Description
Book SynopsisThe history of deliverance politics in Anglo-American history contains remarkable moments of achievement, but this is not a story of triumphal progress. Exodus was hotly contested, used by the powerful as well as the weak, and mobilized to support a host of rival causes. By writing themselves into the Protestant history of liberty, African Americans undercut complacent narratives of progress, injecting a powerful sense of unease into the tradition. The argument over who owns the biblical narrative has continued into the twenty-first century. If Barack Obama saw himself as an inheritor of Exodus politics, so too did George W. Bush. Many Christians - and many non-Christians too - remain understandably suspicious of those who read Israel''s history as political paradigm, especially when it underpins religious nationalism. This story is riddled with moral ironies. The Books of Moses could be used to justify anti-black racism and the dispossession of Native peoples as well as freedom from s
Trade ReviewThis book, a tour de force of historical research and cultural analysis, demonstrates that a rhetoric of 'deliverance' grounded in several key biblical texts has been an under-appreciated but vitally important theme of political mobilization in Britain and American from the 16th century to the present. The argument is built on careful analysis of these texts from the Book of Exodus and elsewhere in Scripture, and of their surprisingly broad effect in different historical periods and national circumstances. The effect adds significantly to political understanding of religious history and religious understanding of the political. It is a noteworthy, but also surprisingly timely work. * Mark Noll, author of Protestantism: A Very Short Introduction *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ; Introduction: "Biblical Traditions that Call for Liberation" ; Part I: Reformations, Revolutions, and Political Slavery ; 1. "The Only Parallel": The Puritan Revolution as England's Exodus ; 2. "God's Favourite People": The Revolutions of 1688 and 1776 ; Part II: Abolitionists, African Americans, and Racial Slavery ; 3. "Pretended Votaries of Freedom": The Rise of Protestant Antislavery to 1807 ; 4. "Yours for the Jubilee": The Abolitionists' Scriptural Imagination, 1808-1865 ; 5. "When Israel was in Egyptland": Black Exodus Politics, 1808-1865 ; Part III: Exodus after Slavery ; 6. "I Have Seen the Promised Land": The Persistence of Deliverance Politics, 1865-2008 ; Conclusion: Sacred Texts, Godly Readers, and Historical Change ; Notes ; Bibliography ; Index
