Paul Harvey

Contact Information

Address and Phone:
Department of History, COH 2
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Colorado Springs, CO 80933-7150
Phone (719) 262-4078; fax 719 262-4068

Email pharvey AT mail DOTuccs DOT edu

Departmental Website

Religion in American History Blog

Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South, from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era

Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925

Themes in Religion and American Culture

The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945

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Current Projects

Jesus in Red, White, and Black (to be co-authored with Edward J. Blum; under contract with University of North Carolina Press)

Jesus in Red, White, and Black examines the central roles played by depictions of Christ in racial battles from the colonial era to the present. It details how whites throughout the nation created a white American Jesus who not only sanctified the exploitation of Native Americans and African Americans, but also blessed materialism, sanctioned colonial warfare, and promoted imperial subjugation. Images of white Christs helped tie whiteness to godliness (and alternatively blackness and redness to profanity) throughout America's most painful episodes, including the devastation of Native Americans, the slave trade, the rise of American imperialism, and the frequent outbreaks of nativism and racial terrorism.

Yet the white Christ has had his share of challengers. Competing images of Christ have been crucial to efforts to undermine white supremacy and racial hierarchies. Various groups fought against the white Christ with countervailing and defiant depictions of the divine. From red and brown Christs imagined by Native Americans and Mexican Americans to black Christs envisioned in African American literature and theology, people of color brought subversive saviors to their struggles. Their Christs offered alternative visions to exploitation, rampant greed, colonial warfare, and racial subjugation. In offering counter Christs, these women and men crafted counter theologies and new and compelling moral visions for the nation. From Malcolm X's diatribes against the “honky Christ” to native peoples' incorporation of a messianic Christ, men and women of color found ways to accommodate, assimilate, and subvert the power of the white Christ.

Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, scheduled for publication 2009 (co-edited with Edward J. Blum)

A complete reference work in American religious history, featuring essays by twenty leading scholars on a variety of major topics in the field; a glossary and timeline; a bibliography including both traditional and electronic resources; and a introduction summarizing major themes and interpretive controversies in the field.

Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom: From the 17th Century to the Present. Book project to begin in summer of 2002. Under contract with Yale University Press. 

Religion, Race, and American Ideas of Freedom will explore the long and complex relationship between the struggle for human and civil rights in American history, the legacy of race and racism, and the complicated role of religious institutions and religiously-motivated individuals in this story. By demanding rights of religious expression, creating independent religious institutions, and nurturing religious communities, historically disadvantaged groups have redefined American freedom and citizenship. American notions of freedom have been formulated, in ways much deeper than we have understood, from within religious communities and through struggles defined by the participants as deeply spiritual ones even when they have eventuated in political and social revolutions or in fundamental shifts in the polity. This work will focus particularly on three groups--African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos in North America and the U.S. I will start in the seventeenth century, with native-European contact and the early debates about slavery and freedom (which largely focused on religion), and move forward through to the present, along the way selecting episodes and particular figures that illuminate the largest questions of the relationship between American religious history and American ideas and practices of freedom and citizenship. 

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Biographical Information

Click here for full curriculum vitae

EDUCATION:

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1992. Major fields U.S. History, Late Modern Europe, and Anthropology of Religion. Major Professor Leon Litwack

B.A. Oklahoma Baptist University, 1983. Summa Cum Laude, with honors

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Petruchio: psycho-kitty, qu'est que c'est???

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