Scholars of American religion are increasingly attentive to material culture as a rich source for the analysis of religious identity and practice that is especially revealing of the relationships among doctrine, bodily comportment, social structures, and innovation. In line with this focus, this article analyses the ways nineteenth-century African American Methodist women turned to dress as a tool to communicate religious and political messages. Though other nineteenth-century Protestants also made use of the communicative powers of dress, African American women did so with a keen awareness of the ways race trumped clothing in the semiotic system of nineteenth-century America. Especially for women entering into public fora as preachers and public speakers, dress could act as a passport to legitimacy in an often hostile setting, but it was not always enough to establish oneself as a Christian lady. Considering the related traditions of plain dress and respectability within the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, this essay finds that AME women cultivated respectability and plainness within discourses of authenticity that tried—with some ambivalence—to use dress as a marker of the true soul beneath the fabric. Based primarily on the autobiographical and journalistic writings of women such as Jarena Lee, Amanda Berry Smith, Hallie Q. Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, as well as accounts from AME publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Church Review, and other church documents, the essay also draws on the work of historians of African American women and historians of dress and material culture. For nineteenth-century AME women, discourses of authenticity could be both a burden and a resource, but either way they were discourses that were often remarkably critical, both of selfmotivation and of cultural markers of class, race, and gender in a world that made a fetish of whiteness.

Beginning in the 1920s, American religious liberals borrowed language from the social sciences to describe the social experience of religion. Wishing to foster tolerance at a time when ethnic hatreds increasingly controlled world politics, they tried to drop the word “race” as the equivalent for a religious community and instead depict religions as cultural units by substituting terms like “group.” This was part of a broad intellectual transition in the free West. Long-standing biological models of society, assuming racial differences, gave way to explanations of human behavior emphasizing acquired traits. In this way, democratic cultures, confronting fascism, reaffirmed the malleability and equality of peoples and rejected determinism and hierarchy. American religious liberals of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish backgrounds, committed to ecumenism and attentive to secular ideas, readily appropriated the new idiom. By the 1940s, talk of Nordic, Celtic, and Jewish races, among others, was rare, and the three mainstream religions, pictured as bearers of values, were praised as democracy's building blocks. Yet, because religion serves private needs and transcendent aspirations as well as society, this romance with social-science functionalism was short-lived. It was a small step from lauding religions as comparable and compromising to missing their distinctiveness, and a mood of traditionalism, expressed in humanistic, often biblically informed words, gained ground after World War II. This was not a simple speech revolution, however. Rhetoric that cast religions as social equivalents had enhanced the climate of freedom, to the point that religious minorities re-explored their heritages with unprecedented confidence. Social-science words set stage for their own subversion. This account of linguistic borrowing suggests the utility of considering religion as one language system among others in a complex culture. In this view, religious rhetoric is a public embodiment of values situated to interact with secular speech, making word use a sensitive meter of religious transformation.

In the 1950s, the United States experienced a domestic religious revival that offered postwar Americans a framework to interpret the world and its unsettling international political problems. Moreover, the religious message of the cold war that saw the God-fearing West against atheistic communists encouraged an unprecedented ecumenism in American history. Jews, formerly objects of indifference if not disdain and hatred in the United States, were swept up in the ecumenical tide of “Judeo-Christian” values and identity and, essentially, “Christianized” in popular and political culture. Not surprisingly, these cultural trends affected images of the recently formed State of Israel. In the popular and political imagination, Israel was formed by the “Chosen People” and populated by prophets, warriors, and simple folk like those in Bible stories. The popular celebration of Israel also romanticized its people at the expense of their Arab (mainly Muslim) neighbors. Battling foes outside of the Judeo-Christian family, Israelis seemed just like Americans. Americans treated the political problems of the Middle East differently than those in other parts of the world because of the religious significance of the “Holy Land.” A man such as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who combined views of hard-nosed “realpolitik” with religious piety, acknowledged the special status of the Middle East by virtue of the religions based there. Judaism, part of the “Judeo-Christian civilization,” benefitted from this religious consciousness, while Islam remained a religion and a culture apart. This article examines how the American image of Jews, Israelis, and Middle Eastern politics was re-framed in the early 1950s to reflect popular ideas of religious identity. These images were found in fiction, the press, and the speeches and writings of social critics and policymakers. The article explores the role of the 1950s religious revival in the identification of Americans with Jews and Israelis and discusses the rise of the popular understanding that “Judeo-Christian” values shaped American culture and politics.