If the image of southern evangelicalism seems dominated by spare and plain meeting houses, fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone sermons, and repressive behavioral restrictions, the southern artistic imagination nevertheless has been infused with rich biblical imagery that has exploded in word, sound, and the visual arts. Recent compact disc collections of formerly rare and inaccessible recordings have opened up this part of southern religious history to nearly any researcher. Southern Africa - Southern Africa - Independence and decolonization in Southern Africa: After the war the imperial powers were under strong international pressure to decolonize. The civil rights struggle re-formed southern denominations, splitting them along the lines of conservatives, moderates, and liberals that typically form cross-denominational alliances. On occasion, they shared liminal moments of religious transcendence, before moving back into a Jim Crow world where color defined and limited everything. (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Origins of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997). Works by scholars such as Samuel S. Hill Jr., John Boles, and Donald Mathews ushered in an era of serious historical inquiry that continues today.5 Meanwhile, the burgeoning field of slavery studies produced classics in the study of antebellum southern religion, most notably Eugene D. Genovese’s provocative Roll, Jordan, Roll (1973) and Albert J. Raboteau’s synthetic Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (1978).6 Most recently, Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt,7 focusing on the early days of southern evangelicals and their accommodation to the moral reality of a patriarchal slave society, shows how much can still be gleaned from rereading the sources with a fresh set of questions. There are obvious and important truths here. Thus, in the recent controversies within southern church organizations, race has been one of the very few items on the agenda not in dispute. The Civil War proved the great dividing line in southern religious institutional history. However, the impact of a new generation of scholarship and the recent establishment of the Journal of Southern Religion will provide an agenda for the scholarly future. The largest percentage of these consists of Latino immigrants, especially to Texas and Florida; but they have increasingly been joined by Asian immigrants to southern cities. Introduction The issue of religious freedom has played a significant role in the history of the United States and the remainder of North America. Alabama is a state in which 90 percent of its citizens profess belief in God and an overwhelming majority believe that the world was created in a single act some 10,000 years ago. The story these scholars tell is complex and, in some measures, contested. First, they were teaching at the end of the 1960s. The American Youth was looking for a peaceful religion that was never based off of suffering or repentance. White Pentecostals soon picked them up, and the two shared hymns and holy dancing. White ministers tutored black protégés for missionary work, on occasion even setting these ministers free. Belief in conjure—or at least a willingness to suspend disbelief—pervaded much of the Deep South. Since the 1960s the standard biblical arguments against racial equality have become relics, embarrassments from a bygone age. In this sense, the cultural captivity thesis damns both white and black churches. Many of the black gospel pioneers came out of the Baptist and Methodist churches, but the influence of Holiness/Pentecostal performance styles broke through the stranglehold of “respectable” music that had defined urban bourgeois black services. In the process they have added significantly to the body of literature on southern religion, even though many of the studies are about other topics. The “Southern” trend in religion, too, mirrored the national scene, as black and white evangelicals were “divided by faith.” The common thread of evangelicalism running through the southern tradition could not mask the very different social interpretations given to faith by black and white church communities. of new religious movements, and out of them, new religious communities. Pioneered by Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1997), scholars have addressed subjects such as ring shouts, conjure rituals, chanted sermonizing, and blues hollers. They still faced some of their old competitors and enemies, such as the honor culture of the Old South that prized masculine assertiveness, as well as the poverty and isolation that gripped so much of the region. Vincent Harding, Clayborne Carson, Peter Holloran, et al., eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 6 vols. Journal of Southern Religion (1998–). Milton Sernett, ed., African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, eds., African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (Westminster, KY: John Knox Press, 2003). Southern sermonic and oratorical forms reverberated through the majestic cadences of Martin Luther King Jr., and American revivalism took a distinctively modern form through southern barnstorming preachers such as Billy Sunday and, later in the century, Billy Graham. Black and white Pentecostals seized on the opportunities provided by mass media to spread their message. Jews have an intriguing relationship as well with the history of religions in the South. A large proportion of the “unchurched” in the region still believes in God and afterlife. Cash, Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941). Questions remain as to whether studies in post–Civil War southern religion will add detail to, or fundamentally change, dominant paradigms for understanding southern history. 3 The ideas of nonviolent civil disobedience first had to make their way from the confines of radical and pacifist thought into African American religious culture. The South still commonly appears as the land of the Bible Belt, of evangelical Protestant hegemony. Reconciliation between churches occurred after the war, except for the Southern Baptists, whose enduring presence in the South remains a key component of southern religion. Black Catholics, too, have grown out of their Louisiana base and have found homes elsewhere. Hispanics gravitate toward specific locales where work awaits them—for example, in the carpet factories in and around Dalton, Georgia, the gigantic hog farms of North Carolina, and the migrant labor crop-picking camps in the Southeast. As a result, scholars have been able to speak of a “solid South” in religion, one that has room for High Church Christianity for the elite and for Catholics in particular regions, but one that is fundamentally defined by Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and (more recently) Pentecostals. Even as diversity has increasingly fragmented American religious life in the last thirtyyears, religious interest remains as lively as ever. This sanctification of segregation was important in making the white South so obsessed with purity and concerned with defending (in the words of scholar Jane Dailey) the sacred triad of sex, segregation, and the sacred. Parochial schools in the South, including New Orleans, were segregated through the late 19th century, and many Catholic churches increasingly took to segregating pews during services or even to requiring blacks to stand at the back and receive Holy Communion last when whites filled up all the pew spaces. Martin Luther King, The sense of sudden change to the position of religion in society, culture and politics in the 1960s is attested by much of the research literature. It’s sometimes hard to understand how the idyllic home life of the Baby Boomers in the 1950s turned into the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, though if we know the economy of the gospel, we know that moralism is often the mother of … Bruce J. Schulman in his 2001 work The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics surveys the history of an overlooked decade. Over 15 percent of Southerners polled in 1999 claimed a Catholic identity. It is intimately bound up with the rise of a slaveholding republic, the national Second Great Awakening, the coming of “civilization” to the rustic southern backcountry and newly opening states of the Deep South, the innovative methods (such as circuit-riding preachers and mass-produced pamphlet literature) employed by the newly rising evangelical denominations, and the concerted (and partially successful) effort to evangelize among enslaved people. Many problems formerly seen as “northern,” such as gangs and drugs, infiltrated southern communities in places such as the Mississippi Delta, where the civil rights movement never made a serious dent on the disheartening statistics of black poverty. Thus, biblical literalists had to give them respect, even if they knew nothing in particular of what Judaism was actually about. Protestant evangelicalism has obviously been the dominant religion of the region since the rise of the Bible Belt in the 19th century and the expanding southern religious empires (especially that of the Southern Baptist Convention) in the 20th century. On the other hand, evangelicalism acted as an unofficial "state" religion for secession-minded southerners. For many ordinary southerners, nothing else besides a religious vision of redeeming the South sufficed for the sacrifices required by the struggle. During and after the Civil War, white evangelicals entered the public arena as never before. 3. The South may be the Bible Belt, but, like Joseph’s coat, it is a belt of many colors, embroidered with a rich stitching together of words, sounds, and images from the inexhaustible resource of the scriptures. Only a decade after the war, hardly any black parishioners still worshipped in the historically white southern churches. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. (Oakland: University of California Press, 1992–2014). For example, women’s historians seeking to understand social reform in the South repeatedly have discovered religion at the center of it. Today’s conservatives, for the most part, have repudiated the white supremacist views of their predecessors. The rigid Bible Belt conservatism associated with the common understanding of religion in the South contrasts dramatically with the sheer creative explosiveness of southern religious cultural expression. 1. In the 1920s, H. L. Mencken slammed the South as “a cesspool of Baptists, a miasma of Methodism, snake-charmers, phony real-estate operators, and syphilitic evangelists.” In the 1930s, John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town underscored how southern churches reinforced the caste system of the region.1 In his 1941 classic Mind of the South, Wilbur J. Learn more on HISTORY.com. Knowing that a perfect society cannot be achieved, churches have long sought to shape social order in an ongoing process consistent—as they saw it—with the will of God. Post–Civil War southern theologians responded to defeat in the Civil War by emphasizing human weakness, fallibility, and dependence on God. Two groups that have received much attention in recent years are the ReligiousRight, on the one hand, and New A… More commonly, they adopt theologies that sanctify inequality. It quickly became evident that whites valued the blossoming of their evangelical institutions and would make the necessary moral accommodations to align southern religious institutions with slave owning. Learning from the techniques of the civil rights movement, the contemporary religious-political right has deployed the language of social righteousness. The religious right got organized. White and black Pentecostal musical styles remained distinct, but they intersected at many points. Do remember, however, to properly cite any references to this transcription. The 1970s saw a massive change in the religious practices and participation of people in the United States. From the early intermingling of Protestant hymns and African styles in spirituals to the mixing of white and black country and gospel sounds on radio dials, two streams of musical religious culture flowed beside each other, never merging but often intersecting. As a result, many of the works discussed here date from the last decade. After an initial phase from 1945 to about 1958, in which … White and black southern religious folk cultures drew from common evangelical beliefs and attitudes and swapped musical and oratorical styles and forms. In its simplest formulation, the thesis runs like this: compelled to choose between Christ and culture, southerners chose culture. Historically, the Catholic Church in the South tried to promote itself among black southerners as one church that did not discriminate, one that welcomed all. But Catholicism has found its way into the Deep South as well, and increasingly it mixes in unobtrusively with the familiar landscape of evangelical Protestant churches. Indeed, despite their reputation for stalwart conservatism, southern evangelicals in fact led the progressive movement in the early 20th century. Despite the presence of the occasional odd anti-slavery southern divine, white southern Christians erected a wall of separation between the realms of spiritual and temporal equality. Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. Although drawing in multiple influences both secular and religious, the freedom struggle was sustained through the religious vision of the ordinary black (and a few white) southerners who made up its rank and file, braved harassment and intimidation, and transformed the consciousness and conscience of the country. Can southern religion remain “distinctive” in such settings? Any discussion of southern religion must begin with the landmark works of Samuel S. Hill Jr., whose 1967 Southern Churches in Crisis and subsequent books, including The South and the North in American Religion (1980), have defined the field.4 Focusing almost exclusively on whites, Southern Churches in Crisis defined the archetypal “culture-religion” of southern Christianity, one more experiential and emotional, less doctrinal and intellectual than religion outside the region. Only a proper ordering of the races would maintain white southern purity against defilement—the sexual metaphors behind the race politics were obvious and restated endlessly. Print Word PDF. Kenneth J. Zanca, ed., American Catholics and Slavery, 1789–1866 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994). subscribe American religious institutions on the whole have historically held deep concern about the structure and activities of society. Until this period, most religious communities shared at least some link with the Judeo-Christian tradition, but the new communes of the 1960s adopted the emerging religions of the East as well as the “New Age” spirituality made popular during this time. Americans later pronounced divine plans and interventions in this entire process. In Southern Africa, however, the transfer of power to an African majority was greatly complicated by the presence of entrenched white settlers. That the legacy of the 1960s may be in important respects illiberal is a profoundly troubling fact for those who value the heritage of America’s founders and the achievements of the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s. African American Protestantism empowered the most important social struggle in 20th-century American history, one that fundamentally redefined citizenship for disfranchised peoples. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). This faith took shape partly under the suspicious eyes of watchful but devout whites, but, more importantly, it developed in the sacred spaces the slaves created for themselves in private worship. In North Carolina alone, the 77,000 Latinos counted in 1990 grew to 377,000 ten years later. Indeed, the very term southern identity itself has been called into question. 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