Religion has been a formative experience for those living
in the American South. “It’s just there,” said
William
Faulkner in explaining why religion appeared so often in his
novels and stories. It was not a matter of whether Faulkner or other
southerners were necessarily believers themselves, but it was a tangible
part of the landscape of a place where many people were passionate
and open about their faith. By Faulkner’s time,
evangelical
Protestantism had already long dominated the South as a whole,
and this proselytizing religious tradition believed in publicly testifying
about the faith by whatever means necessary, making its public presence
especially widespread. Historian John Lee Eighmy coined the phrase “cultural
captivity” to suggest that the South’s predominant churches reflected
a culture of “southernism” shaped by economic and racial elites,
but at the same time, churches themselves shaped the institutional
and personal development of the region and its people. Often theologically
and socially conservative, religion in the South also provided the
rationale and organization for progressive reform. Religion advanced
the cause of slavery, yet it also inspired slave rebellion. Religion
comforts and sustains suffering people, and a South of slavery, Civil
War, poverty, racial discrimination, economic exploitation, ill health,
and illiteracy surely needed that crucial support. As the South went
through the slow and sometimes agonizing process of modernizing,
religion provided justification for the wealthy to profit from economic
development, but it also gave meaning to those bearing the burdens
of economic change without proper recompense. Throughout such changes,
religious organizations remained central institutions of southern
life.
The regional context of religion suggests attention to the geographic,
environmental, demographic, economic, social, and cultural factors that
were the background to religious development. Geographic and social place
mattered in the South. Unities existed across social barriers but experiences
could vary depending on whether you were a Mississippi Delta man or an
Upcountry woman, black or white, rich or poor,
Southern
Baptist or
African
Methodist Episcopal,
Episcopalian
or
Pentecostal.
From early settlement, the geographical places that would become the American
South developed as a hierarchical society; religious forms adapted to
that social reality but also enabled southerners to give voice to their
yearnings that transcended hierarchical boundaries. Time, as well as place,
mattered in understanding southern religion. Religion in the colonial
period looked considerably different from that in 1830, and subsequent
generations experienced dramatic social changes that would affect religion.
Evangelicalism came to dominate the religious life of southerners, in
ways distinctive to the region. Although embodied in a myriad of denominational
forms, evangelical Protestantism has served as an unofficially established
religious tradition, powerful in worldly resources, institutional reach,
moral authority, and cultural hegemony.
Demographics was as fundamental as place and time in creating a
regional religion in the American South. Indigenous peoples in the
South had their own religious systems that the coming of European
Christianity disrupted, but the Native American presence left a spiritual
legacy in the region. More tangible influences of spirit-related
health practices and site-related sacred spaces have long lingered
from Native Americans to the whites and blacks who came afterwards.
The South would be a predominantly biracial society, and the coming
together of the religions of western Europe and western Africa is
essential background for the later development of religion in the
South. European theology, liturgy, and morality would come to predominate
in the South, but not without considerable imprint from African spirituality.
As Mechal Sobel argues, early settlers came from peasant societies
facilitating much cultural interaction. Slaves, moreover, transmitted
to their descendents particular styles of worship, mourning rites,
and herbal practice rooted in religious systems of Africa.
Although its boundaries have sometimes been hard to pin down and
have surely varied from era to era, “the South” has been an ideological
and experiential focus for those living in the region, with significance
for development of distinctive religious forms. Evangelical dominance
developed at the same time as sectional political consciousness crystallized
in the early nineteenth century, and religious groups, both culturally
dominant ones and dissenters, lived within a society constrained
by the orthodoxies of a regional society often at odds with national
expectations. Religious groups in the South sometimes used regional
identification to define themselves against outsiders—especially
northerners—who used their own religious language and ideas to condemn
the immorality of the South. Indeed, religion in the South typically
carried a heavy responsibility of defending “the South” itself because
attacks against it were as often based on morality as on economics,
politics, or other rationales. Ministers were peculiarly positioned
to interpret regional experience as divinely sanctioned when under
attack, and they repeatedly did so.
Region also matters in understanding religion in the South because
of the variety of regional contexts that have existed within the
geographical South. The Upper South of hill country and mountains
nurtured different experiences and cultural forms from those in the
Lower South. “The South” has included such specific regions as the
Atlantic Coast Tidewater, the Piedmont, the Black Belt, the Mississippi
Delta, the Piney Woods, Acadian Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast. The
long predominance of evangelical Protestantism in the South has been
a crucial backdrop for religious development, but that religious
tradition includes many specific groups, often with regional meanings
within the broader South. The Baptists represent, for example, the
largest religious denomination in most counties of the South, but
their greatest strength reaches from southern Appalachia, into the
Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, into northern
Louisiana and east Texas, and into southern Arkansas and southeastern
Oklahoma—creating a Baptist region within the American South that
is itself characterized within the national context as more Baptist
than anything else. The mountains of east Tennessee were an important
hearth for white Pentecostalism, giving birth to the Church of God,
while the Deep South of Mississippi and nearby Memphis nurtured black
Pentecostalism through the Church of God in Christ. The Churches
of Christ, a theologically conservative and morally strict group
that grew out of the Presbyterians, are often one of the numerically
largest and culturally powerful religious groups from middle Tennessee,
down through north Mississippi, Arkansas, and into central and west
Texas, but the group is hardly known in other parts of the South.
Religious traditions that are outside the predominant evangelical Protestantism
have special significance within particular places in the South. Religion
and place in the South reflect demography, with ethnic groups planting
and sustaining religious traditions in regional enclaves that have been
outside the evangelical Protestant hegemony. Roman Catholics dominate
in south Louisiana, dating from sixteenth and seventeenth century French
settlement, creating a unique landscape in the South, but Catholics also
heavily influence life in Hispanic south Texas, Cuban areas of Florida,
and along the Gulf Coast with its early French and Spanish settlement.
Catholics are also a historic presence in Maryland and Kentucky, even
nurturing there a prominent twentieth-century spiritual presence in Thomas
Merton. Jews have been small in numbers in the South, which has shaped
their peculiar patterns of accommodation and resistance to the region’s
overall culture as much as anything. The geography of Jews in the South
is an urban one, to some degree, with notable communities in such cities
as Atlanta, Memphis, Charleston, and Miami, but Jews have been a perhaps
even more significant presence in small towns throughout the South. Central
Texas has a sizeable Lutheran presence, dating from German settlement
in the 1800s, while the Carolina Piedmont is historic home to
Quakers,
Moravians,
and other Protestant dissenters.
