Patriotism Black and White: The Color of American Exceptionalism

by Nichole R. Phillips

Overview

American civil religion unifies the nation's culture, regulates national emotions, and fosters a storied national identity. American civil religion celebrates the nation's founding documents, holidays, presidents, martyrs and, above all, those who died in its wars.

Patriotism Black and White investigates the relationship between patriotism and civil religion in a politically populist community comprised of black and white evangelicals in rural Tennessee. By measuring the effort to remember national sacrifice, Patriotism Black and White probes deeply into how patriotism funds civil religion in light of two changes to America—the election of its first Black president and the initiation of a modern, religiously inspired war.

Based on her four years of ethnographic research, Nichole Phillips discovers that both black and white evangelicals feel marginalized and isolated from the rest of the country. Bound by regional identity, both groups respond similarly to these drastic changes. Black and white constituents continue to express patriotism and embrace a robust national identity. Despite the commonality of being rural and southern, Phillips' study reveals that racial experiences are markers for distinguishable responses to radical social change. As Phillips shows, racial identity led to differing responses to the War on Terror and the Obama administration, and thus to a crisis in American national identity, opening the door to new nativistic and triumphalist interpretations of American exceptionalism. It is through this door that Phillips takes readers in Patriotism Black and White.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481309578
Publisher:	Baylor University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2018
Pages:	388
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.36(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Nichole R. Phillips is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Religion, and Culture at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

What People are Saying About This

R. Drew Smith

An intriguing study of religion, race, and nationalism within rural America, especially at a time when these matters are on such broad display.

Jeffrey Williams

Nichole Phillips provides a wonderfully nuanced understanding of the contemporary dynamics of public theology, civil religion, and national identities among rural evangelicals in the United States. Taking seriously the shared and diverging perspectives of black and white Americans, Nichole Phillips thoughtfully mines what notions of service to country, sacrifice, and nationalism mean to diverse rural dwellers. In the process, she uncovers how a ‘politics of death’ shapes the triumphalism and nativism so characteristic of current forms of nationalism while offering important insight into a corrective for an American exceptionalism too long used to sacralize domination and exclusion. The book will surely generate robust conversation about the content, let alone the viability, of exceptionalism as a category to describe national identity in contemporary public discourse.

Marla Frederick

At a time when black and white Christians seem inherently divided on matters of faith, race, and nation, Nichole Phillips’ ethnography helps us to understand not only the ties that bind a small rural community, like military sacrifice and economic disenchantment, but also how social fissures experienced along racial fault lines consistently challenge the notion of a shared civil religion and national identity.

Editorial Reviews

Phillips deserves much credit for forcing a sociological reckoning with race and American civil religion. Patriotism Black and White demonstrates the racial shortcomings of our previous scholarship and provides a roadmap for further study of evangelicals and their interpretations of what it means to be an 'American.'

Journal of Church and State - Mary Beth S. Matthew

Patriotism Black and White is an interesting ethnographic study of a community in rural Tennessee. It compares rural black and white evangelicals and feelings about faith and patriotism in the United States using 9/11 and the election of Barack Obama as backdrops. Standing on four years of research, this book makes the case that America's national identity crisis relies on a 'nativistic and triumphalistic' American exceptionalism.

Tamelyn N. Tucker-Worgs