Isaiah Ellis

Apostles of Asphalt: Race, Empire, and the Religious Politics of Infrastructure in the American South

We usually imagine infrastructure as offering solutions to problems of mobility and political unification, but grand statements about the positive socio-economic change accompanying infrastructure development grate against renewed criticism of its role in empire-building, structural inequality, and segregation by design. Apostles of Asphalt explores infrastructure’s fraught but central role in the drama of American history by investigating the ideas at the root of the modern highway system. In the decades leading up to the first Federal highway bills of the 1920s, participants in a reform-minded movement for good roads laid the groundwork for a modernized, federally funded highway system. This “Good Roads Movement” was most impactful in the American South, where its advocates drew upon the language of moral reform and longer legacies of U.S. empire building to argue that white southerners had a moral burden to civilize American land by building public infrastructure. Southern road builders were uniquely successful in arguing for public infrastructure because they articulated their efforts as missionary, redemptive, and civilizing, not only on behalf of the nation but also to redeem and reinvigorate their Confederate past. Those rhetorical moves impacted the lives and work of government officials, engineers, and corporate agents, as well as the Black convict laborers and Indigenous pathfinders whose labor made modern roads possible. What the terms “missionary, redemptive, and civilizing” meant was not always straightforward or coherent, but it was their useful ambiguity, as well as their specific cultural resonance in the Jim Crow South, that proved to be roadbuilders’ most effective tool in advancing a national roadbuilding agenda. At its core, Apostles of Asphalt is about infrastructure’s contested rise as an emblem of the public good in the United States, and how American Christianity’s historical entanglement with race and empire continues to haunt American political and public life.

Isaiah Ellis is a scholar of American religion, urbanism, and infrastructure. His research explores how architects, urban planners, bureaucrats, scientists, corporate agents, and others not often considered meaningful agents of religious and cultural change have leveraged religious concepts to enact large-scale transformations of urban and infrastructural landscapes. A multidisciplinary scholar by temperament and an historian by method, his approach captures unexpected moments when American religious phenomena and the nominally secular archives of American political and economic development speak to each other. He holds a PhD in Religion and Culture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was subsequently an Arts & Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto.