World War II brought more change to the American South than any other event in its
history, even the legendary Civil War. The World War upset traditional patterns of
thought and behavior, exposing southerners to new ways of thinking, and it launched
economic developments that would overcome the long period of poverty after the Civil
War. It opened a new period when the South experienced fundamental change in a
social system that had long shaped ideology and experience in the region. Changes
in communication and transportation, population growth, urbanization, the end of
the one-party political system, consumerism, secularization—all pushed the South
toward change. Yet the region retained a self-consciousness promoted by new
national acceptance of cultural identities of all shapes, by appreciation of
cultural traditions associated with the region, by a concern for tourism, by
nostalgia, and by the functionality of regional organizations within a national
federalist framework. Black southerners became among the most energetic examiners
of the mythology of the white South also of their own self-consciousness as
southerners. Appreciation of regions within the South has also grown, seen in the
emergence of new regions, such as the Mid-South around Memphis, Tennessee, a
central Texas complex within the larger, traditional Southwestern region, and a
central Florida region anchored by the fantasies of Disney World. “The South”
has always been a geography of specific places, and that continues to be so.
Through all the changes, religion has represented a force for stabilization in
the region, with the traditionally-dominant denominations retaining their hold
on the region. While a force for spiritual normalcy and often disengagement
from the public sphere, religion has also been deeply involved in political
crusades, through both liberal and conservative causes.
The
civil rights movement was a central moral landmark for the South. African
American church leaders, such as
Martin
Luther King, Jr.,
Fred
Shuttlesworth, and
Ralph David Abernathy, emerged as the leading edge of reform, and local congregations
provided the foot soldiers for the movement’s nonviolent protests and boycotts. The
protests drew from principles of nonviolence that King learned from Indian leader
Mohatmas Gandhi, but equally significant sources were Christian teachings on social
justice and the heritage of the southern black church’s witness against the evils of
segregation. The civil rights movement made the end of Jim Crow segregation a compelling
moral challenge to the white South. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s
Brown
v. the Board of Education decision, major southern white denominational leaders and regional
meetings counseled compliance with the call for desegregation, but rank-and-file church
members rebelled, rejecting the social changes that loomed. Some ministers used the same
biblical justifications for segregation as their ancestors had used to justify slavery.
Progressive clergymen who advocated acceptance of integration often lost their pulpits;
ministers who ignored the issue risked moral irrelevancy in the face of a serious moral
issue. Most white religious leaders, in the end, advised moderation and opposed violence,
but few came out forcefully against the Jim Crow system. In the end, church people
reluctantly acquiesced to racial change, although their segregated churches and private
schools could remain a retreat from those changes. Traditions of separate black and
white worship were deeply held and reflected differing worship styles as well as continued
racial divisions. Southern clergymen have been among the leaders of racial reconciliation
efforts in the recent South, often working through community groups to promote principles
of Christian fellowship across social boundaries.
The traditional evangelical denominations, the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians,
have long been at the heart of a regionally-based religious system, and they retained their
hold on the region during this period of social change. As earlier, Baptists represent about
half of the church-affiliated population of the South, Methodists represent about a quarter,
and Presbyterians 10%. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has been a folk religion of the
South,” and yet it has also been the largest American Protestant church, thanks partly to
establishing congregations in the West, far beyond the original southern borders of the
denomination in the nineteenth century. The SBC has long been closely allied with the
South’s power structure, conservative in raising prophetic issues of racial injustice
in the South, and increasingly a corporate-dominated bureaucracy. Fundamentalists have
taken over institutional control of the denomination since the 1980s, establishing
creeds for the enforcement of orthodoxy, reshaping its educational institutions to
narrow the range of teaching options, emphasizing the primacy of the inerrancy of the
Bible, and moving away from traditional Baptist support for separation of church and
state to support, among other government-enforced social causes, prayer in schools.
Many moderates have left the SBC, weakening its numerical strength and leaving a
narrowed, if ideologically focused, leadership.
Methodists and Presbyterians also remain dominant church traditions in the contemporary
South. Southern Methodists rejoined Methodists from other parts of the nation in a 1939
merger, and in 1968 the Evangelical United Brethren joined with them to form the United
Methodist church, of which Methodists in the South represent about a quarter of
membership. Unlike Baptists, Methodists have retained their Wesleyan stress on piety
above creed. Southern Presbyterians have undergone more recent dramatic denominational
change than Methodists, having reunited with their northern coreligionists in 1983.
Conservatives had already broken away to form the Presbyterian Church in America
because of their fears of the liberalism of mainstream southern Presbyterians, fears
only augmented by the national merger.
Black Christianity has also remained a powerful spiritual force in the recent South. The
clerical role in leading the civil rights movement gave the churches considerable moral
authority, buttressing their historic and continuing efforts in providing fellowship, social
services, recreation, sanctuary from the larger society, and a gospel of hope to marginalized
people. They have long given a prophetic dimension to southern Protestantism that few other
religious institutions have provided. The National Baptist Convention remains the largest
black Baptist group, and the African Methodist Episcopal church is the leading black Methodist
body. The movement for a specifically black theology also had its adherents in the South,
dating back to the call for black power in the late 1960s. African American ministers
within predominantly white denominations particularly championed black theology as a
sometimes militant demand for true spiritual integration. The United Methodist church
struggled into the 1970s to integrate the segregated central jurisdiction into the church’s
overall ecclesiastical system, and its failure to adequately do so left a moral gap for
black Methodist clergymen to exploit the guilt and moral indecisions of white Methodists.
Black theology had influence within black denominations, but nowhere did it convert the
leadership or attain cultural authority.
Secularization prevents as tight a hold of religious ideals upon public morals as once
existed in the South. Attempting to address this problem has been the new right political
movement that began in the 1980s with the Moral Majority, saw the rise of the Religious
Roundtable and the Christian Coalition, and has received a new boost through the presidency
of George W. Bush. While a national movement, it is an effort to impose on society and
church institutions a discipline that believers see once having existed in the small
towns and rural society of the earlier South and which became besieged in the era of
dramatic social changes in the 1960s. The religious right aims to anchor the nation’s
political direction in a moral outlook grounded in the Bible. It has been a national
movement, but with many southern leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and
Ralph Reed. The religious right engages issues it sees as part of an agenda of
“traditional values,” especially those related to family, and including the issues
of abortion, pornography, prayer in schools, and before its defeat, the Equal Rights
Amendment. Concern for prohibition of the sale, or even consumption, of alcoholic
beverages is not a part of this political agenda, a major departure from the
traditional southern ethics of the churches. The new agenda represents, then, a
continued concern that the churches have to impose their moral code upon a
society in need of discipline.
Religion continues to define the American South as a distinctive part of the United
States. It helps to define debates on public policy issues and provides an on-going
organizational base for political campaigns across the ideological spectrum. It
supports a needed infrastructure of social services and educational institutions in a
region of often underfunded public agencies. It offers a still compelling worldview
to the majority of the South’s Christians, giving meaning in troubled times and
empowering the poor and marginalized. It has supported a peculiar variety of religious
pluralism within the United States, allowing for religious minorities to flourish. Forms
of religion identified with the South—Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, Pentecostalism—have
gone into the nation, a prime example of the “southernization of the United States,” and
southerners themselves live in places that often cannot be seen so much as southern as
national or even parts of a global network. The new immigration has increased the Roman
Catholic role in the South, especially through the arrival of Hispanics in record numbers,
making the South a new national center of immigration. Americans moving south since the
1970s have brought to the region denominations and traditions once seldom seen there,
adding to its religious diversity.
