ABSTRACT

Wherever race appears in American political history, religion is never far away. The history of religion in the United States is very much a story about race, and the corollary is also true: race in American political development has been centrally, not peripherally, related to religion. As in other frontier outposts of liberal capitalist expansionism, American categories of race and religion were constructed in relationship to one another—indeed, have fundamentally co-constituted each other. Together they have shaped the politics of labor, nation building, organizing, and citizenship (Fredrickson 2002). Also as belief systems, sources of identity, power structures, and bases for community, religion and race have overlapped and often been deeply enmeshed.