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Doctrine and Race examines the history of African American Baptists and Methodists of the early twentieth century and their struggle for equality in the context of white Protestant fundamentalism.

By presenting African American Protestantism in the context of white Protestant fundamentalism, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars demonstrates that African American Protestants were acutely aware of the manner in which white Christianity operated and how they could use that knowledge to justify social change. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s study scrutinizes how white fundamentalists wrote blacks out of their definition of fundamentalism and how blacks constructed a definition of Christianity that had, at its core, an intrinsic belief in racial equality. In doing so, this volume challenges the prevailing scholarly argument that fundamentalism was either a doctrinal debate or an antimodernist force. Instead, it was a constantly shifting set of priorities for different groups at different times.
 
A number of African American theologians and clergy identified with many of the doctrinal tenets of the fundamentalism of their white counterparts, but African Americans were excluded from full fellowship with the fundamentalists because of their race. Moreover, these scholars and pastors did not limit themselves to traditional evangelical doctrine but embraced progressive theological concepts, such as the Social Gospel, to help them achieve racial equality. Nonetheless, they identified other forward-looking theological views, such as modernism, as threats to “true” Christianity.
 
Mathews demonstrates that, although traditional portraits of “the black church” have provided the illusion of a singular unified organization, black evangelical leaders debated passionately among themselves as they sought to preserve select aspects of the culture around them while rejecting others. The picture that emerges from this research creates a richer, more profound understanding of African American denominations as they struggled to contend with a white American society that saw them as inferior.
 
Doctrine and Race melds American religious history and race studies in innovative and compelling ways, highlighting the remarkable and rich complexity that attended to the development of African American Protestant movements.

The story of a Social Gospel leader who brought faith, activism, and social justice into the heart of modern American politics.

Radical religious and political leader Harry F. Ward started life quietly enough in a family of Methodist shopkeepers and butchers in London. But his relentless pursuit of social justice would lead him to the United States and a long career of religious activism. Ward served as professor of Christian ethics at the Union Theological Seminary and chairman of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union for two decades. He also became a leader in labor groups, Protestant activist organizations, and New York intellectual circles. 

David Duke builds his comprehensive story of this fiery leader from extensive archival sources, including FBI files and private correspondence, sermons, class notes, and other unpublished material. Duke skillfully charts Ward's rise from an idealistic Methodist minister in a Chicago stockyard parish to a prominent national religious leader and influential political figure. Ultimately, Ward's lifelong attempt to synthesize the beliefs of Jesus and Marx and his role as an admirer of the Soviet Union put him on a collision course with McCarthyism in Cold War America. Viewed by some as a prophet and by others as a heretic, traitor, and communist, Ward became increasingly marginalized as he stubbornly maintained his radical positions. Even in his own circle, he went from being a figure of unquestioned integrity who eloquently spoke his convictions to a tragically short-sighted idealogue whose unwavering pro-Soviet agenda blinded him to the horrors of Stalinist oppression. 

Harry Ward's long, colorful career intersected nearly every intellectual current in American culture for more than a half century. This biography will be important for scholars of American religious history, students of liberalism and politics, social Christians, and general readers who enjoy a compelling tour into the private and public lives of notable figures of history. 
 

The life of William Apess (1798–1839), a Pequot Indian, Methodist preacher, and widely celebrated writer, provides a lens through which to comprehend the complex dynamics of indigenous survival and resistance in the era of America's early nationhood. Apess's life intersects with multiple aspects of indigenous identity and existence in this period, including indentured servitude, slavery, service in the armed forces, syncretic engagements with Christian spirituality, and Native struggles for political and cultural autonomy. Even more, Apess offers a powerful and provocative voice for the persistence of Native presence in a time and place that was long supposed to have settled its “Indian question” in favor of extinction.

Through meticulous archival research, close readings of Apess's key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about his largely enigmatic life, Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of this singular Native American figure. This new biography will sit alongside Apess's own writing as vital reading for those interested in early America and indigeneity.

Examines how religious belief reshaped concepts of gender during the New South period that took place from 1877 to 1915 in ways that continue to manifest today

Modernity remade much of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was nowhere more transformational than in the American South. In the wake of the Civil War, the region not only formed new legal, financial, and social structures, but citizens of the South also faced disorienting uncertainty about personal identity and even gender itself. Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him traces the changes in southern gender roles during the New South period of 1877–1915 and demonstrates that religion is the key to perceiving how constructions of gender changed.

The Civil War cleaved southerners from the culture they had developed organically during antebellum decades, raising questions that went to the very heart of selfhood: What does it mean to be a man? How does a good woman behave? Unmoored from traditional anchors of gender, family, and race, southerners sought guidance from familiar sources: scripture and their churches. In Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him, Colin Chapell traces how concepts of gender evolved within the majority Baptist and Methodist denominations as compared to the more fluid and innovative Holiness movement.

Grounded in expansive research into the archives of the Southern Baptist Convention; Methodist Episcopal Church, South; and the Holiness movement, Chapell’s writing is also enlivened by a rich trove of primary sources: diaries, sermons, personal correspondence, published works, and unpublished memoirs. Chapell artfully contrasts the majority Baptist and Methodist view of gender with the relatively radical approaches of the emerging Holiness movement, thereby bringing into focus how subtle differences in belief gave rise to significantly different ideas of gender roles.

Scholars have explored class, race, and politics as factors that contributed to contemporary southern identity, and Chapell restores theology to its intuitive place at the center of southern identity. Probing and illuminating, Ye That Are Men Now Serve Him offers much of interest to scholars and readers of the South, southern history, and religion.