One True Church
An American Story of Race, Family, and Religion
Published on 3. March 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
210 pages
978-1-4696-9459-7 (ISBN)
Description
In the summer of 1872, a white doctor and a formerly enslaved African American farmer walked through a field near Newton Grove, North Carolina, and mapped out the dimensions of a new clapboard church. The men, John Carr Monk and Solomon Monk, had been raised together on a nearby plantation. While neighbors attended newly segregated Protestant congregations, the Monks converted to Catholicism, which offered a framework of racial universalism. Alongside the church, the parish ran parochial schools for the area's Black and white children long before state public schools existed. But visits from night riders emphasized the congregation's threat to the social order. Despite these threats and others, the church used their common theology and local history to navigate the nativism of the 1920s and the bishop' s decision to segregate. Then, in 1953, the church community reintegrated.
While the parish was far from a utopia, it embraced the daily struggle to embody the true church that its founders believed God desired. Drawing from archives, ethnographic observations, and the living histories of parish members, Susan B. Ridgely offers a rich understanding of the ongoing interplay of race, religion, and rural life in this parish, in North Carolina, and in the United States.
While the parish was far from a utopia, it embraced the daily struggle to embody the true church that its founders believed God desired. Drawing from archives, ethnographic observations, and the living histories of parish members, Susan B. Ridgely offers a rich understanding of the ongoing interplay of race, religion, and rural life in this parish, in North Carolina, and in the United States.
Reviews / Votes
"A meticulous account the growth of an interracial Catholic community in Newton Grove, N.C., from the 1870s through the segregation era and beyond. . . . Historians of American Catholicism will want this on their bookshelves."-Publishers Weekly"Susan Ridgely has provided an exceedingly engaging and thoughtful analysis that reframes and examines the nuances of many aspects of Southern history with wide-ranging implications for the study of interracial communities in American religious history."-Julius H. Bailey, author of Down in the Valley: An Introduction to African American Religious History
"An astonishing story of 'racial and religious renegades' that reframes US civil rights history and reveals the possibilities of interracial community-making past and present. Beautifully written and richly detailed, it is a love letter to rural North Carolina."-Julie Byrne, author of The Other Catholics
"I fell in love with Susan Ridgely's One True Church . It is an extraordinary historical study of faith, race, and family in America, and one that speaks to us today."-David Cecelski, author of The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves' Civil War
"This study is at once a fascinating local history of a small but extraordinary Catholic community in Newton Grove, North Carolina, and a case study of how global currents shaped a single parish."-John T. McGreevy, University of Notre Dame "A much larger story about racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South . . . Ridgely uncovers a history drawn from living memory, drawing it much closer to our own lived experience." -Gerardo Marti, author of Worship Across the Racial Divide: Religious Music and the Multiracial Congregation
One True Church is a master class in how to research and write about the complex histories of race and religion in America. Ridgely deftly foregrounds the voices of her interviewees and offers her readers a beautifully rendered microhistory of Black and white Catholicism in rural North Carolina. This is a story of the human need to build and maintain communities of purpose and belonging; it is a testament to the dignity of everyday women and men. This book will stay with me for a very long time.-Kristy Nabhan-Warren, University of Iowa.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chapel Hill
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
14 illustrations - 14 halftones, 1 map, notes, bibl., index - 14 Halftones, unspecified - 1 Maps - Index - Bibliography
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
299 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4696-9459-7 (9781469694597)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
01/2026
The University of North Carolina Press
€19.49
Available for download
Person
Susan B. Ridgely is professor of religious studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.