The history of deliverance politics in Anglo-American history
contains remarkable moments of achievement, but this is not a story
of triumphal progress. Exodus was hotly contested, used by the
powerful as well as the weak, and mobilized to support a host of
rival causes. By writing themselves into the Protestant history of
liberty, African Americans undercut complacent narratives of
progress, injecting a powerful sense of unease into the tradition.
The argument over who owns the biblical narrative has continued
into the twenty-first century. If Barack Obama saw himself as an
inheritor of Exodus politics, so too did George W. Bush. Many
Christians - and many non-Christians too - remain understandably
suspicious of those who read Israel's history as political
paradigm, especially when it underpins religious nationalism. This
story is riddled with moral ironies. The Books of Moses could be
used to justify anti-black racism and the dispossession of Native
peoples as well as freedom from slavery. In the name of liberation,
Protestants have justified war, revolt, and imperialism.
High-minded missions have often had dismal consequences. In
excavating the history of deliverance politics, Coffey relies on
sources buried in many generic strata. As a study of political
rhetoric, the core materials are sermons and speeches, the
published versions of oral performances. Deliverance discourse
found its way into almost every kind of genre, just as it left its
mark on virtually every kind of Hebrew literature. It is present in
an array of literary texts, including pamphlets, treatises,
biblical commentaries, letters, memoirs, newspapers, periodicals,
constitutional documents, and even children's literature. Most
strikingly, the gospel of liberation was depicted in visual
sources, such as paintings, illustrated Bibles, official seals,
commemorative coins and medals, mastheads and banners. Finally,
deliverance politics proved easy to sing. Its strains are heard in
Puritan psalms, Evangelical hymns, African-American spirituals and
the Freedom Songs of the Civil Rights Movement. These sources form
a documentary record, testifying to the powerful political appeal
of the Exodus, the Jubilee and the biblical language of liberty.
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