Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law

In this fascinating cultural history of interracial marriage and its legal regulation in the United States, Fay Botham argues that religion — specifically, Protestant and Catholic beliefs about marriage and race — had a significant effect on legal decisions concerning miscegenation and marriage in the century following the Civil War. She contends that the white southern Protestant notion that God “dispersed” the races and the American Catholic emphasis on human unity and common origins poin...