Exodus and Liberation is a groundbreaking study of Protestant “deliverance politics” from the Reformation to the civil rights movement. It presents a new account of how the Bible’s liberationist texts were deployed and contested in a series of political crises in British and American history. It argues that Exodus and Jubilee carried one of the big ideas in Anglophone political culture–the idea of deliverance. Christians have read Exodus politically ever since Eusebius acclaimed Constantine as the new Moses. In the sixteenth century, however, Calvinist rebels and reformers took the identification with Old Testament Israel to another level as they sought liberation from “popish bondage.” In the English Revolutions of 1640–60 and 1688–89 and the American Revolution, Protestants turned the Exodus narrative and the language of deliverance against “political slavery.” Revolutionary rhetoric exposed the contradiction between libertarian ideology and black chattel slavery. Abolitionists forged a theology of liberation, articulated in resonant biblical mottoes: “Let My People Go!” “Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land,” “Break Every Yoke,” “Release the Oppressed.” Meanwhile, African Americans cast themselves as the children of Israel, forging a distinct identity and questioning the scriptural construction of the United States. After 1865, African Americans imagined their migrations as a journey toward the Promised Land and black Exodus oratory climaxed in the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. The foreign policy rhetoric of American statesmen continued to yoke Providence to liberation. The political reading of the Bible had powerfully informed Protestant conceptions of liberty and slavery.

John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History, University of Leicester. He is the author of Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558-1689 and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism and Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, among other works.