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

Attention to the historical development of religion in the South underscores the dramatic changes the region has undergone and ways in which religion has entered into the ideology and experience of southerners. Anglicanism, an American version of the English national religion, was the first dominant religious tradition in the South, but dissenting Protestant sects, Catholics, and Jews were also present in the southern colonies. Virginia was especially significant as the home to Anglicanism, becoming the established church early on. Maryland, in its origins, represented an early version of southern religious pluralism, established as a potential refuge for Roman Catholics but also attracting Puritans, Quakers, and Anglicans. After the Glorious Revolution in England in the 1680s, Maryland adopted Anglicanism as the state church of the colony, as did the Carolina colonies and eventually the rest of the southern colonies as well. Lay influence made for a distinctive southern Anglicanism, compared to the Church of England. Without a bishop in the colonies and with the predominant secular, materialistic values of a plantation society, the Anglican church was institutionally and culturally weak, but its presence did provide a cultural unity across the colonies, with ministers holding the main religious worship services in the region through the early 1700s, teaching a common theology and moral values, and operating schools. A distinctive group of French Protestants in South Carolina, the Huegenots, mostly joined the Anglican church there, recognizing the importance of its cultural role.

Anglicanism left its stamp on the later culture of the South through its embodiment of an influential social model. Anglican ministers had respected social and political authority and allied themselves with the gentry, and upper-class southerners would long admire the Anglican embrace of social class differences, along with paternalistic responsibilities and benevolence—which historian C. Vann Woodward called a Southern Ethic. When the Anglican church was disestablished after the American Revolution, its descendant, the new Episcopal church, would continue to attract educated and well-off members associated with the southern social elite.

Evangelicalism began its rise to influence in the South during the mid-eighteenth century. Evangelical Protestantism is a religious tradition that prizes religious experience over liturgy, theology, and other forms of religious life. Calvinist realism about human nature was a crucial progenitor of Evangelicalism, giving it a characteristic concern for the inevitability of sinfulness and the need for a strong religious community and discipline to contain human frailty. As evangelical Protestantism developed, it came to be just as characterized, though, by the hope of redemption. Theology gradually came to stress that God’s grace made salvation possible for humans who accepted it. This recognition encouraged preaching that would seek converts, giving birth to the camp meetings and revivalism that would become such a central part of southern life.

Evangelicalism in the South appeared with the rise of dissent within Anglican society. English preacher George Whitefield came to the southern colonies as well as others along the Atlantic Coast, and his preaching helped to fire the enthusiasm of the Great Awakening. He offered the hope of a “new birth,” an emotional conversion experience that resulted from intense preaching that moved many people who had been unmoved by Anglican sacramentalism and perceived worldliness. While the impact of the Great Awakening in the South was limited, it did lead northern Presbyterians, such as the Rev. Samuel Davies, to settle in Virginia and establish an evangelical presence. More important than the Great Awakening in changing the Anglican dominance of religion in the South was the movement of increasing numbers of settlers into backcountry areas of Virginia and the Carolinas after 1750. Attracted by inexpensive land, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, Separate Baptists from the northern colonies, and German Protestants moved into the Piedmont, resulting in a surge of new Presbyterian and Baptist congregations, as well as a new presence of Quakers, Lutherans, German Reformed Methodists, and pietistic Protestant sects. All of these new religious influences rested in appeals to the plain folk of the rural and backcountry areas and resulted in the growing marginalization of Anglicans, which was made complete with the overthrow of English authority in general during the American Revolution. By the 1790s, religious freedom and denominational competition for members represented a new religious system in the South, as across the new nation.

The Great Revival (1800-1805) launched the Second Great Awakening in the South, beginning on the frontier, in Logan County, Kentucky. The Cane Ridge Revival was the largest associated with this awakening, attracting 25,000 worshippers in the summer of 1801, to hear extended preaching. Plain folk in the southern interior found a passionate new religion and Cane Ridge became a hearth for grassroots evangelical growth. The Second Great Awakening was national in scope, as Baptists and Methodists rose to new prominence as they proved especially effective at recruiting plain folk. They became the center of a democratic religion that coincided with the politics of the early nineteenth century. It empowered plain folks in the South and elsewhere.

Evangelicals, as Rhys Isaac notes, were a counterculture to gentry planter culture. They saw religious conversion as a transforming experience that led them to embrace an egalitarian fellowship with the redeemed, whether lowly in societal terms or not. Slaves, women, Indians, and others were welcomed into new communities of enthused believers, who embraced individualistic conversion and shared a rigorous moral austerity. The planter lifestyle, with its indulgence and worldliness, became a target for criticism by young evangelical preachers, who were often itinerants and thus especially suspicious to the powers that be in a hierarchical society. Women prayed, prophesied, and exhorted in unprecedented ways in exercising their spiritual gifts. Evangelicals insisted that converts take up the cross of Jesus, which ranked above even the paternalistic expectations of the male-dominated household of the South. Evangelicals in the early nineteenth century sometimes alienated not only planters but plain folk men with their radical vision that empowered all who put spiritual equality ahead of earthly values. This empowerment was perhaps especially significant in terms of African Americans in the South. Anglicans had been ineffective in efforts to convert slaves, but early evangelicals criticized slavery, sought black converts, and licensed black exhorters. The first black congregation in the southern colonies was Baptist, that in Silver Bluff, Georgia, in 1773, and Mechal Sobel has documented dozens of black Baptist churches by 1830. Most slaves worshipped, though, as part of biracial churches that would become even more numerous after 1830.

Evangelicals came to compromise their early social radicalism, though, as part of their accommodation to existing patterns of southern life and their attempts to gain greater influence over the region. In the first four decades of the nineteenth century, settlers from southern states moved into the Old Southwest, creating a new Cotton Kingdom and extending familial and ideological relationships across what we would now call the Deep South. Evangelicals were expansive and increasingly successful in this area, and they abandoned their original hostility to slavery and restricted black preachers. Evangelical doctrine now restricted women as well, taking away their right to vote in congregations and limiting their public role and emphasizing family life as a new evangelical ideal. Evangelicalism still focused on aggressively seeking converts, demanding moral discipline, and dominating local congregational communities, but it increasingly influenced discussions of public issues as well, providing moral meaning to a southern society that was economically and politically still in formation.

A symbol of the evangelical consolidation of influence in the early nineteenth century was the attempt to convert Native Americans. As settlers moved into the Old Southwest, pressures mounted for removal of Indians from their native lands. Long before this moment, traditional Indian religion had evolved through contact with Christian missionaries. This contact had disrupted Native societies and besieged traditional religious identities. A Cherokee Ghost Dance Movement (1811-1813) produced apocalyptic visions that predicted the destruction of whites, but its failure proved to be a turning point in that tribe’s history, when Christianity replaced traditional Indian worldviews. Baptists first sent missionaries to the Cherokee Nation shortly after that, in 1819, with Methodist circuit riders appearing in late 1823. Evangelical stress on spiritual experience over doctrine, an informal worship ritual, the empowerment of Cherokees themselves as evangelists, and congregational-based authority all promoted acceptance of Protestantism among the Cherokees and other Southeastern Indians. When the federal government forced removal of the Five Civilized Tribes to the Indian Territory, the Indians took forms of southern religion with them and planted them in what would become a border area of the South.

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