God and Race in American Politics: A Short History

Written by Mark A. Noll

Narrated by Adam Verner

Mark Noll, one of the most influential historians of American religion writing today, traces the explosive political effects of the religious intermingling with race.

Noll demonstrates how supporters and opponents of slavery and segregation drew equally on the Bible to justify the morality of their positions. He shows how a common evangelical heritage supported Jim Crow discrimination and contributed powerfully to the black theology of liberation preached by Martin Luther King Jr.

In probing such connections, Noll takes listeners from the 1830 slave revolt of Nat Turner through Reconstruction and the long Jim Crow era, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to "values" voting in recent presidential elections. He argues that the greatest transformations in American political history, from the Civil War through the civil rights revolution and beyond, constitute an interconnected narrative in which opposing appeals to Biblical truth gave rise to often-contradictory religious and moral complexities. And he shows how this heritage remains alive today in controversies surrounding stem-cell research and abortion as well as civil rights reform.

God and Race in American Politics is a panoramic history that reveals the profound role of religion in American political history and in American discourse on race and social justice. The book is published by Princeton University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press Audiobooks
• Release date: Sep 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781509494705

Mark A. Noll

 Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame. His other books include A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, and Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity.

Reviews for God and Race in American Politics

[Paul · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Mark Noll is a well known evangelical and historian of Christianity in America. Here he takes the position that what appears to be a white evangelical backlash against civil rights legislation in the 50s and 60s is really a response to an "unprecedented use of federal authority" to implement the legal and social changes affecting state and local levels. He says in the last chapter that never before were Americans asked to "countenance such strong, centralized federal power." I would ask the author, and those who agree with these statements whether Plessy v. Ferguson might not be a far more oppressive use of "federal authority" -- one which blatantly contradicted most of the 14th and 15th Amendments and created a constitutionally protected apartheid system within the USA. It seems implausible to say that the civil rights laws of the 60s were unprecedented in their use of federal authority in light of Plessy. For that matter, the Dred Scott ruling of 1857 was an almost criminal use of federal authority (i.e. Supreme Ct.). Actually, the civil rights bill of 1964 and then voting rights act basically gave to blacks what the 14th and 15th Amendments had been designed to give them, but which had been taken away by a combination of local, state and federal authorities that created and protected a racist social and political order.

[Alex Ford · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The book, as all by Noll, is superb. Very well researched and argued. Absolutely worth the time.

The reader, however, has several major, notable mispronunciations. Understandable still, but *very* distracting and unprofessional.