Religion has been a formative experience for those living
in the 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 places 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 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 the regional contexts of religion in the South directs
attention to the geographic, environmental, demographic, economic,
social,
and
cultural
factors of religious development. Spatial and
social places mattered. Commonalities existed across social barriers
but experiences
varied 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, religious forms adapted to
a stratifying social reality but also enabled southerners to give
voice to
yearnings that transcended hierarchies. Time, as well as
place, mattered in understanding southern religion. Religion in the
colonial
period was 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. 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. South. Indigenous peoples had
their own religious systems that the coming of European Christianity
disrupted, but the Native American presence left a spiritual
legacy. More tangible influences of spirit-related
health practices and site-related sacred spaces linger
from this earliest time of Native American habitation. As the
South became a predominantly
biracial
society in the nineteenth century,
the coming
together of the religions of western Europe and western Africa provided
the essential background for the later development of religion in the
South. European
theology, liturgy, and morality would come to predominate, but not without
considerable imprint from African spirituality. Slaves 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 varied from era to era, "the South" has been an ideological
and experiential focus 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 society often at odds with national
expectations. Religious groups in the South sometimes used sectional
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 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
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 within the U.S. South, 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. Ethnic
groups planted and sustained religious traditions in regional enclaves
outside the evangelical Protestant hegemony. Roman Catholics have dominated
in south Louisiana, dating from sixteenth and seventeenth century French
settlement, creating a unique landscape in the South, but Catholics also
heavily influenced life in Hispanic south Texas, Cuban areas of Florida,
and along the Gulf Coast with its early French and Spanish settlement.
Catholics were 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
their peculiar patterns of accommodation and resistance to the overall
culture. The geography of Jews in the South
is usually depicted as a predominantly 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 had been historic home to
Quakers,
Moravians,
and other Protestant dissenters.
