Book Reviews

Summary: A history of Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina arguing for the continuation of segregation for theological reasons. 

I have read a lot of Civil Rights and Civil War/Reconstruction/Jim Crow history. And some of that history, like Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, is trying to be comprehensive, but much of it is telling the history from the side of the abolitionists or the opponents to segregation. The Bible Told Them So is telling an essential part of this history from the side of the segregationists and why they were arguing for the continuation of segregation and how they made that argument. The arguments are so explicit and clear here that it becomes hard to avoid the reality of how in the 1950-70s there was a real fight to “preserve white supremacy.”

The book is structured in five chapters. The first focuses on congregational response to Brown v Board and how many pastors were fired for supporting the ruling. The second chapter looks in more detail at the theological reasoning for the defense of segregation. The third chapter looks at how Baptists and Methodists responded to proposals to integrate their denominational colleges (and pairs nicely with the chapter on college from The Myth of Colorblind Christianity). The fourth chapter is about the rise of colorblind language and justifications for segregation in the face of the larger culture’s rejection of segregationist rhetoric. And the final chapter is about the rise of private schools and how those schools were framed, primarily using colorblind rhetoric but for segregationists reasons.

I think the arc of this history is essential. There is a movement from overt segregationist language, theologically informed and undergirded, to alternate public rhetoric while maintaining the private communication, to a colorblind public and private rhetoric without a change in practice, to a denial that the earlier segregationist language was ever used. In many ways, I think this builds on the work on the history of memory from David Blight and others about how there is an intentional misremembering. One of the parts of this story that was new to me was how early colorblind language was drawn directly from the Plessy v Ferguson decision.

“The phrases “natural affinities,” “mutual appreciation of merits,” and “voluntary association of individuals” were not Workman’s. They were the words of Henry Brown Billings, words the Supreme Court in 1896 used to deny Homer Plessy–and all who shared his skin color–ful equity as American citizens…At first blush, Workman’s letter seemed to gesture at a new era of white Christians’ acceptance of racial integration. But by appropriating word for word a line from the Supreme Court case that gave Jim Crow legal sanction in the South for nearly seven decades, Workman’s letter also reveals ways in which the new language of colorblindness had its roots in the desire of segregation. Understanding the historical links between colorblindness and segregationist theology reveals a continuity of segregationist Christianity from the 1950s to the 1970s and a perpetuation of racial separatism by white Christians–even unwittingly so–into the decades beyond.”

As expected, I have a lot of highlights, primarily of quotes that need to be read to be believed. You can see my 12 notes and 76 highlights on my Goodreads page.

One of the interesting realities is that arguments, primarily those in the 1950s and early 1960s, included the positive use of the phrase “white supremacy.”

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Summary: A memoir of the ways that beliefs about God impact our social reality and the ways that we can heal. 

There are books that I know will be misread or not picked up because they are judged without being read. I am never sure if the misreading or the prejudicial lack of reading is the bigger problem. I recieved an advance copy of God is a Black Woman from Netgalley. I glanced at reviews on Netgalley when I downloaded it, and sure enough, the standard (my paraphrase), “well, God may not be a white man, but he sure isn’t a Black woman,” was in one of the early reviews. And in response to a tweet, I posted a quote from God is a Black woman, and a person I do not follow argued with me over several tweets, assuring me that Christena Cleveland was publicly no longer a Christian and now advocated Goddess worship. That person had not read God is a Black woman but assured me that their view was accurate based on their reading of social media. I countered that I had read the book written to address these issues and that Cleveland had neither publicly repudiated Christianity nor advocated Goddess worship. But those two interactions, I think, will characterize a lot of potential readers, vague impressions that inaccurately keep them from picking the book up, and a misunderstanding of the book based on a lack of familiarity with the realities of race, gender, and history. As part of the Twitter conversation, the person suggested that no one believes that God is a white male. However, Color of Christ and many other studies show many people believe that God is a white male either explicitly or implicitly. (Four studies on perceptions of God and Race, older study on the importance of images of Black Christ to counter white supremacy)

I am not a close follower of Christena Cleveland, but I have been aware of her work for a while. I read Disunity in Christ, Cleveland’s first book. I was aware that she was a professor at Duke and led the reconciliation study center started initially by Chris Rice. And that she left the school because of her frustrations with racism around the school. I read her essay about leaving, White Devil in Blue, although the article is now behind a paywall.  And I knew that she had gone to France on pilgrimage to visit a number of the Black Madonnas common in France. Knowing those parts of the story meant that I was not walking into the book blind, but I was not familiar with her broader story.

God is a Black Woman is framed as a memoir of that pilgrimage. Like many memoirs, that framing is an organizing structure more than a foundation. The book primarily looks at what she calls ‘whitemalegod’ and ‘fatherskygod’ and how she personally, and our society more generally, has been shaped by the cultural understanding of God as a white male. There are many ways to misunderstand this book if you have not previously grappled with Black or Womanist theology. Angela Parker’s book If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I, which I have read, but I am going to reread before I post on, has an excellent explanation of what Womanist Theology or biblical studies are and why all Christians, not just Black women must grapple with the questions that are raised by Womanist readings of the Bible or Womanist theological reflections.

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Summary: A brief biography of one of the civil rights era’s most important voting rights figures. 

I have known about Fannie Lou Hamer for a while. She was a figure in many histories of the civil rights era and a character in several biographies I have read, but this is the first book I have read primarily about her. I decided to pick it up after listening to an interview with the author on the Pass the Mic podcast and because I needed to use some credits on Audible. It is a brief biography, and the context is very helpful. But I also wanted a bit more. In print, it is just under 140 pages of text. Given that brief length, I wish there were an appendix with the text of several of her speeches. On the other hand, the book is well documented, with more than 30 pages of endnotes and a ten-page index. That high level of documentation is great, but it reads as a very accessible biography.

After the first, each of the chapters opens with a short passage detailing violence against black women. That framing of the book by connecting Hamer with the current civil rights struggle gives context for why we need to pay attention to Fannie Lou Hamer and other relatively unknown figures today.

Traditionally I have used Julia Child as an example of someone that did not start what they are known for until later in life. Julia Child did not take her first cooking class until she was 36. She didn’t start writing her first cookbook until her early 40s and didn’t start her TV show until she was 50. By comparison, when she was six, Fannie Lou Hamer started working cotton fields when she was trapped into a work contract as a sharecropper. She was sterilized without her consent during surgery to remove a tumor as a young woman. Because of this, she was unable to have biological children but did adopt two daughters and raised two additional girls. It was not until her mid-40s that Fannie Lou Hamer started working in civil rights.

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Summary: A theological exploration of the culture led to Stand Your Ground laws. 

Stand Your Ground by Kelly Brown Douglas is on several lists for best book of theology for the 2010s. In addition, it is regularly cited in books I have read that were published since Stand Your Ground came out in 2015. As many contemporary theology books do, part one is a historical and cultural framing of the issue, with part two concentrating on the constructive theological response.

Part one is much more straightforward to discuss. Kelly Brown Douglas charts the development of the Anglo-Saxon myth of exceptionalism from the 1st century Roman Historian Tacitus’s book Germania. The book was not cited much until the Renaissance, when it was common to root ideology in older Roman or Greek ideas. Germany did not solidify into a single ideological, cultural or political identity until fairly late, but Germania was used in the myth-making (as well as with Nazi ideals.) But Germania was also important to the development of Anglo-Saxon identity because early Anglo-Saxons pointed to Germania as the ideal of what Anglo-Saxons came from and could become. The narrative of Anglo-Saxon identity was important to the American founders. This extended quote of Benjamin Franklin that Kelly Brown Douglas quotes is representative of other over Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism.

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians,   French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

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Summary: A legal and historical look at the development of slavery in the US written and oriented toward theonomist leaning Christians. 

I honestly am not sure how to talk about The Problem of Slavery in Christian America.  The history is very good and helpful. But the political and theological bias of the author, primarily coming out in later sections makes it hard to completely recommend the book.

Part One is focused on the judicial and legal history of the development of slavery in the US, and it is excellent. I learned a ton, and I have over a hundred highlights to show how helpful I found this part. The most helpful is the close reading of the legal development of slavery and how that development undercuts some of the Lost Cause historical revisionism about the reality of slavery.

There has been a very long history of Christians opposing slavery, from very early, out of broad concerns about the love of neighbor and the golden rule reasoning and opposition to the cruelty of slave systems. Even though the British Common Law system did allow for slavery, there was a reasonably strict understanding that other Christians could not be enslaved and that limitations to slavery. The American (and Caribbean) development of slavery rejected British laws to be freer to enslave people.

In part, this desire to enslave was a counter to the system of indentured servitude (which was time-limited but still a form of slavery). Indentured servitude was, in many cases (but not all) a voluntary system where a person agreed to enter service for an agreed period in exchange for payment of the passage to America and room and board during the time of service. But indentured service was not producing enough workers at the rates that tobacco planters were willing to pay. Also, once free, indentured servants could become planters and compete with other planters. Indentured service was a type of apprenticeship at its best where a person would learn a trade and be set up for a future career. (Many indentured servants were very much abused, but there was legal recourse in the system even if it was still often a brutal system.)

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Summary: A retelling of civil rights era history noting ways in which traditional framing distorts the history. 

I am very interested in how framing and bias can distort history. Some books I have read that have informed my perspective on this are Battle for Bonhoeffer (about how this works with an individual, not just more extensive history), and Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction by John Fea (which looks at a historical topic and the ways that Christian nationalism, in particular, distorts historical analysis) and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David Blight (which looks at how there was an intentional misremembering at the end of the Civil War to reunify the United States by orienting the US toward a vision of white racial superiority instead of orienting the country toward the rights of newly freed Black citizens.) I have heard about A More Beautiful and Terrible several times, but some quotes from Jamar Tisby in one of his newsletters caused me to pick it up finally.

Once I read for a little while, I looked up some background on the author. Jeanne Theoharis is a political science professor at Brooklyn College. She is the daughter of Athan Theoharis, a historian who specialized in the history of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, and other US intelligence agencies, which is a fascinating background for a father when Jeanne specializes in civil rights history. Liz Theoharis is Jeanne’s sister, a professor at Union Seminary, an ordained minister in the PCUSA, and co-chair of the modern Poor People’s Campaign, along with William Barber. Again, it is essential background to know that Jeanne Theoharis is writing about the use and misuse of civil rights history while her sister is helping to lead one of the most important civil rights organizations that is actively organizing for civil and economic rights. (I also know locally active people in the Poor People’s Campaign.)

Each chapter is about one aspect of the civil rights story and how the traditional framing can distort the way we remember and think about civil rights history. I think this is a reasonable organizational method, but it also leads to some repetition because the chapters have overlapping content.

Chapter one is about desegregation, but instead of telling the story of a Southern Brown v Board, it tells of a failed story of integration in Boston. The Massachusetts legislature passed the Racial Integration Act in 1965, eleven years after Brown. But school boards refused to acknowledge school segregation. Nearly 25 years after the NAACP chapter in Boston created an Education committee and organized around desegregation, there was a federal lawsuit and an order to use bussing to integrate Boston schools and federal supervision of the plan until the late 1980s. Resistance to busing was strong, and White flight reduced the city’s White population. The 1974 Supreme Court case limited the desegregation busing to municipalities, effectively limiting busing and allowing residential segregation and white flight to continue school segregation. Primarily, we think of school desegregation as a success story in the US.

The year 1989 was the high point of school integration, and like in Boston, federal oversight largely had stopped by the late 1980s. Schools have been segregating again so that the likelihood of a Black or Hispanic student going to an 80% or more Black or Hispanic school was roughly the same as in the late 1960s to early 1970s when many districts were only starting their desegregation efforts. As I have said before, the Louisville school district, where my mother spent part of her elementary years (she is a couple of weeks younger than Ruby Bridges), did not desegregate until the school year I was born. School segregation today is different from school segregation in the past. It is not overtly legal for one reason. It is also not complete in the same way. Historically, school segregation was universal; no Black students were in a White segregated school. Today’s schools are technically integrated, but most white students attend majority-white schools, and most minority students attend majority-minority schools. Part of this is that schools are economically isolated and that class and economics have a racial dimension. It is also that neighborhoods are still largely racially segregated because of historic housing patterns. But all of that is background, which gives context to how we tell the story of school desegregation efforts as a hero story.

The second chapter is about how the view of race riots of the 1960s tends to ignore resistance to community organizing that had often gone on for decades before riots. Primarily focusing on LA and Detroit, I learned about the Detroit Great March in 1963, several months before the March on Washington, which had at least 125,000 in attendance (using Wikipedia’s numbers) and maybe as many as 200,000 (using the book’s estimate). When riots are framed as starting out of the blue, instead of contextualizing them within a larger civil rights movement, often a failed one, it further diminishes how civil rights history is a history of many local movements, not just a few big players. The other part of this is that most racial riots in the civil rights and post-civil rights era are in northern or western cities, where civil rights gains were much less tangible. One of the book’s central themes is that while southern racism was more overt, the more subtle racism of the North and West was more likely to be sustained and unchanged.

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Summary: A trio of high school students make their way through growing up, romance, jazz, and racism. 

As I have been reading the Harry Potter books to my kids, I have been reminded that one of the things I do not like about young adult literature is the poor decision-making of real young adults. It is not that only teens make poor decisions, but that part of being a teen is that the consequences of our decisions are opaque to us. What seems like a good idea often isn’t. Still, with less experience of the world, and less capacity for communication and emotion processing, there is also less understanding of how our decisions impact others.

Swing (not a follow-up to Solo as I thought it was) is about three teens. It is primarily told through the voice of Noah, the only child of a couple who also manages a hotel. Noah’s best friend is Walt, who wants to be called Swing. Swing is both obsessed with baseball and jazz. He is not very good at baseball, but he works hard and keeps practicing, trying to get onto the team as a junior. The third member of the trio is Sam, and Noah has been in love with her since the third grade but cannot tell her. Much of the book is about Noah’s attempt to find a way to talk to Sam about his affection for her. Meanwhile, she is dating Cruz, the star baseball player at their high school, who is trying to pressure Sam into sex.

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Summary: An American ex-pat in Berlin becomes an English-speaking guide at Bonhoeffer’s family home. As she encounters the physical spaces of Bonheoffer, she explores the world around her through that lens.

I have no idea who coined the term “Usable History,” and there is likely nuance to the history of that term that I do not know. But as I have spent more time reading biography and memoir the last year, part of what has drawn me is finding “usable history” to help me understand my life.

Laura Fabrychy is the wife of a US diplomat. As a stay-at-home parent in an overseas posting, she has to learn how to manage the responsibilities of a family in a new culture and with a language that she does not understand well. Fabrychy and her family moved to Berlin in the summer of 2016 and spent three years living not far from Bonhoeffer’s family’s home. She had been interested in Bonhoeffer before moving to Berlin. (She has a Master’s in political theology and is working on her Ph.D. in Systematic Theology.) However, after visiting the home several times for herself or bringing visitors, she was asked if she wanted to become a guide for English speakers.

Keys to Bonhoeffer’s Haus is part memoir of her time in Berlin and exploration of culture and what it means to be an ex-pat. It is also an exploration of who Bonhoeffer was and how we can learn from others that can influence our own lives. This is not hagiography or utilitarian “five things we can learn from Bonhoeffer to make our life better,” but an honest grappling of a very human Bonhoeffer. As she attempts to balance family life and the strains of a new culture and language with her interest in Bonhoeffer, she reads several books by and about Bonhoeffer.

One of them, The Battle for Bonhoeffer by Stephen Haynes, explores the use and misuse of Bonhoeffer, a particular problem since Bonhoeffer died so young and interest in his work has so often appropriated part of his life and abandoned other parts. (I am reading A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History right now, which is attempting a similar thing for Civil Rights history.) I am fascinated by how we shape our understanding of the past for current use (also well explored in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory ). Of course, simply repeating history is the first step in understanding. But it is higher-order understanding to interact to bring a fundamental understanding of both history and current reality and to engage the two meaningfully. Part of the reason that books like Battle for Bonhoeffer and A More Beautiful and Terrible history exist is that so often, there is a flat appropriation of history in a way that distorts instead of illuminates. Haynes has a particular disdain for the ways that Eric Metaxes distorts Bonhoeffer for his own purposes, and it is easy to do the same.

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Summary: My least favorite of the books, but with some new reasons when I read it to my kids.

I have been reading the Harry Potter books to my kids. We will do the third one and then wait a while before we tackle the second part of the series, which I think moves from middle grade to YA.

I have long thought that Chamber of Secrets is the weakest book of the series. (spoilers are coming)

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Summary: 49 sermons on Advent from one of the best preachers alive today. 

I have spent a lot of time watching Fleming Rutledge preach on youtube since I discovered her about 5-8 years ago. I am completely serious that I think she is one of the best preachers alive today, and I think many should read her sermon collections or watch her preaching on video.

I started Advent in 2019 as a semi-devotional reading for the Advent season. And it is so worth reading to get the historically accurate vision for what Advent is about. As a low church baptist, my perception was that Advent was a time of preparation for Christmas similar to Lent, where we remember that Christ came to earth 2000 years ago. So there is an aspect of that in Advent, but it is more accurate to say that Advent is a time of preparation for the second coming, not just the first. In other words, it isn’t that Advent is ignoring Christmas, but that part of what we are doing is remembering the first coming as a way of looking forward to the second coming.

the truly radical nature of the Advent promise, which sweeps away cheap comforts and superficial reassurances and, in the midst of the most world-overturning circumstances, still testifies that “Behold, I am coming soon! . . . I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:12, 13).

And because of the focus on the second coming, there is a lot of emphasis in this collection of sermons on judgment. Judgment is not a common theme for Advent or Christmas among my low church evangelical pastors, but it makes sense in the context of what Rutledge is preaching about. She points out the injustice around us and how we can rest in the fact that the second coming will make right the injustice around us, not as a way to gloss over the injustice, but as empowerment for our own work to right injustice. This quote highlights that balance well,

The church is not called to be a “change agent”—God is the agent of change. The Lord of the kosmos has already wrought the Great Exchange in his cross and resurrection, and the life of the people of God is sustained by that mighty enterprise.26 The calling of the church is to place itself where God is already at work. The church lives, therefore, without fear, in faith that the cosmic change of regime has already been accomplished.

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