Harriet Beecher Stowe is famous as the abolitionist author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Less well known is that she became a white supremacist later in life, reflecting the nation's shameful backpedaling on civil rights after the War Between the States. Stowe's conversion, noted in "God and Race in American Politics," reflects something else, too: the conflicting, Jekyll-and-Hyde impulses of our religious tradition and believers.

(...) "First, race has always been among the most influential elements in American political history, and in many periods absolutely the most influential," Noll writes in his opening paragraph. "Second, religion has always been crucial for the workings of race in American politics. Together, race and religion make up, not only the nation's deepest and most enduring moral problem, but also its broadest and most enduring political influence." Anyone surprised by any of that probably isn't reading this newspaper. (...)