One white response to these forces was a new mission to the slaves. South Carolina Methodists were most successful in establishing specific missions, while an evangelical alliance led by minister-planter Charles Colcock Jones in Liberty County, Georgia, promoted an idealistic vision of an evangelical biracial community that would lead to the end of slavery. These initiatives were of limited impact, but they symbolized a new willingness among slaveowners to allow white preachers and, sometimes, black exhorters to preach the gospel to their slaves. The gospel that appeared here was one that stressed moral discipline and obedience of slaves to masters, with ultimate hopes for redemption in heaven. White religious leaders assumed new responsibilities for the fate of slave souls, which was a response to their overriding concern to convert everyone, their concern to achieve greater social control of slaves, and their belief that slavery was not an inherently immoral institution.
Blacks responded to the new evangelical message, though, for different reasons than those advanced by slaveowner-sanctioned preachers. The potential for spiritual equality, and even the hope for earthly liberty, could be taken from evangelicalism, and that held a powerful appeal for slaves. Evangelicalism's informal, spirit-driven style of worship could evoke remembrances of the religious ecstasies of African dance religions. Nowhere else in southern society did African Americans find the status that they could achieve in churches. Some African Americans worshipped in separate black churches, but most slave worship was in biracial churches. Black Baptists and Methodists had shaped evolving evangelicalism since the earliest revivals. The generation before the Civil War represented the one moment in southern religious life when blacks and whites shared the same ritual and spatial setting, listened to the same sermons, partook of communion together, and shared church disciplinary procedures. The interaction within biracial churches represented a foundation for later spiritual commonalities among blacks and whites in the South. Slaves also worshipped in secret praise services in the slave quarters—their "invisible religion" (Raboteau, 1978). Here, God stood in judgment of the Christianity of the slaveowners, and slave preachers applied the biblical story of Exodus to their own people, with ultimate liberation a hope. Slave spirituals became the creative group expression of these aspirations. The ring shout was the most distinctive expression of religious worship in the praise service, with African-derived dancing and body movement emphasized. The invisible religion of the slave quarters also included conjure, a system of spiritual influence that combined herbal medicine with magic and sometimes gave surprising authority to slave practitioners who believed they could affect whites as well as blacks.
While slaves saw in the Bible a vision of spiritual liberation, southern white religious leaders increasingly after 1830 used the same scriptures to justify slavery, as part of their defense against abolitionist criticism. One strain of the proslavery argument saw southern society as the last bulwark against an inhumane industrial order that had abandoned Christian orthodoxy. Ministers cited biblical examples of the coexistence of Christianity and slavery, quoted Old Testament approvals of slavery, cited Paul's New Testament letters that taught that servants should obey their masters, and interpreted a passage from the book of Genesis to mean that blacks were descendants of the sinner Ham and destined forever to be bondsmen. Southern writers developed the image of plantations as well-ordered pastoral places, presided over by benevolent patriarchs, an image with deep roots in Western biblical tradition.
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Southern religious leaders made a major contribution to promoting
southern nationalism by the secession of major denominations.
Well before the nation's political parties separated along sectional
lines, the churches did so, beginning in the 1840s, when southern
Baptists withdrew from fellowship with northern congregations
over the issue of whether a slaveowner could be a missionary.
Southern Methodists withdrew from other U.S. Methodists after
debates on whether a slaveowner could serve as a bishop. One group
of conservative southern Presbyterians split from northerners
in 1857, and after the Civil War a new Presbyterian Church in
the Confederate States of America appeared. The Episcopalians
did not formally divide, but a Confederate Episcopal church did
operate during the Civil War years. In the aftermath of the divisions
came disputes over who controlled church property in some areas,
unleashing fears, angers, and suspicions among religious people
and creating disputes over who would control denominational life
in border areas. The Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians of
the South did not reunite with their northern coreligionists after
the war, creating enduring sectional institutions that became
perpetuators of a southern cultural identity. |
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Postcard of First
Baptist Church,
New Bern, NC |
The challenge for Roman Catholics and Jews in the South before the Civil War was to maintain their separate religious identities and yet find ways to accommodate to a biracial society dominated demographically and culturally by evangelical Protestants. Catholics had long been a major presence in the upper South, going back to the founding of Maryland, and in Gulf Coast areas, but the antebellum years saw the coming of Irish and German immigrants who spread the Catholic influence through other areas of the South. Most Catholic immigrants to the United States went to northern cities and formed major communities. This happened in the South also in places like New Orleans and Savannah, but in most places the rural nature of southern life gave a peculiar character to the Catholic church. The small numbers of priests and parishes led the Catholic leadership to spend its resources on building churches, recruiting priests and nuns, and encouraging devotionalism. The leadership also had to cope with interethnic conflicts among French, Irish, and German Catholics. The Catholic Church in the South sanctified the political order of slavery and states' rights, with Bishop Augustin Verot famously delivering a sermon at the beginning of the Civil War that justified slavery in the same proslavery language that other southerners had been using for a generation.
Jews were an early presence in southern colonies, and by 1820 South Carolina had the largest Jewish population in the United States. Early Jewish immigrants to the South were from the Iberian Peninsula, with those from central Europe coming in larger numbers after 1840. They embraced the religious freedom that the nation offered, as well as its economic opportunities. Many became merchants and professionals, carving out distinctive roles in a slave society that did not have a place for immigrant laborers but did welcome their contributions. Jews became active in political and civic activities throughout the nineteenth century, and Jewish elected officials served throughout the South. They justified slavery and became slaveowners; they spoke the language of honor and fought duels to defend it. Despite such assimilation, intolerance of Jews was also a part of southern religious history, with Civil War frustrations leading to Jews' becoming scapegoats for other southerners.
With the inception of the Confederate States of America southern sectional identity became a national identity. Southern religion played a crucial role in buttressing the war effort. For a generation, white ministers had preached that slavery was a divinely-ordained institution, and whatever misgivings many of them had about war, they rallied around the Confederacy and gave moral support through preaching that the southern cause was a holy war. They blessed the troops going off to war and saw victories as God's blessings and defeats as God's chastisements for their failures. Religious institutions declared days of fasting and thanksgiving to encourage understanding of the spiritual nature of the war. Ministers cared for soldiers, preached revivals, led prayer groups, and performed mass baptisms. Behind the lines, women joined with ministers in staging rallies to support the troops, preaching sacrifice for home and God, feeding those in need, teaching the children of veterans, nursing the sick, and leading missionary societies. The war promoted new roles for women in southern religious life, as they took over new responsibilities for praying, counseling, and even conducting home services in the absence of ministers off in the war effort. Because of the disruptions of public worship, religion became more private, and the failure of the Confederate holy war brought a crisis of faith for many white southerners.
The Reconstruction period (1865-1877) brought enormous challenges and major change to religious patterns. War had been disruptive and denominations had to rebuild churches, reincorporate ministers into congregations, and deal with the spiritual traumas among defeated white southerners. Northern religious groups entered the South as missionaries to a benighted people. Northern missionaries wanted to promote reconciliation with southern whites and provide relief and reform for former slaves, but white southerners rejected their efforts, seeing them as an extension of Union armies that had conquered them and wanted to overturn their entire civilization. Whites embraced their sectionally-based evangelical denominations, seeing Confederate defeat as a chastisement from God who was nonetheless preparing his chosen people for coming challenges.
During the era of Reconstruction many Blacks joined northern-based religious groups like the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and they withdrew from the prewar, biracial evangelical churches in which they had once worshipped, creating their own independent churches. This occurred as a result of African American frustration with the unwillingness of white Christians to agree to a truly equal role in participation and goverance of local congregations and ecclesiastical associations. The separation of white and black Christians in the South established a pattern of racially segregated worship that has long endured. Blacks now controlled their own religious destinies. Churches became important organizing agencies in the political conflicts of Reconstruction, and afterwards they were among the central institutions of black life in the South. The folk spirituality of the slaves' praise services merged with the denominationalism of evangelical Protestantism to create unique religious institutions.
