World War II brought more change to the U.S. 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 era of poverty.
It opened a new period in which the South experienced fundamental changes
in a social system that had long shaped ideology and experience.
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 South retained a self-consciousness
promoted
by
new
national acceptance of cultural identities of all shapes, by appreciation of
southern cultural traditions by a concern for tourism,
by
nostalgia, and by the functionality of southern organizations within a national
federalist framework. Black southerners became among the most energetic examiners
of the mythology of the white South, as well as of their own self-consciousness
as southerners. Appreciation of regions within the South has also grown,
seen in
the emergence of new conceptualizations of those regions, such as the Mid-South
around Memphis, Tennessee;
a
central Texas complex within the larger, traditional Southwestern region; the
Atlanta metro region; and
a
central Florida region anchored by the fantasies of Disney World. Through
all the changes, the traditionally-dominant denominations
have retained their hold. While a force for spiritual normalcy and often
disengagement
from the public sphere, religion has also been deeply involved in both liberal
and conservative political
crusades.
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
Mahatmas 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 most 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.
Few white religious leaders came out forcefully against the
Jim Crow system. In the end,
white church people
reluctantly acquiesced to racial change, although their segregated churches and
private schools remained retreats from those changes. Traditions of separate
black and
white worship were deeply held and reflected differing worship styles as well
as racial divisions. Southern clergy 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 the South's religious culture, and they
retained their
hold during this period of social change. Baptists
continue to represent about half of the church-affiliated population of the
South,
Methodists
about a quarter,
and Presbyterians ten percent. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has been
a
"folk
religion of the
South," and yet it has also been the largest U.S. Protestant church, thanks
in part to establishing new congregations in the West, far beyond the original
southern
borders of the
denomination in the nineteenth century. Increasingly a corporate-dominated bureaucracy,
the
SBC
has
long
been
closely
allied
with the
South’s power structure, lending its conservative voice to issues of racial and
social justice.
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
narrow 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. Methodists in the South represent about
a quarter of
the national 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 over the liberalism of mainstream southern Presbyterians,
fears
only confirmed by the national merger.
Black Christianity has also remained a powerful spiritual force in the latest
South. The clerical role in leading the civil rights movement gave 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 oppressed
people. They have long given a prophetic dimension 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 has 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 desegregate the central jurisdiction
into the church’s
overall ecclesiastical system, and its failure to adequately do so allowed black
Methodist clergymen to exploit the guilt and moral indecisions of white Methodists.
Secularization slowly loosened the hold of religious ideology
upon
public morals. 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 received a new boost
through the presidency
of George W. Bush, has attempted to address this slippage. While a national movement,
the religious right hopes to impose on society and church institutions
a discipline that adherents believe
once
existed
in the small
towns and rural society of the earlier South before becoming besieged
in the dramatic social changes of the 1960s. The religious right aims
to
anchor
the nation’s
political direction in a moral outlook grounded in its biblical interpretation.
National leaders of the movement have included many southern figures, such
as Jerry Falwell, Pat
Robertson,
and
Ralph Reed. The religious right engages those issues it sees as part of an agenda
of
“traditional values,” including issues related to family definition, as well
as 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 belief that fundamentalist, evangelical churches must impose their
moral
code
upon
a
society in need of discipline.
Religion continues to define the U.S. South as a distinctive part of the United
States. It contributes to defining debates on public policy issues and provides
on-going
organizational bases for political campaigns across the ideological spectrum.
It supports a needed infrastructure of social services and educational institutions
in southern regions where public agencies are underfunded. 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. Southern religion 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
traveled throughout the nation, a prime example of the “southernization
of
the
United
States.” Meanwhile, southerners themselves live in places that often cannot be
seen as southernso much
as
parts of a national or even global network. Recent immigration, especially the
arrival of Hispanics in record numbers, has
increased the Roman Catholic role in the South. Americans
moving southward since the 1970s have brought denominations and
traditions
once
seldom seen in the South,
adding to its religious diversity.
