Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans examines a difficult chapter in American religious history: the story of race prejudice in American Christianity. Focusing on the largest city in the late-nineteenth-century South, it explores the relationship between churches--black and white, Protestant and Catholic--and the emergence of the Jim Crow laws, statutes that created a racial caste system in the American South. The book fills a gap in the scholarship on religion and race in the crucial decades between the end of Reconstruction and the eve of the Civil Rights movement.

Drawing on a range of local and personal accounts from the post-Reconstruction period, newspapers, and church records, Bennett's analysis challenges the assumption that churches fell into fixed patterns of segregation without a fight. In sacred no less than secular spheres, establishing Jim Crow constituted a long, slow, and complicated journey that extended well into the twentieth century.

Churches remained a source of hope and a means of resistance against segregation, rather than a retreat from racial oppression. Especially in the decade after Reconstruction, churches offered the possibility of creating a common identity that privileged religious over racial status, a pattern that black church members hoped would transfer to a national American identity transcending racial differences. Religion thus becomes a lens to reconsider patterns for racial interaction throughout Southern society. By tracing the contours of that hopeful yet ultimately tragic journey, this book reveals the complex and mutually influential relationship between church and society in the American South, placing churches at the center of the nation's racial struggles.

James B. Bennett is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University, where he has taught since 2002. Prior to that, he was the Reach for Excellence Assistant Professor of Honors at the University of Oklahoma. From 2015 to 2020, he also served as Associate Provost for Undergraduate Studies at Santa Clara University. 

He received his PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University in 1999 and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Center for Religion and Democracy at the University of Virginia and the Center for Religion and American Life at Yale University.

Jim Bennett is the author of Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton University Press, 2005). His research presentations and publications have explored the intersections of religion and race in the United States, conflicts within American Christianity, religion in the American West, and most recently, new religious movements. His work has appeared in Religion and American Culture and Theology Today, as well as in several edited volumes. 

His current research project is a study of the Anticult Movement in the United States during the second half of the twentieth-century. He is a mentor for the 2019-2020 cohort of Young Scholars in American Religion at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI, where he was a Young Scholar in the 2004-2005 cohort. He is also a co-founder of the Religion in the American West unit of the American Academy of Religion and started the Bay Area American Religion Group.

Source: University of Virginia - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture