The Exodus story has played a vital role in the history of the U.S. regarding Black nationalism. America has historically been viewed as the country where dreams are achieved, from the country’s settlement to the Revolution and beyond. The Exodus story takes on a poignant meaning for African Americans during the antebellum era. African Americans, free and slaves, considered themselves a modern Israel held in bondage in a new Egypt and thus struggled to escape into Canaan. However, Ironically, America was perceived as Canaan. Eddie S. Glaude’s Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in the Early Nineteenth-Century Black America examine how Black leaders took the Exodus story and adapted it to create a sense of nationhood for African Americans.
The concept of ecclesiastical Exodus is not foreign as African Americans, especially the enslaved, identified with the Israelites during the time of Moses as stipulated in the Christian Bible. Antebellum sermons and works by Black leaders often drew the comparison by symbolizing Exodus to the voice of a people’s outrage over their condition during slavery. The message in the Bible, where Moses is instructed to command Pharaoh to free the Israelites, is a passage used in African American hymns as a message to contemporary whites and slave owners. Free Black in the Northern states viewed themselves as enslaved Israelites in Egypt in an equality battle. The free slaves were discriminated against and also cried for deliverance from the bondage of inequality.
The significance of the Exodus myth to early nineteenth-century African American public discourse, particularly the discourse of nation, is argued for in this book. Exodus is a metaphor for a vision of a country that starts with the common social inheritance of slavery and the insult of discrimination and matures into a collection of responses on the part of people acting for themselves to improve their predicament. Examining the various interpretations and uses of Exodus in Black communities, Glaude highlights the metaphor’s multiplicity. However, the author foregrounds a figure whose commitment to racial solidarity was not bound with a rejection of America. The emigrations ideologies that the Exodus story would engage are reduced in favor of ideologies of Black nationalism that embody the civil rights movements.
Glaude provides a chronicle of the early years of freed Black people’s political aspirations. He does this by using the documentation created by the intellectuals of the time and the institutional records of Black religious institutions. According to Glaude, religious thought and experience are necessary to understand the Exodus metaphor’s political utility and activist weight. Through the Exodus story, America is imagined through the precepts of Black Christianity and how it is embodied institutionally in the independent Black church. The church took the role of a formed public as it enabled the national convention movement to expand the dimensions of the Black political public in the North. Slave religion was viewed as a corrective sign as the North ramped support for slaves to flee the South to the free states of the North.
The book offers another theoretical formulation of the process by which the God of ancient Israelites’ Exodus transforms into the God of oppressed African Americans. To achieve that link, Glaude uses the sense of peoplehood that emerged through the hermeneutic of biblical typology. The author shows how the Puritans were thrown into the wilderness but later reshaped via colonial war and revivalism into the American ideology where the rights of personal ascent were tied to the rite of race. Glaude posits America as the new Canaan from Puritanism to its transformation in the 1776 Revolution. He sets up the African American reversal of the Exodus with Egypt as the U.S., the throne of Pharaoh located in the nation’s capital and the Black old Israel present in the European American. This symbolism shows how color was central to the development of the American ideology as white were considered religious, and thus treated well. The Puritans sought to depurate the Church of England as Americans purified their race of African Americans.
The book’s thesis is flawed as it is based on Egypt’s ancient civilizations, which contradicts American Egypt. The author strives to base African American tradition on the tradition of the Israelite’s Exodus; thus, the statements are biased in relation to the nationalist objectives. Glaude dismisses arguments for nationalism, including self-liberation and racial solidarity, due to the condition and unity of the moral community. Engaging with other academics and critics helps Glaude explore his main concerns. These include Sacvan Bercovitch on the rhetoric of errand, Etienne Balibar on national identity, Catherine Bell on ritual, and Paul Gilroy on tradition. Although well-reasoned and frequently provocative, these critiques and applications of other people’s viewpoints occasionally take on a life of their own and divert focus away from the specific thesis objectives of the ecclesiastical Exodus.
The book is a purposeful analysis for readers focused on the relationship between racial and national unity in the antebellum era. It investigates how religion and political activism overlapped, developing into Black nationalism and rhetorics of race. Furthermore, the book shows that Back nationalism is a recurring theme that flows throughout the history of Black religious life and politics. The negative aspects entail a contested nature of the ecclesiastical Exodus and the achievement it represents to enslaved people. The development of relations between Ecclesiastical Exodus and American morality would have led to stronger arguments in relation to the thesis.