Author and historian William Yoo joins ‘Reading Theologically’ to discuss his new book

LOUISVILLE — Ahead of the Tuesday publication of his latest book, “Reckoning with History: Settler Colonialism, Slavey and the Making of American Christianity,” the Rev. Dr. William Yoo spoke with the Rev. Bill Davis of the Presbyterian Foundation for a special episode of “Reading Theologically,” a takeoff on the “Leading Theologically” series. Listen to half-hour discussion here.

Image

Yoo is Associate Professor of American Religious and Cultural History at Columbia Theological Seminary who wrote the acclaimed “What Kind of Christianity: A History of Slavery and Anti-Black Racism in the Presbyterian Church.” Davis serves as the Foundation’s Senior Director of Funds Development.

In some ways, the new book “is simply a history of Christianity in the United States, the making of the content and context of Christianity and how it came to be,” Yoo told Davis. He uses the analogy of a child asking, “Where do babies come from?”

“I don’t know in 2025 if my kids know the stork analogy, but that’s what you thought of, right? That’s what I thought of,” Yoo said. Part of the reason we make up such stories is “the actual answer is complicated, messy and complex,” Yoo said.

“We tell these myth narratives,” Davis said, “until we’re ready to grapple with the history and the truth.”
Yoo said the book “is about the advances, the ideals, the beauty, but also the brokenness and the contradictions and the compromises in which the United States as a nation came to be.” That history sometimes included “unjust engagements with Indigenous peoples and various Indigenous nations, and it did involve the inheritance of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, first in the Colonies and then in the United States.”

“What was doesn’t have to be what is and what will be,” Yoo said. “Can we hold onto the ideals of democracy while repenting of and repairing some of the sins and the mistakes of not following out and living out that democracy? So similarly, the story I tell is about American Christianity, the content and context of how Christianity came to be.”

In his research, Yoo said he found “many awe-inspiring accounts of Indigenous rights activism, such as the broad coalition and movement to oppose the expulsion of Cherokee and other Indigenous nations in the state where I currently reside, Georgia, and other states nearby.”

Many Christians were deeply involved in the abolitionist movement, and the reason for their involvement was “God’s goodness, love and truth, as revealed in Scriptures and other theological resources,” including the works of John Calvin, John Knox and Martin Luther, Yoo said.

“So that’s the story I wanted to tell. It’s messy and it’s complicated,” Yoo said. “There was severe injustice, and there were those seeking to enact justice and resist all the bad that was happening.”
Davis asked: As you dove into this history, what surprised you the most?

Yoo noted his emphasis was not on inducing guilt or shame among readers of privilege. “It’s about repair and, to use a Reformed understanding, illumination, that we might be illuminated toward a pathway of productive change.” Yoo was often surprised while reading primary sources by people like William Apess, a Pequot pastor and activist in the early 19th century. In a speech, Apess told his hearers that you and I are not guilty of our ancestors’ crimes, “but we are responsible for the world and church and nation that’s we’ve inherited,” Yoo said. “It is a traumatic history that Indigenous people and enslaved people lived. It is good for us to know it and be informed so we can get busy with the work of repairing the world we’ve inherited.”

Yoo said he was also surprised by “the obviousness, the bigness of the weight and the stakes of slavery.”
“What surprised me was the growth in intensity, fervor and proliferation of the pro-slavery Christian movement,” a term that “seems like an oxymoron. Those words shouldn’t go together, and yet they did,” Yoo said. “At first it was accepted as a kind of quiet compromise of what was, in their language, ‘the peculiar institution.’”

“Long story short — and this is ironic — is how good pro-slavery pastors got at defending slavery, how good they got at finding biblical passages and how good they got at refuting abolitionists’ appeals and reasoning,” Yoo said. Such pastors knew they’d have to respond to appeals to the Golden Rule and Luke 4. Yoo was amazed and saddened by “how good, in such a perverse way, pro-slavery pastors were at their craft.”

“I think that’s an important word for us today. I think of Christian nationalism in a similar vein,” Davis said, asking Yoo: “What about this history is most helpful to pay attention to today?”

As for Christian nationalism, Yoo said he tries to speak to “what does it mean to be patriotic, to belong to a nation and a church or a faith, and do that well?” Yoo found inspiration in the work of James W.C. Pennington, Samson Occum, Frederick Douglass and others, who all note that “we don’t live in a borderless world.” We are also “citizens of Christ with a higher calling” to “test, refine, purify, grow and sharpen our national identity,” Yoo said.

Image

Yoo told Davis he begins and ends the book with this thought: “I think it is possible if not necessary for us to be deeply honest and yet deeply hopeful about our past, present and future” and to “understand how we can talk, pray, worship and work together to be involved in growing our churches and for our churches to be involved in growing local communities and, ultimately, the nation and the world.”
“I want us to stop fighting about the past,” Yoo said. “The fullness of history is both infuriating and inspiring.”

There’s a lot people of faith can do, he said. “Let’s dialogue and wrestle and maybe work together while we disagree sometimes,” Yoo suggested. “Let’s talk about how we can be responsible Christians who are committed to justice, racial and other forms of repair. That’s the hope.”

What others are saying about Yoo’s recent book

“In ‘Reckoning with History,’ William Yoo shines as a church historian with the gaze of a prophet and the soul of a pastor,” wrote the Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam in an endorsement for the book. Ross-Allam is director of the PC(USA)’s Center for the Repair of Historic Harms, which hopes “to initiate a denomination-wide effort to inspire repair and reconciliation both within and beyond the church.”

“Well-researched and story-filled, clarifying and convicting,” Ross-Allam wrote, highly recommending Yoo’s book “for students of church history, social ethicists, and religious studies courses as well as faith formation ministries and church discussion groups.”  

Image

“In addition to providing much-needed pastoral guidance for the church’s critical shift to the responsible repair of historic harms —and away from trendy and counterproductive institutional habits of privilege-shaming and guilt-mongering — 'Reckoning with History’ ultimately issues an invitation to practicing Christians in the United States to become the 21st century’s extension of trans-ethnic decolonial cooperation among Christian people of the United States until this collective decolonial mission is complete,” wrote Ross-Allam. 

The invitation to consider present action and repair is what excites pastors of congregations like the North Decatur Presbyterian Church, which will host Yoo’s book launch event in Atlanta. The in-person event will also be livestreamed through the church’s website at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, Feb. 6. The Rev. David Lewicki described Yoo’s current scholarship as being in the same vein as his previous book, “What Kind of Christianity,” but broadening the scope beyond Presbyterianism. Lewicki wrote: “He's asking a really good question: If the history of our church is in oppression, what is the moral and theological responsibility for those of us in the present?” 

Yoo will also visit First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, California, on Feb. 23. He encourages churches to reach out to him directly if they are interested in his facilitating a discussion around his book and this topic.

Westminster John Knox Press, which published “Reckoning with History,” has a free study guide to accompany the book.

Beth Waltemath contributed to this report.