Religion In The Contemporary South Changes, Continuitiesm And Contexts

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178

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Corrie E. Norman and Don S. Armentrout, eds., Religion in the Contemporary South: Changes, Continuities, and Contexts (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2005). xxiii + 332 pp., $21.95, paper.

The American South has long been understood as a region deeply imbued with religiosity. The authors of this compendium recognize the evangelical Protestant leanings of this region while acknowledging simultaneously that this majority voice need not silence other voices that also can claim a space in southern religiosity. On one side, the “Baptist-Methodist” ethos is usually considered in this work in Southern Baptist terms (no chapter devoted to Methodism is included), and this hegemony is itself questioned through a critical analysis of a number of changes the Southern Baptist Convention has undergone within the last few decades. On the other side, southern religious pluralism is considered through chapters devoted to southern instances of Roman Catholicism (within both the Anglo and Latino communities), Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and other traditions. But no chapter is devoted to the African American voice, an absence that marks the work as deficient. The Episcopa- lian voice, on the contrary, is very pronounced, due to the compendium’s origins at the 1999 DuBose Lectures at the Episcopalian-affiliated University of the South, Sewanee. The Pentecostal witness is exclusively represented by one chapter written by David Roe- buck of the Church of God T eological Seminary. This piece considers the changing roles of women in the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) as a case study of how Pentecostal- ism has shifted from being a marginal to an acceptable religious presence in the South. As the Church of God grew to be a more established church, the voices of women ministers began to be less and less pronounced. Roebuck unabashedly indicates that this develop- ment was a negative reaction on the part of the Church of God to the increased role of women in the second half of the twentieth century, and that this move was typical of other Pentecostal denominations in which the tendency was to understand femininity in ways more congruent with traditional notions of gender in southern evangelical culture.

This last issue points to perhaps the most important contribution this work as a whole can make to Pentecostal scholarship. The authors in this collection portray a South that has an imbedded religious culture that influences the way various churches within this region have come to think about certain issues. When one considers Christian embodiments in the South, one still finds that women are generally not viewed as being on equal ground with men in the ministerial ranks, churches are still for the most part segregated on any given Sunday, and a sense of the church catholic is lost in the midst of an unquestioned denominational fragmentation characteristic of modern-day Protestantism. T ese charac- teristics are typical of most Christian churches in the area, including Pentecostal ones, which thereby raises the question of whether Pentecostals have simply assumed the southern evangelical culture as their own when, in fact, they have good reasons for not doing so.

Outside of these additional considerations, the work’s importance for Pentecostal schol- arship is questionable. Although the theme of religion in the contemporary South is a very important one, this work approaches it through a “case-study” format so that a running, multifaceted argument is not attempted. In this light Pentecostalism (as represented by

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157007407X178292

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178

Roebuck’s piece) is simply one voice among many others (both Christian and non-Christian) vying for space in the arena of southern religiosity, one that is gradually becoming more cacophonous (or polyphonic, depending on one’s stance) as the region becomes more diverse.

Reviewed by Daniel Castelo

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