Reckoning with History: Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and the Making of American Christianity
By William Yoo
Westminster John Knox, 272 pages
Published February 25, 2025
As matters of social justice and faith are again on the public front burner, Yoo’s work is of interest to all people of faith, White Christians in particular, who are called to a deeper, more honest approach to American history and who seek a faithful way forward in the life of the church.
“Reckoning” carries with it multiple levels of meaning. It can function as a financial term or a straightforward approach to a situation to gain further understanding. At a deeper level, reckoning means facing reality truthfully and honestly, coming to terms with it, and taking action. Church historian William Yoo’s Reckoning with History: Settler, Colonialism, Slavery, and the Making of American Christianity invites and essentially compels readers – Christians in particular – into that more profound understanding of reckoning as a means to face American history honestly and penitently. That reckoning then calls the church to accountability for the ways it perpetrated and perpetuated racism, while ultimately laying out a pathway for future hope.
Following his earlier work, What Kind of Christianity: A History of Slavery and Anti-Black Racism in the Presbyterian Church, Yoo both broadens his scope and deepens his exploration. The first half of the book focuses on settler colonialism, the ways that European colonists, primarily English, violently dispossessed Indigenous populations of their lands, their homes, their families, and their culture. The second half centers on chattel slavery, how White Americans – including White Christians in both north and south – supported and practiced the enslavement of Africans and those of African descent, advancing their economic interests while seeking social status.
The linkage, of course, is racism, specifically the racism of White American Christianity, fueled by economics and the hunger for goods, land, labor, profit, social standing and the raw quest for power. And whether settler colonialism or slavery, the themes are constant and pervasive: neglect, rationalization and justification, corrupted biblical interpretation, misguided understandings of evangelization, warped theology, timidity, apathy, fear.
Yoo recasts familiar narratives from American history with the goal of truth-telling, using account after account, personal story after personal story, leading readers into a deeper and more honest understanding of the relationship between patriotism and American Christianity’s “success,” that is, a very timely consideration of the relationship between faith, politics and civic action. This history does include exceptions to the norm, namely White Christians as well as Indigenous and Black leaders who were committed to what we would now call “social justice,” including dedicated abolitionists. But they were just that, exceptions, typically ignored or even ostracized by their communities.
As matters of social justice and faith are again on the public front burner, Yoo’s work is of interest to all people of faith, White Christians in particular, who are called to a deeper, more honest approach to American history and who seek a faithful way forward in the life of the church. He concludes not with a prescription but with insights that invite discernment and discussion, perhaps within small groups.
We live at a crossroads. For the church to truly be “the church with a soul of a church,” to paraphrase Yoo’s recasting of historian Sidney Mead’s well-known phrase, the church must face its history without flinching. The indictment cannot immobilize it but can empower it, leading to faithful action. History, and Yoo’s telling of it, can guide us in that project.
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