The varieties of African American religions that have explicitly challenged US colonialism – most notably, the problem of internal colonialism – have most visibly embodied the intersection of religion and empire. As we have seen in Chapters 4 and 5, Black religious movements that were rooted in self-determination and the strident rejection of state racism created a Black Christian settler state: Liberia. This was accomplished through multiple iterations of missionary-settler movements in West Africa. The democratic freedom so brazenly embodied in the White settler state became the central rationality for pursuing Black self-governance. In this way, the Black settler quest for democratic freedom enabled stateless free Blacks in the United States to fashion self-determination. But this freedom, like that of the White settler state, manifested its roots in slavery and the colonial relation of power. This meant Americo-Liberians governed native Africans as racial outsiders whose relation to the governing polity of Liberia remained perpetually alien and external. This was no accident. It was, rather, a central formation within the architecture of democratic freedom.

The fundamental tension, moreover, between Black self-determination and the pursuit of Black citizenship within the United States was frenetic and fructuous in the aftermath of the Civil War. Thousands of African Americans refused to accommodate themselves to remaining stateless in the wake of slavery's formal demise. As Henry McNeal Turner advocated, they pursued the political project of self-governance in Liberia, where they could enjoy the fruits of a racial state whose political community was grounded in the Black Christian racial subjectivity of Americo-Liberian settlers. By contrast, those who remained in the United States were increasingly caught between the extralegal brutality of White terrorism and the burgeoning architecture of legal apartheid that formally gestured toward their status as racial outsiders in a White republic.

This did not, however, eviscerate African Americans' quest for political inclusion. As White government officials increasingly offered pathways for Blacks to join the US military – the Buffalo Soldiers epitomized this legacy – many African Americans promoted US imperialism to abet White colonial conquest over Native Americans, Cubans, and Filipinos.