On July 9, 2011, South Sudan celebrated its independence as the world's newest nation, an occasion which the country's Christian leaders claimed had been foretold in the Book of Isaiah. The Bible provided a foundation through which South Sudanese could distinguish themselves from Arab and Muslim Sudanese to their north and understand themselves as a spiritual community now freed from their oppressors. Less than three years later, however, new conflicts emerged along ethnic lines, belying the liberation theology that had supposedly reached its climactic conclusion with independence. In Chosen Peoples, Christopher Tounsel investigates the centrality of Christian worldviews to the ideological construction of South Sudan and the inability of shared religion to prevent conflict. From the creation of a colonial-era mission school to halt Islam's spread up the Nile, the centrality of Biblical language in South Sudanese propaganda during the Second Civil War (1983--2005), and post-independence transformations of religious thought in the face of ethnic warfare, Tounsel highlights the potential and limitations of deploying race and Christian theology to unify South Sudan.