Constructing Race and Christian Identity in Reconstruction-Era Southern Methodism

Amid the uncertainties of black civil and political rights in the post-emancipation South, many black
Protestants defended their equal citizenship by appealing to a shared Christian identity with white
southerners. Religious identity appeared a more mutable category than racial identity in these years,
and African Americans crafted arguments for their Christian citizenship that linked racial and religious
identity and that insisted that white southerners’ Christian duty involved defending black citizenship.
White southerners contested these claims with their own version of Christian citizenship that linked
racial, gender, and religious identity to efforts to circumvent black political rights.
This paper reinterprets the relationship between the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) and the
Methodist Episcopal Church, South, (MECS) in the Reconstruction South as a case study for how
arguments about Christian citizenship redefined blackness and whiteness after emancipation. Scholars
have treated the relationship between these two groups as a simple story of white paternalism and
black accommodation, but I suggest that this relationship could be understood instead as an important
space where racial, religious, and political identity was constructed. CME leaders were the black
Christians with whom white southern Methodists had the closest and most significant interactions as coreligionists. As CME leaders pushed MECS clergy and laypeople to recognize them both as an
independent denomination and as faithful Methodists, they helped redefine white, black, and Christian
identity during Reconstruction.