Description
Book SynopsisDerek Chang chronicles the American Baptist Home Mission Society's efforts to evangelize among African Americans in the South and Chinese migrants on the Pacific Coast during the late nineteenth century. He brings together for the first time African American and Chinese American religious histories in an innovative comparative approach.
Trade Review"Focusing on freedpeople in and around Raleigh, North Carolina and Chinese immigrants in Portland, Oregon, Chang's comparative research and theoretical reflections shed fresh light on the subject of post-war religious reconstruction." *
Journal of American History *
"Ambitious and erudite. . . . It is rare to find a work of such bold comparison within the United States or to find a single work of history that attempts to write the stories of two such disparate regions. There is much to be gained from this approach, and Chang produces many lucid insights into the linkages between racial formation and a national form of evangelicalism." *
American Historical Review *
"In this rich account of African Americans and Chinese immigrants who invested their hopes and dreams in the Baptist faith and of the white Baptist missionaries whose goal was to embrace and make proper citizens of them, Derek Chang shows how closely entwined have been the forces of racism and anti-racism in U.S. history. A powerful contribution to our understanding of citizenship and nationalism." * Mary A. Renda, author of
Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 *
"
Citizens of a Christian Nation is an imaginative comparative study of race and nationalism that integrates histories generally interpreted as distinct. Even as Baptist missionaries' rhetoric and practice of racial uplift and inclusion created opportunities for Chinese and African Americans and challenged 'un-Christian' white supremacists, Derek Chang argues, the missionaries' inclusive impulses ironically reproduced racial divides. It is a revelatory analysis of the enduring significance of race, even or especially among those professing to work toward racial equality." * Moon-Ho Jung, author of
Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Evangelical Christianity and the Problem of Difference
1. "A Grand and Awful Time"
2. Faith and Hope
3. Callings
4. Congregation
5. Conflict and Community
Conclusion
Transformations
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
