The Methodist Unification: Christianity and the Politics of Race in the Jim Crow Era

The Methodist Unification focuses on the efforts among the Southern and Northern Methodist churches to create a unified national Methodist church and how their plan for unification came to institutionalize racism and segregation in unprecedented ways. How did these Methodists conceive of what they had just formed as "united" when members in the church body were racially divided?
Moving the history of racial segregation among Christians beyond a simplistic narrative of racism, Davis shows that Methodists in the early 20th century - including some high-profile African American clergy - argued publicly against "social equality" of the races, and thus contributed to the widely held belief that mixing the races would lead to interracial marriages and threaten the social order of American society.
The Methodist Unification illuminates the religious culture of Methodism, Methodists' self-identification as the primary carriers of "American Christian Civilization," and their influence on the crystallization of whiteness during the Jim Crow Era as a legal category and cultural symbol.

Morris L. Davis is Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity and Wesleyan/Methodist Studies at Drew University.