The system of dehumanization through the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery drew upon racism as its economic and religious rationale. White Protestants, who predominated among the earliest white settlers, developed their theology and social ethics in a concretized context of Black subjugation. The vast majority of the enslaved, exposed to Protestantism in British North America, never abandoned sensibilities derived from their African religious background. Postbellum and twentieth-century society saw a growth in missions, Social Gospel work, church-building, the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, activism and justice movements, and political involvement among Black Christians – often resisted by white Christians every step of the way. Today’s Black church increasingly identifies with the Black Lives Matter movement and the importance of critical race theory, which posits that racism pervades sacred and secular structures and systems in American society.

Eric Gardner’s “Reconstructing the Rhetoric of AME Ministry” begins to consider how a group long crucial to Black print – ministers and church activists – adapted religious rhetoric after the Civil War and specifically reached into militaristic language in ways that allowed Black writers and readers to think about national and local citizenship, church engagement, the mission and meaning of the Civil War, the continuing violence surrounding many Black lives, and Black print within the larger arena of Black faith. Initially anchored in two key books published early in Reconstruction by major AME figures, Bishop Daniel Payne’s The Semi-Centenary and the Retrospection of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Benjamin Tucker Tanner’s An Apology for African Methodism, the essay broadens to consider how such rhetorics reached into texts such as Harper’s serialized Recorder novel Sowing and Reaping and Henry McNeal Turner’s eulogy to Charles Sumner.