Introduction | Beginnings to 1830 | 1830-1880 | 1880-1940 | 1940-2000 | Documentary Films on Southern Religion

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.

Introduction | Beginnings to 1830 | 1830-1880 | 1880-1940 | 1940-2000 | Documentary Films on Southern Religion

Originally Published: 16 March 2004 | Last Revised: 14 June 2005| Revision History

© 2004 Charles Reagan Wilson and Southern Spaces