Religion In The American South Protestants And Others In History And Culture

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Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews, eds., Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 340 pp.

This collection represents an earnest attempt to oﬀer an inclusive, multidimensional treat- ment of religion in the South. The essays are independently engaging, with each ﬁlling an important gap, providing historical correction, or oﬀering a new interpretation.

Jon F. Sensbach, in “Before the Bible Belt: Indians, Africans, and the New Synthesis of Eighteenth-Century Southern Religious History,” provides a historiographical review of recent literature on southern religious history. The author agrees with historians that the two basic elements characterizing southern religion are its “biracial character” and “creative fusion of European and African belief systems” (7), and proceeds to outline four major themes in eighteenth-century southern religious history, including (1) “the role of Indians, an inherent part of the southern religious landscape, as they struggle to survive the demo- graphic and cultural losses wrought by European colonization” (8); (2) “the increasingly transatlantic character and variety of religion in the eighteenth-century South” (11); (3) “the importance of religion as a venue of cross-cultural exchange and mediation” (15); and (4) gender. The themes collectively conﬁrm that the eighteenth century was not simply “a mere enabler of the evangelical movement” but rather “the most volatile and dynamic period in southern religious history” (8).

An exercise in critical inquiry, Beth Barton Schweiger’s “Max Weber in Mount Airy, or, Revivals and Social T eory in the Early South” attempts to liberate the history of southern religion from notions of intransigence and the preoccupation with salvation. The author interrogates various themes, including revivals and region; creating cultures; churches, sects, and the South; Afro-Christianity and the slave self; white evangelicalism and the self; dissident social space, doctrine, and the evangelical self; and revivals as organizing process redux. The author concludes that revivals “did more than usher in modern bureaucracies and justify the impure motives of those who ran them,” as Max Weber had charged; they also “brought good news” to the disenfranchised (55).

Emily Bingham’s “T ou Knowest Not What a Day May Bring Forth: Intellect, Power, Conversion, and Apostasy in the Life of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus (1788-1838)” provides a case study of a Jewish southern woman’s conversion experience, one that ultimately aﬃrms that “there may be new angles from which to read the history of conversion and southern religious expression” (67). Kurt O. Berends’s “Confederate Sacriﬁce and the ‘Redemption’ of the South” interrogates how the Civil War shaped Christianity. Historians maintain three distinct positions. Some argue that Christianity was “central to the creation and sustenance of Confederate nationalism and morale”; others argue that “basic Christian doctrines or features of the faith undermined any possibility of Confederate victory”; still others argue that “Christianity both supported and undermined the Confederacy” (9). Berends argues ultimately that the Civil War moved southern evangelical Protestantism “away from its Calvinist heritage toward an Arminian understanding of conversion,” that is, one that “sacralized the idea of sacriﬁce on behalf of the cause (115).

Donald G. Mathews’s “Lynching Is Part of the Religion of Our People: Faith in the Christian South” takes a sustained look at “religion as lynching” (156). The author argues

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 311-363

that “the ﬂaw of white evangelicalism” was that it “assumed absolutely no responsibility for the violence inherent in its obsession with purity and danger” (183). Lynn Lyerly’s “Women and Southern Religion” provides a concise overview of the role that black and white Protestant and Catholic women played in the preservation, dissemination, and trans- formation of religion and religious expression in the South. In “God and Negroes and Jesus and Sin and Salvation: Racism, Racial Interchange, and Interracialism in Southern Reli- gious History,” Paul Harvey “explores the ways in which the theologically and culturally grounded Christian racism pervasive among white southern Christians eventually faltered, giving way to the more inclusive visions espoused by black Christians in the civil rights movement” (283).

T ree essays comprising approximately one-third of the volume attest to the recent scholarly appreciation for Pentecostalism. T ey examine Pentecostal subjects who respec- tively use prayer, southern hospitality, and singing to aﬃrm and share their faith. Based on the life stories of ﬁrst-generation Pentecostals, Daniel Woods’s “The Royal Telephone: Early Pentecostalism in the South and the Enthusiastic Practice of Prayer” was written in response to Grant Wacker’s suggestion that scholars attempt to “uncover the ‘forgotten world’ of the Pentecostal Movement’s “internal culture,” one eﬀectively treated in Woods’s critical exam- ination of prayer. Anthea D. Butler, in “Church Mothers and Migration in the Church of God in Christ,” argues that early COGIC church mothers used “southern hospitality” to help establish churches in various regions of the country. With its examination of southern black Pentecostalism in geographical exile, it aﬃrms the need for a careful examination of black Pentecostal expression in the South, the region from which the Pentecostal Move- ment among African Americans emanated. Jerma Jackson, in “Sister Rosetta T arpe and the Evolution of Gospel Music,” argues that T arpe helped revolutionize gospel music by singing gospel songs in night clubs. T arpe’s presentation was a harbinger of the gradual blurring of the boundaries between the sacred and secular in what increasingly became an economic enterprise.

The collection aﬃrms in breadth and scope the insight to be gained from a careful and multifaceted examination of religion in the South, including the classic themes of race, interracialism, class, gender, and redemption. Given its aim, it is remarkable that the collec- tion contains no essay — descriptive, analytical, or historiographical — that is dedicated unequivocally to African American religion in the South. Not to include such an essay is to overlook key participants in the overall sustenance and transformation of southern religious culture, including, but not limited to, members and supporters of the seven largest inde- pendent black denominations or Protestant communions controlled entirely by blacks, such as the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church, Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc. (NBC), National Baptist Convention of America, Unincorpo- rated (NBCA), Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC), and Church of God in Christ (COGIC).

Reviewed by Karen Kossie-Chernyshev

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