Religion and regionalism have been intertwined in America since John Winthrop baptized New England and declared its purposes of God. The Latter-day Saints have dominated Utah and its environs since the nineteenth century. Even Garrison Keillor’s splintered Brethren seem to embody a region. But no regional identity has been more bound up with religion than that of the American South. It has become a sine qua non—or a clichae, depending on your perspective—for those discussing southern identity to quote Flannery O’Connor’s description of the region as “Christ-haunted.” And with good reason.
For decades, however, scholars ignored southern religion. If, as Catherine Clinton has claimed, women are the half-sisters of southern history, then religion has long stood as the poor cousin. Ten years ago, John B. Boles could only modestly report that “the issuance since 1980 of at least a dozen books on southern religious history demonstrates the current interest in a topic sadly neglected in the scholarship until recently.” Today, it is fair to say that southern religion is a cottage industry.
Seven recently published books on southern religion share two elements. One element seems obvious, the other less so. With the exception of two essays in Religion in the Contemporary South, these books are entirely devoted to Christianity, six of the seven to evangelical Protestantism. This perhaps cames as no surprise, since poeple usually mean Christianity when they speak of “religion in the South.” As Samuel S. Hill put it, “Any real acquaintance with southern religious history equips a person with the knowledge that the evangelical family of Protestant Christianity has long been the region’s largest and most influential heritage.” Which is what renders the second shared component of these books so remarkable: commentators on southern religion have, without quitting their devotion to Protestantism, caught up with the rest of the world and turned their attention to diversity.
Charles Reagan Wilson’s latest book offers an elegant and evocative portrait of the “cultural implications of evangelical Protestantism’s long hegemony over southern life.” In essays covering such varying topics as Bear Bryant’s funeral, church fans, Calvinism’s influence on William Faulkner, and beauty pageants, Wilson illuminates “how the dominant strain of southern religion seeped into many features of regional life.” Like most of the authors discussed in this review, Wilson is concerned with the relationship between southern religion and southern culture more broadly construed. John Eighmy posed the problem in his 1972 Churches in Cultural Captivity, suggesting that southern churches were complicit in the evils of southern society, captives to, rather than shapers of, their own culture. Scholars of southern religion, turning Niebuhr’s church/culture model on its head and inside out, have been debating the question ever since. For Wilson, religion does not stand “in isolation from other aspects of southern culture but” interacts with them.
Wilson is concerned with popular religion—”the religion of the people, rather than of leaders or institutions”—and, following up on a theme from his 1980 Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, civil religion. I am charmed and fascinated by Wilson’s forays into the former, but unconvinced by the latter, possessing, as I do, an old-fashioned and unsophisticated inability to entertain the concept of civil religion. Despite the efforts of Wilson, Robert Bellah, Edwin Gaustad, and others, it seems to me no coincidence that Rousseau coined the term when he did. I do not share Wilson’s perception of beauty pageants as somehow religious, civil or otherwise. Defining “religion” is, of course, a tricky endeavor (and more interesting than defining it, I suppose, is understanding who has the power to do so), but “civil religion” has always struck me as encompassing all the characteristics we might associate with religion—sacred texts, pilgrimage, iconography, for example—and leaving out God. It is a bigger leap than I am willing to take to suggest that, mutatis mutandis, Miss Mississippi contests function as religious ritual. In Wilson’s scheme, Miss America and Elvis Presley stand in for God; that smacks more of idolatry than religion.
That quibble notwithstanding, Judgment and Grace in Dixie is an excellent introduction to the nexus of religion and regionalism in the South. Wilson expertly demonstrates the multifaceted ways that Protestantism has defined southern identity. No one interested in southern culture, religious or otherwise, will close this book disappointed.
It is the challenge that increasing religious diversity poses for Protestantism’s “long hegemony over southern life” that Religion in the Contemporary South and The Changing Shape of Protestantism in the South take up. O. Kendall White and Daryl White recognize that “like the nation, the South now confronts problems of religious diversity, maintaining community, and preserving religious and regional identities as we move into the twenty-first century. … [T]he issues of multiculturalism and religious pluralism that grip the rest of the nation resonate in today’s South.”
However, the collection of essays White and White have edited is not adequate to the task of addressing these conundrums. Having chosen to “neglect … Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, mainline Protestant denominations, Mormonism, and some of the new religions,” contributors to this collection hardly convey that religious pluralism even echoes in “today’s South.” The “alien” in Brenda G. Stewart’s essay “Strangers in a Strange Land: The Non-Christian As Alien in the South” turns out not to be a Jew or Hindu, but a Unitarian-Universalist! Furthermore, these essays are cast in often impenetrable academese, an obstacle for even the most devoted reader.
One who is interested in challenges facing today’s southern churches would do better to turn his attention to Marion D. Aldridge and Kevin Lewis’s outstanding volume, The Changing Shape of Protestantism in the South. Although anthologies tend to be uneven, these essays, presented at a 1995 conference addressing the ways in which southern Protestantism is changing as we enter the twenty-first century, are uniformly thoughtful and thought-provoking.
The concern of contributors to this volume is twofold: How southern is the South today, and how can Protestantism withstand the flood of non-Protestant and “new” religions entering the region? As sociologist Wade Clark Roof points out in his essay “Southern Protestantism: New Challenges, New Possibilities,” the two questions are intimately bound up with one another. More than mint juleps, big hair, and etiquette, Protestantism is a major component of the South’s “southern-ness.” For all the doomsayers who bemoan the decline of southern exceptionalism, I feel confident that regional identity still persists in Dixie. Nonetheless, the concern of contributors to Changing Shape is not unwarranted. There is no denying that with television and the Internet, with the increasing Wal-Martification and McDonald’s-izing of the country, regionalism is on the decline and will prove a less significant force in the American future than it has in the American past (although, on a recent trip to Maine, I noticed McDonald’s offered lobster sandwiches, fare seldom available at fast-food eateries in North Carolina).
The second concern is more pressing. Despite the findings of a February 1997 poll conducted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for Research in Social Science where 69.3 percent of southerners identified themselves as Protestant, in contrast with just 47.9 percent of nonsoutherners, religious diversity has come to the South. The puzzles that immigration posed to northeastern Protestants in the nineteenth century now confront their southern cousins. Asian Americans have introduced Hindu and Muslim worship practices in increasing numbers, and a mushrooming Latino population has made the presence of Catholics more widely felt. Lawrence H. Mamiya argues persuasively that although “the greatest challenge … [for black Protestants] will be how black churches respond to the growing class differentiation occurring in the black community,” Islam and African-based religions, brought to the South by Jamaican, Haitian, and Latino immigrants, will tempt many African Americans, further jeopardizing the influence of the black church. Wicca, Goddess worship, and other forms of New Age spirituality are, according to Wade Clark Roof, increasingly prevalent among southerners whose parents might have attended the Baptist or Episcopal church.
Nancy A. Hardesty emphasizes the challenge and opportunity posed to Protestantism by Goddess-based feminist spirituality. “Many women,” she writes, ” … have totally repudiated their former Protestant Christian faith. Some prefer to call themselves ‘witches.’ ” Hardesty hopes that the increasingly appealing alternatives offered to women from outside the church will force Protestant churches to pay attention to many women’s needs and desires for “basic recognition and equal inclusion in language, leadership and congregational decision making. Honesty, integrity, sensitivity, and scrupulous non-abuse from church leadership. More intimacy and honest emotional sharing with other members. Meaningful and participatory ritual. A theology that values the experiences of women and children.” Hardesty warns that “if Protestant churches are not going to be places where women are respected, renewed, and refreshed, then women are going to continue to leave.”
Perhaps because my own mother, daughter of generations of Southern Baptists, put down the Bible long ago in favor of Empowering Women books, I take Hardesty’s adumbration the most seriously of any presented in the book. Women have, throughout American history, constituted the majority of church participants. Across regions, denominations, and classes, women have outnumbered men in Protestant churches. As historian Ann Braude recently put it, “women have made religious institutions possible by providing audiences for preaching, participants for rituals, material and financial support for religious buildings, and perhaps most important, by inculcating faith in their children to provide the next generation of participants. There could be no lone man in the pulpit without the mass of women which fill the pews.”
Hardesty’s vision of the church sans women should give pause to all Christians. Still, Hardesty is cautiously optimistic; like the other contributors to The Changing Shape of Protestantism in the South, she views the South’s increasing religious pluralism as an opportunity for rejuvenation inside the church. She hopes the church will evolve in order to fare better among women in the increasingly competitive religious market. As Wade Clark Roof notes, “loss of establishment status may well be invigorating.” Although that has not been the case for mainline churches in the past half-century, let us hope that it will prove true for the southern church in general.
Three decades ago, Samuel S. Hill, founder of the modern study of southern religion, prefigured Aldridge and Lewis’s concerns about the future of the Protestant church in the South. “As Southernness becomes less important,” Hill wrote, “uncritical subscription to church religion is apt to follow a parallel course. This constitutes the crisis of the Southern churches.”
Having throughout his career dealt with the waning of the Protestant church in his contemporary South, Hill demonstrates in his newest book, One Name but Several Faces, that the diversity of southern religion is not a new phenomenon. Throughout southern history, there has been a great, if heretofore unrecognized, diversity within Protestant denominations themselves. Although Hill contends that denominations remain useful analytical categories, his essays on the Baptists, the “Christians” (denominations such as Disciples of Christ, that claim the name Christian for their title), and the “of God” bodies (such as the Church of God) complicate our thinking about denominations, showing that—as Hill’s title suggests—even within a single Protestant name-group, there can be significant variety.
If southern historians remain entrenched in the debate spurred by C. Vann Woodward’s 1951 Origins of the New South—the debate of continuity versus change—Hill asserts that, at least as far as religion is concerned, change is one of the persistent characteristics of the South. Each of his three examples demonstrates “discontinuity in the religious life of the people of the American South.” The Protestant hegemony, while perhaps unchallenged by non-Protestant alternatives, was, from the eighteenth century, not as homogeneous as we have thought. As Hill writes,
Most of us who studied the subject in the early years of the recovery of southern religious history—especially a few venerables like me—ended in claiming virtual continuity from the late colonial season to the present. We were enticed to that view by the persistence of the evangelical heritage and by the relative homogeneity of the regional population when a demographic revolution was unsettling the rest of the country.
To be sure, religious diversity historically posed a less dramatic challenge to the Protestant South than to the rest of the nation, but “disruption and dislocation have been endemic to regional life. Pain, risk, uncertainty, and damaging consequences have bored deep into human sensibility in the more conservative, less progressive region, as they have everywhere else.”
Hill himself fails to address satisfactorily that most basic “variety” in southern religious life. Although he does touch on black southerners (even citing the formation of independent black churches and denominations in the second half of the nineteenth century as one of the “four major transitions, shifts, turning points” in southern religion), Hill does not treat black Christians in anywhere near the detail he does their white coreligionists. Black Christians remain the exception to a white rule.
For example, in his discussion of the “Christian” denomination, Hill argues, following Nathan Hatch’s work, that Christians seized upon the political freedom let loose by the American Revolution and applied it to religion. “Since the Christians of the Stone-Campbell movement in particular placed their fingers precisely on the pulse of the national drive towards freedom,” Hill writes, “treating their history affords an ideal context for a detailed examination. An ideal context, perhaps, but not the only one, for southerners (white citizens, that is), have been declaring their freedom throughout their history, sometimes with such effectiveness as to change the course of human history, often in the face of great peril.” In fact, the southerners who most notably “declared their freedom”—certainly altering history, and certainly at great risk to themselves and their families—were not white citizens, but black slaves.
Indeed, it has become something of a commonplace in the study of southern religion to call for a recognition of the interpenetration and interconnection of black Christianity and white Christianity. Alonzo Johnson and Paul Jersild, in their introduction to “Ain’t Gonna Lay My ‘Ligion Down,” caution that
it is important to keep in mind that whatever level or dimension of religious life one is addressing … one must not isolate the black religious experience from the rest of southern religion, for there is more interaction between them than has often been recognized. In fact, there has always been a symbiotic relationship between the development and the structure of the religious life of African Americans and the religious life of non-African American southerners.
Unfortunately, “Ain’t Gonna Lay My ‘Ligion Down” fails to deliver, as it incorporates the religious lives of white southerners even less than Hill incorporates the religion of black southerners. If Sunday is still the most segregated day in the South, religion remains the most segregated subject in southern scholarship.
Paul Harvey, however, in Redeeming the South (the title’s jeu de mots should not be lost on us), rises to the challenge of incorporating black Christianity and white Christianity into a single story. Chronicling the tale of all manner of southern Baptists (not just the sbc) from Reconstruction to 1925, Harvey offers a detailed and thorough account of a symbiotic development for Baptists, black and white. The establishment of independent black churches, writes Harvey, “did not preclude intriguing parallels and interactions between white and black believers in belief and practice.” Harvey does not pretend that black and white coreligionists lived in harmonious acceptance of one another. He understands that whatever black and white Baptists may have “learned from each other … their mutual cultural influence hardly mitigated the racial violence and hostility of the so-called southern way of life.”
But southerners did not spend their lives in a vacuum labeled “the race question.” All Baptists in the South muddled through the quandaries posed by modernization and industrialization. Pastors black and white, seeking to professionalize the clergy and make the church respectable and orderly, came into conflict with congregations hesitant to trade communal baptism and lined-out singing for decorum and protocol. Finally, Harvey demonstrates that black and white worship practices developed from one another. “Southern white and black worshipers borrowed freely (if sometimes unwittingly) from each other. … Whites taught blacks the Christian story. African Americans showed Euro-americans compelling physical expressions of experiencing the sacred.” Scholars such as Donald G. Mathews have taught us for years about the interpenetration of black and white religious life in the antebellum South, but Harvey’s treatment of the postbellum South is pioneering.
Another recent chronicle of Southern Baptists (this one treating the sbc almost exclusively) fails to recognize any religious variety in the South. Keith Harper’s The Quality of Mercy is distinctly out of step with the trend to grapple with the heterogeneity that Hill and Harper suggest is not new to southern religion. Arguing that Southern Baptists, contrary to what most historians think, were in fact practitioners of the Social Gospel, The Quality of Mercy takes an unconvincing stand on a narrow historiographical debate that is not of much interest to anyone but a handful of scholars. Harper is perhaps correct when he claims that “at a practical level … the Social Gospel has no real consensual definition” among students of American religion. However, most historians concur that the Social Gospel involves not mere acts of benevolence, but some actual critique of social institutions as well. Harper ably demonstrates that white Southern Baptists at the fin-de-siecle engaged in benevolence—although that claim is hardly contentious. If, however, one accepts his evidence for a Southern Baptist Social Gospel—primarily that Southern Baptists established orphanages and mountain mission schools and were engaged in “racial uplift”—one must expand the definition of the Social Gospel to something so broad that it becomes meaningless. Any good works become the Social Gospel, which means that Hebrew Bible Israelites, following the biblical injunction to care for the fatherless, would be practitioners of the Social Gospel, as would any missionary who has ever founded a school. Three times in The Quality of Mercy’s last two pages, Harper argues that the critic who contends that Southern Baptists had no Social Gospel because they offered no sustained critique of society “misses the point.” Sadly, at the end of this book, one is left wondering just what the point is.
Two conclusions stand unquestionable: Protestantism has been, and continues to be, the dominant religious force of the South; but the South now wrestles with the same challenges of diversity facing the nation as a whole. All Christians, not just southerners, should be concerned about the fate of the church in the face of an increasing array of religious options (and an increasingly prevalent mindset that religion is to be shopped for like so many back-to-school clothes). Concerned, but not anxious. Marion D. Aldridge’s advice is sage. We should embrace the challenges now facing the church rather than running from them. “As Christians,” Aldridge reminds us, “we must not be merely nostalgic, clinging to tradition, hankering for the good ol’ days. In Jesus, Christians have hope for the future.” We ought not gaze longingly at halcyon days gone by: In Isaiah 43:18-19, God chides us not to “consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.” As Aldridge writes: “Can God go with us, as a church and as individuals, to those places we have never been before? Of course God can.” Selah.
What’s Judgment and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvisby Charles Reagan Wilson Univ. of Georgia Press 202 pp.; $14.95, paper
One Name but Several Faces: Variety in Popular Christian Denominations in Southern History by Samuel S. Hill Univ. of Georgia Press 128 pp.; $20
Religion in the Contemporary South: Diversity, Community and Identity Edited by O. Kendall White, Jr., Daryl White Univ. of Georgia Press 172 pp.; $20, paper
The Changing Shape of Protestantism in the South Edited by Marion D. Aldridge and Kevin Lewis Mercer Univ. Press 85 pp.; $15, paper
Redeeming the South: Religious Culture and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 by Paul Harvey Univ. of North Carolina Press 333 pp.; $49.95, cloth, $17.95, paper
The Quality of Mercy: Southern Baptists and Social Christianity, 1890-1920 by Keith Harper Univ. of Alabama Press176 pp.; $21.95, paper
Ain’t Gonna Lay My ‘Ligion Down”: African American Religion in the South Edited by Alonzo Johnson and Paul Jersild Univ. of South Carolina Press 141 pp.; $19.95
Lauren F. Winner is Kellett Scholar at Clare College, University of Cambridge. She is at work, with Randall Balmer, on a book about contemporary American evangelicalism.
Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
