Noll, long of Wheaton College in Illinois and more recently of the University of Notre Dame (where I spent a semester eons ago), puts religion at the heart of his book, God and Race in American Politics. Noll argues that religion and the various economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic forces it interacts or intersects with, particularly race, have been central to American political history, American political culture, and American life since the beginning of the United States.
Noll takes a chronological approach to how religion and race have, to use a word that has become common in academia these days, intersected and been central to American political culture. He argues that before the Civil War religion, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant religion, was the civil religion or civic religion that gave Americans a common identity and held American society together. The Civil War, he rightly notes, split America’s churches apart just as it split America itself apart over the issue of slavery.
After the Civil War, Noll argues, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant public religion was replaced by a more generalised civil religion, a civic religion that united the divided American North and South in the era after Reconstruction. This new civic or public religion united Americans around notions of America’s choosiness and America' messianic destiny. It was a civil religion, says Noll, a civic religion in which race was elided, elided because those opposed to slavery saw race in abstract terms and assumed that once slavery was ended the problem of race in the United States was once and for all solved. It wasn’t, of course, as Noll and as subsequent history reminds us.
While Whites in the North, claims Noll, consciously or unconsciously swept race under the carpet so to speak and made their peace in a variety of ways with Jim Crow racial apartheid in the South, a space simultaneously opened up for Blacks particularly in the Black church, and, by extension, in Black communities. Black Christianity gave Black churches important leaders and it provided a space for a prophetic reading of Christianity which placed racial inequality at the heart of its prophetic calls for racial justice. In the process, Noll argues, Black Christianity and its friends in the White community laid the groundwork for a civil rights movement that eventually united many Blacks and many Whites in an effort to bring about an end to racial inequality. In time this civil right movement had an impact on American politics in the form of a civil rights act, a voting rights act, and equal opportunity legislation, and led to a host of other civil rights movements including those for women and gays (all things that are now under threat in Trumerica).
The civil rights movement also, as Noll argues, gave rise to a White evangelical and largely White conservative backlash. It was, paradoxically, aided and abetted, Noll notes, by the end of Jim Crow. The death of Jim Crow enabled Southern evangelical Christianity to shed its perceived links and ties to racism and spread out from the South into other parts of the US in particular the Midwest and the Intermountain West and even to Southern California. In the process the civil religion that was hegemonic in the post-Civil War era split apart giving rise to two and perhaps more civil religions at cold war and sometimes even hot war with each other, a split that is clearly evident today.
Noll ends his book ends with the election of George Walker Bush in 2004. In a final chapter he offers a moderate Calvinist reflection on the human condition arguing that while humans are fallible they also can change their worlds for the better. In time, Noll opines, he hopes that America can once and for all come to grips with and overcome the racism that remains central in American political culture and in American life.
Though Noll ends his book with a message of hope it is clear that America is once again deeply divided, perhaps as deeply divided as it was prior to the Civl War. At present, as Heather Cox Richardson notes in her book How the South Won the Civil War the South, and more specifically the South's states rights ideology and fear of big government ideology, has, at least for the moment, won the civil war that the US has been fighting in cold and hot form since the beginning of its existence. Whether the Southern states rights ideology (an ideology that has no problem rationalising the use of the federal or local governments to send the military to California or overturn legislation passed by, for instance, the Austin city council), and anti-big government ideology (an ideology that has no trouble rationalising using the paternalistic nanny state to forward their ideological agenda) which is, at least ostensibly, central to the ideological culture of Trump and his cult which is transforming American political culture as I write, has won the war or has won simply won the latest battle in the seemingly never ending American culture wars, is an open question. The question of whether the Trumpian faith will prove any more lasting than the WASP civil religion or the civil religion that was hegemonic in the US from the Great Depression to Richard Nixon awaits a future social scientist and a future historian to answer that question.
While Noll argues that religion and race have been the forces around which American politics and American culture circles—the election of Trump seems to suggest he is at least kind of right—he does recognise that at times other economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic forces are important and even hegemonic in American political culture. In this context it is important to remember that the Trumpies, the latest of American religious and secular theocrats, may play with race and religion but they also claim to be proponents of free enterprise and individualism as well as defenders of traditional values, the traditional family, and traditional notions of sex (it is, of course, rather hilarious in this context that Trump has been married multiple times and engaged in several extra-marital affairs, is it not, but then humans are well known for their hypocrisies), notions that are often allied with religion. As with states rights, the Trump cult may officially defend the gospel of free enterprise individualism but Trump and his sometimes buddy Elon Musk are some of the biggest welfare queens that I know of.
Whether Noll’s admission that factors other than religion and race have been and are central to American political culture undermines his argument is debatable. What is clear is that religion, a cultural factor, has long been central to American life and American culture along with a host of other cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographical factors, is an important factor in American political culture and American life today. It is likely to remain so for some time though the growth of nones, those with no religion, in America over the last fifty years or so is also worth watching
