This book explores the life and ideas of Hilary Teage, a Baptist pastor, merchant, statesman, and newspaper editor. Through both his actions and writings, Teage tirelessly promoted Christianity, rationalism, and republican government.

This book explores the life and ideas of Hilary Teage, a Baptist pastor, merchant, statesman, and newspaper editor. A native of Virginia, Teage applied his many talents and considerable energies to building Liberia, the first republic in Africa. Although long ignored, he produced an engaging and prodigious range of poems, personality profiles, ethnographic articles, and policy papers.Through both his actions and writings, Teage tirelessly promoted Christianity, rationalism, and republican government. His abiding obsession was achieving and sustaining black self-government as a means by which the long-degraded children of Africa could be animated, regenerated, and redeemed. This passion was derived from his exposure to degradation in the United States and reinforced by the horrors of the slave trade, which were still evident in West African societies in the early nineteenth century. Consequently, he became a major and early exponent of "black nationalism" several decades before its golden age.Although republicanism, Protestantism, and black nationalism have constituted enduring features of African-American thought, the writings of Hilary Teage present one of the earliest intellectual integrations of these previously disparate elements.

The Prodigal Republican chronicles the historic relationship between blacks, Democrats, and Republicans. It is based on three topics: voting your values, family leadership, and Christian faith, all geared toward strengthening the American family generally and the black family in particular. The Prodigal Republican encourages everyone to return to core values by being self-reliant and realizing that government aid is never a pathway to prosperity; by promoting the sanctity of human life; and by favoring traditional marriage to perpetuate humanity. The Prodigal Republican is a guide to strengthen the family through a common-sense approach by avoiding teen pregnancy before marriage, graduating from high school and university or trade school, considering marriage, and having a work ethic. The Prodigal Republican makes a case for Christians to actively engage in the political process. Christians are called to engage in the political process in order to elect godly leaders and to consequently impact the community with their Judeo-Christian values.

Born in Connecticut, Lemuel Haynes was first an indentured servant, then a soldier in the Continental Army, and, in 1785, an ordained congregational minister. Haynes's writings constitute the fullest record of a black man's religion, social thought, and opposition to slavery in the late-18th and early-19th century. Drawing on both published and rare unpublished sources, John Saillant here offers the first comprehensive study of Haynes and his thought.

During the revolutionary age and in the early republic, when racial ideologies were evolving and slavery expanding, some northern blacks surprisingly came to identify very strongly with the American cause and to take pride in calling themselves American. In this intriguing study, Rita Roberts explores this phenomenon and offers an in-depth examination of the intellectual underpinnings of antebellum black activists. She shows how conversion to Christianity led a significant and influential population of northern blacks to view the developing American republic and their place in the new nation through the lens of evangelicalism. American identity, therefore, even the formation of an African ethnic community and later an African American identity, developed within the evangelical and republican ideals of the revolutionary age. Evangelical values, Roberts contends, exerted a strong influence on the strategies of northern black reformist activities, specifically abolition, anti-racism, and black community development. The activists and reformers' commitment to the United States and firm determination to make the country live up to its national principles hinged on their continued faith in the possibility of the collective transformation of all Americans. The people of the United States -- both black and white -- they believed, would become a new citizenry, distinct from any population in the world because of their commitment to the tenets of the Christian republican faith. Roberts explores the process by which a collective identity formed among northern free blacks and notes the ways in which ministers and other leaders established their African identity through an emphasis on shared oppression. She shows why, in spite of slavery's expansion in the 1820s and 1830s, northern blacks demonstrated more, not less, commitment to the nation. Roberts then examines the Christian influence on racial theories of some of the major abolitionist figures of the antebellum era, including Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and especially James McCune Smith, and reveals how activists' sense of their American identity waned with the intensity of American racism and the passage of laws that further protected slavery in the 1850s. But the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation, she explains, renewed hope that America would soon become a free and equal nation. Impeccably researched, Evangelicalism and the Politics of Reform in Northern Black Thought, 1776--1863 offers an innovative look at slavery, abolition, and African American history.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Book By championing the ideals of independence, evangelism, and conservism, the Southern Baptist Covention (SBC) has grown into the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The Convention's mass democratic form of church government, its influential annual meetings, and its sheer size have made it a barometer for Southern political and cultural shift. Its most recent shift has been starboard-toward fundamentalism and Republicanism. While the Convention once ofered a happy home to Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and church-state separationists, in the past two decades the SBC has become an uncomfortable institution for Democrats, progressive theologians, and other moderate voices. Current SBC member-heroes include Senators Trent Lott and Jesse Helms. Despite this seeming marginalization, Southern Baptist politicians have grown from political obscurity to occupying the four highest positions in the constitutional order of succesion to the presidency. President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Senate President pro-tempore Strom Thurmond, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich are all Southern Baptists. In its emerging Republicanism, the SBC has taken on characteristics of its more active fellow travelers in the Christian Right, forging alliances with former enemies (African Americans amd Roman Catholics), playing presidential politics, establishing a Washington lobbying presence, working the political grassroots, and declaring war on Walt Disney. Each of these missions has been accomplished with calculating political precision. The Rise of Baptist Republicanism traces the Republicanization of the SBC's Republicanism in the context of the rise of the Fundamentalist Right and the emergence of a Republican majority in the South. Describing the SBC's political roots, Oran P. Smith contrasts Baptist Republicans with the rest of the Christian Right while revealing the theological, cultural, and historical factors which have made Southern Baptists receptive to Republican/Fundamentalist Right influences. The book is a must read for anyone wishing to understand the intersection of religion and politics in America today.