Ecclesiastical Standoffs, Freed People, and the Rigors of Redemption

Chapter 8 demonstrates that, during Reconstruction, new civil and political liberties for African Americans secured for them the right to worship independently and the means to protect their church property. It also demonstrates that black believers abandoned white-controlled churches in droves in their own schisms, creating their own Baptist and Methodist organizations, and faced down the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan to nurture distinctive faiths that advanced the social, economic, and political prospects of African Americans. After political “Redemption” in 1875, white evangelicals remained ecclesiastically divided. New and delimited understandings of Divine Providence, which prompted evangelicals now to look only to the past for signs of God’s intervention, could no longer provide confident predictions of social and political transformation. This new understanding of the Almighty constituted a key modulation in white evangelical faith arising as a consequence of the schisms and the sectional struggle they helped to spawn.