Religion has been a formative experience for those living
in the
American U.S. South. “It’s
just there,” said
William
Faulkner in explaining why religion appeared so often in his novels
and stories
(Glynn and Blotner, 1959, 41). 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
s 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 South and
its people.
(Eighmy, 1972) 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.
A consideration of Tthe
regional context of religion
in the South suggests directs attention
to the geographic, environmental, demographic, economic, social, and
cultural
factors
that
were the background to of religious development.
Spatial Geographic and
social place
s mattered
in the South.
Commonalities Unities existed across
social barriers but experiences
varied 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
a stratifying that social reality
but also enabled southerners to give voice to
their yearnings
that transcended
hierarchies hierarchical
boundaries. Time, as well
as place, mattered in understanding southern religion. Religion in the
colonial
period
was 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
nation 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
U.S. 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 linger
ed from
this earliest time of Native American
s habitation to
the whites and blacks who came afterwards.
As Tthe
South
would be became a predominantly
biracial society
in the nineteenth century,
and the coming
together of the religions of western Europe and western Africa
provided
the 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
sectional regional society
often at odds with national expectations. Religious groups in the
South sometimes
used
sectional 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
sectional 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
, for
example, 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
domain region within
the
U.S. American South
, that which 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 eEthnic
groups plant
inged and sustain
inged religious
traditions in regional enclaves
that
have been outside the evangelical Protestant hegemony. Roman
Catholics
have dominate
d in
south Louisiana, dating from sixteenth and seventeenth century French
settlement, creating a unique landscape in the South, but Catholics also
heavily influence
d life in Hispanic south
Texas, Cuban areas of Florida,
and along the Gulf Coast with its early French and Spanish settlement.
Catholics
awere 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
helped shape
d 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
usually depicted as a predominently 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
had a sizeable Lutheran
presence, dating from German settlement
in the 1800s, while the Carolina Piedmont
is has
been historic
home to
Quakers,
Moravians,
and other Protestant dissenters.
