police department issued a curfew to black churches, mandating that services at "Colored churches" must end by 10 pm. An interracial group of Methodist clergy protested, talking back to the state on the state's own terms, insisting that the new curfew violated the First Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. These clergy vowed to ignore the curfew. The city relented, although the victory was hollow. The police extended the curfew to all churches—but they could enforce it selectively. This episode shows that the church could have some marginal impact on political mores, but it also illustrates how, in Bennett's phrase, "the political realm could invade the pews." A word that, like Douglass' 1845 charge, we would do well to keep before us today.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School. Her study of 18th-century Anglicans in Virginia is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Books discussed in this essay:

Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834 Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007

Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 , Princeton Univ. Press, 2005

James B. Bennett, Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans , Doubleday, 2009

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