Charles Reagan Wilson, Overview: Religion in the American South

Defenders of a self-consciously “southern” civilization after the Civil War came to use the term “way of life” to indicate an ideological defense of a peculiar pattern of institutions and attitudes associated with the region. White southerners saw their system of paternalistic white supremacy as the essence of a regional civilization, but the “way of life” included countless specific attitudes and customs rooted in regional life and reified as a constructed social identity. Religious institutions and leaders gave a spiritual gloss on the “southern way of life,” infusing it with transcendent significance at times and often blurring the lines between Christianity and southernism. Above and beyond religion’s defense of a self-consciously southern ideology, religion in the South was indeed distinctive within national patterns of religion, but more importantly, it was a central part of life for many people in the region.

The generations from the end of Reconstruction to World War II lived with pronounced orthodoxies at the heart of the belief in a peculiar way of life, and religion played a role in each. A tangible memory of the Civil War experience haunted white southerners, for example, and the spiritual interpretation of Confederate defeat became a southern civil religion—the religion of the Lost Cause. Its saints were leaders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and its ritual celebrations were Confederate Memorial Day and dedications of monuments to the Lost Cause. Organizations like the United Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were the epitome of cultural authority in the region, and they regularly used religious language to sacralize the Confederacy. The 1890s witnessed the strengthening of the Lost Cause, with increased organizational and ritual activity, in the same decade as the hardening of southern racial attitudes. Indeed, the legal codification and institutionalization of white supremacy represented another of those orthodoxies at the heart of the southern way of life. While white churches often criticized the worst of racial violence, they nonetheless blessed Jim Crow segregation, disfranchisement of black voters, and other manifestations of racism. The second Ku Klux Klan, which appeared after World War I, tapped evangelical moralism as a foundation of its appeal for white purity. Evangelicalism itself stressed individual morality, through avoidance of personal sins, but the churches moved beyond private morality to campaign for laws to regulate gambling, Sunday recreation, dancing, and most importantly, the sale of alcoholic beverages.

These orthodoxies need to be seen as within a developing society after the Civil War that balanced continuities with the past and a new forward-looking ideology—all of which became known as the New South. Although most southerners continued to farm, live in rural areas and small towns, and preserve many of their earlier folkways, a sense of change was also a part of southern life. The railroad most notably came to symbolize a new freedom of movement and the possibilities of economic development, but such developing industries as textiles, timber, and mining brought southerners off the farms and into new work and business arrangements. Southern religious leaders blessed the wealth that came out of economic development, and imposing new urban churches began to appear as centers of social prestige, economic power, and cultural authority. Defeat of the southern cause in the Civil War led evangelical Protestants to fear for their future, but their energetic efforts at evangelism and missionary work strengthened their role in southern life by the turn of the twentieth century. While an evangelical worldview had come to characterize much of the South before the Civil War, the postwar period saw rising membership in evangelical churches and participation in church life. The Southern Baptist Convention, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Presbyterian Church in the United States consolidated their independence as regionally distinctive mainstream churches of the New South.

By the turn of the twentieth century, black church membership was 2.7 million out of a population of 8.3 million, an amazing commitment to the churches as the central institutions of southern black life. The largest denomination was the Baptists, especially the National Baptist Convention, which had consolidated in 1895. The next largest black denomination was the Methodists, embodied in the African Methodist Episcopal church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, and the Colored Methodist Episcopal church. Black church doctrine was often similar to that of white evangelical denominations—fundamentalist and biblically centered, otherworldly, fatalistic, and moralistically focused on individual sinfulness. Black churches always had the challenge of creating nurturing spaces as sanctuaries for their people who suffered abuses from being outside the circle of white orthodoxies. Black religion affirmed the equality of the individual, whatever the larger society was saying, and the church represented one of the few institutions affirming the ultimate dignity and worth of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Although critics would later deride black preachers as Uncle Toms who assimilated to the caste system, the church provided the base for social dissent and protest whenever conditions made it possible in the twentieth-century South. The folk religion of the rural South was at the heart of what W.E.B. DuBois called the “souls of black folk” and would long inspire the musical, literary, and artistic creativity of African Americans.

Interior of a negro church in the Mississippi Delta, Mississippi.
June 1937

Dorothea Lange
Farm Security Administration
17306C

Uplift was the term blacks and whites used to describe their churches’ efforts to bring reform and improvements to religious life and regional society in general in the New South. It reflected the New South’s advocacy of progress, which emphasized educational improvement, economic development, and moderate race relations. Middle class in outlook, the ideology of uplift discouraged the folk religion that was so prominent among the rural faithful and it worked to utilize resources to aid those in dire straights. Women carved out new roles in missionary societies to advance the public role of women, with Methodist women particularly effective in going beyond traditional male-dominated church hierarchies to achieve new influence. Black women, as well as white, worked through their churches and through such agencies as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, women’s clubs, and denominational social service groups to promote improvements in the lives of the needy and, in the case of African American church women, to advance the cause of social justice for black southerners. The uplift of southern religion also included modernization of institutional church life, with new, well-organized bureaucracies appearing and ministers increasingly achieving professional status, at least in growing urban areas.

A Negro church at Vicksburg, Mississippi.
March 1936

Walker Evans
Farm Security Administration
RA8071-A

Sectarian religion, those new religious movements that grew out of dissatisfaction with mainstream churches, burst forth with new manifestations around the turn of the twentieth century. The Churches of Christ, for example, are a Restorationist church, embodying an early New Testament church outlook and local congregational control. Their opposition to musical instruments in worship and to organized missionary societies marked them as culturally different from most southern Protestants, and their strong inheritance of Calvinist theology distinguished them from southern evangelicals, with whom they did not claim identity. The Churches of Christ gained early strength in middle and west Tennessee, from where they spread out into influence in hill country regions of the mid-South and into the Southwest. Holiness churches were even more significant, emerging from Methodism as an urgent expression of a religion of the spirit and appealing to the working class and the disfranchised in southern life. Methodist founder John Wesley had written of a post-conversion second infusion of grace, leading to perfectionism, and Holiness believers stressed this doctrine as a central point of faith. Pentecostalism later emerged out of Holiness, practicing such spiritual manifestations as the baptism of the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, and faith healing. Pentecostals could be found on the Great Plains and in southern California in the early twentieth century, but eastern Tennessee was one of its hearths as well. A.J. Tomlinson had once been a leader of Holiness members in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, but he later helped found the Church of God, in Cleveland, Tennessee, one of the most important Pentecostal groups. Charles Harrison Mason founded the leading African American Pentecostal group, the Church of God in Christ, in Memphis in 1906. Sectarians in general relied often on charismatic leadership, doctrinaire beliefs, and rigid morality to create separate religious space and compete effectively for members. The Holiness/Pentecostal tradition—the Sanctified Church in black culture—has been an especially creative force in southern life, shaping generations of religious and secular music.

Roman Catholics and Jews entered a new phase of their life in the South in the late nineteenth century, lasting until the mid-twentieth century. New immigrants from Italy, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as continued Irish immigration, brought more Catholics into the South at the turn of the twentieth century, although the numbers were far below those in northeastern and midwestern areas. Still, these people energized the church and its efforts to meet their needs. The church worked to preserve a Catholic identity in the South, despite being in an overwhelmingly Protestant culture, through recreational organizations, devotional groups, use of southern-born priests, and especially, parochial schools. The church also identified with the larger southern society, even establishing Jim Crow segregation in parishes and schools. Despite this accommodation, Catholics suffered increased Nativist harassment in the half century after 1890, limiting the participation of Catholic political aspirants. Anti-Semitism was similarly at its worst in the decades after 1890, and the lynching of Leo Frank in 1915 dramatized the terror that could affect anyone in the South who did not fit the orthodoxies of a closed society. Southern Jews practiced their religion, but they tended to embrace Reform Judaism, with its less restrictive dietary and ritual requirements than Jewish Orthodoxy, making them stand out less from their Protestant neighbors. They built temples that could sometimes look like Protestant churches. Southern evangelicals are people of the Bible, and they could see the Jews among them as like Old Testament Hebrews. Catholics and Jews thus became southerners, albeit with differences from the large number of Protestants around them.

The church life of the latter had its own rhythms that reflected and shaped rural and small town life. Religious ties to the southern environment were especially manifest in the outdoor water baptisms that were a common enough feature of rural areas, in rivers and streams, with congregations and onlookers standing watch on the banks nearby. The South was an agricultural region, and a central ritual of Evangelicalism, the revival, usually took place in the mid-summer when crops were in the ground and worshippers could devote their spirits to refreshment. Evangelistic campaigns were among the major social and cultural activities of the region. Revivalism came out of the predominant concern of evangelicals for conversion of the lost, and revivalists became celebrities well known in the region. Georgia Methodist Sam Jones was the most famous revivalist of his time, stressing the need for upright moral behavior and preaching Prohibition as well as conversion. As more southerners moved to cities, revivalism moved with them, with mass revivals in the 1920s becoming prominent features of urban life, conducted by traveling preachers like Mordecai Ham and J.C. Bishop (the “Yodeling Cowboy Evangelist”). Billy Graham would later take evangelistic campaigns out of his native North Carolina into unprecedented international forums.

Modernity was a mixed experience for southern religious people. They embraced the opportunities it presented for expanding evangelical and outreach projects, through better training for ministers in better funded educational institutions, larger church facilities to provide more services for their followers, and extended networks made possible by improved transportation and communication. Modern thought raised, however, enormous fears for people rooted in theological and social orthodoxy. Science raised special concerns because of its rising authority in Western Civilization, and scientific evolutionism and higher criticism of the Bible have continued for generations to alienate southern evangelicals committed to a literalist reading of the Scriptures. The Scopes Trial, in the summer of 1925, became the most notorious example of seeming southern religious hostility to the forces of modern science. Critic H.L. Mencken covered the trial and out of his experience observing religion in the South coined the term Bible Belt to characterize the South and other areas of conservative Protestantism. Despite their theological conservatism, the South’s predominant churches did not provide as strong a home for the national Fundamentalist Movement as might have been thought. To be sure, believers who saw themselves as “fundamentalist” fought for control of their denominations in the 1920s, but they lost to moderates. Moreover, southerners kept close allegiance to their regional denominations, limiting their involvement in interdenominational national fundamentalist agencies. After the Scopes Trial, Fundamentalism as an organized movement did slowly mature in the South, embodied in private educational institutions, independent associations, and interdenominational groups.