The End of Days

Theology in U.S. history is often misread as metaphor. In this concentrated study of black Protestant leaders in North Carolina, Matthew Harper shows that placing themselves within biblical stories allowed black Protestants to chart their future. Harper does not want us to see the black use of biblical narratives as an abstract illustration of their political choices or economic experiences. He seeks to demonstrate that theology preceded political choice and economic reality. Harper centers African American eschatology, working to explain in each chapter how eschatological expectations foreordained nitty-gritty political decision making. Within the broad frame of theology, eschatology is the most dramatic and variegated narrative form, including within it many different subplots and characters concerned with death, the judgment of individual souls, and the final destiny of humankind. In the most compelling chapter, Harper focuses on how black temperance functioned as an eschatological exercise. Abstemious practice indicated the high place black Americans occupied in the sacred historical design; even more, fighting for the enforced restraint of others through reform activism articulated further their unique moral role. Theology is the territory; politics is the map. Harper wants readers to understand definitively that black leaders' use of the Bible was their politics

Art · Destiny (ISS module · Emancipation · Eschatology · Literature · Manifest destiny · Metaphor · Narrative · Political science · Political theology · Politics · Protestantism · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies