Attention to the historical development of religion in
the South underscores dramatic changes
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. Lay influence made for a distinctive
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 some degree of unity across
the colonies, with ministers holding the main religious worship services
in the
South
through the early 1700s, teaching a common theology and moral values,
and operating schools. A distinctive group of French Protestants
in South
Carolina, the
Hueguenots,
mostly joined the Anglican church there.
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. When the Anglican church was disestablished after
the American Revolution, its descendant, the new Episcopal church,
would
continue
to attract 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 pessimism 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, however,
it came to be equally characterized by the hope of redemption. Its theology
came to stress that God's grace made salvation possible for those who
accepted it. This recognition encouraged preaching that sought 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 as well as that elite denomination's 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
appealed 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 during the American Revolution. By
the 1790s, religious freedom and denominational competition for members
represented a new religious sensibility 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 Upcountry 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, especially effective
at recruiting plain folk, rose to new prominence. They became the center
of a more democratic religion complementary to the politics of the early
nineteenth century that empowered plain folks in the South and elsewhere.
Evangelicals, as historian Rhys Isaac notes, initiated a countercultural
movement 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 the socially
marginalized were
welcomed as enthusiastic believers, who embraced
individualistic conversion and proclaimed a rigorous moral austerity.
The planter way of life
with its indulgence and worldliness, became a target for criticism by
young evangelical preachers, who were often itinerants and especially
suspicious of the powers that be in a hierarchical society. Women
prayed, prophesied, exhorted and in other ways exercised their spiritual
gifts in unprecedented ways. Evangelicals insisted that converts take
up the cross of Jesus, sometimes alienating 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, founded in
Silver
Bluff, Georgia, in 1773, was Baptist, 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.
In time, evangelicals compromised their early social radicalism as part
of their accommodation to existing hierarchies of southern life and their
attempt to gain greater influence. 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, as they abandoned their original hostility
to slavery and restricted black preachers. Evangelical doctrine increasingly
restricted women as well, taking away their right to vote in congregations,
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 society that was economically
and politically in formation.
Emblematic 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, as increasingly 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 evangelical religion with them and planted them
in what would become a border area of the South.
