Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

Fulfill Thy Ministry

Three Episcopal Clergymen, Race, and the Civil War Era

Av Loren B. Mead, J. Michael Martinez

1749 kr

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Beskrivning

Race and enslavement were the major issues confronting the Christian Church in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. During the antebellum era, churches debated whether their scriptures condoned race-based slavery.To understand better how these Southern churches evaluated and made their choices in postwar nineteenth-century America, this book examines the lives and careers of three white Episcopal clergy from South Carolina: Peter Fayssoux Stevens (1830-1910), A. Toomer Porter (1828-1902), and William Porcher DuBose (1836-1918). These men present illuminating case studies because they were contemporaries and their early lives were remarkably similar, yet their responses to how the Southern church welcomed or rejected freed Blacks significantly diverged following the Civil War.Each of these representative figures was born in antebellum South Carolina, reared in the Protestant Episcopal Church (PEC), and called to ministry. Porter and DuBose hailed from families made wealthy by the labor of enslaved persons. When war erupted in 1861, each man served the Confederate States of America (CSA). After the war, however, their attitudes toward race sharply differed.Their responses to the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow can be understood within the context of the men’s lives and careers. That three white South Carolina Episcopalians born within a decade of each other would pursue divergent paths in subsequent years highlights the contradictions, complexities, and hypocrisies of faith and racial attitudes in the nineteenth-century Protestant church.The book contributes to Southern religious history, church history, and American religious history. Studying these figures tells a larger story about how the Christian church, and the South, understood faith commitments in the context of social and religious racism—racism that, sadly, remains in evidence in the church today.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum: 2026-04-30
Mått: 150 x 230 x 24 mm
Vikt: 620 g
Format: Inbunden
Språk: Engelska
Antal sidor: 328
Förlag: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9798881803544

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Mer information

Loren B. Mead (1930-2018) was a prominent Episcopal priest and prolific author and a native of Florence, South Carolina.J. Michael Martinez is the author or editor of 20 books on American history and law including the Rowman & Littlefield titles A Long Dark Night: Race in America from Jim Crow to World War II (2016), Terrorist Attacks on American Soil: From the Civil War Era to the Present (2012), Coming for to Carry Me Home: Race in America from Abolitionism to Jim Crow (2011), and Carpetbaggers, Cavalry, and the Ku Klux, Klan: Exposing the Invisible Empire during Reconstruction (2007). He teaches political science at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

Recensioner i media

The late Rev. Loren B. Mead and the historian J. Michael Martinez have given us an invaluable composite biography of three white Episcopal priests from South Carolina who, after their faithful service to the Confederate military and ordination in the Protestant Episcopal Church, followed distinctly different paths in their post-emancipation responses to the new racial order and the ways and means of white supremacy. Looking from afar, we might expect three sons of the ruling class to share a rigorous fealty to anti-Black positions in the tumultuous era of Reconstruction in South Carolina. However, as the authors’ careful portraiture reveals, the priests—Peter Fayssoux Stevens, Anthony Toomer Porter, and William Porcher DuBose—varied in religious temperament and commitment to the pastoral mission of the Episcopal Church, which in turn led to important differences in their thoughts and actions regarding freed people’s place in the post-war ecclesial and social order. Even if none challenged the most basic expectations of white racial supremacy, only DuBose held strong to an anti-Black vision of the Church. The more grounded ministries of Stevens and Porter, in varying degrees, either sought room in the Church for Black South Carolinians or endeavored to uplift freed people through education. Each biography of an understudied figure is valuable in itself, but the inspired decision to bind them into one book yields the important insight that, even among white conservatives and in the most conservative of white Southern churches, the emerging racial order of the New South was not foreordained and did not go unchallenged.

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