One True Church

An American Story of Race, Family, and Religion

Susan B. Ridgely

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN: 9781469694597, 9781469694580
• eBook ISBN: 9781469685335
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: North American History

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 risk 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: From Plantation to Parish: Antebellum North Carolina to 1870
• Chapter Two: St. Mark’s and the Limits of a Parish’s Protection: 1870–1904
• Chapter Three: The Delicate Dance of Rural Catholicism in the Protestant South: 1899–1926
• Chapter Four: Maintaining Unity Through Segregation?: 1926–1952
• Chapter Five: Can Two Become One?: Striving for Unity, 1953–1974
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index