Review of John Coffey's 'Exodus and Liberation'

Journal article

On July 3, 1776, John Adams reflected on recent events with joy and trepidation: “Britain has been filled with folly, and America with wisdom … It is the will of Heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever. It may be the will of Heaven that America shall suffer calamities far more wasting.” For a New Englander steeped in puritan enthusiasm, the new prospect in human affairs opened by American “Independency” was, in fact, a very old one. The hearts of the British, like Pharaoh’s, had been hardened; the Americans had successfully thrown off the imperial yoke. God was acting in history once more to deliver his chosen people from slavery. But as an attentive reader of Exodus, Adams knew that their trials were only beginning. One must submit to “an overruling Providence … unfashionable as the faith may be.”

John Coffey’s Exodus and Liberation argues that, in the context of the Revolution, Adams’s providentialism and Old Testament allusions were not “unfashionable” at all. His letter provides a consummate example of what Coffey calls “Protestant deliverance politics,” an Anglo-American tradition of political rhetoric that he traces from the Reformation to thepresent day. The book details how successive generations of political actors and activists have drawn on Old Testament narratives and texts – primarily Exodus, but also the Jubilee proclamations of Leviticus and Isaiah – to frame their own struggles for liberty as reenactments of the Hebrews’ divine deliverance. For Coffey, an early modern historian, the English Civil War or “Puritan Revolution” provides the pattern for a “Biblical language of liberty” that politicized religious ideas of deliverance and liberation previously confined to the spiritual realm. The first of the book’s three parts argues that the deliberate echoes of Jubilee and Exodus heard in revolutionary cries to “Break every yoke!” and the rhetorical contrast between liberty and slavery pioneered in 1644 profoundly shaped the revolutions of 1688 and 1776 that followed. The second shows how abolitionists in England and America later adopted and transformed this language by arguing that slavery was not simply a metaphor for the oppression of white Christians. The final section examines the continued importance of Exodus and Jubilee motifs in the 20th century, particularly in the Civil Rights movement. Coffey’s narrative extends beyond the 2008 presidential election to show that deliverance politics remains alive and well in America both on the Left and the Right—especially in foreign policy, where echoes of the “missionary imperialism” of 19th century British abolitionists abound.

Authors: Bejan, T

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Politics and Religion
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 852-855
• Publication date: 2014-07-30
• Acceptance date: 2014-05-28
• DOI: 10.1017/S1755048314000509
• ISSN: 1755-0491