With emancipation, a long battle for equal citizenship began. Bringing together the histories of religion, race, and the South, Elizabeth L. Jemison shows how southerners, black and white, drew on biblical narratives as the basis for very different political imaginaries during and after Reconstruction. Focusing on everyday Protestants in the Mississippi River Valley, Jemison scours their biblical thinking and religious attitudes toward race. She argues that the evangelical groups that dominated this portion of the South shaped contesting visions of black and white rights. Black evangelicals saw the argument for their identities as Christians and as fully endowed citizens supported by their readings of both the Bible and U.S. law. The Bible, as they saw it, prohibited racial hierarchy, and Amendments 13, 14, and 15 advanced equal rights. Countering this, white evangelicals continued to emphasize a hierarchical paternalistic order that, shorn of earlier justifications for placing whites in charge of blacks, now fell into the defense of an increasingly violent white supremacist social order. They defined aspects of Christian identity so as to suppress black equality—even praying, as Jemison documents, for wisdom in how to deny voting rights to blacks. This religious culture has played into remarkably long-lasting patterns of inequality and segregation.

This book challenges the argument that the United States is a Christian nation, and that the American founding and the American Constitution can be linked to a Christian understanding of the state and society. Vincent Rougeau argues that the United States has become an economic empire of consumer citizens, led by elites who seek to secure American political and economic dominance around the world. Freedom and democracy for the oppressed are the public themes put forward to justify this dominance, but the driving force behind American hegemony is the need to sustain economic growth and maintain social peace in the United States. --from publisher description.

'City of God' explores the role of neo-Pentecostal Christian sects in the religious, social & political life of Guatemala. O'Neill examines one such church, looking at how its practices have become acts of citizenship in a new, politically relevant era for Protestantism.

How does being a follower of Christ affect your relationship with government? What do Solomon, Joseph, Nehemiah, Gideon, and other biblical characters teach us about citizenship? Lon Fendall profiles contemporary people who illustrate what it means to be an active Christian citizen and he shares biblical models.