Skidmore College Creative Matter English Faculty Scholarship English 1998 Someone's in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall Mason Stokes Skidmore College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://creativematter.skidmore.edu/eng_fac_schol Part of the American Studies Commons, and the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons Recommended Citation Stokes, Mason. “Someone's in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall.” American Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 4, 1998, pp. 718–744. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at Creative Matter. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Creative Matter. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Someone's in the Garden with Eve: Race, Religion, and the American Fall MASON STOKES Skidmore College America's so-called "Negro problem" has always been, at the same time, a theological problem. W. E. B. Du Bois put this clearly when, in 1913, he called the church "the strongest seat of racial and color prejudice."' "The Negro problem is the test of the church," he wrote, and since American Christianity "was the bulwark of American sla- very," it is hard to imagine that Du Bois was very optimistic about the outcome of this test.2 He does allow himself a touch of optimism, however, when, in the same essay, he muses upon the historical interrelation between religious racism and American science. "Even the rock of 'Science,'" he writes, "on which the white church rested with such beautiful faith, hoping to prove the majority of humanity inhuman, ..