On July 2, 2007, the federal government seized everything from me, including my reputation. The systematic process of investigation, prosecution, and incarceration, turned me into a mere memory of my former self. I eventually landed in a prison cell, wearing an orange uniform, and facing LIFE in federal prison without parole. Having absolutely no prior criminal activity in my life, I felt that this was an impossibility for anyone. However, the system sometimes knows no redemption. I cried out to God on a daily basis, but I felt like He had abandoned me. I read about Job and the suffering of Paul, but they did little to appease me. One day, I realized that life in general is not fair, and that we as human beings will be judged by the way we play the hand that we are dealt. I see now, that it took losing everything, to gain what the Bible calls, "the peace that passeth understanding." I told God that I would use this experience to glorify HIM. I began counseling other inmates because solving their problems made me, at least for that instant, forget my own. I found myself enjoying sharing my faith and Biblical Principles with everyone. I applied to a Baptist University and I eventually completed a Masters and Ph.D in Psychology and Christian Counseling. I told the university that I wanted to write a dissertation that would minister to both inmates and their families, and not just a paper that would sit in their library. That case study of counseling prisoners, through various entertaining prison engagements, became the precursor to Suicidal Kings: The Road to Redemption. For the prisoner, it provides hope. For those searching for God, it provides understanding. And for the Christian Counselor, it becomes a prescription against the thinking errors of the carnal mind. Enjoy the ride

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"Draws upon previously neglected primary sources to offer a ground-breaking analysis of the intertwined political, racial, and religious dynamics at work in the institutional merging of three American Methodist denominations in 1939. Davis boldly examines the conflicted ethics behind a dominant American religious culture's justification and preservation of racial segregation in the reformulation of its post-slavery institutional presence in American society. His work provides a much-needed, critical discussion of the racial issues that pervaded American religion and culture in the early twentieth century.a
--Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, Academic Dean and Associate Professor of History and Theology, United Theological Seminary, Dayton Ohio

aA discerning, sober, and troubling probing of the preoccupation within the Methodist Church with Christian nationalism, civilization as defined by white Anglo-Saxon manhood, and race, race consciousness and athe problem of the Negroa that was foundational to and constitutive of a reunited Methodism. A must read for students of early 20th century America.a
--Russell E. Richey, Emory University

In the early part of the twentieth century, Methodists were seen by many Americans as the most powerful Christian group in the country. Ulysses S. Grant is rumored to have said that during his presidency there were three major political parties in the U.S., if you counted the Methodists.

The Methodist Unification focuses on the efforts among the Southern and Northern Methodist churches to create a unified national Methodist church, and how their plan for unification came to institutionalizeracism and segregation in unprecedented ways. How did these Methodists conceive of what they had just formed as auniteda when members in the church body were racially divided?

Moving the history of racial segregation among Christians beyond a simplistic narrative of racism, Morris L. Davis shows that Methodists in the early twentieth century -- including high-profile African American clergy -- were very much against racial equality, believing that mixing the races would lead to interracial marriages and threaten the social order of American society.

The Methodist Unification illuminates the religious culture of Methodism, Methodists' self-identification as the primary carriers of "American Christian Civilization," and their influence on the crystallization of whiteness during the Jim Crow Era as a legal category and cultural symbol.