Notes Preface 1. The word heathen has a complex etymological history. Heathen has most frequently denoted “irreligious,” “uncultured,” and “uncivilized”; its mean- ings have not necessarily assumed a religious context. My use of the word reflects its deployment in the context of European colonization and, in light of the primary sources examined in this study, chiefly reflects its meaning “non- Christian.” It is true that even during colonization (including the nineteenth century), heathen connoted primitivism or cultural backwardness. Its primary referent, however, was the figure of the non-Christian. 1 The People(-ing) of God 1. I use the term Israelitic to indicate contemporary appropriations of “Israelite”—being people of God—as represented in the Israelite narrative of election. Only the bygone, ancient society is appropriately termed “Israelite.” But contemporary peoples, through participating in an idea of identity, may be “Israelitic.” 2. Homi Bhabha’s description of narrative knowledge has become very important for understanding how popular narratives constitute “knowledge” and organ- ize 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). 3. See Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 4. Schwartz, The Curse of Cain; Martin Marty, Modern American Religion, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 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 136 Notes 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. 5. Perry Miller, The New England Mind, 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 6. 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). 7. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones, 4. These writers by and large argue that African American Christianity more consistently represented the idea of man- umission and social freedom associated with the Israelitic theme of Exodus because Black Christianity assumed a decidedly antislavery, antiracist stance. The same was not generally true of white religionists. 8. Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 143–153. 9. 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). 10. Glaude, 75, 76, 81. 11. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982). 12. 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 prima- rily from making performative whiteness the normative category for explaining social circumstances that comprise many peoples and a variety of conflicts. 13. Among theologians, Anthony Pinn has produced a unique response to the normalization of Christian identity in Varieties of African American Notes 137 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). 14. 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). 15. 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 Turn-of-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). 16. Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1999). 17. 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 phe- nomenon and thus as atypical of Northern religion. Paul Griffin has devoted a 138 Notes 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. 18. 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 proj- ect, 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). 19. See Peterson, Ham and Japheth; Mathews, Religion in the Old South; Hill, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks; Wilson, Baptized in Blood. 20. Griffin, Seeds of Racism (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1999). 21. George M. Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Inequality (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University