“I invoke . . . the gracious favor of Almighty God.” With those words, Abraham Lincoln signed his name to the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 — and, in his own telling, staked his place in history on it. In IN GOD WE TRUST: The National Reckoning of the Emancipation Proclamation, Bishop Wellington Boone tells the story most textbooks leave out: that the road from slavery to freedom in America was paved, at almost every mile marker, by prayer.
Beginning with the biblical Jubilee of Leviticus 25 and the Christian covenants of the earliest American colonies, and moving through the Great Awakenings, the Black Church Watch Night tradition, the courage of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln’s own wrestling with conscience and Constitution, Boone traces a single unbroken line of faith from Genesis to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Along the way, readers meet the enslaved Christians who prayed all night on December 31, 1862, believing God would move the President’s hand — and who, the next morning, discovered He had.
Organized around Boone’s “Ten Pillars of American Emancipation,” this concise, richly documented study weaves together Scripture, primary-source quotations, and a detailed chronology of events (with page references) to make the case that America’s founding documents and its emancipation from slavery cannot be understood apart from the Christian convictions that produced them. The full text of the Emancipation Proclamation is reproduced in the appendix.
Written by a bishop recognized by researcher George Barna as the #1 Black American leader in racial reconciliation of the 20th Century, IN GOD WE TRUST is both a work of history and a call to the church today: to remember what prayer accomplished once, to walk in the humility and forgiveness modeled by figures like Harriet Tubman, and to contend again for a nation whose God is the Lord.
At just 40 pages, it’s a fast, powerful read for personal devotion, small-group study, homeschool history units, or commemorative reading around Black History Month, Juneteenth, and Independence Day.
