The Methodist Unification

Book excerpt: “A ground-breaking analysis of the intertwined political, racial, and religious dynamics” in the early twentieth century Methodist Church (Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, United Theological Seminary, Dayton Ohio). In 1939, America’s three major Methodist Churches sent delegates to Kansas City, Missouri, for what they called the Uniting Conference. They formed the largest, and arguably the most powerful, Protestant church in the country. Yet this newly “unified” denomination was segregated to its core. In The Methodist Unification, Morris L. Davis examines this unification process, and how it came to institutionalize racism and segregation in unprecedented ways. Davis shows that Methodists in the early twentieth century—including high-profile African American clergy—were very much against integration. Many feared 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.