The Journal of Southern Religion

Volume 14 (2012)

http://jsr.fsu.edu

ISSN 1094-5253

About the JSR

Masthead

Editors

Luke E. Harlow, Co-Editor

University of Tennessee, Knoxville
lharlow1@utk.edu

Michael Pasquier, Co-Editor

Louisiana State University
mpasquier@lsu.edu

Arthur Remillard, Book Review Editor

Saint Francis University
aremillard@francis.edu

Emily S. Clark, Managing Editor

Florida State University
esclark@fsu.edu

Lincoln A. Mullen, Web Editor

Brandeis University
lincoln@lincolnmullen.com

Advisory Board

Sam Hill

University of Florida, Emeritus

Walter H. Conser

University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Randall Stephens

Northumbria University

John Corrigan

Florida State University

Briane Turley

West Virginia University

Editorial Board

Beth Barton Schweiger

University of Arkansas

Edward L. Ayers

University of Richmond

Donald G. Mathews

University of North Carolina

Ted M. Ownby

University of Mississippi

Russell E. Richey

Emory University

Sandy Martin

University of Georgia

Dickson D. Bruce

University of California, Irvine

Gary Laderman

Emory University

Bland Whitley

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Princeton University

Joel Martin

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Paul Harvey

University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Tracy Fessenden

Arizona State University

Andrew M. Manis

Macon State College

Lewis V. Baldwin

Vanderbilt University

Charles H. Lippy

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Charles A. Israel

Auburn University

Rodger M. Payne

University of North Carolina at Asheville

John Hayes

Augusta State University

Lee L. Willis III

University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point

Alison Collis Greene

Mississippi State University

Editorial Policies and Submission Guidelines

Overview

The Journal of Southern Religion is a fully peer-reviewed academic journal reflecting the best traditions of objective and critical scholarship in the study of religion. As an interdisciplinary venture, the editors invite submissions from historians, religionists, anthropologists, sociologists, and other interested scholars. The journal welcomes submissions on all aspects of southern religion but is especially interested in publishing manuscripts that address the following topics:

- Regionalism in southern religion, e.g., Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, south Florida and the Caribbean

- religious aspects of southern culture, e.g., religion and cuisine, music, and southern literature

- southern civil religion

- local and folk religions, including ethnographic studies of congregations and parishes

- ethnicity including immigration and slave religions

- religion and race, class, disability, and gender issues in the South.

Scholars desiring to submit their research to the journal should read the submissions policy.

Open Access and Copyright

The Journal of Southern Religion is an open-access publication. You are encouraged to make use of the materials published in the JSR in your scholarship and teaching.

All materials are © copyright Association for the Study of Southern Religion, 1998–2012. All articles, book reviews, podcasts, and other material are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

This license grants you permission to use the material published in the journal as you see fit, for example, in course packs, on course websites, and in quotations in other scholarly works. In return, you must cite the JSR wherever you use its contents. The citation must include all relevant bibliographic information, as well as a URL pointing to the content. See the sample citations below. Your citation may not imply that the JSR endorses or has published your derivative content.

The grant of these open-access permissions does not remove your professional obligation concerning proper use, citation, and plagiarism.

Citing the JSR

As with print media, any use of JSR materials for scholarly or other purposes should be properly documented. The following format should be used:

Footnote or endnote

Chad E. Seales, “An Old Love for New Things: Southern Baptists and the Modern Technology of Indoor Baptisteries,” Journal of Southern Religion 13 (2011): http://jsr.fsu.edu/issues/vol13/Seales.html.

Bibliography

Seales, Chad E. “An Old Love for New Things: Southern Baptists and the Modern Technology of Indoor Baptisteries.” Journal of Southern Religion 13 (2011): http://jsr.fsu.edu/issues/vol13/Seales.html.

Minimally, all references should contain the author’s name, title, and the name of the journal with volume and year citations. If cited in an online publication, the appropriate URL for that site may be linked for instant reference. The use of the URL is recommended even for print publications.

All articles, essays, reviews, etc. that appear in a given calendar year constitute a single journal volume.

Article Guidelines

Submitting Manuscripts

Submissions to the JSR are fully peer-reviewed by members of the editorial board and their designees. Electronic submissions are preferred. Please submit via email to both of the editors.

- Michael Pasquier, mpasquier@lsu.edu

- Luke Harlow, lharlow1@utk.edu

Authors wishing to submit paper manuscripts should contact the editors, after which they may send three double-spaced copies to:

Luke Harlow, editor, Journal of Southern Religion
Department of History
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996

and

Michael Pasquier, editor, Journal of Southern Religion
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Louisiana State University
102 Coates Hall
Baton Rouge, LA 70803

Unsolicited manuscripts should fit broadly into one or more of the categories outlined by the journal’s editorial policies. Materials submitted to JSR must not have been previously published nor submitted for publication elsewhere while under review by JSR editors.

All submissions should be accompanied by the author’s name, current institutional affiliation, postal and e-mail addresses. Paper manuscripts will not be returned. In most cases, authors will be notified within ninety days whether or not their submission has been accepted.

Electronic publication allows for the addition of images and other visual or auditory aids, and the editors encourage authors to include such with articles when appropriate. Authors should make certain that all submitted materials are clear of copyright claims or that they obtain permission as required by law. JSR reserves copyright privileges for all materials published.

Accepted Manuscripts

Acceptance: If a submission is accepted, the author will sign a contract with JSR assigning copyright to the Journal of Southern Religion. After making corrections and revisions, the author should submit the accepted manuscript via email to the editors as a Microsoft Word file (.doc or .docx) or as valid HTML. Please include at the top of the first page of the manuscript, the title, your name, your current academic rank (or equivalent), and your institutional affiliation. The revised manuscript will be copyedited and uploaded to the JSR site for the succeeding annual issue, usually published in the fall. At the present time, JSR does not provide authors with offprints of published materials, but we will notify you by email when your manuscript is published online.

Solicited essays should conform to the same criteria but are not restricted by word length requirements.

JSR Style

All manuscripts should follow the Chicago Manual of Style.

Book Review Guidelines

Thank you for agreeing to review a book for the Journal of Southern Religion. Reviews are a vital part of the journal. At their best, as historian Steven Stowe has observed, reviews are a “vernacular form of scholarly talk” that assess where we are, where we are going, and how we might best reshape our work.

Book reviews should be between 500 and 1,000 words, but we have no formal limit. Scholars interested in submitting book reviews to JSR should contact the book review editor Art Remillard.

- Art Remillard, aremillard@francis.edu

When you receive your review copy, please send a short confirmation message to the book review editor. Within eight weeks, please email your review for approval and editing.

Book reviewers should consult the book review style sheet before submitting reviews. Please refer to the guidelines below as you write.

JSR seeks reviews that:

1. Tell plainly what the book says and for whom it is written. Most readers read reviews to learn the scope and argument of a book. In addition, a careful assessment of the book’s intended audience is of particular interest to the readers of an interdisciplinary journal such as the JSR.

2. Set the author’s argument in a broad context of scholarly analysis. Reviewers should bear in mind that scholars from a variety of disciplines will read the review. The perspectives of the reviewer’s own discipline will be of great interest, but reviewers should avoid assessments based solely on issues of interest to those in a single field or subfield.

3. Suggest whether the author achieves the book’s stated purpose and assesses the significance of that goal. Criticism is welcomed, of course, but it should be made only on courteous and constructive terms. The editors will either ask reviewers to rewrite sections that breach this standard or refuse the submission altogether.

Writing should be concise yet lively, and should strive to balance a personal voice with careful analysis.

Book Review Style and Format

Most reviews run between 500 and 1,000 words, but there is no formal limit.

All reviews should be submitted as an e-mail attachment in Word format to the book review editor.

The following information should appear at the top of the review:

Author. Full Title of the Book. Place of Publishing: Publisher, Date of Publication. Number of Pages. ISBN. Reviewed by Name of Author.

Please list your name and affiliation at the end of the essay.

Reviewers should consult the Chicago Manual of Style on all questions of style. Please supply page numbers for all quoted passages. Use the first name in the initial reference to any person (including the author). With organizations or acts, use the full name in the initial reference; all subsequent references may use initials or acronyms. Please supply publication dates of any books mentioned in the review.

Please proofread the text of the review carefully.

Questions should be directed to the book review editor.

Status of Electronic Reviews

Professional ethics dictate that a scholar can publish only one review of a book. Journal of Southern Religion reviews count as that one review. As indicated above, Journal reviewers have permission to republish their reviews provided that proper credit is given to the Journal of Southern Religion, but should not agree to write a separate review of the same work for a print journal.

Religion in the Early South: a Roundtable Edited by Rebecca Goetz

Religious Diversity and the Coming of Christianity in the Prerevolutionary South

Rebecca Anne Goetz

Rebecca Anne Goetz is an assistant professor of History at Rice University.

As I was beginning research on what became my first book more than a decade ago, people repeatedly told me to give the project up. Religion and race in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake? Certainly race mattered, of course it did, there in that crucible of tobacco and slavery. But religion? There were no sources for religion in seventeenth-century Virginia! For my critics, religion only mattered in Virginia—and indeed in the rest of the South—for the emergence of the evangelical Bible Belt. This dominant narrative obscured the religious worlds of colonial southerners—the many Christianities, African religions, Islam, Judaism, and the beliefs of native Southerners.[1] Older assumptions festered: the South’s white colonists valued profits over prayers and enslaved people lived in a world devoid of the sacred, victims of a “spiritual Holocaust.”[2]

The last ten to fifteen years have seen a sea change in our understanding of colonial religiosity in general and in the early South in particular. I have observed the changes through my own work; where I was once pressed to defend the study of religion in Virginia, I am now asked detailed questions about religious minorities and African American syncretic Christianity. When the editors of the Journal of Southern Religion asked me to put together a forum on religion in the early South, I saw an opportunity to show how delightfully complex our awareness of the religiosity of the early South has become. The colonial South was a deeply and variously religious place, and the advent of the Bible Belt was a much longer, more complicated process than earlier work had indicated. Most critically, scholars have absorbed the existence of many colonial Christianities and the place of both the Atlantic World and the continental interior in circulating ideas and beliefs. They have also begun to take the spiritual lives of non-whites seriously. The forum essays by Travis Glasson, Jewel Spangler, Maura Farrelly, Jason Young, and Tracy Leavelle, take into account these historiographical and methodological developments and offer thought-provoking suggestions about where future research might take us.

The early South we are in the process of recovering was deeply diverse: it was multireligious, multiethnic, and multiracial. As Philip Morgan recently wrote about colonial Virginia, “[u]northodoxy, no matter what the perspective, was widespread.”[3] Morgan’s observations on Virginia could be usefully applied to the rest of the colonial South. Christian heterodoxy and general religious diversity were persistent and ubiquitous features of the colonial South. A list of the many Christianities present in the region would be longer than my arm: there were Roman Catholics, members of the Church of England (in all their glorious variety), Huguenots, German Pietists, Moravians, Quakers, and in the eighteenth century, small groups of Baptists and Presbyterians as well. And this list is not exhaustive, of course. The most important point is that European Christians, their Indian and African converts, and various non-Christians lived cheek-by-jowl with one another. While this did occasion episodes of sectarian violence (often between Protestants of various stripes and Roman Catholics), it also forced a practical toleration. In Virginia, Quakers—though mistrusted and sometimes imprisoned—never found themselves in danger of being executed as their brethren were in Massachusetts. In Virginia, too, wealthy landowning Catholic families such as the Brents were not only tolerated but even protected.[4] Some southern colonies even wrote toleration of a sort into their founding documents. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina mandated religious toleration “that civil peace may be maintained amidst diversity of opinions.”[5] Though the Carolina document was never much respected among its constituents, other southern colonies also experimented with toleration. Georgia, for example, initially did not have an established church and extended religious toleration to all except Roman Catholics. Recognizing the religious diversity of the colonial South, then, should have the effect of encouraging scholars to think anew not only about the sources of religious violence in the early South but also about the origins and development of religious toleration.[6]

One of the happy effects of acknowledging religious diversity and of decentering the growth of evangelicalism has been to refocus attention on the Church of England. Most historians generally considered Anglicanism too weak (even where established), too peppered with scandalously unprincipled clergy, and too irrelevant to the daily lives of ordinary colonists to have had a meaningful impact. In this narrative, the Church of England remained a quaint creature of the elite, waiting to be challenged and overcome by evangelicalism. Though other, less pejorative histories of Anglicanism have long emanated from within the Church of England, counternarratives of a dynamic and adaptive Anglican church have only recently come to the fore.[7] Travis Glasson’s essay “Protestantism in the Early South” establishes the importance of Anglicanism in the South in the context of a multiracial, multireligious society, crediting Atlantic history with reviving the fortunes of Anglican historiography. As Glasson points out, “Atlantic history has served as an antidote to the excessive exceptionalism to which some Southern religious history has been prone.” Glasson also notes that Anglicanism appealed to a much wider group of people than had been previously assumed. The Church of England adjusted to a variety of conditions and bound Anglicans living around the Atlantic together. It was also a source of rich tradition and valued spirituality—especially for displaced Britons. Glasson’s own fine book specifically addresses Atlantic Anglicanism in the context of missionary activity in the Caribbean and mainland North America. The very fluidity and adaptability of the Church of England transformed a missionary movement designed to mitigate the worst effects of slavery into a fully formed proslavery Christianity. Yet as Glasson also notes, the Church of England was crucial to the development of black Protestantism.[8] In this new history of the Church of England, Atlantic currents and careful attention to nonwhite interaction with Anglicanism will help scholars answer new questions about African and Indian interactions with Christianity in a context where it has been sorely overlooked.

As colonial Anglicanism has emerged from the shadows, so have the South’s dissenting Protestants. Dissenters were, of course, everywhere—even in colonies with established churches. Their communities should be viewed not in isolation but as part of a broader Atlantic context of migration, exchange, and conflict. The experiences of individual dissenters moving around an Atlantic world full of religious ferment show how varied dissenters were and how their own beliefs changed over the course of their lifetimes. The seventeenth-century Anglican minister Patrick Copeland, for example, began his career by evangelizing Bengalis on behalf of the East India Company. He later became a member of the Virginia Company of London, advising the Company on matters related to Indian conversion. He eventually emigrated to Bermuda, where he abandoned the Church of England in favor of radical congregationalism. He was briefly imprisoned on Bermuda before joining a colony on the island of Eleuthera (Greek for “freedom”) that welcomed all Protestant dissenters. Copeland’s experiences show how dissenters moved around the English imperium, and also illustrate how their religious liberties were usually limited to some degree by the state.[9] Protestant dissent moved and circulated throughout the Atlantic world, shaping nascent religious cultures and challenging—by their very existence—mainstream Protestantism.

Black Protestant dissenters also moved around the Atlantic world. In the eighteenth century, the tale of Rebecca Protten similarly demonstrates the movement of dissenters in the Atlantic world, this time through the Moravian Church. Rebecca was born into slavery on the island of St. Thomas. She converted to Christianity through the efforts of a Moravian missionary, gained her freedom, and became a missionary in her own right, living first in the Caribbean, then in Germany. Her last voyage as a missionary was to the Danish slave-trading factory of Christianborg on the Gold Coast, where she died in 1781. Protten’s story suggests the complicated relationship among Moravians, race, and the institution of slavery.[10] Studying Protestant dissenters is another window into the spiritual lives of nonwhite southerners. Moravians and Quakers embraced racial equality in interesting ways; rather than treating their radicalism on race (and gender for that matter) as odd outliers, scholars should integrate them into the broader narrative of southern religion.

Puritans—that hotter sort of Protestant—were ubiquitous in the seventeenth century. Far from being confined to New England, puritans lived in Bermuda, the Caribbean, and in the South. The presence of puritans in early Virginia drew Governor William Berkeley’s ire; he drove them out as soon as he was able to and his conflict with these dissenting Protestants exposed fault lines in colonial southern society. Dissenters were sometimes seen, as Berkeley saw them, as traitors and as dangers to the stability of colonial administration. As late as the 1670s, Berkeley directed sarcastic commentary toward Massachusetts Bay puritans, whom he referred to as the “Brethren,” “for they as the Popes ever did doe love an usurper better than a lawful prince.”[11] Berkeley’s feud with puritans and his support for the established Church of England reinforce to some degree the trope of established elites in conflict with challenging dissenters. Recent scholarship strongly suggests, though, that thinking in terms of conflict between an orthodox establishment and upstart dissenters might not be useful for the eighteenth century. Jewel Spangler argues in her essay “Protestant Dissenters in the Early South” that some dissenting traditions such as Presbyterians and Baptists, while offering true alternatives to the Church of England, also worked within an established social order. Her conclusions suggest that dissenters were not as countercultural as those they supposedly challenged—including Berkeley—wanted to believe.

Spangler also argues in her essay here and in her other well-received work that dissenter congregations were “supportive of planter power, social hierarchies, and slavery.”[12] Spangler’s work is also part of a renaissance in new studies of non-Anglican Protestantism in the late colonial and early national periods that has upended previously cherished truths about the rise of evangelicalism and proslavery Christianity. New work by Randolph Scully and Charles Irons, for example, highlights the complicated relationship between these emergent congregations and African Americans, and both paint a complex picture of the relationship between Protestant dissent and proslavery Christianity.[13] Included among southern dissenters were also smaller groups, Moravians, Quakers, and Huguenots for example. As Spangler also notes, these people did not fit neatly into old standard narratives about the development of evangelicalism. With that narrative sufficiently complicated, Spangler suggests that scholars can renew their interest in groups that faded in the nineteenth century, taking them and their importance for the religiosity of the colonial South seriously on their own terms. Their presence and persistence in the colonial period again highlight the importance of ideas of religious toleration and religious liberty.

Though our understanding of Protestantism and its dissenters has changed radically in the last decade, Protestantism maintains its hold on our imaginations. It is the form of Christianity that dominates the narrative of religious history in the early South. But until the early eighteenth century, Protestants in any guise were the minority Christian group in the South, heavily outnumbered by Roman Catholics.[14] The Spanish had missions in Florida (and for a brief period, in the Chesapeake), and the French presence in the lower Mississippi Valley brought Catholicism farther west. If we take seriously Juliana Barr’s call to define the South as a “Sunbelt” stretching from the Atlantic coast into the Southwest to the Pacific Ocean, Catholicism’s dominance in the colonial South becomes even more obvious.[15] Spanish missions in Texas, New Mexico, and California worked hard to convert native people to Catholicism, and by the early eighteenth century, their efforts had borne fruit. From Florida to Santa Fe, French, Spanish, and native Catholics connected across trade routes that reached into the desert Southwest and into the heart of the continent. Far from being a land of (mostly) Anglophone Protestants of various stripes, when seen from the Caribbean, from Florida, from the French trade up and down the Mississippi River, or from Mexico City, the South was a Roman Catholic space.

The English (Protestant) challenge to the Catholic South came not with the establishment of Jamestown (though the Virginia colonists spent much of the seventeenth century living in fear of Spanish raids), but with the establishment of Carolina and the growth of a vigorous trade in enslaved Indians. Between 1702 and 1705, English slave traders and their Indian allies repeatedly raided the missions of Spanish Florida, destroying many towns and enslaving and killing native people. Those who were not killed or enslaved fled to French territory, hoping for protection there. During one particularly devastating raid in 1704, a party of English and Ochese raiders burned towns and tortured captives, and in a fit of anti-Catholic ire, the invaders burned and looted a mission church.[16] English ascendancy in Carolina not only threatened the Catholic South but also doomed the well-connected chain of missions that stretched from the Florida peninsula to the Gulf Coast South. As Jon Sensbach has pointed out, the early eighteenth-century attacks on the Florida missions represented a turning point in the history of the South, one that historians who have been shaped by the narrative of Protestant domination have missed.[17] This Catholic South needs to be understood on its own terms, and its dominance needs to be integrated into our understanding of southern religiosity.

As Maura Farrelly notes in her essay “Catholicism and the Early South,” Catholicism had an “English accent” in Maryland, the only English colony formed deliberately to shelter Catholics. English Protestants quickly outnumbered English Catholics in the little colony (puritans in the settlement attempted to take over the colony on behalf of Parliament in 1645–1646). After the Glorious Revolution, Farrelly observes that though Catholics labored under sometimes severe legal disabilities during the eighteenth century, they retained a commitment to toleration and religious liberty that spurred their enthusiastic participation in the American Revolution. Farrelly also argues that Maryland’s English Catholics were crucial to the legal institutionalization of race-based slavery in the Chesapeake, and that slavery “played a role in the creation of a distinctly ‘American’ form of Roman Catholic identity.”

Maryland’s Catholics might not have wrestled with questions of conscience regarding race and slavery, but as Farrelly points out, French and Spanish Catholics, especially the regular clergy, certainly did. The New Orleans Ursuline convent housed French, Cuban, and American-born women but championed equal access to the sacraments for all people.[18] Equally important were the large numbers of African Catholics in the South. Just as Travis Glasson argues that understanding enslaved Anglicans is an important project, so is understanding enslaved Catholics. Jason Young’s essay “African Religions in the Early South” makes a powerful case for carefully considering African Catholicism in the context of a diverse southern religiosity. When Kongolese Catholicism entered the South with enslaved people, it was a Catholicism that had been understood, adopted, and adapted by several generations and had been worked into the fabric of West African life. British missionaries and clergymen observed with interest and some puzzlement the presence of this strong Afro-Catholicism among enslaved people in Carolina; some of these Kongolese Catholics requested conversion into the Church of England. Kongolese Catholics’ devotion to the Virgin Mary might have inspired the slave rebellion in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739.[19] Young rightly suggests that West African Catholicism, like Protestantism and Islam, contributed to the emergence of African American religion later in the eighteenth century. But Afro-Catholicism is also important in its own right. The South was sprinkled with black Catholic converts as well, especially in Spanish Florida. These men and women chose Catholicism in the New World rather than in the Old.[20] Roman Catholicism in the broad South was diverse: it was multiethnic, multiracial, and multilingual. It appealed to people from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and it formed the backbone of southern religiosity for the better part of three centuries.

Other Old World monotheisms made their way to the American South as well. Islam came to the North American continent via the South, and it accompanied Christianity. The history of Islam in the New World began as soon as Old World voyagers began exploring the land. In the sixteenth century, Muslims came mostly from North Africa via trade in slaves around the Mediterranean. Estebanico, a North African slave on Panfilo de Narvaez’s expedition, was one of only four survivors of the venture and spent the years between 1527 and 1536 walking from the west coast of Florida to the Pacific coast of Mexico. Estebanico was from the town of Azamor in Morocco, and was most likely born into a Muslim family. After his enslavement, probably by Portuguese invaders/traders, Estebanico’s captors likely forced him to convert to Christianity and gave him a new name—after St. Stephen. Spain forbade the immigration of Muslims, Jews, and conversos to the New World, so Estebanico’s master must have accepted his Christianity, at least nominally. Estebanico had a gift for languages and an adaptability that eluded some of his Spanish counterparts; he was confident in his relationship with native peoples he met along the way.[21] Another Muslim, named Chinano and enslaved in Cartagena, found his way home to the Levant via one of Francis Drake’s piratical attacks and a (possibly spurious) conversion to Christianity in London.[22] Even in the seventeenth century, Turks found themselves in North America after circuitous journeys. In the 1670s, three Turkish captives were living in Virginia, and Governor Berkeley promised them freedom if they converted to Christianity. Two of the men took the governor up on his offer, and Lady Berkeley stood as godmother to the new converts. The third man did not convert, but Berkeley freed him anyway.[23]

The stories of Estebanico, Chinano, and the three Turkish captives hint at the possibility of many microhistories of Muslims in the early South awaiting discovery in the archives. Yet most of what we know about Islam is anecdotal or comes from reconstructing the deep context of the African origins of enslaved people. As Michael Gomez has noted, Islam was fairly common in portions of Senegambia and the interior of the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin—all places from which British planters preferred to import enslaved people. Gomez estimates the numbers of West African Muslims coming into the colonial South in the thousands—making African Muslims a significant presence.[24] Jason Young notes that enslaved African Muslims were present in French Louisiana, Spanish Florida, and the British South, and that African Muslims helped shape African American society and identity. Atlantic history has been crucial to tracing the existence and legacies of African Muslims as well. Young’s previous work argues for the importance of “African Atlantic religion” in defining the importance of African Christianities and African Islam to the formation of African American identity.[25] Yet despite the scholarly certainty that the presence of Muslims is important to understanding the religiosity of the early South, there are still more questions than answers. The history of the early South’s Muslims unfortunately remains a niche topic that has resisted integration into broader narratives about the diversity of southern religiosity. In this way older assumptions about the principal importance of European Christianities still hobble efforts to see a more diverse South.

The questions are similar for the history of Judaism in the early South. We know that Jews came in small numbers to mainland North America, yet their stories are also not integrated into the larger narrative of southern religiosity. And here too the Atlantic paradigm is critical to understanding how Judaism came to the South and how Jewish people circulated throughout the Anglophone and Lusophone worlds. Jewish people came to the South individually or in small groups. In Maryland, Jacob Lumbrozo, identified as “the Jew doctor,” was prosecuted “for uttering words of blesphemy agst [against] Our Blessed Sauiour Jesus Christ” in 1658. Lumbrozo demurred, telling the Provincial Court that he had answered particular questions “[b]ut sayd not any thing scoffingly or in derogaon [derogation] of him, Christians acknowledge for their Messias.”[26] Lumbrozo was probably a Sephardic refugee who left Brazil after the conquest of Dutch Recife by the Portuguese in 1654. Though it is not clear why Lumbrozo chose to settle in Maryland over New Netherland, Amsterdam, or Curaçao, he evidently made an impression on Marylanders. Jews had first come to the New World (officially and openly) via the Netherlands to Dutch Brazil, where they were not only tolerated but also permitted to worship freely. Jewish people trickled into Anglophone North America over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under similar circumstances to those of Lumbrozo: they sought places of safety and toleration where they might peacefully settle.[27] Many of these people settled in New York or Newport, from which they were involved in the Atlantic trading activities that bound the mainland colonies with the Caribbean.

Starting in the late seventeenth century, other groups of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews began to make their way specifically to the Gulf Coast South. Jewish settlers were tolerated (though not encouraged) by the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which granted freedom of religion to “Jews, Heathens, and other Dissenters from the purity of the Christian Religion” (though no Roman Catholics were allowed). Evidence suggests that by the 1690s at least a few Jewish families from Barbados were living in Charleston. In 1733 a group of Jewish settlers departed London for Georgia, and after a harrowing six-month voyage and some controversy on their arrival, they were allowed to stay in Savannah.[28] Judaism in the colonial South is often overlooked because of small numbers, but it must be a part of the narrative of southern religiosity.

Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, African religions, Islam, and Judaism were all newcomers on a continent with its own religious traditions. The world of Native American religiosity has suffered the same neglect and erroneous assumption as African American religion: that the coming of Christianity in all its forms was so destructive that native people (and their religious beliefs) were overrun, assimilated, and lost. This trope of the “vanishing Indian,” notes Tracy N. Leavelle in his essay “Native American Religions in the Early American South,” no longer controls historical inquiry into the Indian past, but Native American religions do remain understudied. Some of our current knowledge comes from archaeological studies of Mississippian chiefdoms and tracing the remnants of precontact Mississippian beliefs into the era of contact.[29] Early English settlers as well as later French settlers in the Gulf Coast South observed native people performing the Green Corn Ceremony, and French traders witnessed the remnants of the Mississippian chiefdoms among the Natchez in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Yet much of the literature wrestles with the long encounter between native people and Christianity, gauging the destructiveness of the Franciscan missions in Florida, of the Jesuits in the Mississippi Valley, or of the English with their Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Leavelle calls for not only renewed scholarship into native religion, but also for scholarship that while not overlooking or excusing the destructiveness of European colonialism also seeks to understand the “creative transformations of people engaged in a struggle for freedom and dignity.” Leavelle also notes that the religious studies scholar Joel Martin argued in 1997 that only 2% of human history in the South involves contact among native people, Europeans, and Africans. Much of that missing 98% remains unknown, which means the longue durée of southern religious history has been flattened withits dynamism and diversity excluded from the narrative.

Despite the paucity of sources, this neglect is probably due in part to the hold explanations for the emergence of the Bible Belt retain on scholarly approaches to southern religious history. As this historiography has changed to make room for a muscular and adaptive Church of England, for dissenters who matter in their own right, for widespread, numerically superior Roman Catholicism, and even for new treatments of Islam in the early South, I would like to suggest one more avenue for upending the dominant narrative. Viewed through the lens of Native American history, much of the emphasis on the history of Christianity in the South is misleading. Christianity in all its forms was a minority religion in the colonial South. Christians of all types—established Protestant, Catholic, and dissenter—were outnumbered by native people with their own religious traditions and by the rich and varied religious traditions, including Islam, brought by enslaved people from Africa. If we take Philip Morgan’s observation about the unremarkable heterodoxy of the early South to its logical conclusion, what we see is a South where pockets of Christianity were surrounded by vast seas of other, non-European religions. Indians and Africans interacted with Christianity—sometimes on their terms, sometimes under duress, but always adapting it to suit their needs and desires in a changing world. Perhaps this colonial South, where Indian and African religions hold the most explanatory power and where they dominate the narrative, will be the intriguing place that drives scholarship forward.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

2. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 157.↩

3. Philip D. Morgan, “Religious Diversity in Colonial Virginia: Red, Black, and White,” in From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia,ed. Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 75.↩

4. Bruce E. Steiner, “The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 387–409.↩

5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp↩

6. There is some excellent new work on toleration. For the early Republic see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); for the colonial period see Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Evan Haefeli wrestles with Dutch contributions to American ideas of religious liberty; see Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am also intrigued by the possibility of an Atlantic history of toleration. See Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).↩

7. ,For example, see John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), and Edward Bond’s chronically underappreciated Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000).↩

8. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).↩

9. On Patrick Copeland, see Edward D. Neill, Memoir of Reverend Patrick Copeland: Rector Elect of the First Projected College in the United States: A Chapter in the English Colonization of America (New York: Charles Scribner & Co, 1871); Shona Vance, “A Man for all Regions: Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World,” in Shaping the Stuart World 1603–1714: The Atlantic connection, ed. Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 79–116; Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–254.↩

10. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For another biographical account of West African Moravianism, see Ray A. Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 115–136.↩

11. Governor William Berkeley to Richard Nicholls, 20 May 1666, in The Papers of William Berkely, 1605–1677, ed. Warren M. Billings (Richmond, VA: The Library of Virginia, 2007), 279–280. Berkeley’s contempt for “the Brethren” was probably common among Virginia elites after the Restoration.↩

12. Jewel L. Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Establishment, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).↩

13. Randolph Ferguson Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).↩

14. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632.↩

15. Juliana Barr, “How do you get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A Colonial Sun Belt,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 553–566.↩

16. Alan Gallay, Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 104–109.↩

17. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632–633.↩

18. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).↩

19. Mark M. Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” Journal of Southern History 67 (August 2001), 513–534.↩

20. See Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 116–123.↩

21. On Estebanico as a Muslim, see Andres Resendez, A Land so Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (NY: Basic Books, 2007), 55–56.↩

22. David Beers Quinn, “Turks, Moors, and Others in Drake’s West Indian Voyage,” Itinerario 14 (1982): 97–104.↩

23. Reverend John Clayton (Præbendary of St Michans), The Defense of a Sermon, Preach’d upon the Receiving into the Communion of the Church of England, the Honourable Sir Terence Mac-Mahon Baronet and Christopher Dunn: Converts from the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1701), preface, n.p.↩

24. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 60–61. See also Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).↩

25. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).↩

26. Attorney General vs. Lumbrozo, 23 February 1658/59, in The Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Provincial Court of Maryland, 1658–1662, ed. Bernard Christian Steiner (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1922), 203.↩

27. On the Sephardic diaspora in Dutch Brazil and in the Atlantic World, see the excellent essays in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Converso, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).↩

28. On Jewish settlers in Charleston and Savannah, see William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 117–141. For an encyclopedic overview of Jews in the Americas, see Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776 III vol. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).↩

29. See for example Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking, 2009).↩

Catholicism in the Early South

Maura Jane Farrelly

Maura Jane Farrelly is assistant professor of American studies and director of the Journalism Program at Brandeis University.

The Catholic Church in America began in a southern context, and Catholicism was the first form of Christianity to take root in the American South. Sixteen years before Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to found the first British colony in North America, thirty-seven years before the Virginia Company of London set up shop along the banks of the James River, and fifty years before the first English Calvinists anchored their ships on the tip of the arm of Massachusetts Bay, Spanish priests were serving soldiers on what eventually became known as Parris Island, South Carolina, and Jesuits were working to convert Algonquian Indians along what was then called the “Ajacán Peninsula,” between the James and the York Rivers that empty into the Chesapeake Bay.[1]

The Catholic presence in colonial Virginia and South Carolina, of course, would not last for long. While the Escamacu Indians who converted on Parris Island seem to have remained Catholic into the early years of the seventeenth century, the Spanish were gone from the Port Royal Sound by 1587. Catholicism, however, continued to grow in other parts of the South—eventually dominating the religious landscape in Louisiana and parts of Florida and assuming an English accent in Maryland at the time of that colony’s founding in 1634.

Nevertheless, the religious history of the South—be it colonial, antebellum, Reconstruction, or Civil Rights-era—has been an almost exclusively Protestant and evangelical story. By that same token, the history of Catholicism in the United States has been an almost exclusively northern and urban story, in spite of the fact that the first Catholics to live in the United States were located primarily in the slaveholding states of Maryland and Kentucky, and there were more Catholic dioceses in the South than there were in the North until 1850.[2]

The primary reason evangelical Protestantism has dominated the religious history of the South, and northern urbanism has dominated the American history of the Catholic Church, is simple: numbers. In spite of the bravado with which I began this essay, boldly staking a claim for Catholicism on the colonial southern landscape, the reality is that the vast majority of people living in the region—white, black, and Native American, alike—were unchurched in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Moreover, it was not until Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian evangelicals made the inhabitants of the South their personal project that the South became the “Bible Belt” that journalists have been writing about ever since H.L. Mencken spent a few historically significant days in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925.[3]

As far as Catholicism goes, the Church has been the largest denomination in the United States since 1850 because of the massive waves of Irish—and then German, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, and Latin American—immigration that began hitting the shores of New York and Massachusetts in the 1830s. Indeed, between 1830 and 1860, the Catholic population in the United States grew by more than 900 percent, and by the outbreak of hostilities between the North and the South in April 1861, there were more Catholics living in the Diocese of Boston alone than there were in all eleven states that would ultimately secede from the Union, plus Maryland—the state that was home to the oldest diocese in the United States and had been the epicenter of English-speaking American Catholicism for more than 200 years.[4]

Immigration to cities like New York, Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago was the driving force behind the growth of the Catholic Church in America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is not surprising, then, that so much of the scholarship on American Catholic history has focused on urban centers in the Northeast and Midwest—and on the process of “Americanization” that Catholicism experienced following its nineteenth-century incarnation as an immigrant church.

The relationship between Catholicism and American culture has not been natural or easy. The Church is not a democracy; it is a corporate body that until very recently (1965) did not subscribe to the notion that the proper relationship between the Church and the State was one of “separate spheres” or to the belief that religious pluralism was an ideal to be embraced and encouraged. True freedom for Catholics is not the purview of the individual, the way it is for most Americans; true freedom is to be found only within the community, and with the guidance, of the Catholic Church. Immigrant Catholics, therefore, who had been raised in the hierarchical, “ultramontane” tradition that the Vatican started cultivating in Europe following the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution had to adapt to—and adopt—the individualistic, rights-oriented values that dominated the political, economic, social, and religious culture of their new country.[5]

The transition was far from seamless—thanks not just to the rabid anti-Catholicism of Protestant leaders like Theodore Parker, Lyman Beecher, Samuel Buchard, and Paul Blanschard, but also to the religious and ethnic parochialism that was encouraged by Catholic leaders like Archbishop John Hughes of New York and Archbishop Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia. While it is true that Protestants did not want “slavish” Catholics threatening their supposedly free and liberal society, it is also true that many Catholic clergy did not want their parishioners fraternizing too closely with dangerously individualistic Protestants. As a consequence, from the 1840s until the end of the Second World War—if not the post-Vatican II era of the 1960s and 1970s—Catholicism in America was characterized by what historian Garry Wills has called a “ghetto mentality” that encouraged Catholics to settle in the same urban enclaves, send their children exclusively to Catholic schools, and cluster in occupations that were dominated not just by Catholics, but often by people who had the same ethnic backgrounds.[6]

Until recently, many, if not most, of the scholars writing about the American Catholic experience grew up within this “ghetto” tradition that defined American Catholicism for more than 100 years. This reality, too, in addition to the numbers, is the reason historians have tended to focus on the period between 1840 and 1960, the years when the ghetto tradition took root in America and thrived, and on the urban north, where the considerable concentration of Catholics made parochialism possible.[7]

But the times have certainly been changing. Younger scholars who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, and without the Baltimore Catechism, are now writing about the history of the American Catholic Church, untouched (and unscathed) by the experience of the Catholic ghetto. In a particularly refreshing development, American Catholicism has also become a topic of interest for scholars who are not even Catholic.[8] Add to these changes the push within the fields of southern and colonial history for a more layered, “Atlantic” approach to the region and the period—one that extends the boundaries of the colonial South beyond those of Virginia and appreciates that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British, French, and Spanish colonies of the South were “ground zero” for a host of imperial rivalries that had economic, political, and religious manifestations. From these developments, you get a small, but growing body of scholarship that considers the experiences of lay and clerical Catholics in the colonial South.[9]

This recent scholarship, interestingly enough, has not entirely abandoned the old fascination with Americanization, though some of the newer scholarship has deliberately avoided the word “Americanization” because of the term’s republican implications and its tendency to build up an oppositional relationship between “American” and “European” Catholicism that a handful of scholars consider to be false.[10] But even when the scholarship has eschewed the word “Americanization,” the focus has still been on the ways in which Catholics and Catholicism changed when they were placed in an American context. Scholars have asked how and why priests, nuns, and lay Catholics took responsibility for their religious identity in climates that were culturally hostile and institutionally poor. They have also explored how Catholics’ collective and individual responses to the local circumstances they encountered in the colonial South shaped American Catholicism into a religious creature that, to this day, is unlike anything found anywhere else in the Catholic world.

Papist Patriots

America’s first Catholics—that is to say, the Catholics who oversaw America’s transition from a collection of British colonies to an autonomous republic—were southerners, slaveholders, ardent republicans, and enthusiastic revolutionaries. Catholics from Maryland, some of them priests, joined the independence movement, even as their co-religionists in Europe condemned the war as a “sedition” that was “worthy of damnation.” Additionally, their compatriots in North America labeled George III’s toleration of Catholics in Quebec “intolerable” and insisted that the war was an effort to keep the British colonial people free from a “most cruel tyranny in Church and State” that was “fed with blood by the Roman Catholic doctrines.”[11]

Catholics supported the Revolutionary War in numbers that were proportionally greater than those of their Protestant contemporaries. An astounding seventy-nine percent of the 145 Catholic men who married in St. Mary’s County between 1767 and 1784 swore their allegiance to the free state of Maryland, donated money and supplies to the American war effort, and served in the Continental Army or the St. Mary’s County Militia. Fifty-eight percent of the men who belonged to the Jesuits’ congregation at St. Inigoes Manor in 1768 did the same, and an analysis of the lives of more than two thousand men from St. Mary’s County who aided the independence movement reveals that more than half of them were probably Catholic—at a time when Catholics represented between twenty-five and thirty-two percent of the population of St. Mary’s County.[12]

In contrast, the most generous estimates argue that just forty to forty-five percent of the white population in all thirteen colonies actively supported the independence movement, and that average includes Massachusetts and Virginia, where support for the Revolution may have been as high as sixty percent. Maryland was home to one of the largest contingents of Loyalist soldiers, and Maryland’s merchants were among the last to sign on to the colonial non-importation agreement in the wake of the Stamp Act.[13] Protestants in the colony seem to have been quite ambivalent about independence; that ambivalence, however, was not shared by their Catholic neighbors.

Why, though, did a movement that emphasized individual rights, challenged traditional authority, and came wrapped in the mantle of anti-Catholicism resonate with a group of people who subscribed to a hierarchical, communally-oriented faith like Catholicism? And why were America’s first Catholics so willing to take the independent, republican attitude that animated their approach to politics into their church? Historians, after all, have long noted (and the more apologetically Catholic among them have lamented) the phenomenon of “lay trusteeism” within the early American church, whereby boards of elected laymen oversaw the “temporal affairs” of their parishes, matters that included everything from when and how a new roof might be placed on a chapel to the hiring of priests and the payment of their salaries.[14]

In short, why did “papists” become “patriots”? This is a question that I have tried to answer in my own research.[15] I believe that the answer has a long history, one that began in England in the early seventeenth century, when being English and Catholic meant rebelling against both the Church and the State to some degree, and gained momentum during the nine decades preceding the American Revolution, when Maryland’s Catholics lost a religious toleration that had been uniquely theirs in the English-speaking world and were forced to maintain their faith in an environment that was neither welcoming nor supportive.

Throughout the so-called “Penal Period” in Maryland’s history, which ran from 1692 to 1776, the colony’s General Assembly took up numerous pieces of legislation that were designed to restrict the civil, military, educational, economic, religious, and even parental rights and behavior of Maryland’s Catholics. Even when these bills were not actually turned into laws—and they were, frequently, turned into laws—the discussions and debates that the bills engendered made it decidedly inconvenient, at times even onerous to be Catholic in Maryland. But it had not always been this way. The colony had been founded in 1634 by a Catholic nobleman, and for the first fifty-five years of Maryland’s existence, Catholics had worshipped freely along the Chesapeake—something they had not been able to do in England. At times, they had even dominated the Upper House of the Assembly, thanks to the unabashed and indelicate nepotism of the colony’s third proprietor, Charles Calvert.

The age of Catholic toleration in Maryland came to an end when the Glorious Revolution in England sparked a similar revolution in Maryland, firmly establishing that to be “English” was to be “Protestant” and forcing the Calvert family to convert to Anglicanism in order to retain the charter to Maryland. For the next eighty-four years, Catholics in the Calvert family’s colony would be politically marginalized. They subsequently fashioned a version of Catholicism for themselves that reflected both the adverse political circumstances under which they lived and the New World contingencies with which they were forced to grapple on a daily basis.

They also constructed a collective “memory” of what life had been like in Maryland during the age when all varieties of Christianity had been tolerated. The memory was a bit selective. It tended to avoid the reality of religious favoritism in Charles Calvert’s government, and it also spoke of toleration in the seventeenth century as if it were a fact, simply because it was a law. The reality was that many of Maryland’s Protestants rebelled against the rule of their Catholic proprietor, even before the Calvert family was forced to convert. The memory was not meant to be completely factual, however. It was meant to sustain the Catholic community during a time when being Catholic had become inconvenient. The memory preserved Catholic identity, in spite of the inconveniences that came with it, by linking that identity to liberty and tradition and, in so doing, ennobling it. The memory also, implicitly, identified England as a source of corruption. Maryland’s “constitution” (to use the word that Catholics started using as early as 1718) had been a perfect guarantor of the rights of Englishmen. Those rights, according to one priest who served in Maryland from 1712 to 1724, included “Liberty of Conscience,” which was the “reason behind the peopling of this province” and the “perpetual and inherent birthright of each Marylandian.”[16] Had the colony not been tied to England, the priest implied, the religious bigotry that had infected England’s constitution in 1689—and which threatened the rights of Englishmen in Maryland—never would have infected the constitution of Maryland.

Little wonder, then, that when the break with England finally came in 1776, Catholics enthusiastically embraced it. They had been evolving into Americans for decades by that point. The independence movement’s emphasis on liberty and freedom, and its insistence on the separate nature of the colonies’ constitutions and on the corrupting influence of England resonated with a population that had experienced first-hand the negative consequences of being tied politically to England. In many respects, Maryland’s Catholics were the colonists most prepared in the 1770s to accept the ideological, cultural, and psychological implications of a break with England.

Masterless Mistresses

There were no convents in British colonial America. At least thirty-one women left the colony of Maryland between 1747 and 1756 to join convents in continental Europe. But unlike the men who traveled to Europe throughout the eighteenth century and returned to the Calvert family’s proprietary holding as Jesuit priests, none of the women who left Maryland to join the Church leadership during the colonial period returned to the New World until after the colonies had won their independence in 1783.

Mother Bernardina Teresa Xavier of St. Joseph returned to her native Charles County in 1790, having left her parents thirty-six years earlier so that she could sail to Belgium as Ann Matthews and enter the contemplative order of the Discalced Carmelites. Together with her two nieces, who were also Maryland-born Carmelite nuns, and Charles Neale, a priest from Port Tobacco whose older brother, Leonard, would one day become the second Archbishop of Baltimore, Mother Bernardina founded the first convent in the United States, the Mount Carmel Monastery in Charles County, Maryland.[17]

In 1831, Archbishop James Whitefield moved the Carmelite convent to the city of Baltimore. Today, fifteen sisters (and one border collie) serve the Catholic community in Maryland from that post.[18] In an ultimately obvious, though initially confounding twist, however, the first convent in the United States is not the oldest convent in the United States. That title belongs to the Ursuline Convent of New Orleans, which was founded in 1727, three-quarters of a century before Louisiana finally secured its permanent identity as part of the United States.

Historian Emily Clark has painstakingly unearthed the joys, sorrows, trials, and accomplishments of the sixty-nine French, Cuban, and Creole women who belonged to the Ursuline Convent from its founding in the age of French colonial expansion, through its existence in a Spanish New World colony, and into its status as an early institutional leader of the Catholic Church in the new United States.[19] The story that emerges from Clark’s work is a decidedly “American” one, in that the women who operated the convent learned early on that life in the New World was different from life in the Old, and that many of the traditional hierarchies and values that had governed their lives in Europe could not be easily transplanted to North America. This does not mean that the sisters did not try—and Clark makes it very clear that within the convent’s walls, the Ursuline nuns did order their universe “along rigidly conservative lines” that maintained the Old World distinction between elite “choir nuns” and working-class “converse” nuns and, in so doing, “cultivat[ed] and preserve[ed] in a colonial setting a replica of the hierarchical European social order to which elites were attached.”[20]

But Clark also makes it clear that even as they replicated this European social order, the Ursuline nuns were forced to grapple with realities that were uncommon, unnecessary, or often even non-existent in Europe. The experience of reconciling these realities with their identities as women, nuns, and especially Ursulines turned the people who operated the convent in New Orleans into women, nuns, and Ursulines who were different from—that is, more independent and worldly than—their counterparts in Europe.

Race was one of the realities that Ursulines of the New World grappled with. It was an unavoidable consequence of the geographic and economic setting in which the sisters found themselves. Indians were mere novelties in France, and people of African descent, while not unheard of in Europe, were far more plentiful in eighteenth-century Louisiana, where they also tended to be enslaved. Clark tells us that the Ursulines chose to order their convent in a way that respected the agenda of universal female education that had been laid out for them by their order’s founder and by the original superior of their convent. In a city where the complexion of the Catholic Church grew darker and darker as the century progressed (a development that the Ursulines played no small role in affecting), this meant that within the convent’s walls, white students were increasingly expected to share classrooms and bedrooms with black and mixed-race students, irrespective of the laws and social mores that governed racial relations on the streets of New Orleans.

This dogged determination to remain true to the obligations that had been set for them in the Old World, together with their status as educated, permanently unmarried female members of colonial society, forced the sisters to assume assertive and at times even antagonistic postures toward certain civil and religious leaders in Louisiana, especially during the period from 1767 to 1803, when the colony was under Spanish rule. The Spanish, Clark tells us, “practiced an established choreography of racial demarcation at odds with the slippery categories that evolved in the French colonial church and convent.” During the Spanish period in Louisiana’s history, “an elaborate repertoire of labels was introduced to classify people of color.” The French were “certainly not indifferent to skin color,” and the Ursulines who ran the convent in New Orleans never actually challenged the institution of slavery, in spite of the fact that they clearly recognized the wretched nature of the slave condition. But the nuns did exhibit a substantial degree of color-blindness when it came to the issue of the Sacraments, recognizing inter-racial marriages that violated the Spanish concept of limpieza de sangre, i.e., “purity of blood,” and insisting that marriages involving slaves be consecrated in the Church, even as civil authorities were reluctant recognize such marriages.[21]

Sometimes, this racial ecumenism created conflict within the convent itself, as Spanish creole nuns who were “accustomed to a cultural vocabulary of racial purity” joined the convent and struggled with the fluid nature of race relations within. Often, however, the conflict that the Ursulines created was between themselves and the civil and clerical authorities who represented the Spanish government in the New World. Beginning in the 1770s, these authorities “enacted a series of measures that signaled diminishing formal toleration for blurred and imprecise social and racial demarcations.” And yet, behind the convent’s walls, the Ursulines continued to teach and minister to “all of the city’s female population, even as this activity grew notably more incongruous with the interests of the class and race to which they belonged.”[22]

In asserting themselves in this way—as well as in other ways that involved the convent’s finances and the non-educational services the sisters would supply (or were expected to supply) to the city—the Ursuline nuns of New Orleans morphed into New World Catholics who challenged not just the gender norms that dominated their church in the Old World, but also—as Clark points out in her epilogue—the gender norms that would dominate the early years of the American republic. The nuns were “masterless mistresses” whose experiences of “independence” were markedly different from those of both the nuns who belonged to the same order in Europe and the Protestant women who made up the bulk of the population in the country the New Orleans sisters would ultimately join. “These elements,” Clark tells us, “mark the Ursulines as American.”[23]

Frontier Fathers

In France, revolutionary sensibilities took on a tone that was very different from the tone that characterized the independence movement in the British colonies. This tone, of course, was overtly anti-aristocratic. But it was also anti-clerical, and during the ten months that constituted the so-called “Reign of Terror” in 1793 and 1794, twenty-seven Ursuline nuns, ranging in age from thirty-one to seventy, were beheaded by revolutionary zealots who saw the Catholic Church as antithetical to the republican society the reformers claimed to be establishing.[24]

The Ursulines were among 126 clerical women who were put to death during the Reign of Terror. Ten times as many priests and monks were also killed. Between 1789 and 1800, revolutionaries forced nearly 30,000 priests to leave France or else face execution. Most of the priests who fled chose to remain in Europe, but twenty-three of them elected to immigrate to the United States, which was just a few years old at the time. The number seems small, until one considers that in the 1790s, there were just thirty priests living in the entire United States. Seen in this light, it becomes perfectly understandable why—in the words of historian Michael Pasquier—“French missionary priests did wield considerable influence in the development of an ecclesiastical presence in the United States, and especially in Maryland, Kentucky, Texas, and Louisiana.” [25]

Many scholars have noted the role that the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution played in the spread of an “ultramontane” approach to Catholicism.[26] Ultramontanism was a philosophy of worship that the Vatican began cultivating in the early nineteenth century, in response to the “de-Christianization” of France. It stressed the fallen nature of humanity and the idea that people and their governments could overcome the reality of sin only through the wisdom and guidance of the Church. Rome was the font of all authority for ultramontane Catholics, be it civil or religious, and French priests who knew what could happen when civil authorities refused to recognize the authority of the Church helped to cultivate a strain of conservative Catholicism that historian Luca Codignola has insisted soon came to dominate the faith in “the new North Atlantic World.”[27]

While Codignola is undoubtedly correct that refugee French priests were vital to the spread of ultramontanism—even in the United States—I think his analysis of ultramontanism’s growth in the North Atlantic World is a little too eager to ignore the strong strains of republicanism that were present in American Catholicism during the first few decades of America’s existence as an independent nation. In so doing, Codignola has failed to do justice to the role that Irish immigration played in the growth of ultramontanism in American Catholicism. Ultramontanism found fertile ground in Ireland, where the authority of the local, civil officials had been rendered understandably suspect by centuries of religious persecution. Looking “over the mountain” (i.e., the Alps) to Rome was a way for Ireland’s Catholics to delegitimize English authority, even as they were forced to defer to it. When they came to the United States, Ireland’s Catholics brought their Rome-centered Catholicism with them.[28]

Understanding that the dominance of French priests on the ecclesiastical landscape in early America did not automatically mean that American Catholicism became ultramontane, Pasquier focuses his attention on the role that “local circumstances, individual personalities, and educational formation played in the practice of the priesthood in American missions.”[29] Pasquier’s analysis actually lies beyond the “colonial” parameters of this roundtable; his exiled French priests arrived in the United States, and although some eventually made their way to Louisiana, the people they served were technically no longer European colonists by that point. They were Americans.

I include a brief discussion of Pasquier’s work in this roundtable, however, in part because his work serves as a corrective to Codignola’s effort to label North Atlantic Catholicism as definitively “conservative,” and also because I think his exploration of the “frontier fathers” who guided the ecclesiastical development of early American Catholicism could serve as a model for scholars who are working on the history of Catholicism in Spanish colonial America—parts of which, of course, ultimately became the American South.

Pasquier consciously avoids the theme of “Americanization” in his analysis, because the priests he focuses on were decidedly not Americanizers; indeed, many of the priests who came to the United States from France—or who were trained in the United States by priests who had fled from France—were leaders in the successful movement to banish lay trusteeism from the American Catholic experience. John Carroll, the first bishop in the United States, had been a reluctant, but definitive supporter of lay trusteeism as a way of managing the Church’s affairs during the years when there were very few priests in the United States.[30] Following Carroll’s death in 1815, however, American bishops began working to dismantle lay trusteeism because they saw in it the taint of American Protestantism.[31]

While he eschews the Americanization theme, Pasquier does understand that the priests who came to America from France were irrevocably and unavoidably changed by the experience. “Missionary priests struggled to reconcile what they were taught in French seminaries and read in devotional literature with what they experienced on the frontier,” Pasquier tells us. As French priests moved from Baltimore into the territory that lay west of the Appalachian Mountains—Kentucky, the Mississippi territory, Louisiana, Missouri, even Texas—they experienced poverty, disease, isolation, non-Catholics, and irreverent Catholics. Very few of them abandoned their vocations as they encountered these challenges. But some did “slip,” so to speak, taking mistresses and drinking too much alcohol, and even those who maintained their celibacy and sobriety “changed the way they practiced the priesthood as they encountered a diversity of people, ideas, institutions, and places.”[32]

In America, the French priests became more devotional, as living along the frontier tested their faith. In the privacy of their own hearts, they often questioned their vocation and the appropriateness of their mission to North America. In an effort to triumph over their spiritual crises—and to hide them from the men and women they were bound to serve—the priests focused upon the role that Christ’s suffering on the cross played in the salvation of humanity. It was not enough that Christ had died for humanity’s sins; he had suffered for them, just as the fathers on the frontier were suffering. And the saints had suffered, too. “French missionary priests looked to the saints for ways to interpret suffering as something to be welcomed,” Pasquier explains. “They attempted to incorporate Catholic symbols like crucifixes, statues, and relics into the visional and material fabric of the American frontier.”[33]

Europe, too, eventually saw the growth of a highly devotional approach to Catholicism.[34] But it happened a little sooner along the frontier in the new United States. Also, the development of Catholic devotionalism in the United States was not, at least initially, a response to modernity and/or secularism, as it was in Europe. Rather, the first strains of Catholic devotional piety were a response to the spiritual challenges that French priests experienced in the wilds of the frontier.[35]

“The decision to ‘Americanize’ the Church … was not always made in official councils or pastoral letters or theological treatises or papal announcements,” Pasquier writes (in his one overt acknowledgment of the contribution he is making to the conversation about Catholic Americanization). “Priests rarely decide to transform the Church in obviously calculative ways…. Much of the Church changes when the priests change, and priests change because of the places they go and the people they meet.”[36]

I think it could only be a good thing if the scholars who focus on the development of Catholicism in Spanish colonial America could take this realization with them into the archives. Some have—but their work has focused primarily on Mexico, and not on the territories that eventually joined the slave-holding American South. Jodi Bilnikoff and Alan Greer have put together a marvelous volume that considers the ways in which the Catholic Church in Mexico accommodated itself to the contingencies of the New World. Devotion to St. Anne, for instance, flourished in Mexico, even though the Vatican actively sought to suppress this devotion as part of its effort to promote a patriarchal view of the Holy Family. The priests in Mexico allowed—and even encouraged—devotion to St. Anne because their parishioners demanded it, and according to Charlene Villaseñor Black, this demand was a consequence of the “preference for the extended matriarchal family” that characterized “indigenous family structures.”[37]

To what extent did this kind of accommodation take place in the Spanish colonial territory that eventually became Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Florida? Future scholars, I hope, will tell us.

American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism

The Ursulines who immigrated to New Orleans in 1727 and the priests who fled to Baltimore in the 1790s all joined a culture that had firmly embraced race-based slavery – and Clark insists “it was beyond their power… to delay or oppose” the development of this economic and cultural institution.[38] The English Catholics who migrated to Maryland in the 1630s and 1640s, however, did not join a culture that had accepted slavery; they helped to create that culture. The first legal recognition of race-based slavery in British colonial America, after all, was a law passed in Maryland in 1664, requiring all Africans brought into the colony as servants to serve “durante vita,” i.e. for the duration of their lives.[39] An interrogation of the relationship between colonial Maryland’s Catholics and the institution of slavery, therefore, offers scholars a unique opportunity to explore the contours of the Catholic relationship with a fundamental—possibly even foundational—component of American cultural identity.

Many scholars have already explored the Catholic Church’s support for slavery in the United States. Most have focused on the religious intolerance of the abolitionist movement’s leaders, concluding that the Church’s stance on slavery was fueled as much (if not more) by the virulent anti-Catholicism of firebrands like William Lloyd Garrison and Lyman Beecher as it was by a theological commitment to the enslavement of an entire race of people. A few scholars have also ventured into the realm of doctrine, noting that Church fathers such as Augustine and Aquinas taught that slavery brought order to a fallen world in which some people were born without an ability to govern themselves.[40]

My own research, however, has suggested that slavery may have played a role in the creation of a distinctly “American” form of Roman Catholic identity—one that was comfortable with the republicanism and individualism that were at the heart of what it meant to be an American at the time of the Founding. The British journalist Harriet Martineau observed the republican leanings of American Catholics in the early 1830s and concluded that in America, Catholicism had been “modified by the spirit of the times.” Historians since then have agreed with her, concluding that pre-immigrant Catholics were “influenced by broader American notions of authority.” They were “accustomed to the republican idea that ordinary people such as themselves were the source of power in civil society.” They assumed, then, that that meant they were the source of at least some power within the Catholic Church, as well.[41]

But American notions of authority at the time of the Founding were not simply about the idea that “ordinary people” were the “source of power in civil society.” As Edmund Morgan pointed out nearly forty years ago, “American slavery,” with its racially based, inherited qualities, was the “flying buttress” to “American freedom.” The reason the “most ardent American republicans [in the 1770s] were Virginians,” Morgan wrote, was that lawmakers in colonial Virginia had taken the poorest residents and “isolated [them] by race and removed [them] from the political equation.”[42]

In the eighteenth century, the Chesapeake Bay region was home to the second-largest concentration of slave labor in the burgeoning British empire. In 1790, when the first formal census of Maryland’s population was taken by the United States government, roughly a third of the state’s entire population was enslaved. Between 1743 and 1759, the average number of slaves owned by an elite planter in Maryland was 22—but the average number of slaves owned by a Catholic, “elite” or clerical, during this same time period was 31. Indeed, Catholics such as Charles Carroll of Annapolis and Henry Darnell were some of the largest slaveholders in the entire colony.[43]

The American identity that Maryland’s Catholics embraced in the 1770s and 1780s, republican though it was, was not based on a foundation of radical individualism (or more overtly, anti-Catholicism) the way it was for many Protestants, especially in the North. Catholic republicanism—like the republicanism identified by Morgan, Eugene Genovese, and Lacy Ford—was a racialized republicanism built on a foundation of ordered relationships that were defined and defended by the institution of race-based slavery.[44] Republican society for southerners and colonial and early national Catholics alike was not one in which freedom and individualism ran amok, as they did in the industrializing North soon after the Revolution was over. Rather, it was one in which communal obligations were honored and relationships were seen to be ordered in such a way as to allow for the basic human needs of all individuals to be met, while at the same time giving a growing number of men—white men—the freedom to cultivate their individual talents.

Slavery, in other words, made republicanism and individual freedom “safe” for eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Catholics to embrace by ensuring that the bonds of hierarchy and reciprocal obligation that were so important to the Catholic understanding of human relations remained intact. This may explain why few, if any Catholics manumitted their slaves in the years that immediately followed the American Revolution. From 1783 to 1790, between 7,000 and 10,000 slaves in Maryland were freed by their masters—a phenomenal spike in manumissions that scholars have pointed to as a sign that some slaveholding members of America’s founding generation recognized that slavery could not be easily reconciled with the ideology of the American Revolution. Yet, extensive genealogical surveys of the surviving manumission records from the period reveal that Catholics in Maryland did not start manumitting their slaves until at least the second decade of the nineteenth century—a time when scholars believe manumissions may have been prompted by other factors, such as the declining profitability of slavery in the Upper South.[45]

None of this information requires that Catholics be condemned as a group for failing to manumit their slaves in the immediate wake of the American Revolution. The fact is that most Methodists, Anglicans, and Calvinists did not free their slaves during this period, either. But some did. And the fact that Catholics did not suggests that they may not have seen the hierarchical and authoritarian reality of slavery as inconsistent with the republican principles they embraced when, in the wake of the Revolution, they officially became Americans.

The study of Catholicism in the colonial South—particularly the study of lay Catholic experiences during this period—will, I fear, continue to be plagued by an exaggerated version of a perennial problem in the field of colonial American history: the scarcity of sources. Nevertheless, the scholarship that has come out in the last decade or so suggests that the contributions early Catholics made as people, rather than as members of an institution, to the cultivation of American and even southern identity in the eighteenth century can be uncovered with some creative massaging of the surviving sources, a bit of genealogical research (so as to find the Catholics in the sources that are not specifically church-related), and a whole lot of dedication.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

2. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 157.↩

3. Philip D. Morgan, “Religious Diversity in Colonial Virginia: Red, Black, and White,” in From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia,ed. Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 75.↩

4. Bruce E. Steiner, “The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 387–409.↩

5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp↩

6. There is some excellent new work on toleration. For the early Republic see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); for the colonial period see Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Evan Haefeli wrestles with Dutch contributions to American ideas of religious liberty; see Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am also intrigued by the possibility of an Atlantic history of toleration. See Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).↩

7. ,For example, see John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), and Edward Bond’s chronically underappreciated Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000).↩

8. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).↩

9. On Patrick Copeland, see Edward D. Neill, Memoir of Reverend Patrick Copeland: Rector Elect of the First Projected College in the United States: A Chapter in the English Colonization of America (New York: Charles Scribner & Co, 1871); Shona Vance, “A Man for all Regions: Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World,” in Shaping the Stuart World 1603–1714: The Atlantic connection, ed. Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 79–116; Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–254.↩

10. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For another biographical account of West African Moravianism, see Ray A. Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 115–136.↩

11. Governor William Berkeley to Richard Nicholls, 20 May 1666, in The Papers of William Berkely, 1605–1677, ed. Warren M. Billings (Richmond, VA: The Library of Virginia, 2007), 279–280. Berkeley’s contempt for “the Brethren” was probably common among Virginia elites after the Restoration.↩

12. Jewel L. Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Establishment, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).↩

13. Randolph Ferguson Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).↩

14. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632.↩

15. Juliana Barr, “How do you get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A Colonial Sun Belt,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 553–566.↩

16. Alan Gallay, Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 104–109.↩

17. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632–633.↩

18. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).↩

19. Mark M. Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” Journal of Southern History 67 (August 2001), 513–534.↩

20. See Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 116–123.↩

21. On Estebanico as a Muslim, see Andres Resendez, A Land so Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (NY: Basic Books, 2007), 55–56.↩

22. David Beers Quinn, “Turks, Moors, and Others in Drake’s West Indian Voyage,” Itinerario 14 (1982): 97–104.↩

23. Reverend John Clayton (Præbendary of St Michans), The Defense of a Sermon, Preach’d upon the Receiving into the Communion of the Church of England, the Honourable Sir Terence Mac-Mahon Baronet and Christopher Dunn: Converts from the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1701), preface, n.p.↩

24. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 60–61. See also Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).↩

25. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).↩

26. Attorney General vs. Lumbrozo, 23 February 1658/59, in The Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Provincial Court of Maryland, 1658–1662, ed. Bernard Christian Steiner (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1922), 203.↩

27. On the Sephardic diaspora in Dutch Brazil and in the Atlantic World, see the excellent essays in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Converso, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).↩

28. On Jewish settlers in Charleston and Savannah, see William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 117–141. For an encyclopedic overview of Jews in the Americas, see Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776 III vol. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).↩

29. See for example Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking, 2009).↩

30. John Carroll, “John Carroll’s Letter on Trusteeism,” (1786), in Mark Massa and Catherine Osborne, eds., American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 32; Rodger van Allen, “Lay Distrusteeism,” Commonweal, 12 September 12 2008. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has argued that Carroll was an opponent of lay trusteeism, but Carroll’s letter to the trustees of St. Peter’s Church in New York City makes it clear that he saw lay trusteeism as an important means by which the Catholic Church in early America might be sustained. See Dolan’s lecture, “Right from the Start: John Carroll, Our First Bishop.”↩

31. Thomas J. Shelley, “When Catholics Were Congregationalists,” Commonweal, 12 September 2003, 29; Dale B. Light, Rome and the New Republic: Conflict and Community in Philadelphia Catholicism between the Revolution and the Civil War (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 241; Carey, Priests, People, and Prelates, 214.↩

32. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 59, 19.↩

33. Ibid., 68, 65–66.↩

34. For more on the growth of Catholic devotionalism in Europe—particularly English-speaking Europe—see Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Bill McSweeney, Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance (New York: Palgrave, 1980); and Derek Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century (Shepherstown, WV: Burns and Oates, 1978).↩

35. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the United States did experience a wave of Catholic devotionalism that was cultivated by the Church hierarchy as a way of shepherding Catholics to the margins of their predominantly Protestant society and, in so doing, preserving the unique features of the Catholic faith. This manifestation of devotionalism was a deliberate reaction against the move toward “Americanization” that Catholic converts like Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson were pushing for, and in this sense, its origins were very different from earlier varieties of Catholic devotionalism along the frontier. See McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 27–29; and Ann Taves, “Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Church History 54 (1985): 482–195.↩

36. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 21.↩

37. Charlene Villaseñor Black, “St. Anne Imagery and Maternal Archetypes in Spain and Mexico,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas. 1500–1800 ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 22.↩

38. Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 160. Tracy Fessenden has suggested that Clark may be a little too willing to attribute a “rhetoric of equality” to the Ursuline sisters, in light of their unwillingness to challenge slavery. Tracy Fessenden, “untitled review,” review of Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834,* * by Emily Clark, Church History 77 (2008): 1073–1078.↩

39. “An Act Concerning Negroes and Other Slaves” (1664), in Civil Rights and African Americans, eds. Albert P. Blaustein and Robert L. Zangrando, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 8–9.↩

40. Thomas J. Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 131, 147–149; James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 143–157; and McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 43–67.↩

41. Harriet Martineau, Society in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 2:323; and O’Toole, The Faithful, 59.↩

42. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 381, 380.↩

43. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom in the Middle Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 13; Trevor Graeme Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691–1776 (New York, 2002), 5, 36, 38, 265; and Beatrize Bentancourt Hardy, “Papists in a Protestant Age: The Catholic Gentry and Community in Colonial Maryland, 1689–1776” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993), 214, n. 68. Charles Carroll of Annapolis owned 386 slaves in 1773. Henry Darnell owned 100 in 1711.↩

44. Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Political Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 6, 17; Lacy K. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 372–373. For more on how Protestants used anti-Catholicism to define the parameters of American freedom, see Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).↩

45. Farrelly, “American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism,” 92–94, n43; and Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: New Press 1992), 46, 29.↩

Protestantism in the Early South

Travis Glasson

Travis Glasson is an associate professor of history at Temple University.

For those who like their historiographical reflections served with a dash of commemoration, this is an apt moment for considering recent scholarship on Protestantism in the colonial South. In 1562—around 450 years ago and forty-five years before the founding of Jamestown—a leading Huguenot nobleman and courtier, Gaspard de Coligny, sponsored a voyage of exploration and settlement to what became the southern United States. Looking to win France a larger share of the New World’s wealth, anxious to prove that Calvinists could be loyal and valuable servants to the French Crown, and perhaps casting a predatory eye on the rich treasure flotas that the Spanish sailed through the Bahama Channel, Coligny sent two ships under the command of his fellow Huguenot Jean Ribault to establish an outpost in the vast region the Spanish claimed under the name La Florida. On May 1, 1562, Ribault’s ships, manned primarily by Protestant sailors and soldiers from northern France and accompanied by a preacher of what Spanish sources generalized as “the doctrine of Luther,” made landfall in what is today north Florida, where they met local Timucuan people and erected a stone pillar emblazoned with the arms of the King of France.[1] As readers will be aware if they know this history, and might infer if they do not, French attempts to colonize the southeast coast ultimately failed, but given the religious sympathies of those involved, it seems likely that this arrival marked the first act of Protestant worship in what would become the United States. The anniversary has recently been marked by the city of Jacksonville, the rededication of a monument to Ribault by the National Park Service, and prayer services.

This public awareness suggests how understandings of the history of the early South have changed in recent decades. As successive commentators have recognized, a major impetus for the explicit study of southern religion was the sense that the region was poorly accounted for within long-dominant narratives that began national religious history with Puritan New England and which characterized the colonial South as either irreligious or irrelevant.[2] These roots have meant that historians interested in southern religion have often looked at the colonial period primarily to explain the emergence of a distinctive religious culture in the South. This typically has meant a focus on the second half of the eighteenth century and on uncovering the origins of the particular strains of evangelical Protestantism that seem so central to life in the region from the antebellum period to today.[3] Recent work, however, addresses a wider range of themes. If the origins of evangelicalism remain an important part of the religious history of the colonial South, they are no longer the only things that matter.

As a whole, current scholarship tends to portray the early South as a broad region characterized by persistent and complex patterns of religious exchange and competition. This perspective, connected to wider movements in the history of the colonial South toward borderlands, continental, and hemispheric approaches, has extended the traditional geographic and temporal boundaries of both “colonial America” and “the South.” This has seen scholars give more attention to lands south and west of the Chesapeake and the Carolina Low Country and to periods before and after the eighteenth century.[4] It is revealing, to take just one recent example, that Walter H. Conser, Jr.’s religious history of the Cape Fear region begins not with the arrival of English settlers, but with a consideration of Native American culture and religion and Spanish Catholicism in the region.[5] Intercultural contact and exchange did not usually entail toleration; encounters in the South between Europeans and between settlers and Native Americans were often antagonistic and violent. As Karen Kupperman has observed, “transatlantic colonization was undertaken in the atmosphere of religious conflict that touched everything Europeans did.”[6] Nevertheless, from early in its history the colonial South was a place where people from an array of cultural and religious traditions lived side by side.

The patterns established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries long endured across a region where the cultures of three European empires (Spanish, French, and British) interacted with those of an array of Native American, African, African-American, and other European peoples. Randy Sparks, for example, has noted the late-seventeenth century presence of Catholic French people, Native Americans, and Africans in what became the state of Mississippi. To the consternation of local priests, German Lutherans were recruited to settle in the region by the French government, and they were followed by successive rounds of Spanish, Irish, and English migration in the eighteenth century. To add further complexity, control of land in the region changed hands between Native Americans and settlers and between the French, Spanish, English and American governments.[7] Other contributors to this forum will address the historiographies of southern Catholicism, Protestant dissent, and Native American and African-American religion separately, but it is clear that none of those religious traditions developed in isolation. Dynamics like those that existed in Mississippi, the exchanges that occurred across the South between enslaved Africans and Europeans, and cooperation and competition within the British-controlled South’s Protestant community were all central to the long-term religious history of the region.

Understandings of religion in the early South have also been shaped by Atlantic history’s development into a leading paradigm for conceptualizing early American history more generally.[8] As many recent accounts stress, the migrations of Anglicans, Quakers, Huguenots, Moravians, Presbyterians, and others to the South did not sever their ties to Europe or their co-religionists elsewhere in the New World. People, practices, and ideas continuously moved around well-connected and enduring religious networks. Consequently it has become clear that the religious lives of early southerners, like those of people elsewhere in the Americas, were shaped by combinations of local and broader, indeed transnational, forces. Borderlands, continental, and hemispheric approaches have drawn attention further south and west than long-dominant histories focused on colonial British America. Atlantic history has pushed southern historians to look east and highlighted, among other things, connections and similarities between the mainland South and the Caribbean, which has enriched studies of the development of black Protestantism, Quakerism, colonial Anglicanism, and other subjects. In this way, Atlantic history has served as an antidote to the excessive exceptionalism to which some southern religious history has been prone.

Somewhat paradoxically, recent attention to subjects in southern religious history other than evangelicalism may also be due to influential work on evangelicalism itself. Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Bancroft Prize winning 1998 book Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, challenged any easy assumptions about the “naturalness” of the emergence of southern evangelicalism by arguing that many southerners were hostile to the movement and that it grew primarily in the early national and antebellum periods, rather than the colonial era. There was, Heyrman noted, nearly a century “between the 1740s, when evangelicals started actively proselytizing in the South, and the middle of the nineteenth century, when they may have won the attention if not the allegiance, of a majority of southern whites.”[9] Protestant evangelicalism’s progress was even slower among African-Americans and Native Americans. If, as Heyrman’s work suggested, colonial southerners were not simply evangelicals in waiting, then, what were they? For several decades now, the once standard notion that they were just not very religious has been challenged on a number of fronts.[10] One answer is that many of them were active adherents to the Church of England, and recent years have seen the emergence of a richer and more sophisticated literature on the Church of England in early America.

Much new research on Anglicanism, like older work, has focused on Virginia and South Carolina, but wider Atlantic histories and other sites have also received some attention. For the seventeenth century, recent work has tended to stress the many things that early Anglican settlers in Virginia had in common with their contemporaries in England, New England and elsewhere in the Americas and this has meant an increased awareness of the place of religion in the colony’s establishment. Douglas Bradburn has argued that militant Protestant—that is anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic—thinking and rhetoric played an important part in Virginia’s founding.[11] Like the Spanish and early settlers in New England, the first Virginians saw the Christianization of Native Americans as part of their mission. While early hopes for the wholesale conversion of Virginia’s Native Americans did not result in mass conversions, Kupperman’s recent history of Jamestown has noted the “Virginia Company planned for a mission and education program on a very grand scale, and people throughout England supported it with their contributions.”[12] Both “borderlands” and “Atlantic” perspectives have been useful here by situating the earliest English attempts at colonization firmly within the context of a religio-political rivalry in which the English both admired and disparaged aspects of Spain’s imperial growth. Eliga Gould, in considering early Anglo-America as a “Spanish periphery,” has noted that “English spent their first fifteen years in Virginia trying to the turn the colony into a sort of Protestant Mexico” and justified their own treatment of Native Americans by reference to Spanish practices.[13]

Likewise, scholars have deemphasized the contrast between Virginia and New England by recognizing that seventeenth-century Puritanism, a diverse movement that largely aimed to reform rather than destroy the Church of England, was not a phenomenon confined to one American region. April Lee Hatfield has noted that “Puritans formed an important part of Virginia’s population from the outset of its colonization” and had ties to like-minded settlers in New England.[14] Surveying the circum-Atlantic religious scene in the 1640s, Carla Pestana has written that “many colonists could be classed as ‘puritan’ in their religious sensibilities” and this included not only those who had settled in New England, but also residents of “Providence Island, the Somers Islands, and Virginia.”[15] Against the backdrop of politico-religious civil war in Britain, the 1640s and 1650s were tumultuous decades of intra-Protestant wrangling in the royal colony of Virginia. Governor William Berkeley expelled some prominent Puritan ministers in the 1640s and subsequently supported the banishment of active Puritans. In 1652 a Commonwealth-sponsored expedition cowed the colony’s royalists, deposed Berkeley, and installed the Puritan governor Richard Bennett.[16] The restoration of the House of Stuart in Britain, and of Berkeley to the governorship, in 1660 secured the power of non-Puritan Anglicanism in the colony. While for much of the seventeenth century the Church of England was riven by internal controversy, the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 cemented its Protestant episcopalianism and its legal privileges, the latter of which were leavened by the official toleration of Protestant dissent. From the 1690s, the Church of England would grow across the South, bolstered by a trans-Atlantic network of assertive Anglican activists including the members of two new voluntary organizations, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).

The expansion of the colonial Church of England, which had a dramatic impact on the South, was underpinned by a common belief in the importance of communal worship and a widespread, albeit never universal, acceptance of the principle of established religion. Although Anglican southerners and Puritan New Englanders disagreed about the ecclesiastical and theological details of any such establishment, they shared considerable common ground on this point. Nor were these two churches’ adherents alone in this. In 1722, for example, the South Carolina Presbyterian minister Archibald Stobo challenged the colony’s 1706 law establishing the Church of England, but rather than a severing of the church-state bond he envisioned a new joint establishment encompassing both Presbyterianism and Anglicanism.[17] Wider perspectives on the early South underline this point: Catholics and Anglicans alike wrestled with how to recreate state-supported European Christianity in colonial societies. Supporters of the Church of England always lived side by side with other Protestants in the English colonial South, but as John K. Nelson has noted of eighteenth-century Virginia, church and state were intimately connected and the parish was a unit with responsibility over matters that would (only subsequently) come to be seen as both “civil” and “religious.”[18]

Beyond recovering the salience of the church-state nexus, J. Nelson has provided a sweeping reevaluation of the Church of England as a provider of institutional religion by attempting “to reconstruct the everyday context of colonial Virginia Anglicanism.” He has shown that the colony’s Anglican clergy was more dedicated and less scandalous than frequently claimed and that the widespread creation of chapels of ease, which allowed for the existence of multiple congregations within large parishes, made churchgoing easier and more common than previously understood. Through the regular provision of opportunities for communal worship and careful to attention to its legal privileges, the church found ways to ensure that Virginians—men and women, rich and poor, free and slaves—adhered to it. “Viewed from its parishes rather than from Williamsburg or London,” J. Nelson argues, “Virginia’s Anglican establishment appears firmly rooted and tightly woven into the daily and commonplace experiences of eighteenth-century Virginians.”[19]

While many metropolitan supporters of the trans-Atlantic Anglican revival aspired to fully recreate the ecclesiastical structure of the church in England, in the colonies it remained an episcopal church without local bishops. Historians continue to explore how this expanded the power of the laity in church affairs and affected local religious practice. Leslie Lindenauer, for example, has argued that in the seventeenth century, the absence of a dominant Anglican ministry helped open up space for women to exercise religious authority.[20] Edward Bond has argued that while books and deacons were used to assist ordained ministers in conducting public worship in seventeenth-century England, in contemporary Virginia they were even more important as the colony struggled to attract sufficient numbers of episcopally-ordained clergymen.[21] As several scholars have recognized, the Book of Common Prayer, used at home and in church, served as a loyalty-inspiring touchstone of Anglican practice for southern men and women.[22] The influence of the laity did not mean, however, that popular commitment to the church was weak. J. Nelson has emphasized the extent to which “Virginia’s parishes were firmly under lay control by leading gentry families,” but argued that this system produced in non-clergymen a “remarkable sense of responsibility in ensuring that Anglican worship—in form and substance—prevailed everywhere in the colony.”[23]

The Church of England clearly appealed to southern elites, but it also attracted the allegiance of more common people. Evidence for the depth of lay support for Anglicanism has often been difficult for historians to gauge. In Bond’s characterization, “theirs was a low-key piety, deeply felt and involving the ‘whole individual’,” but given to order rather than to passion or ecstasy. Anglicans worked out their salvation through a well-ordered journey to God.“[24] When lay Anglicans’ devotion left traces in the written record, it often did so through churchmen’s opposition to what they regarded as the excesses of other denominations. William Stephens of Georgia, the secretary to the new colony’s Trustees, was a witness to some of the earliest moments in evangelical history in the colony in the late 1730s and 1740s. Stephens became increasingly concerned with the doctrines and style of George Whitefield, who arrived in the colony as an Anglican clergyman in 1738, but nevertheless recorded in his diary that”I should still think it my duty to attend the publick Worship, whatever my Sentiments were of the Preacher." It was his responses to the rising public influence of Whitefield and his supporters, a recent biography notes, that revealed “how much Stephens valued the principles and rituals of the Church of England.”[25]

Given these evidentiary challenges, students of colonial Anglicanism, like other scholars of American religion, have been drawn to examinations of religious practice and material culture as ways to better understand “lived religion.” Nelson has noted that “the evidence for Anglican spirituality and vital religious practice must largely be inferred from everyday behaviors,” and he and others have taken up this challenge.[26] Lauren Winner has argued that “Virginians were not whited sepulchers just waiting for evangelical revivalists to ‘awaken’ them to the importance of Christianity,” and used analyses of objects including baptismal bowls, needlework, cookbooks, and mourning rings to illustrate the “quotidian religiosity of the eighteenth-century Virginia gentry.”[27] Louis P. Nelson has focused on South Carolina Anglicans’ “material religion,” including but not limited to church architecture, to demonstrate the richness of lay religiosity in the colony and argue that Anglican devotional life migrated from the household to “the space of the church” over the course of the eighteenth century.[28] Evangelicals would subsequently decry the aridness and superficiality of the established church, but in Christine Heyrman’s apt summary, such generalizations were countered by their own “recollections of the devotional regimen of Anglican mothers, the stern rectitude of Anglican fathers, and the common parental practices of teaching young Anglican children to read with the Bible as their primer, drilling them in the catechism, and stocking their households with books of sermons and other religious treatises.”[29]

While rejecting the notion that the Church of England’s only role was the buttressing of social and political hierarchy, most recent work does not deny that Anglican practice helped display and bolster the dominance of the Anglophone South’s slave-holding gentry. Rather it suggests, as L. Nelson has argued, “that Anglicans were fully capable of embracing the piety and prayer associated with the contemplative life and the social and political hierarchies that were an everyday reality.”[30] Getting the balance right in this regard can be challenging. The ongoing rehabilitation of southern Anglicanism should not obscure the fact that its entanglement with slavery—as much as lay piety and the power of vestries—helped determine the particular features of the colonial Church of England. Atlantic perspectives are particularly valuable in this context because the fusion of legally-established Anglicanism with plantation slavery was not just a feature of the mainland South. L. Nelson, for example, has argued that Virginia and South Carolina should be considered as part of a greater British Caribbean dominated by “a cohesive planter class united by a shared political and social identity.” The emergence of this group—a process that stretched from the 1670s to the 1710s—“was marked by a profound transformation in the architecture of Anglican churches” across the region. The masonry and cruciform churches constructed in this period not only represented Anglican respect for “regularity” and order, they also marked “the appropriation of the architecture of the church by this new elite, hereditary landed class for the purposes of reifying their social and political station.”[31]

Similarly, in a creative and compelling account of eighteenth-century colonial Anglican ritual life, Nicholas Beasley has argued that the “British slave societies” of Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina saw “the gradual elaboration of a set of ritual habits in societies whose most powerful members were committed to a fundamental racial and cultural stasis.”[32] Beasley stresses the similarities among these three colonies, arguing that in all of them participation in Anglican rituals was more vigorous than many older accounts claimed. A commitment to the regular practice of Anglican rites was both an exercise in “whites’ studied continuity with early modern English religious culture” and a modification of it as they developed practices, such as home rather than church baptism, that “excluded most persons of color from Christian worship throughout the colonial period.”[33] This affected religious life for black and white people alike, and Beasley’s and L. Nelson’s works demonstrate that colonial Anglicanism’s interaction with slavery cannot be walled off from its wider history. As slavery moved to the center of economic and cultural life in many localities, Anglican affinities for systems of hierarchy led many supporters of the church on both sides of the Atlantic to identify its interests with those of masters.[34] This desire to cultivate masters, gentry hostility to conversion, the patterns of exclusion noted by Beasley, and black people’s own awareness and rejection of such dynamics, help to explain why the great majority of enslaved people in the colonies remained outside the established church. Despite the fact that Anglicans were among the first Protestants to seek to convert slaves, it was not until well into the nineteenth century that Christianity became a sizeable presence within communities of enslaved people. Moreover, evangelicalism, rather than Anglicanism, proved to be the key vehicle for this transformation.[35]

If, as Beasley suggests, planters found ways to modify Anglican practices such as baptism to underline their own power, it is also the case that the church’s aspirations to be the church for the entirety of the population contributed to a surprisingly enduring interest in Christianizing the Atlantic world’s black people. In what is probably the most revisionist argument made within recent work, Annette Laing has used the scholarship of John Thornton and others on west Africa’s connections to the Atlantic world to point out that at least some of the enslaved people in South Carolina who were touched by Anglicanism already knew Christianity in Africa through Catholicism. This has led her to argue that enslaved people in South Carolina before 1750 would not necessarily have identified Christianity with trans-Atlantic slavery or as an aspect of their repression in the colonies, and that “contrary to received wisdom, neither the quantity nor the quality of the American evidence supports the belief that most Africans in the early South Carolina Low Country rejected Anglican Christianity.”[36] Few other recent scholars have been willing to go as far as Laing in estimating Anglicanism’s appeal to enslaved people, but it is clear that some free and enslaved people of color did find forming connections to the established church appealing for a wide, if variable and difficult to unpack, array of spiritual, cultural, and political reasons.[37] Moreover, even as most enslaved people remained aloof or excluded from the established church, the enslaved slave population of some parts of the continental South and the Caribbean was proportionally so large that black people became a sizeable part of some congregations. This has led Robert Olwell to observe that in South Carolina, while “the church may have been of small importance in the lives of most slaves, slaves played a significant part in the life of the church.”[38] Together, recent work suggests that J. Nelson’s characterization of the Church of England as “by no means a ‘for whites only’ institution” in Virginia is applicable across the colonial South.[39]

What then of evangelicals and the religious revivalism that have long been central to the story of the religion in the South? Since Jon Butler’s challenging, now thirty years ago, of the existence of a single, interconnected Great Awakening across the thirteen colonies, many scholars of colonial religion have been wary of overestimating the power of early evangelicalism, especially in the South.[40] Heyrman’s argument that “evangelicalism came late to the American South, as an exotic import rather than an indigenous development” has also proven influential in this regard.[41] Recently, however, Thomas Little has argued for a deeper history of southern evangelicalism and the significance to it of the particular religious dynamics present in early eighteenth-century South Carolina. Little has noted that Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregationalist, Quaker, French Reform, and German Reform congregations all existed in the colony before George Whitefield’s arrival there, and argued that the presence of “very sizeable and pluralistic non-Anglican Protestant reform and sectarian population” was one of the “critical variables that shaped the context in which southern evangelicalism emerged.” But, in Little’s analysis, it was also important to the development of evangelicalism that the colony saw an Anglican resurgence that produced a strong but contentious legal establishment for the Church of England, an aggressive program of church building, and an influx of missionary clergymen, all of which combined to create a feeling of crisis for those dissenters who remained.[42] In Little’s view, it was South Carolinians’ active and passionate commitment to their various churches, not their spiritual deadness, that set the stage for the new revivalism of the 1740s and beyond.

As historians have long known and recent work underlines, early evangelicalism’s footprint was uneven: often shallow in relatively mature coastal communities but deeper in more recently settled inland areas.[43] J. Nelson observed that in Virginia, for example, while Baptists and Presbyterians became more numerous in the colony from the 1750s, “some parishes had few or no first-hand encounters with dissenters” before the 1770s.[44] Jewel Spangler’s careful attention to these patterns led her to argue that dissenters’ and churchmen’s efforts to Christianize Virginia can partly be seen as complementary, with Presbyterians and Baptists helping to meet religious “supply” problems in regions underserved by the established church.[45] While many historians continue to stress the distinctiveness of evangelical culture, there are also suggestions to rethink the rather too neat divides that have been used to differentiate evangelicals from southern Anglicans. Spangler has argued that first Presbyterians and then Baptists simultaneously challenged Virginia’s existing culture and found ways to appeal to aspects of it. Most Baptists, she claims, “did not leave behind their commitment to patriarchy and slavery.”[46] They were able to expand their churches in part “because they did not stand in stark opposition to the dominant social and political order in ways that would have mattered the most.”[47] Likewise, others have reconsidered overly-simplistic distinctions between tolerant evangelicals and intolerant Anglicans. Evangelical ministers cooperated at times, but they also competed for new adherents. Peter N. Moore has cautioned against too strong an emphasis on a shared culture of accommodation or toleration in the backcountry, noting that in the predominantly Scots-Irish upcountry South Carolina settlement of the Waxhaws “sectarian identity was strong” and that “religious outsiders—Baptists and in particular Anglicans—came in for torrents of abuse from their Presbyterian neighbors.”[48]

If evangelical religion was present in parts of the South at least from the 1740s, how widely influential it was in the colonial period remains a more contested issue, especially in light of the historiographical reevaluation of Anglicanism. New forms of evangelical religion profoundly affected the lives of some they touched, but did this dramatically change colonial society? As Spangler has noted in her admirably lucid and even-handed explication of the growth of the Baptists in Virginia, “in 1775 the Baptist Church was still a tiny dissenting sect in the most Anglican of North American colonies.”[49] J. Nelson has cautioned that despite “contemporaneous fears, rumors, as well as estimates to the contrary,” we should remember that “evangelical dissenters were not omnipresent in Virginia in the two or three decades preceding the Revolution.” Moreover, Nelson claims, “there is a temptation to read the post-Revolutionary triumphs of evangelical Protestantism back into the pre-Revolutionary decades.”[50] In Thomas Kidd’s view, however, “the Great Awakening can be acknowledged as ‘great’ because it produced the evangelical movement.” Although, he notes, “the movement’s most explosive growth remained in the future, eighteenth-century evangelicals had successfully established the religion of the new birth as a permanent fixture on the American cultural scene.”[51]

While these historians differ in their points of emphasis there is considerable shared terrain here. As with many other aspects of early American history, much depends on whether colonial religious history is conceived of as a self-contained field or as the beginning of a longer American story. Given the recent recovery of the richness and vitality of colonial Anglicanism, it is fitting that besides being the 450th anniversary of Jean Ribault’s Huguenot expedition, 2012 marks the 350th anniversary of the publication of the canonical 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer. The southern United States would be transformed by evangelical Protestantism, but colonial southerners’ religious lives were not spent simply waiting for its arrival.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

2. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 157.↩

3. Philip D. Morgan, “Religious Diversity in Colonial Virginia: Red, Black, and White,” in From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia,ed. Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 75.↩

4. Bruce E. Steiner, “The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 387–409.↩

5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp↩

6. There is some excellent new work on toleration. For the early Republic see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); for the colonial period see Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Evan Haefeli wrestles with Dutch contributions to American ideas of religious liberty; see Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am also intrigued by the possibility of an Atlantic history of toleration. See Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).↩

7. ,For example, see John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), and Edward Bond’s chronically underappreciated Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000).↩

8. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).↩

9. On Patrick Copeland, see Edward D. Neill, Memoir of Reverend Patrick Copeland: Rector Elect of the First Projected College in the United States: A Chapter in the English Colonization of America (New York: Charles Scribner & Co, 1871); Shona Vance, “A Man for all Regions: Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World,” in Shaping the Stuart World 1603–1714: The Atlantic connection, ed. Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 79–116; Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–254.↩

10. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For another biographical account of West African Moravianism, see Ray A. Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 115–136.↩

11. Governor William Berkeley to Richard Nicholls, 20 May 1666, in The Papers of William Berkely, 1605–1677, ed. Warren M. Billings (Richmond, VA: The Library of Virginia, 2007), 279–280. Berkeley’s contempt for “the Brethren” was probably common among Virginia elites after the Restoration.↩

12. Jewel L. Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Establishment, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).↩

13. Randolph Ferguson Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).↩

14. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632.↩

15. Juliana Barr, “How do you get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A Colonial Sun Belt,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 553–566.↩

16. Alan Gallay, Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 104–109.↩

17. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632–633.↩

18. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).↩

19. Mark M. Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” Journal of Southern History 67 (August 2001), 513–534.↩

20. See Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 116–123.↩

21. On Estebanico as a Muslim, see Andres Resendez, A Land so Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (NY: Basic Books, 2007), 55–56.↩

22. David Beers Quinn, “Turks, Moors, and Others in Drake’s West Indian Voyage,” Itinerario 14 (1982): 97–104.↩

23. Reverend John Clayton (Præbendary of St Michans), The Defense of a Sermon, Preach’d upon the Receiving into the Communion of the Church of England, the Honourable Sir Terence Mac-Mahon Baronet and Christopher Dunn: Converts from the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1701), preface, n.p.↩

24. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 60–61. See also Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).↩

25. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).↩

26. Attorney General vs. Lumbrozo, 23 February 1658/59, in The Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Provincial Court of Maryland, 1658–1662, ed. Bernard Christian Steiner (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1922), 203.↩

27. On the Sephardic diaspora in Dutch Brazil and in the Atlantic World, see the excellent essays in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Converso, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).↩

28. On Jewish settlers in Charleston and Savannah, see William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 117–141. For an encyclopedic overview of Jews in the Americas, see Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776 III vol. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).↩

29. See for example Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking, 2009).↩

30. John Carroll, “John Carroll’s Letter on Trusteeism,” (1786), in Mark Massa and Catherine Osborne, eds., American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 32; Rodger van Allen, “Lay Distrusteeism,” Commonweal, 12 September 12 2008. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has argued that Carroll was an opponent of lay trusteeism, but Carroll’s letter to the trustees of St. Peter’s Church in New York City makes it clear that he saw lay trusteeism as an important means by which the Catholic Church in early America might be sustained. See Dolan’s lecture, “Right from the Start: John Carroll, Our First Bishop.”↩

31. Thomas J. Shelley, “When Catholics Were Congregationalists,” Commonweal, 12 September 2003, 29; Dale B. Light, Rome and the New Republic: Conflict and Community in Philadelphia Catholicism between the Revolution and the Civil War (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 241; Carey, Priests, People, and Prelates, 214.↩

32. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 59, 19.↩

33. Ibid., 68, 65–66.↩

34. For more on the growth of Catholic devotionalism in Europe—particularly English-speaking Europe—see Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Bill McSweeney, Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance (New York: Palgrave, 1980); and Derek Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century (Shepherstown, WV: Burns and Oates, 1978).↩

35. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the United States did experience a wave of Catholic devotionalism that was cultivated by the Church hierarchy as a way of shepherding Catholics to the margins of their predominantly Protestant society and, in so doing, preserving the unique features of the Catholic faith. This manifestation of devotionalism was a deliberate reaction against the move toward “Americanization” that Catholic converts like Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson were pushing for, and in this sense, its origins were very different from earlier varieties of Catholic devotionalism along the frontier. See McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 27–29; and Ann Taves, “Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Church History 54 (1985): 482–195.↩

36. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 21.↩

37. Charlene Villaseñor Black, “St. Anne Imagery and Maternal Archetypes in Spain and Mexico,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas. 1500–1800 ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 22.↩

38. Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 160. Tracy Fessenden has suggested that Clark may be a little too willing to attribute a “rhetoric of equality” to the Ursuline sisters, in light of their unwillingness to challenge slavery. Tracy Fessenden, “untitled review,” review of Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834,* * by Emily Clark, Church History 77 (2008): 1073–1078.↩

39. “An Act Concerning Negroes and Other Slaves” (1664), in Civil Rights and African Americans, eds. Albert P. Blaustein and Robert L. Zangrando, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 8–9.↩

40. Thomas J. Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 131, 147–149; James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 143–157; and McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 43–67.↩

41. Harriet Martineau, Society in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 2:323; and O’Toole, The Faithful, 59.↩

42. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 381, 380.↩

43. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom in the Middle Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 13; Trevor Graeme Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691–1776 (New York, 2002), 5, 36, 38, 265; and Beatrize Bentancourt Hardy, “Papists in a Protestant Age: The Catholic Gentry and Community in Colonial Maryland, 1689–1776” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993), 214, n. 68. Charles Carroll of Annapolis owned 386 slaves in 1773. Henry Darnell owned 100 in 1711.↩

44. Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Political Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 6, 17; Lacy K. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 372–373. For more on how Protestants used anti-Catholicism to define the parameters of American freedom, see Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).↩

45. Farrelly, “American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism,” 92–94, n43; and Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: New Press 1992), 46, 29.↩

46. Ibid., 165.↩

47. Ibid., 4.↩

48. Peter N. Moore, World of Toil and Strife: Community Transformation in the Backcountry South Carolina, 1750–1805 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 3.↩

49. Spangler, Virginians Reborn, 87.↩

50. Nelson, A Blessed Company, 285.↩

51. Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 323.↩

Native American Religions in the Early South

Tracy Neal Leavelle

Tracy Neal Leavelle is an associate professor of history at Creighton University.

“In the beginning there was no fire, and the world was cold,” according to Cherokee storytelling traditions. The Thunders sent lightning upon the land and created fire in the bottom of a hollow sycamore tree that grew on an island. The animals could see the smoke rising from the top of the tree and gathered in council to decide how they could obtain the fire. Several birds flew to the island—Raven, Screech-owl, Hooting Owl, Horned Owl—but the heat was too much for them. Two snakes swam across the water, but they too failed to return with fire. After another council, the Water Spider said she would go. She spun a little bowl, placed it on her back, and crossed the water to the burning tree. “She put one little coal of fire into her bowl, and came back with it, and ever since we have had fire.”[1]

In the late nineteenth century, between 1887 and 1890, the ethnologist James Mooney listened to Eastern Cherokee elders who shared a range of stories, including this one on the origins of fire. A’yun’ini, or “Swimmer,” provided most of them. He had been born in the 1830s and remained prominent in the ceremonial life of the community until his death in 1899. Another elder, John Ax, was around ninety years old when he spoke to Mooney. He was an authority on Cherokee customs and had a living memory of such early nineteenth-century events as the Creek wars and agreements with the United States. Mooney collected the stories of these and other Cherokee men into his magnificent volume Myths of the Cherokees.[2]

The book was typical of the Bureau of American Ethnology projects of the time; it was part of an effort to gather ethnographic and linguistic data before aging elders passed away and “authentic” Native knowledge and traditions disappeared. Mooney conducted most of his work in the mountains of Carolina—and not in Oklahoma, where most of the Cherokees lived—because there he found the kind of Indians he was looking for. “Far away from the main-traveled road of modern progress, the Cherokee priest still treasures the legends and repeats the mystic rituals handed down from his ancestors,” he wrote. “There is change indeed in dress and outward seeming, but the heart of the Indian is still his own.”[3]

Although Mooney knew that ceremonies like the Green Corn Festival continued, he believed that a coherent “national legend is now lost forever.”[4] Nonetheless, Myths of the Cherokee is a remarkable cultural document. It preserves stories about the origins of the world, the character of animals and other beings, historical events, and local legends and lore.And despite Mooney’s concern with loss, Myths of the Cherokee reflects a deep knowledge of the past. The stories reveal an unbroken connection to the long history of the Cherokees and to their location in the world, even while they acknowledge the profound significance of change. The stories are as much about change as they are about tradition.

One fascinating story linked the Cherokees to the great mounds that stood impressively at many places in the region. Fire-keepers at these mounds maintained sacred and eternal fires for the people. According to the account, “just before the Green-corn dance, in the old times, every fire in the settlement was extinguished and all the people came and got new fire.” The gift of the Thunders and the Water Spider burned at the center of Cherokee life. The story also provided a religious explanation for the tragedies of the nineteenth century. Trouble came to the nation when the most powerful ceremonial items the Cherokees possessed were lost to conflict and “the old religion was neglected.” The storyteller ended, “all the old things are gone now and the Indians are different.”[5]

It would be easy in writing the history of Native American religion in the South to follow the path set by Mooney, from an idealized and fully developed ritual life, through periods of conflict and rapid assimilation, and finally to a gradual and inevitable decline. In the historical sketch that opens the volume, Mooney concludes of the Eastern Cherokee: “the older people still cling to their ancient rites and sacred traditions, but the dance and the ballplay wither and the Indian day is nearly spent.”[6] The very richness of the oral traditions recorded in the text and the complex history Mooney himself recounts argue against such simple narratives of decline. Indians are different, but they have not disappeared. Some fires have even been rekindled.

Scholars of Native history in the American South have mostly abandoned the vanishing Indian myth that provided an intellectual framework for Mooney and an ideological foundation for assimilationist projects. Tribal members, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists have challenged conventional narratives and addressed the complexity of the past. Still, of the many studies that have appeared in the last thirty years or so, few have focused specifically on religion. Politics, diplomacy, trade, disease, and the emergence of new Native identities have all received more attention than religion. The study of Native religion in the South remains underdeveloped despite the efforts of several important scholars.

In a 1997 essay, religious studies scholar Joel Martin made a case for a postcolonial history of American religion through an analysis of contact and colonialism in the Deep South. Martin called for a reorientation “informed by the new history on Indians and stimulated by the contemporary perspectives of Indian intellectuals.” He proposed that we “turn from accounts that suggest Indians disappeared to those that depict Indians as constant participants in American life. We can progress from narratives that ignore uneven power relations to those that explain how these relations affected religious history and historiography.”[7]

Martin cited 10,000 years of contact history in the South, only 2% of which involved the interactions of Native people with Europeans and Americans. This is the deep history revealed by Mooney’s storytellers and by contemporary archaeologists alike. The long history of dynamic and changing Native American communities is important in its own right, but the cultural and social forms that emerged through the centuries also provided the context for colonial contact, conflict, and exchange. The Hernando de Soto expedition of 1539–1542 entered a complex society of Mississippian chiefdoms, a world the Spaniards failed to understand. Although weakened by colonial violence and disease, Mississippian-style chiefdoms survived until the destruction of the Natchez in the eighteenth century.

At the same time, Martin urged historians of American religion to consider the ways that contact affected all of the people involved, not just Native Americans. He wrote, “sometimes [contact] was direct and face-to-face, as when Anglo-Americans and African Americans entered Creek country. Other times it was indirect, mediated by journalism, political rhetoric, sermons, folktales, literature, artifacts, and artistic works.”[8] These exchanges still occurred in an environment shaped by colonialism, and one cannot comprehend the many religiously inspired resistance movements and other historical developments without paying attention to the effects of invasion and conquest.

Martin provided some interesting examples of what a postcolonial religious history might look like. These histories would span a much longer chronology, beginning not with European contact but with hundreds or even thousands of years of religious change. They would account for both cultural exchange and the presence of uneven power relations. Indians would not disappear from the narratives. They would remain, as they have in American life, a major influence on the religious development of the United States. It might seem a little premature to call such a narrative postcolonial when many Native intellectuals and others have identified ongoing colonial processes (the appropriation of Native religious forms is a prime example) and advocated for further decolonization of Native peoples, lands, and cultures.[9] The postcolonial moment may not have arrived for American Indians, but the challenge posed by Martin remains.

Native religious history did not begin with the emergence of the Atlantic world. The Cherokee oral tradition about the mounds is in part an account of change over time. The Mississippian tradition responsible for the sacred landscape in the river valleys of the South and Midwest flourished for around six hundred years and lasted well into the era of European colonization. The tradition was rooted in thousands of years of cultural development that included the adoption of maize agriculture, the rise and fall of powerful chiefdoms, the elaboration of trade networks, the mobilization of labor for massive building projects, and the appearance of ceremonial and symbolic systems whose influence continued long after the last Great Sun, the spiritually and politically powerful chief of the Natchez.[10]

The spectacular mounds of Cahokia, just east of St. Louis, seem to get most of the attention from historians. The great Mississippian chiefdom is a useful example to counter the beliefs of those who remain skeptical about the presence of Indian civilization in North America. Cahokia flourished between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. At the height of its power and influence, Cahokia had a population of between 3000 and 16,000 people. Some archaeologists contend the population was much higher, as high as 30,000 people, comparable to the population of medieval London.[11]

In any case, the political, ceremonial, and trade center linked a densely populated region of mound complexes, villages, and fields. The residents constructed more than one hundred earthen mounds through centuries of occupation. The largest is known today as Monk’s Mound. More than one hundred feet tall and covering sixteen acres, Monk’s Mound is the largest ancient earthwork in North America. It contains 21,700,000 cubic feet of earth, carried in baskets and packed and shaped under the supervision of expert builders. Four large open plazas aligned to the cardinal directions surround the flat-topped pyramid, and lesser mounds stretch beyond this central site according to a careful plan. In the thirteenth century, a thatched building–perhaps a temple–rose from the heights. The mounds elevated the political and priestly elite, allowing them to see and be seen by the commoners who lived below them. Public ceremonies in the great plazas, the coordinated construction and annual reinforcement of mounds, and elaborate mortuary practices supported elite claims to power. These activities and the possibility of shared mythologies and symbolic systems created ritual connections between the different levels of society.[12]

Equally interesting from a historical standpoint is Natchez, where we have the archaeological record as well as written documents. We know the names of specific people—the Europeans knew three Great Suns, the political and ceremonial leaders of the community. Archaeological investigations in the 1960s and 1970s showed that occupation of the “Grand Village of the Natchez,” known to archaeologists as the Fatherland site, had started by the thirteenth century. Development in this location occurred just as Cahokia was going into its decline. European trade goods at the site demonstrated its continued occupation into the era of colonial contact, and archaeologists have verified many of the observations made by European visitors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the first synthesis of this history for almost a century, James Barnett describes the complexity of Natchez society and culture and shows how important this powerful Mississippi River nation became in the colonial contest between the French and the English.[13]

In 1700 the French colonial official Pierre LeMoyne d’Iberville visited the Grand Village and provided the earliest written description of the site based on direct experience. Iberville found the Great Sun and many others sick from dysentery. The Great Sun’s home was large, twenty-five by forty-five feet, and sat on a raised earthen platform ten feet high. The temple mound was around the same height as the chief’s mound and bounded a large open plaza “about 250 paces wide and 300 long,” according to the French visitor.[14]

The memoirist Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz provided the most detailed account of the Natchez in the eighteenth century. Du Pratz arrived in the French colony of Louisiana in 1718 and two years later established a plantation in the Natchez territory. For a decade, he observed and interacted with his Native neighbors and documented the region’s human and natural history. Du Pratz reported, “during my residence among the Natchez I contracted an intimate friendship, not only with the chiefs or guardians of the temple, but with the Great Sun, or the sovereign of the nation, and his brother the Stung Serpent, the chief of the warriors.”[15] His familiarity with Natchez leadership, language, and culture makes his descriptions particularly valuable. Du Pratz witnessed the death and dramatic funeral of the Stung Serpent in 1725. He also described the large temple and its origins. According to the temple guardian, a man and wife had come many years ago from the sun to teach the Natchez how to live properly. The man provided moral instruction and told the people how to construct the temple. He explained further “that in the temple they should eternally preserve a fire, which he would bring down from the sun.”[16] On a tour, Du Pratz found that the eternal flame was kept in the larger of the two rooms that made up the temple. An altar table next to the sacred fire held the bones of a previous Great Sun. The ceremonial life Du Pratz described in his book lasted until the defeat and dispersal of the Natchez by the French in the early 1730s.[17]

Scholars have produced excellent studies on the transformation of the Mississippian-style chiefdoms, the impact of European colonization, and the emergence of new ethnic identities in the South. Most notable is Patricia Galloway’s highly influential Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700 (1995), which uses the archaeological record and European maps and travel narratives to document the ethnogenesis of the modern Choctaws. More recently, a collection of essays edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Schuck-Hall, Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone (2009), connects the colonial Indian slave trade to widespread regional instability and dramatic social and cultural change. Many of the contributors to this collection have also written book-length studies on the colonial era. For the most part, however, religion remains a relatively under-examined feature of Native communal adjustments to European colonization in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The latter volume does contain an essay on the Natchez which makes the provocative assertion that Tattooed Arm, sister of the Great Sun, tried to convert a Catholic missionary priest to the Natchez religion and then had a son with him—a boy who grew up to become the last Great Sun. The author contends that the treatment of the missionary reflected the common Natchez practice of making outsiders into kin.[18]

Nevertheless, missionization and its effects on Native communities in the South constitute an area of study that requires substantially more investigation. The field is still not nearly as well developed as it is for other colonial regions like New England, New France, and most of the Spanish colonies of the Americas. In recent decades, scholars working on a variety of topics have developed a much more sophisticated understanding of colonial religious encounters, conversion and the indigenization of Christianity, and the role of religious change in social and economic life, diplomacy and politics, and more.[19] Colonial missions in the South have not been entirely ignored and it is worth noting some of the more prominent examples of the work that already exists. Hopefully, the presence of this work combined with the influential scholarship on missions and Native Christianity that has appeared in recent decades will encourage scholars to ask new questions about missions, Native peoples, and Christianity in the South.

Archaeologist and anthropologist Jerald Milanich has done a lot to bring the history of the extensive mission networks of Spanish Florida into the conversation. His work, highlighted by Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians (1999), reveals the impact of missions on the many Native communities that were incorporated into the colonial world of the Spanish Caribbean. The Jesuits arrived to evangelize and to help secure Spanish claims to Florida soon after the establishment of St. Augustine in 1565. The Jesuit missions were not very successful and the Society of Jesus withdrew its personnel in the 1570s. Spanish colonial officials still had a legal and moral obligation to expand the kingdom of Christ, and they needed Indian allies and Indian labor. They turned to the Franciscans, who developed a large network of missions across northern Florida and adjacent territories. According to Milanich, “the goals of the Franciscan missions were to save the souls of the Indians while shaping their minds and controlling their bodies, all in support of Spanish interests.” The missionaries targeted influential chiefs for conversion as a way to gain access to larger populations. Milanich argues that Franciscan efforts were quite successful in the seventeenth century, leading to widespread acceptance of Christianity and a blend of old and new cultural practices.[20]

There was a terrible cost for Native communities, however. Milanich writes, “the missions of Spanish Florida should be viewed not as a benign offshoot of colonialism, but as colonialism itself. Religious education was a calculated way to save souls while converting a potentially hostile population into a labor force that toiled in support of the colony and its colonial overlords … The light of knowledge cannot brighten one dark truth: missions and colonialism must take most of the blame for the disappearance of a significant portion of the southeastern Indians.”[21] Milanich relies on both the archaeological and documentary records to draw such conclusions. His work overlaps in time with the studies of Galloway and others and offers plenty of evidence that missions, and religion more broadly, should be included in the analysis of change in the “shatter zone.”

Religious studies scholar Michelene Pesantubbee is deeply informed by this newer work on religious change. In Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (2005), she tries to explain a decline in the status of Choctaw women during the period of French colonization in the lower Mississippi Valley. The ambitious study is concerned in particular with high-status Beloved Women, an earned title well known from surrounding Indian nations like the Cherokees, Creeks, and Chickasaws.[22] Since European sources tend to favor the actions of men, the reconstruction of Choctaw women’s lives is difficult. In her search for Choctaw Beloved Women, she uses whatever documentary evidence she can find, but she also relies on cultural narratives that supported a tradition of balance and complementarity in the different roles of women and men.

Choctaw origin stories frequently refer to a migration to or emergence from Nanih Waiya (“Leaning Mountain”), a sacred mound in Mississippi often referred to in Choctaw as “Beloved Mother.” The connection to the mound links the Choctaws to an ancient spiritual landscape that remains important to this day.[23] Choctaw oral tradition recalls a time when the people living near the mound did not have enough food to eat. Two men went hunting to feed their village, but could only manage to catch a single bird. Disappointed, they started to eat but soon heard a song like a dove. Following the sound, they came upon a beautiful woman standing atop a grassy mound. She, too, was hungry and they shared their bird with her. She thanked them for saving her life and told them to return to the mound the next summer. The men did so and found the first corn plant, a gift from the woman and her father, the Great Spirit of the Choctaws. Corn became the staple item in the Choctaw diet. The story is certainly a beautiful expression of the ideal of reciprocity. The narrative also underlines the value of women in Choctaw society, a matrilineal, matrilocal society in which women performed most of the agricultural work. In so many ways, Choctaw women were truly the givers of life.[24]

Pesantubbee describes a dramatic decline in the status of women in the eighteenth century. A number of factors led to the collapse of the more balanced gender relationships: the violence unleashed by the colonial contest for interior North America, changing patterns of captivity and redemption, and the work of Catholic missionaries to transform Choctaw social structures.[25] Pesantubbee complains that a lack of documentation and a belief then and now that French Catholic missionaries did not enjoy much success in the Louisiana colony has contributed to the unmerited assumption that Christianity had little impact on the Choctaws. She explains that both direct and indirect contact with missionaries influenced the Choctaws and other Native peoples in the region. Christian religious practices and ideas circulated widely, although this indirect influence is difficult to measure. Missionary activity in the lower Mississippi Valley and surrounding areas began in earnest at the very end of the seventeenth century, but many of the missions were short lived. Missionaries came and went. The Jesuits lasted the longest, working throughout the region and establishing the first mission among the Choctaws in 1727. However, other orders also labored in these fields. The diocesan priests sponsored by the Séminaire de Québec, for example, had mission stations among the Natchez and others in the early seventeenth century.[26]

Assessing their impact, Pesantubbee concludes that “missionary concern about women’s sexuality contributed to women’s exclusion from two important political activities: diplomatic ceremonies and war councils.” Furthermore, the missionaries introduced the concepts of sin and forgiveness, forcing Native people to confront their own “ideas about human nature and the spirit world.”[27] Colonialism pushed women to the margins of Choctaw society, at least in certain respects, reducing their visibility in critical public events and altering their place in the family structure.

Pesantubbee poses important questions in her book about the changing status of women in Choctaw society, although sometimes the answers to those questions remain frustratingly incomplete. The fragmented historical record explains part of the problem. However, there is confusion about the work of the various missionary organizations. The missionaries of the Society of Jesus and the Séminaire de Québec were in competition with each other. Their training and methods were different. The Jesuits of the eighteenth century were also not the same as those of the seventeenth. Although the seventeenth-century martyrs of New France inspired later missionaries, mission work had changed significantly in the intervening decades. The Jesuits knew much more about Native languages and cultures, and the colonial context had changed as well. These distinctions are not always clear in the text. However, the attempt to reconstruct the influence of Native women on cultural change in the colonial era is a welcome trend. In this sense, Pesantubbee’s work builds on Theda Perdue’s groundbreaking Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–183 (1998)5.[28]

Historically speaking, the story continues with Clara Sue Kidwell’s Choctaws and Missionaries, 1818–1918 (1995), published a decade prior to Pesantubbee’s book. Rising nationalism, westward expansion, and religious revival coalesced in the early nineteenth century into a powerful assimilationist program supported by the federal government and Christian missionary societies. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions started the first mission to the Choctaw nation in 1818. The missionary program relied on education as the primary instrument of conversion, but these early missions achieved disappointing results as far as the missionaries were concerned. Many Choctaws actively pursued educational opportunities and requested schools for their regions, recognizing potential benefits, but they were less interested in the social and cultural teachings that were so central to the project of conversion. However, as Kidwell demonstrates, “civilization was not the salvation of the Choctaw Nation.”[29]

In 1829 the state of Mississippi extended its authority over Choctaw land in its effort to open the area to further resettlement. In the wake of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a minority of Choctaw leaders signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The 1830 treaty ceded Choctaw lands to the United States and forced most Choctaws to move west to Indian Territory. A few thousand remained in their Mississippi homeland, however. According to Kidwell, “the Choctaws in Mississippi lost all political autonomy. Without federal recognition or a land base, they underwent a process of enclavement, surrounded by black and white communities but part of neither.”[30]

Yet, the Choctaws survived as a people both in Mississippi, near the sacred mound of Nanih Waiya, and in Oklahoma. The Choctaws used assimilationist institutions like churches and schools to acquire education and to help maintain strong communal connections. In making her argument, Kidwell rejects traditional acculturation theory (the “loss of culture” approach) for an examination of ethnic identity that accounts for social and cultural change in a long process of encounter and conflict.

Acculturation theory is a major component of the analytical framework William McLoughlin employs in Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (1984). Anthropological theories of culture loss and factionalism as well as Geertzian definitions of culture are heavy influences on this impressively researched and influential book. Even so, McLoughlin is just as interested in Cherokee agency. McLoughlin may be primarily concerned with, as he puts it, “ideological and social reorientations as seen by those Cherokees who came face to face with the missionaries,” but he also describes “the effect of the Cherokees upon the conscientious white missionaries.”[31] While there is no question that the missionaries contributed to the fragmentation of Cherokee society in the period before removal, they also provided support for a remarkable process of cultural revitalization, a development that McLoughlin has called the Cherokee Renascence.[32] Ultimately, McLoughlin concludes, “what the Cherokees took from the missionaries they took on their own terms and adapted to their own needs and perspectives.”[33]

McLoughlin believes that the turning point for the Cherokees was 1794, the year they signed a treaty with the United States to end the conflict related to their decision to side with Great Britain during the Revolutionary War. The Cherokees faced difficult decisions: “they had lost most of their hunting grounds and were almost surrounded by whites. They retained the right of local self-government, but they were under constant pressure from federal agents, factors, and missionaries to alter their ways and beliefs.”[34] The Cherokees responded with an extraordinary though not uncontested program of economic, social, and cultural transformation. Missionaries became an integral part of this process. The Moravians arrived at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) followed not long after. ABCFM representatives opened the Brainerd mission in 1817. Baptist ministers and Methodist circuit riders also worked among the Cherokees in the years before removal. Although some Cherokees adopted Christianity as a religious faith and practice, many more remained consistently interested in the practical skills like reading and writing that missionaries offered in their schoolhouses. In many ways, Christianity supported Cherokee revitalization. Some missionaries also acted as advocates for the Cherokees during the debates over removal.

The Cherokees did not universally welcome the intrusion of these foreigners into their nation and their lives. As McLoughlin acknowledges, “increasing Protestant evangelism was a divisive as well as a progressive force.” Despite his reliance on the study of factionalism as an organizing principle, McLoughlin does not fall into the trap of creating static oppositional social groups to support his argument. He writes, “Cherokee society in the 1820s was too complex to be divided into simplistic categories such as pro- or anti-mission, fullblood or mixed blood. Many other factors were at work: regionalism, social class or wealth, slave ownership, kinship, and opinions regarding the optimal amount and speed of change.”[35]

Two resistance movements stand out. The first is the so-called “Ghost Dance” movement of 1811–1813. James Mooney applied this appellation to a resurgence of Cherokee tradition in his massive study of the Ghost Dance religion that swept the West in the 1880s. Visions and prophecies, frightening earthquakes and a portentous comet, and the specter of war provided energy for the revival of older religious practices. A vision recorded by the Moravians contains warnings and a call for change:

the Mother of the Nation has forsaken you because all her bones are being broken through the grinding [of the mills]. She will return to you, however, if you put the white people out of the land and return to your former manner of life. You yourselves can see that the white people are entirely different beings from us; we are made from red clay; they, out of white sand.[36]

The man in the vision said that “neighborly relations” with whites would be acceptable as long as the Cherokees recovered all of their sacred Beloved Towns. McLoughlin does not view this movement as a complete rejection of what he calls “acculturation,” but rather as “an assertion of Cherokee nationalism and a profound expression of their desire for cultural autonomy.”[37] He contends that participants simply wanted to shape change according to Cherokee standards as opposed to internalizing the ideologies and attitudes of white Americans.

The second is White Path’s Rebellion of 1827, another response to rapid cultural change. This time the resistance was tied directly to rejection of missionaries. Anti-mission sentiment had been rising for years, when the Cherokee leader White Path (Nunnatsunnega) started openly opposing the actions of the Cherokee National Council. The Council expelled White Path in 1825. By 1827, White Path had become a prominent leader of a rebel council and support of the missionaries plummeted even further. White Path and others seemed to resent the growing power of the wealthy mixed-blood elite and the missionaries who openly supported them. McLoughlin contends that the rebellion “was not a reactionary movement seeking simply a return to a lost past but rather an effort to keep faith with their own heritage and identity as a people.”[38]

The cultural and social transformation of the Five Civilized Tribes has taken up a lot of narrative space, but resistance movements like the Cherokee “Ghost Dance” and White Path’s Rebellion have received increasing attention because they illuminate so well the diverse experiences of Native peoples entangled in colonial processes. Gregory Evans Dowd makes a compelling case for this turn in his interpretation of the “religiously charged struggle for unity” led by such figures as Neolin (the Delaware Prophet), Pontiac, Tenskwatawa (the Shawnee Prophet), and Tecumseh.[39] Dowd shows that at times supporters of accommodation and adherents of nativism could live in harmony. In certain times of crisis, however—during and after the Seven Years’ War and in the period leading up to the War of 1812—prophecy divided communities even as visionaries sought to unite Indians against the encroachments of white invaders. He writes, “during these periods, constellations of individuals who possessed special knowledge of the Great Spirit–those who came to be called ‘prophets’ by the Anglo-Americans–rose to provide spiritual guidance to militant followers charting the waters of intertribal diplomacy.”[40]

Alfred Cave includes a chapter on the Muskogee (Creek) Red Sticks in his survey of Native American revitalization movements. In it, he acknowledges the influence of a visit to the Muskogees in 1811 by Tecumseh and a holy man associated with Tenskwatawa’s prophetic movement. Yet, he also argues that “the Muskogee world had its own prophets, and those prophets had their own agenda and their own timetable.”[41] The Red Stick leaders openly questioned the propriety and the efficacy of the “civilization” program, and they urged the people to return to the life created for them by the Great Spirit. The prophets rejected Euro-American culture and advocated traditional gender roles, with women growing crops and men involved in hunting. The Shawnee Prophet’s songs and rituals added elements to a spiritual movement already underway. The prophecies bitterly divided the Muskogees, leading to a bloody civil war. Andrew Jackson defeated supporters of the movement in the Creek War of 1813–1814, although both supporters and opponents of the Red Sticks suffered in the aftermath due to land cessions and forced removal.

Lee Irwin profiles the Red Sticks and the Cherokee revival in his sophisticated comparative study of American Indian prophecy. No single volume better synthesizes the diverse and challenging material on prophecy from ancient times to the present. A historian of religion, Irwin examines what he calls the “ethnotheology” of the various movements he describes. He explains, “ethnotheology refers to the creative synthesis of indigenous religious beliefs (and practices) with a variety of Christian theological ideas, particularly sin, salvation, reward and punishment after death, and the moral teachings of kindness, nonviolence, and the preservation of family and communal values.”[42] Rather than seek some abstract unified theory of Native prophecy, Irwin instead uses this concept as a flexible guide on a journey through centuries of religious renewal and change.

Joel Martin’s Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (1991) remains the essential account of the Red Stick rebellion. Martin provides the necessary context for understanding the origins and development of the revolt. He views the movement as a creative response, rooted in Muskogee religious traditions, to the crisis brought on by the pressures of colonization: the trade in slaves and skins, the invasion of Muskogee lands, and the U.S. civilizing mission. Tecumseh’s visit and a series of violent earthquakes in 1811 and 1812 only gave momentum to a religious movement already in formation. Martin concludes, “the pattern of action that informed the [Muskogee] revolt was modeled on traditional rites of passage and world renewal ceremonies. The Redstick millenarian movement of 1812–1814 was an initiation ceremony performed on a grand collective scale.”[43]

The stories of these sacred revolts against colonization are a way to recognize the complexity of the past, a complexity that is too easily overlooked. James Mooney listened to some of these stories, but he represented a common perspective that within only another generation or so Indians would lose forever their authentic connections to real traditions. Only ghosts and collections of texts would remain. Indians might still perform a ceremony or two, but they would not be the same. No serious person can discount the very real destruction caused by colonization and conquest. However, the longer history of change and continuity that goes back hundreds of years, well before the arrival of Europeans and Africans, and the active and creative ways in which Native peoples responded to colonization resist any narrative that relates only a story of decline.

In his book on American Indian sacred places, Peter Nabokov tells of his visit to the site of the great Cherokee white or peace town of Chota, now under twenty feet of reservoir water in the Little Tennessee River Valley. This Cherokee Beloved Town was in the eighteenth century a place where one visitor explained that “the fire of Peace is always burning.” The Cherokees maintained the fire that Water Spider had acquired with courage and ingenuity so long ago. Nabokov writes, “fire was the medium of transformation, turning offerings into gifts for spiritual intercessors or the four quarters of the earth. And when their coals cooled off, fires left behind the symbols of charred blackness and death, along with the ashen whiteness associated with peace and the power of elders.”[44] It is easy enough when looking at the past to see the darkness, to recount the story of death and destruction that is a central part of the Native experience of colonization. However, it is also worth searching for the “ashen whiteness” that offers another perspective on change, the creative transformations of people engaged in a struggle for freedom and dignity.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

2. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 157.↩

3. Philip D. Morgan, “Religious Diversity in Colonial Virginia: Red, Black, and White,” in From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia,ed. Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 75.↩

4. Bruce E. Steiner, “The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 387–409.↩

5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp↩

6. There is some excellent new work on toleration. For the early Republic see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); for the colonial period see Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Evan Haefeli wrestles with Dutch contributions to American ideas of religious liberty; see Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am also intrigued by the possibility of an Atlantic history of toleration. See Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).↩

7. ,For example, see John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), and Edward Bond’s chronically underappreciated Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000).↩

8. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).↩

9. On Patrick Copeland, see Edward D. Neill, Memoir of Reverend Patrick Copeland: Rector Elect of the First Projected College in the United States: A Chapter in the English Colonization of America (New York: Charles Scribner & Co, 1871); Shona Vance, “A Man for all Regions: Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World,” in Shaping the Stuart World 1603–1714: The Atlantic connection, ed. Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 79–116; Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–254.↩

10. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For another biographical account of West African Moravianism, see Ray A. Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 115–136.↩

11. Governor William Berkeley to Richard Nicholls, 20 May 1666, in The Papers of William Berkely, 1605–1677, ed. Warren M. Billings (Richmond, VA: The Library of Virginia, 2007), 279–280. Berkeley’s contempt for “the Brethren” was probably common among Virginia elites after the Restoration.↩

12. Jewel L. Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Establishment, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).↩

13. Randolph Ferguson Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).↩

14. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632.↩

15. Juliana Barr, “How do you get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A Colonial Sun Belt,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 553–566.↩

16. Alan Gallay, Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 104–109.↩

17. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632–633.↩

18. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).↩

19. Mark M. Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” Journal of Southern History 67 (August 2001), 513–534.↩

20. See Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 116–123.↩

21. On Estebanico as a Muslim, see Andres Resendez, A Land so Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (NY: Basic Books, 2007), 55–56.↩

22. David Beers Quinn, “Turks, Moors, and Others in Drake’s West Indian Voyage,” Itinerario 14 (1982): 97–104.↩

23. Reverend John Clayton (Præbendary of St Michans), The Defense of a Sermon, Preach’d upon the Receiving into the Communion of the Church of England, the Honourable Sir Terence Mac-Mahon Baronet and Christopher Dunn: Converts from the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1701), preface, n.p.↩

24. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 60–61. See also Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).↩

25. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).↩

26. Attorney General vs. Lumbrozo, 23 February 1658/59, in The Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Provincial Court of Maryland, 1658–1662, ed. Bernard Christian Steiner (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1922), 203.↩

27. On the Sephardic diaspora in Dutch Brazil and in the Atlantic World, see the excellent essays in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Converso, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).↩

28. On Jewish settlers in Charleston and Savannah, see William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 117–141. For an encyclopedic overview of Jews in the Americas, see Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776 III vol. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).↩

29. See for example Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking, 2009).↩

30. John Carroll, “John Carroll’s Letter on Trusteeism,” (1786), in Mark Massa and Catherine Osborne, eds., American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 32; Rodger van Allen, “Lay Distrusteeism,” Commonweal, 12 September 12 2008. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has argued that Carroll was an opponent of lay trusteeism, but Carroll’s letter to the trustees of St. Peter’s Church in New York City makes it clear that he saw lay trusteeism as an important means by which the Catholic Church in early America might be sustained. See Dolan’s lecture, “Right from the Start: John Carroll, Our First Bishop.”↩

31. Thomas J. Shelley, “When Catholics Were Congregationalists,” Commonweal, 12 September 2003, 29; Dale B. Light, Rome and the New Republic: Conflict and Community in Philadelphia Catholicism between the Revolution and the Civil War (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 241; Carey, Priests, People, and Prelates, 214.↩

32. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 59, 19.↩

33. Ibid., 68, 65–66.↩

34. For more on the growth of Catholic devotionalism in Europe—particularly English-speaking Europe—see Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Bill McSweeney, Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance (New York: Palgrave, 1980); and Derek Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century (Shepherstown, WV: Burns and Oates, 1978).↩

35. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the United States did experience a wave of Catholic devotionalism that was cultivated by the Church hierarchy as a way of shepherding Catholics to the margins of their predominantly Protestant society and, in so doing, preserving the unique features of the Catholic faith. This manifestation of devotionalism was a deliberate reaction against the move toward “Americanization” that Catholic converts like Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson were pushing for, and in this sense, its origins were very different from earlier varieties of Catholic devotionalism along the frontier. See McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 27–29; and Ann Taves, “Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Church History 54 (1985): 482–195.↩

36. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 21.↩

37. Charlene Villaseñor Black, “St. Anne Imagery and Maternal Archetypes in Spain and Mexico,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas. 1500–1800 ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 22.↩

38. Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 160. Tracy Fessenden has suggested that Clark may be a little too willing to attribute a “rhetoric of equality” to the Ursuline sisters, in light of their unwillingness to challenge slavery. Tracy Fessenden, “untitled review,” review of Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834,* * by Emily Clark, Church History 77 (2008): 1073–1078.↩

39. “An Act Concerning Negroes and Other Slaves” (1664), in Civil Rights and African Americans, eds. Albert P. Blaustein and Robert L. Zangrando, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 8–9.↩

40. Thomas J. Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 131, 147–149; James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 143–157; and McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 43–67.↩

41. Harriet Martineau, Society in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 2:323; and O’Toole, The Faithful, 59.↩

42. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 381, 380.↩

43. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom in the Middle Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 13; Trevor Graeme Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691–1776 (New York, 2002), 5, 36, 38, 265; and Beatrize Bentancourt Hardy, “Papists in a Protestant Age: The Catholic Gentry and Community in Colonial Maryland, 1689–1776” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993), 214, n. 68. Charles Carroll of Annapolis owned 386 slaves in 1773. Henry Darnell owned 100 in 1711.↩

44. Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Political Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 6, 17; Lacy K. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 372–373. For more on how Protestants used anti-Catholicism to define the parameters of American freedom, see Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).↩

Protestant Dissenters in the Early South

Jewel L. Spangler

Jewel L. Spangler is an associate professor of history at the University of Calgary.

It is difficult now to imagine that as recently as the 1960s few monographs on the southern British colonies of Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia (as the “early South” would then have been defined) addressed religious topics in a sustained way. The historical master narrative of fifty years ago typically contrasted “religious” New England with the more secular “plantation colonies,” reflecting a dearth of curiosity about the nature of early southern religious institutions, beliefs, and experience. Those working on southern religious topics tended to be lone voices, not fully in conversation with one another and barely audible to non-specialists.[1] In textbooks, a few lines about the (weak) Anglican establishment and brief mention of other Protestant faiths—mostly as accompanying immigrants from Scotland, Ireland, France, German principalities, and the like—had to suffice. Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager, in the 1969 edition of their popular textbook, put it typically: “in New England, the people associated in compact villages to maintain their church congregations; in most of the South, congregations counted for little.”[2]

In my lifetime, the historiography of southern Protestant dissent before the American Revolution has expanded fantastically and has become required reading for both southernists and American religious historians more generally. There are, of course, many ways that one might parse this literature, but I would like to suggest here a particular reading of the field around three groupings of the scholarship. A “founding” set of publications on southern Protestants appeared primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, which both awakened sustained interest in the subject and inspired further research. Such work shaped a new understanding among academics of the region as religiously oriented and at the same time distinctive in beliefs, practices, and institutions from the rest of the United States. While the antebellum period was the dominant focus, the recovery of a religious history of the early South, including dissenting Protestant groups, also developed apace. A second grouping, overlapping somewhat with the first, is thematic in nature, comprised of studies that addressed early Protestant dissent as a countercultural movement. This work assessed whether and how Christian communities posed political, social, and/or cultural opposition to the dominant “southern” order. It typically also considered whether, when, and how those challenges were neutralized in the emergence of a distinctive, southern evangelicalism in the post-revolutionary period, one that yielded to the hierarchal, proslavery vision of the southern ruling class. A third grouping is comprised of publications that evidence a decided move away from the preoccupations of the founding generation, and the current emphasis on new topics which mark a general fragmentation of the field.

While there has long been some scholarship on early southern Protestantism, after midcentury several historians had a particularly pronounced impact beyond their immediate intellectual circle, helping to awaken a renewed and sustained scholarly interest in southern religion. Among the best known of these founders of the field were Donald G. Mathews, John B. Boles, Dickson D. Bruce, Eugene D. Genovese, and Albert J. Raboteau, though several others could certainly be named here.[3] This field emerged at a time when scholarship treated the South, past and present, as distinctive, different, perhaps a few steps to the side of the American cultural mainstream—as an unmodern or antimodern, face-to-face, hierarchical culture clinging to tradition (think Old Time Religion) in a modernizing world.[4] The work that launched southern religious history as a field highlighted the fact that many dissenting Protestants in the post-revolutionary South retained Calvinist impulses that were becoming outmoded elsewhere. Dissenting Protestant groups attracted plain farmers who sometimes gathered in primitive camp meetings—these were rough and tumble events, more “authentic” than the slick affairs that would eventually become popular in the North. Masters and slaves came to worship under one roof, navigating their distinctive, southern relationship, in part, through church practice and religious belief. Mathews was surely not the only one in this group of founders who hoped that his work would inspire “further discussion of the character, functions, and significance of religion in shaping and defining the South as a distinct part of the new American nation.”[5]

As early Americanists caught this same intellectual wave, their work thoroughly undermined the myth of the “secular” southern colonies. Two mutually compatible lines of inquiry emerged. One asserted the importance of the established Anglican Church in the region, an institution that so defined a mainstream that all other Protestants must automatically be understood as dissenters, even in places where the Church itself was weak. Here the work of Joan R. Gundersen, S. Charles Bolton, John Woolverton, Dell Upton, Edward L. Bond and John K. Nelson particularly stand out.[6] All of these historians, and others besides, treated the southern colonies as distinctive from the rest of British North America both because the Church of England enjoyed some considerable sway there (or could hope to) and because the Church was in some sense shaped by the interests of a plantation-based master class, unlike elsewhere.

Another group of scholars described the eighteenth-century British South as increasingly rife with “evangelical” Protestant dissenters, especially Presbyterians and Baptists (and eventually Methodists), whose more emotive, stripped down version of “vital religion” built a deep sense of community among adherents and made particular inroads with plainer folk and even the enslaved. Rhys Isaac is perhaps the most important single figure here. His articles and subsequent book, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (1982), centered on the idea that dissenting groups offered a real alternative to the established church and increasingly challenged not only its religious primacy but also its core values. This “evangelical revolt” laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Bible Belt across the southern states in the early-national period, again connecting Protestant dissent back to the development of regional distinctiveness. The early chapters of Donald Mathews’s synthesis touched on similar themes, while Richard R. Beeman and J. Stephen Kroll-Smith quickly provided more detailed studies of evangelicals in Virginia and William Howland Kennedy III, David T. Morgan, and Allan Gallay were among the first to draw sustained academic attention to their significance for the Carolinas and Georgia.[7]

As the profession reckoned with early dissenters as never before, a new core theme emerged that comprises a second grouping of the literature for our purposes here. The focus settled, for a time, on the question of how, and to what extent, early Protestant dissent challenged the dominant social order—what southern religious historian Beth Barton Schweiger has termed the “stock opposition of American history . . . populism versus hierarchy.”[8] Constructing a story of a viable established church and the emergence of active dissent from it almost of necessity creates a framework of opposition between the two. Yet those who first drew widespread attention to early dissent, especially Isaac and Mathews, took the point much further. These studies sat at the crossroads of two historiographical trends that they, and the historians they influenced, sought to square with one another. One line of reasoning underscored planter power (over slaves, but also in southern life generally) as the defining feature of the development of a distinctive South—even, to a degree, before there was a nation for these colonies to become southern states of—potentially muting internal conflict among free people and channeling and blunting slave resistance.[9] Isaac’s treatment of the Church of England identified it with southern elites, and viewed its primary function as the reinforcement of social hierarchy and elite privilege. Mathews, while unimpressed with the effectiveness of the colonial church in the South, claimed that it “tried to fit everyone snugly into a social system where individuals were valued not on the basis of their own merit but on their family background and social station.”[10] The other historiographical trend of the 1960s and 1970s that influenced work on early southern Protestantism centered on class and cultural conflicts and how they related to the American Revolution. This literature drew attention to internal social relations and the efforts of common folk to assert themselves politically, reject social hierarchy, and embrace a more egalitarian ethos in the Age of Revolution.[11] Isaac, in particular, implied that evangelical religion appealed to and welcomed plain folk and slaves, but it was not initially attractive to very many in the ruling class. Dissenting fellowship gave plain folk a sense of belonging and a means of asserting themselves in public. These faiths valued all souls equally and their practices eschewed earthly hierarchies. The “evangelical revolt” contained a reform impulse that potentially threatened slavery, as well as offering a political and cultural critique of planter society. It is not entirely clear in this literature how the hierarchy and the counterculture moved forward from their colonial battles to create a distinctive southern Protestantism of which the planter class could approve, but both Isaac and Mathews hint that evangelicals gradually backed away from the most radical aspects of their faith and practice in pursuit of legitimacy and longevity.

Mathews’s and Isaac’s work in many ways set the terms for future research on Protestant dissent for at least a generation, whether scholars ultimately supported, nuanced, or challenged their arguments. Key books completed in the 1990s seemed to embrace the oppositional narrative most pointedly. Erskine Clarke’s masterful 1996 study of Calvinists (mostly Presbyterians and Congregationalists) in Lowcountry South Carolina represents one way that this was so. The dissenting congregations at the center of this book took in a surprisingly large number of early South Carolinians, black and white, rich and poor, and endured internal divisions that echoed the tensions within southern society more broadly at the end of the colonial period. Clarke shows us how congregations struggled to strike a balance between the expectation that religious institutions would provide order and preserve hierarchy and the impulse to recognize individual liberty (and maybe even equality). At times, these tensions became open conflicts, until the post-revolutionary period, when the elite won the day and a more hierarchal, order-driven form of dissent came to the fore. Alternatively, Christine Leigh Heyrman’s beautifully written Southern Cross (1997) describes this cultural clash as external to dissent, not internal to it. She argues, in fact, that evangelical dissent was so very countercultural that it could attract few converts in its founding generation and expanded very slowly indeed. Only well into the nineteenth century, after dissenters abandoned most of their distinctiveness, were they able to succeed in becoming dominant in the region.[12]

In the 2000s, the oppositional narrative has continued to play a role in defining the focus of many studies, though with some modifications. Some scholarship, while still in conversation with Isaac and Mathews, sought to undermine their interpretations by rejecting the premise that Protestant dissent was socially oppositional. My own study of the rise of evangelical religion in colonial Virginia would be a case in point.[13] I argue that Presbyterians and Baptists did offer an alternative to the Anglican establishment that was truly distinctive in terms of belief and practice. While these dissenting faiths certainly presented challenges to the dominant order at times (Anglican and secular), I suggest that evangelicals were only able to expand as rapidly as they did because their beliefs and practices also evidenced correspondences with the dominant culture from the first. I tended to read these congregations as supportive of planter power, social hierarchies, and slavery. The rise of evangelicalism, then, was part of the process of solidifying a distinctive South but not part of a revolutionary-era cultural conflict that helped to give impetus and meaning to the American Revolution.

To my mind, some of the best work of the aughts engaged with the frameworks developed by the founders of the field but also began to transcend both of their core narratives, marking a transition to a third grouping in the literature. Monica Najar’s study of early Baptists in Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee, for example, describes dissenting belief and practice as conflicting with the values of the dominant order in areas as fundamental as gender conventions, class hierarchies, and racial ideology. Yet these observations are not aimed simply at casting Baptists as countercultural. Rather, she develops a larger point that these churches “acted as both civil and religious bodies,” especially in areas that were institutionally weak. Baptist congregations created “institutions that drew settlers together, galvanized their loyalties, and schooled them in the structures of community,” which ultimately reformulated “the lines between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ realms.”[14] The distinctive South being referenced here is not simply the one that planters controlled, slaves labored in, and evangelicals provided the religious services for. It is also one in which religion played a particularly active civic role and where public and private were defined in unique ways, that would be familiar to any student of southern history. Similarly Janet Moore Lindman’s Bodies of Belief (2008), a study of Baptists in the Pennsylvania and Virginia colonies, notes the distinctiveness of this dissenting faith without taking up the core intellectual projects of the previous generation of scholarship. Her aim is both to highlight the paradoxes attendant upon those distinctions (in her words, “Baptists adopted the spiritual equality of the New Testament but built an institutional structure based on racial and gender asymmetry”) and to analyze the “bodily enactment” of religious conversion, belief, and practice. [15]

Perhaps the migration in interpretation is most evident in the work on African American dissenters. The countercultural narrative of the “founders,” followed by declension into proslavery Christianity, was the standard way of discussing early African American Protestantism for some time. For example, in The World They Made Together (1989), Mechal Sobel described early Baptist Christianity in Virginia as “a shared black and white phenomenon” and claimed that each group’s world view “stimulated, permeated, and invigorated the other.” Then in the post-revolutionary period, an escalation of racism in congregations pushed slaves and Free Blacks to the margins of fellowship, as the countercultural moment gave way to planter power.[16] Jon Sensbach’s 1998 study of African Americans among North Carolina Moravians highlights a similar trajectory from countercultural egalitarianism to social conformity and African American exclusion.[17]

Fast-forward to 2008. Two studies published on evangelicals in Virginia that year discussed similar subjects, but without casting early evangelicals simply as cultural outsiders or producing the strict declension narrative which typically placed planters at the helm of a solidly proslavery South, with evangelicals in their pockets. Charles F. Irons’s spectacular study, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity, observes that early evangelical churches provided opportunities for African American agency that were sorely absent in other public spaces, and Irons acknowledges considerable evangelical deviations from dominant racial hierarchies. Yet he also shows us biracial churches that had always evidenced complex and sometimes conflicting policies, practices, and ideas with respect to race and slavery, and engendered a range of experiences for African American churchgoers. Concomitantly, even after the rise of so-called proslavery Christianity, Irons explains, “white southerners’ religious commitment was never completely prostituted to the slave power; it sometimes abetted and sometimes inhibited slaveholders’ political ambitions.” His larger objective is to recast the significance of black agency in biracial churches, and to show how it was directly, albeit inadvertently, related to the development of proslavery practices and policies. Similarly, Randolph Ferguson Scully’s monograph on Virginia Baptists, published almost simultaneously, gives us a complex characterization of pre-war evangelical distinctiveness. Scully, too, rejects the simple trajectory of decline from the revolutionary-era peak of inclusiveness, suggesting instead that even Nat Turner’s 1831 Rebellion did not produce the complete ascendance of proslavery evangelicalism.[18]

To define a third group of work, I take some liberties with the very concept of a “grouping.” In recent years, as asserted just above, work on evangelical dissent in the early South has begun to disengage from both the counterculture theme and the concern with the rise of a distinctive and unified “southern” Protestantism out of these eighteenth-century roots. This work reflects a general tendency among southernists in recent times to problematize the very notion of a “southern” history before the American Revolution, and to conceive of the South as a diverse and, in some ways, disaggregated region, even after the formation of the United States.[19] As historians of the early Protestant South move beyond the issues that most interested the field’s modern founders, they have also begun to take on new subjects and new ways of defining the field itself. The general impulse right now seems to be toward fragmentation. Rather than looking for the roots of a fairly unified southern Protestantism, historians of the early “South” are striking out in various directions with no clear synthesis yet in sight (and perhaps more interestingly, not necessarily even wanted).[20]

In a 2004 essay, Sensbach persuasively called upon early southern religious historians to rethink the terms “colonial” and “South.” If the region were considered not as the origin point for a “southern” evangelical religion, and not merely defined as the colonies that became the southern seaboard states, new themes would surely come to the fore.[21] In my view, he was completely right on this point as it pertains to dissenting Protestants. Take the question of geographical framing. Historians have long noted transatlantic connections in the rise of evangelicalism, and they have sometimes considered the southern seaboard colonies in comparative context.[22] Sensbach’s own 2005 book, Rebecca’s Revival, stands as an excellent example of how historians are moving beyond old geographical categories and pushing from the comparative to the transnational, and why these are admirable goals. He traces the free black Moravian Rebecca Protten’s evangelical activities in the Danish Caribbean, in (primarily German-speaking) Europe and parts of West Africa, and in the process illustrates how her life reflects the emergence of a Black Christianity in the Americas and how it relates to African American Christianity in the American South.[23] Widening the geographical scope beyond the seaboard colonies, and even beyond the “South” of the antebellum period, provides new insights that promise to thoroughly refresh this field.

The major evangelical groups that arose in the early period—the Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists—have been the subject of many studies and have often been homogenized into a single “evangelical” category.[24] But the complexity and diversity of “evangelical” dissent in the colonial period is now coming more fully into view as well. Philip N. Mulder’s 2002 study is a case in point. He focuses on the largest dissenting faiths, but his aim was to highlight what defined each group separately, how these groups related to one another, and the internal conflicts that plagued them on occasion. The result is a variegated study that brings the distinctive beliefs and practices of each group to the center of the discussion rather than seeking a central and homogenized narrative.[25]

Studies of the many other Protestant groups that took root in the South before 1775, but did not become one of the “winning” denominations of the nineteenth century, now have room to emerge as well. Take the Quakers, for instance. The first southern Friends began meeting together in the mid-seventeenth century, and with the advent of religious toleration Friends’ monthly meetings expanded in the eighteenth. As a faith that deeply valued its distinctive practices (like plainness, the peace testimony, and rejection of some earthly marks of social distinction) and actively sought to remain a separate people (especially in terms of endogamous marriage practices), the story of the Quakers fit awkwardly within the trajectory of the narrative of evangelical revolt and post-war co-optation. Freed of that structure, historians can now turn their attention to this important faith anew.[26] Similarly, there has been a renewed interest in other, less-well-known Protestant groups, especially Moravians and Huguenots, and I fully expect that this trend will continue.[27]

As I see it, historians of early religious dissent are currently going through a regrouping phase. Liberated from the intellectual projects of the past, they are embracing new subjects, new goals, and new conclusions. The results may well be at least temporarily frustrating for those who are looking for ways to bring this work into a master narrative of American religious history or southern history. But, in the reputed words of William Faulkner, “People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it…. [Y]ou have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.”

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

2. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 157.↩

3. Philip D. Morgan, “Religious Diversity in Colonial Virginia: Red, Black, and White,” in From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia,ed. Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 75.↩

4. Bruce E. Steiner, “The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 387–409.↩

5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp↩

6. There is some excellent new work on toleration. For the early Republic see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); for the colonial period see Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Evan Haefeli wrestles with Dutch contributions to American ideas of religious liberty; see Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am also intrigued by the possibility of an Atlantic history of toleration. See Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).↩

7. ,For example, see John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), and Edward Bond’s chronically underappreciated Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000).↩

8. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).↩

9. On Patrick Copeland, see Edward D. Neill, Memoir of Reverend Patrick Copeland: Rector Elect of the First Projected College in the United States: A Chapter in the English Colonization of America (New York: Charles Scribner & Co, 1871); Shona Vance, “A Man for all Regions: Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World,” in Shaping the Stuart World 1603–1714: The Atlantic connection, ed. Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 79–116; Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–254.↩

10. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For another biographical account of West African Moravianism, see Ray A. Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 115–136.↩

11. Governor William Berkeley to Richard Nicholls, 20 May 1666, in The Papers of William Berkely, 1605–1677, ed. Warren M. Billings (Richmond, VA: The Library of Virginia, 2007), 279–280. Berkeley’s contempt for “the Brethren” was probably common among Virginia elites after the Restoration.↩

12. Jewel L. Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Establishment, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).↩

13. Randolph Ferguson Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).↩

14. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632.↩

15. Juliana Barr, “How do you get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A Colonial Sun Belt,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 553–566.↩

16. Alan Gallay, Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 104–109.↩

17. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632–633.↩

18. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).↩

19. Mark M. Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” Journal of Southern History 67 (August 2001), 513–534.↩

20. See Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 116–123.↩

21. On Estebanico as a Muslim, see Andres Resendez, A Land so Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (NY: Basic Books, 2007), 55–56.↩

22. David Beers Quinn, “Turks, Moors, and Others in Drake’s West Indian Voyage,” Itinerario 14 (1982): 97–104.↩

23. Reverend John Clayton (Præbendary of St Michans), The Defense of a Sermon, Preach’d upon the Receiving into the Communion of the Church of England, the Honourable Sir Terence Mac-Mahon Baronet and Christopher Dunn: Converts from the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1701), preface, n.p.↩

24. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 60–61. See also Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).↩

25. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).↩

26. Attorney General vs. Lumbrozo, 23 February 1658/59, in The Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Provincial Court of Maryland, 1658–1662, ed. Bernard Christian Steiner (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1922), 203.↩

27. On the Sephardic diaspora in Dutch Brazil and in the Atlantic World, see the excellent essays in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Converso, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).↩

African Religions in the Early South

Jason Young

Jason Young is an associate professor of history at the University of Buffalo.

Writing in 1978, famed historian Albert Raboteau suggested that in British North America, the slaves’ “African religious heritage was lost.”[1] While religious practices that bore clearly the stamp of specific African influences thrived in the former slave societies of Central and South America, “African retentions in the United States,” Raboteau contended, “cannot be ascribed with any certainty to definite areas of West Africa.”[2] In explaining this development, Raboteau suggested that the United States was unique among all other New World slave societies in its creation of a slave society where slaves comprised a consistently low percentage of the overall population, where plantations remained relatively small, and where slaves achieved natural increase at a relatively early date. Without a decided numerical majority and with natural increase eliminating the need to replenish the slave class with steady streams of African laborers, “it was not possible to maintain the rites of worship, the priesthood, or the ‘national’ identities which were the vehicles and supports for African theology and cult organization.”[3] Instead, slavery in the United States destroyed the African religious heritage as “the gods of Africa gave way to the God of Christianity.”[4]

The broad contours of this argument—and, in particular, the notion of African cultural loss in the United States under slavery—has enjoyed a remarkably long life in American slave historiography. In some of the earliest scholarly writing on the subject, this argument emerged as a presumption of enslaved African cultural vacuity. Writing in 1959, Stanley Elkins contended that the cultural distance between African and African American culture was “even wider than we imagined.”[5] Beginning at the point of initial enslavement and transport from Africa, through the dreaded Middle Passage and on to the United States, much of the slave’s “past had been annihilated; nearly every prior connection had been severed.” Having been so thoroughly set adrift from culture and history, Elkins queried, “Where then was he to look for new standards, new cues–who would furnish them now?”[6] In a word, the master.

Much of the earliest historical record of slavery makes clear the presumptions of planters who saw in enslaved Africans so many tabula rasa whose naturally mimetic personalities made them specially suited to receive the bounty of presumably superior European ways and manners. But despite slaves’ skills at imitation, planters still decried their efforts, arguing that they imbibed the culture, language, and customs of the master class only imperfectly, due to their presumed cultural inferiority.[7]

Many early chroniclers of U.S. slavery, basing their arguments principally on sources drawn from the master class, came predictably to similar conclusions. One historian assured readers that the slaves’ language, even if peppered with some “unconsciously preserved” African words, was little more than “the crude and ungrammatical English of an illiterate folk.”[8] In language as well as in religion, some concluded that Africans “merely followed and enlarged upon the Christian example provided by whites.”[9] According to historian Kenneth Stampp,

There is no need to trace back to Africa the slave’s…dread of witches, ghosts, and hobgoblins, his confidence in good-luck charms, his alarm at evil omens, his belief in dreams, and his reluctance to visit burying grounds after dark. These superstitions were all firmly rooted in Anglo-Saxon folklore.[10]

In the end, the slaves’ English was broken, their manner brusque and their religion little more than ecstatic perversions of a more staid Protestant moral model.[11]

While few, if any, scholars would today argue that enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas as blank slates, or that the cultures and religions of Africa were of little consequence in the subsequent development of African American culture, at least one strain of this older argument persists; namely, the idea that enslaved men and women in British North America were unable to preserve and maintain African systems of belief. Writing in Awash in a Sea of Faith (1990), Jon Butler argues that between 1680 and 1760, “African slaves in the British mainland colonies experienced a spiritual holocaust that effectively destroyed traditional African religious systems,” though some particular and discrete religious practices remained.[12] African religious practices may have persisted in the Americas, but only—as Saidiya Hartman suggests in a similar context—in a manner “akin to a phantom limb, in that what is felt is no longer there.”[13]

In direct opposition to these claims, another historiographical tradition asserted the primacy of African culture and religion in the development of black culture in the United States and elsewhere. The clarion call for this approach can be found in Melville Herskovits’s 1941 publication, The Myth of the Negro Past. In it, Herskovits argued for the substantial, significant, and continued influence of Africa in the histories, lives and cultures of blacks throughout the Americas.[14] Herskovits’ early arguments were strengthened in the work of subsequent scholars. For example, Sterling Stuckey argued not only that African cultural and religious elements persisted in the United States, but also that the realm of ritual and belief constituted the cultural center around which African Americans formed themselves into a people. In this sense, African religion was the source of African American identity.[15]

More recently, a growing body of scholarship makes increasingly clear the role that the long arm of Africa played in the cultural and religious lives of enslaved Americans. Walter Rucker, writing in The River Flows On (2007), argues that a widespread set of African-derived beliefs in spiritual forces and ideas about death, the afterlife, and transmigration proved crucial in the development of slave resistance and revolt in the United States.[16] Religion, in this sense, not only helped forge a people, as Stuckey had argued earlier, but also strengthened the community ethic of resistance that made large-scale slave rebellion possible. This was certainly true for Nat Turner, the slave preacher turned rebel who, in 1831, organized the country’s largest slave insurrection after receiving divine inspiration and instruction to do so.

Notwithstanding these recent developments, presumptions of African cultural loss in the face of American slavery continue to play a large role in debates about early African American culture, making clear the difficulties, not only historical, but also historiographical, of claiming a space for Africa in the early religious development of the United States. As Michael Gomez notes, “the cultural and social transformations of transported Africans tend to invite a quality of critique unique in its level of elevated scrutiny, emphasizing distance and lacunae in the substance and circumstances separating Africa and the Americas.”[17] Whether intended or not, the terms of this opposition result “in the Negrofication of the African-descended in the Americas,” by which Africa is regarded as of little or no significance to the experience and history of black people in the New World.[18] At the same time, this failure to see Africa in America contributes to the “reification of the African as the quintessential Other.”[19]

The suggestion that African systems of belief were lost in the Americas is predicated, at least in part, on the idea that cultural practices might be transported as were so many commodities in the grand commercial exchanges that occurred around the Atlantic. Whatever we might say of African religious systems, we know that they were very much in flux between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries due to the dislocations of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and also to the mere passage of time and circumstance. Evidence of new and dynamic religious and ritual configurations is evident throughout the continent in this period. One thinks, for example, of Dona Beatriz, the Kongolese prophetess who, after undergoing a transformative spiritual experience in the early eighteenth century, revealed a revised Christian theology that challenged the nativity and nationality of Christ and derided the Catholic Church for its racism.[20] Her message did not die with her execution in 1706, but traveled throughout the Americas with her followers and adherents who were swept up en masse and sent as slaves to the plantation Americas. In this way, the Atlantic slaving zone was a highly contested and contingent space where all sorts of systems—political, economic and certainly religious—were ever changing. To be sure, slaves did not merely replicate Africa in the Americas; but neither should we expect them to have done so. The language of cultural loss and of slaves’ failure to reconstitute religious systems paints a dire portrait of African American life and belief as an always already fractured piece of some formerly African cultural and religious whole.

The question of Africa’s role in the development of African American religion is a vexed matter. “Inevitably, it is highly political,” as one historian recently noted.[21] But going even further, anthropologist Richard Price suspects that something even more nefarious is afoot in these opposing schools of thought. Writing in “On the Miracle of Creolization,” Price maintains that it is “hard to escape the conclusion that ideology and politics—the specifics of North American identity politics—continue to direct the master narratives, as well as influence how they are read.”[22] Amounting to a “motivated erasure of countervailing scholarship,” Price suggests that this type of identity politics may be reduced to base “careerism” as expressed in disagreements “between Africanists and Americanists and sometimes between historians and anthropologists, but more importantly on underlying ideologies or partis-pris.”[23] Price charges “Africa-centrists” as well as their sympathizers and apologists with bending or ignoring counter evidence to support ideological positions. Scholars who argue for the centrality of Africa in the subsequent development of African American cultures are likely representing an ideological, rather than a historical position.

I have suggested in another context the need to change the terms of a debate that has become fraught in several ways. Drawing on the work of David Scott, I have expressed concern that much of this debate has been verificationist in its orientations. On both sides of the debate, the central questions have been whether or not and to what extent African American cultures are authentically African; and whether or not and to what extent black people in the United States have retained (one might say, performed) an authentic memory of their past.[24] In order to enter the fray, one must engage the debate on its own terms by presuming, on the one hand, that pasts are such as can be identified in their authenticity and, on the other, that the special task of an anthropology of peoples of African descent consists of providing the evidence, both theoretical and methodological, necessary to debate the role of African pasts in black American slave culture.[25] Ultimately, Scott contends, these studies rest on the assumption that “peoples of African descent in the New World require something like anthropology, a science of culture, to provide them with the foundational guarantee of an authentic past.”[26]

But what does it mean to be authentically African? Or, more to the point, what are the limits of authenticity? Scholars have typically defined traditional African religion too narrowly. From the vastness of African religious beliefs and practices, a smaller set of well-known and often repeated tropes describe what is african about African religions, leaving whole fields of religious belief and practice beyond the pale. Writing in the seminal African Religions and Philosophy (1969), John S. Mbiti describes traditional African religion this way:

In traditional religions there are no creeds to be recited; instead the creeds are written in the heart of the individual…. There are no sacred scriptures. Religion in African societies is written not on paper, but in people’s hearts…. There is no conversion from one traditional religion to another. A person has to be born in a particular society in order to assimilate the religious system…. African religions have neither founders nor reformers.[27]

First published in 1969, African Religions reflected its time by underscoring the coherence and logic of African belief systems that had for so long been dismissed as mere superstition. It is well to note that only six years earlier, in 1963, Oxford historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued confidently and with no need of evidence that Africa had no history to speak of, but only the “unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”[28] The trouble with Mbiti’s description, however, is its tendency to timelessness; in its portrait of African religions as unchanging and ahistorical (if not anti-historical). Without founders or reformers, African religious practices are as they always have been. Interestingly, Mbiti depicts religion as both a total institution, evident in all aspects of life, as well as a fiercely fugitive idea, being lodged in no one place at all—certainly not in officially sanctioned scriptures or liturgies. African religion is transparent enough to be articulated to the outsider and the uninitiated, but ultimately unknowable, covered as it is in an impenetrable cultural opacity that allows no conversion.

The terms of Mbiti’s description point to a linguistic and ideological genealogy that extends back to the earliest developments of ethnographic and anthropological approaches to African life and culture. Geoffrey Parrinder, for example, writing in African Traditional Religion (1954), argued “African tribal societies are relatively undifferentiated and homogenous. This great comparative homogeneity of African society is apparent in the religious sphere…. In religious beliefs, there is great similarity between many parts of the continent.”[29] Rather than contribute to greater cultural development, some saw this homogeneity as a sort of stifling, unchanging sameness. Writing in Kenya before the White Man, Christopher Wilson described it this way:

It is surprising to know that for many thousands of years before the earliest records of historical time men of advanced physical type, with at least the rudiments of culture, lived in Kenya. It is still more surprising to realize that in spite of this eary start, those inhabitants of Kenya made almost no further progress towards higher human standards through all the centuries of history.[30]

Drawn principally from European travelers’ accounts and missionary reports, these descriptions reflect less information about African religious systems, as such, and more the emergence of an epistemological problem to be solved. For European chroniclers, these descriptions reflected a certain “kind of knowledge” about Africa generally that established a set of immutable oppositions between African systems of belief against their European counterparts; of rational modernity against “primitive” backwardness; of true religion against base superstition; and ultimately of white against black.[31] In this connection, Christianity can be seen as “the inheritor of Greek reason” and, at the same time, the continuation and ultimate achievement of the Judaic tradition. In this dual role—possessor of proper religion and critic of false superstition—Western traditions supported modernity by laying bare that body of thought, belief and practices thought pre-modern and “primitive;” and therefore ill fit for modernity’s present and futures.[32] Writing in a similar context, V.Y. Mudimbe notes that “Anthropology, as well as missionary studies of primitive philosophies, are then concerned with the study of the distance from the Same to the Other.”[33] At bottom, this “missionary language of derision is a cultural position, the expression of an ethno-centric outlook.”[34]

But how is it possible that a missionary and ethnographic language of derision could find in more current scholarly descriptions of African religion a genealogical descendant? Or, put another way, how is it that the post-colonial authors of African life and culture might, knowingly or not, harken back to an older ethnographic moment? The anthropological gaze that first contributed to the creation of binary and inherently oppositional categories between black and white; that flattened the great diversity of African religious life into a mere type; and that created hierarchies for assessing these differences also provided key elements necessary for the subsequent development of Pan-African and Black Nationalist perspectives. If, in the hands of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonialists, an ethnographic language highlighted the difference between “the Same and the Other,” the post-colonial project did much the same via a crucial interchange between the Object and the Subject of study. In the midst of post-colonial nationalist movements, many black authors argued for the necessity of an African cultural unity toward new liberatory projects. This trend is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the work of Mbiti.

Our knowledge of “traditional African religions”—or, more to the point, our ways of knowing these rituals and practices—derive from two different, though intimately related epistemological streams. One, drawn from European colonial sources, flattened the diversity and dynamism of African religion into a foil to be compared negatively against European models. The other, rooted in Black Nationalist and Pan-African movements, found in traditional African culture and religion an imperative for African unity and opposition to colonial power. But in both formulations, the idea of traditional African religions has a totalizing effect on our understanding of religion and belief in Africa, marking off boundaries of what is and is not authentically African.

One consequence of this is that some religious traditions and practices in Africa are normally regarded as always foreign to the continent. This is certainly the case as it relates to the history of Christianity in Africa despite its significant and longstanding history on the continent. In the longest view, Christianity’s history in Africa extends back to the first century of the Common Era and is firmly established in the development of the Ethiopian Coptic Church in the fourth century. But more recently, and more germane to present considerations, Christianity’s history in West Africa extends back to the late fifteenth century when Portuguese missionaries converted Kongo King João I in 1491. Initially embraced as a religion of the royal court, Christianity eventually spread throughout the country with alacrity; and this expansion from urban centers to rural provinces was largely an indigenous affair, relying on the translation of key theological ideas and practices into local languages and, by extension, into local ways of being religious. John K. Thornton argues that “Christianity ‘conquered’ Kongo peacefully—but at the cost of adapting itself almost wholly to Kongolese conceptions of religion and cosmology,” becoming part of the traditional religious landscape of West-Central Africa.[35] Many of these Kongolege Christians found themselves swept up by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, populating British North America in large numbers. Indeed, in the early decades of the slave trade, West-Central Africans were over-represented when compared to Africans from other regions, and especially so in the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina where they predominated.[36]

All of this encourages a reconsideration of the origins of African American religious life. If Christianity is better regarded as one part of the religious heritage that Africans bequeathed to their enslaved progeny in the Americas, then we may need new narratives to explain more fully the origins of Christianity among enslaved Africans, or even the origins of the Black Church.[37] The impetus for this reconsideration comes from enslaved Africans themselves who claimed Christianity as part of their African heritage. For example, in 1710, Francis Le Jau, an Anglican missionary in South Carolina noted:

I have in this parish a few Negroe Slaves and were born and baptized among the Portuguese…. [T]hey come to Church and are well instructed so as to express a great desire to receive the H. communion amongst us, I proposed to them to declare openly their Abjuring the Errors of the Romish Church without which declaration I cou’d [sic] not receive them…[38]

After an eighteen-month term of religious instruction, Le Jau finally welcomed two of the men to communion. But despite Le Jau’s best efforts to rid the new converts of their “Romish” trappings, he was continually confounded by the converts’ ability to manipulate the doctrine to suit their own spiritual needs. Neither was Le Jau alone in this regard. Well into the antebellum period, Thomas Turpin, a prominent Baptist missionary who worked along the Georgia coast, complained bitterly that slaves under his charge had organized Roman Catholic societies.[39]

The insistence shown by these black Catholics mirrored that shown by successive waves of fugitive slaves who, in the late seventeenth century, fled Georgia and South Carolina, seeking asylum with the Spanish in Florida. Upon arrival in Florida, Catholic missionaries interviewed the escapees, some of whom noted that they had been Catholics in their homelands, even though they insisted on praying in their native tongue, much to the consternation of their priests.[40] All of this suggests that Christianity is part of Africa’s traditional religious heritage, upon which slaves drew in the Americas.

Of course, a similar consideration can be applied to the historical significance of Islam in West Africa and, by extension, to enslaved Muslims in early British North America. Like Christianity, Islam is not typically included in that broad set of religious and spiritual practices thought to comprise “traditional African” religions. But on the eve of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Islam’s history in Africa had already extended back for centuries. Michael Gomez notes that as many as fifty percent of the slaves exported to North America were captured from areas in West Africa where Islam was either a state religion or at least the religion of significant minority populations. Since the Muslim presence in North America “antedates the arrival of English colonists,” a renewed focus on the history of Islam in British North America promises to shed new light not only on the religious history of African Americans, but indeed on the early religious history of the country more generally.[41] Spain’s military outpost in Florida, located at St. Augustine, featured a sizable population of African Muslims, while French Louisiana also imported large numbers of African Muslims, principally from Senegambia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. In British North America, planters’ stated preference for “Mandigos”—a trade name denoting Africans from Senegambia and Sierra Leone—lead to the importation of many African Muslims. Moreover, slave runaway ads often included details pointing to the significant presence of Muslims among the ranks of the enslaved.[42]

As in the case of African forms of Christianity, much of the impetus behind this renewed focus on Islam comes from enslaved African Muslims themselves who worked assiduously to maintain their faith in early British North America in the establishment of regularized daily prayer, the maintenance and passing on of Muslim names, the use of prayer beads and mats, and in the writing and recitation of the Qur’an.[43] Moreover, evidence suggests that some prominent African Americans, Frederick Douglass chief among them, may have been a descendant of enslaved Muslims, his family name Bailey likely being a variant of Bilal or Bilali.[44]

While there is not much evidence of enslaved Muslims practicing their faith in organized congregations, ample evidence suggests that many practiced their faith in their homes and within their larger communities. Rosa Grant, a former slave from Possum Point, Georgia, remembered that her grandmother prayed every morning at the rising and the setting of the sun by facing the east whilst kneeling, bowing until her forehead touched the ground three times, and reciting in a manner consistent with Muslim prayer.[45] Charles Wylly, grandson of the famed Georgia planter Thomas Spalding, remembered seeing “devout mussulmans, who prayed to Allah … morning, noon and evening” on the Spalding planation.[46] In antebellum Georgia, Umar ibn Said, an enslaved African, transcribed the opening chapter of the Qu’ran, passing it off as the Lord’s prayer.[47] These examples could be much multiplied to include several enslaved Muslims who achieved some degree of celebrity in the United States. Abd-Rahman, known as “The Prince,” became the most popular African in America and a cause-celèbre in the 1820s when a national humanitarian campaign won him not only his freedom, but also his repatriation to Africa. Enslaved Muslims contributed to African American society not only in the maintenance of their faith, but also in the very process of African American identity formation in the United States. As Gomez notes, enslaved Muslims tended to be among the first enslaved Africans to eschew their own particular ethnic identities in favor of larger group identities and ultimately, to race-based affiliations.

Of course, African forms of Christianity and Islam persisted in the slave communities of early British North America alongside that wide range of ritual and spiritual beliefs typically called “African traditional religions.” As noted above, the very scale and scope of these religious traditions—extending as they do across the African continent and re-emerging in various ways throughout the plantation Americas—means that broad descriptive generalizations may be valid, even if not applicable to every single case. In this way, the idea of “African traditional religions” may be useful as a heuristic device—pointing as it does to certain broadly shared practices and beliefs including, for example, reverence for ancestors, belief in the unity of the sacred and the secular realms, and ritual communion with otherworldy powers. Gomez tells us, “the essentially African perspective of an all-encompassing dual reality permeated the cultural and social fabric of African Americans” not only in the realm of religion, but also in other aspects of life.[48] The unmistakable evidence for this perspective can be found in the persistence of the “widespread practice of healing and intercessory procedures collectively and alternately known as voodoo, hoodoo, conjure and root work.” This persistence is likely explained, at least in part, by the vast numbers of African priests who were targeted by political leaders as potential threats to power and subsequently sold to the Americas as slaves.[49] Gomez sees in these developments evidence of “clear continuities of African customs and beliefs, modified for the use of Africans and their descendants as they passed through the great tribulation.”[50]

To be sure, the use of spiritualism, divination, herbalism and allopathy were all quite widespread among both blacks and whites in early British North America, making the colonies home to a pronounced religious and spiritual pluralism. But in this vast world of wonders, slave conjure—comprising a diverse set of practices including herbal remedies, divination, poisoning, and curses—was held in particular opprobrium by the masterclass. This is because one of the principal cohesive elements of slave conjure was its political relationship to slavery. Writing elsewhere, I have noted that conjure provided a form of spiritual resistance that not only undercut the authority of the masterclass, but also established an independent realm of criminality and justice. Conjure granted its practitioners and adherents an avenue to influence, power, health, and retribution over which the masterclass had little influence.[51]

Oftentimes, these powers were used in direct resistance to slavery. Root doctors and conjurers often used their powers to protect slaves from the brutalities of slavery, creating in some slaves an obstinate defiance. Perhaps the best evidence of this spirit of resistance can be found in the example of Denmark Vesey of Charleston, South Carolina who, in 1822 directed one of the country’s largest insurrectionary plots.[52] Key to the conspiracy was Vesey’s election of Gullah Jack, a conjurer of great repute, as his chief co-conspirator. Jack “kept African religious traditions alive” by providing the rebels with African religious symbols that promised victory and invincibility. He was roundly regarded as a powerful conjurer and was both feared and respected by his fellow slaves.[53] Indeed, on his initial passage from Africa to South Carolina, Jack reportedly “had his conjuring implements with him in a bag which he brought on board the ship and always retained them.”[54] The rebels firmly believed in Jack’s powers and felt that if they “retained the charms which he had distributed they would themselves be invulnerable.”[55]

This ritual assurance of invincibility was widespread and long-lived among slaves. Frederick Douglass noted his own encounter with Sandy, “a genuine African [who] had inherited some of the so-called magical powers said to be possessed by the eastern nations.”[56] When Sandy offered to prepare a root for Douglass, which, if kept always in his possession, would prevent any white man from striking him, Douglass reasoned: “I at first rejected the idea that the simple carrying of a root on my right side could possess any such magic power. I had a positive aversion to all pretenders to ’divination’ …but if it did me no good it could do me no harm.”[57]

In the end, all of this points to the idea that slavery, racism, colonialism and the capitalist project were all global phenomena that connected black people around the world in both the process of empire building as well as in the imperative to challenge it through resistance. As Robin D.G. Kelley notes, these processes “were never uniform or fixed, but did create systems that were at times tightly coordinated across oceans and national boundaries.”[58] In this sense, Africa’s religious legacy in the Americas is found, to be sure, in the emergence and maintenance of traditional African religious practices, but also in the persistence of Christianity and Islam, which were each and all intimately connected to the grand exchange of goods and people that was at the heart of global slavery.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

2. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 157.↩

3. Philip D. Morgan, “Religious Diversity in Colonial Virginia: Red, Black, and White,” in From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia,ed. Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 75.↩

4. Bruce E. Steiner, “The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 387–409.↩

5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp↩

6. There is some excellent new work on toleration. For the early Republic see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); for the colonial period see Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Evan Haefeli wrestles with Dutch contributions to American ideas of religious liberty; see Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am also intrigued by the possibility of an Atlantic history of toleration. See Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).↩

7. ,For example, see John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), and Edward Bond’s chronically underappreciated Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000).↩

8. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).↩

9. On Patrick Copeland, see Edward D. Neill, Memoir of Reverend Patrick Copeland: Rector Elect of the First Projected College in the United States: A Chapter in the English Colonization of America (New York: Charles Scribner & Co, 1871); Shona Vance, “A Man for all Regions: Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World,” in Shaping the Stuart World 1603–1714: The Atlantic connection, ed. Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 79–116; Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–254.↩

10. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For another biographical account of West African Moravianism, see Ray A. Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 115–136.↩

11. Governor William Berkeley to Richard Nicholls, 20 May 1666, in The Papers of William Berkely, 1605–1677, ed. Warren M. Billings (Richmond, VA: The Library of Virginia, 2007), 279–280. Berkeley’s contempt for “the Brethren” was probably common among Virginia elites after the Restoration.↩

12. Jewel L. Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Establishment, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).↩

13. Randolph Ferguson Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).↩

14. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632.↩

15. Juliana Barr, “How do you get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A Colonial Sun Belt,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 553–566.↩

16. Alan Gallay, Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 104–109.↩

17. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632–633.↩

18. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).↩

19. Mark M. Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” Journal of Southern History 67 (August 2001), 513–534.↩

20. See Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 116–123.↩

21. On Estebanico as a Muslim, see Andres Resendez, A Land so Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (NY: Basic Books, 2007), 55–56.↩

22. David Beers Quinn, “Turks, Moors, and Others in Drake’s West Indian Voyage,” Itinerario 14 (1982): 97–104.↩

23. Reverend John Clayton (Præbendary of St Michans), The Defense of a Sermon, Preach’d upon the Receiving into the Communion of the Church of England, the Honourable Sir Terence Mac-Mahon Baronet and Christopher Dunn: Converts from the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1701), preface, n.p.↩

24. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 60–61. See also Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).↩

25. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).↩

26. Attorney General vs. Lumbrozo, 23 February 1658/59, in The Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Provincial Court of Maryland, 1658–1662, ed. Bernard Christian Steiner (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1922), 203.↩

27. On the Sephardic diaspora in Dutch Brazil and in the Atlantic World, see the excellent essays in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Converso, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).↩

28. On Jewish settlers in Charleston and Savannah, see William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 117–141. For an encyclopedic overview of Jews in the Americas, see Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776 III vol. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).↩

29. See for example Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking, 2009).↩

30. John Carroll, “John Carroll’s Letter on Trusteeism,” (1786), in Mark Massa and Catherine Osborne, eds., American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 32; Rodger van Allen, “Lay Distrusteeism,” Commonweal, 12 September 12 2008. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has argued that Carroll was an opponent of lay trusteeism, but Carroll’s letter to the trustees of St. Peter’s Church in New York City makes it clear that he saw lay trusteeism as an important means by which the Catholic Church in early America might be sustained. See Dolan’s lecture, “Right from the Start: John Carroll, Our First Bishop.”↩

31. Thomas J. Shelley, “When Catholics Were Congregationalists,” Commonweal, 12 September 2003, 29; Dale B. Light, Rome and the New Republic: Conflict and Community in Philadelphia Catholicism between the Revolution and the Civil War (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 241; Carey, Priests, People, and Prelates, 214.↩

32. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 59, 19.↩

33. Ibid., 68, 65–66.↩

34. For more on the growth of Catholic devotionalism in Europe—particularly English-speaking Europe—see Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Bill McSweeney, Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance (New York: Palgrave, 1980); and Derek Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century (Shepherstown, WV: Burns and Oates, 1978).↩

35. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the United States did experience a wave of Catholic devotionalism that was cultivated by the Church hierarchy as a way of shepherding Catholics to the margins of their predominantly Protestant society and, in so doing, preserving the unique features of the Catholic faith. This manifestation of devotionalism was a deliberate reaction against the move toward “Americanization” that Catholic converts like Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson were pushing for, and in this sense, its origins were very different from earlier varieties of Catholic devotionalism along the frontier. See McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 27–29; and Ann Taves, “Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Church History 54 (1985): 482–195.↩

36. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 21.↩

37. Charlene Villaseñor Black, “St. Anne Imagery and Maternal Archetypes in Spain and Mexico,” in Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas. 1500–1800 ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: Routledge, 2003), 22.↩

38. Clark, Masterless Mistresses, 160. Tracy Fessenden has suggested that Clark may be a little too willing to attribute a “rhetoric of equality” to the Ursuline sisters, in light of their unwillingness to challenge slavery. Tracy Fessenden, “untitled review,” review of Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834,* * by Emily Clark, Church History 77 (2008): 1073–1078.↩

39. “An Act Concerning Negroes and Other Slaves” (1664), in Civil Rights and African Americans, eds. Albert P. Blaustein and Robert L. Zangrando, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 8–9.↩

40. Thomas J. Murphy, Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 131, 147–149; James Hennesey, American Catholics: A History of the Roman Catholic Community in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 143–157; and McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 43–67.↩

41. Harriet Martineau, Society in America (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 2:323; and O’Toole, The Faithful, 59.↩

42. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 381, 380.↩

43. Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom in the Middle Ground (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 13; Trevor Graeme Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691–1776 (New York, 2002), 5, 36, 38, 265; and Beatrize Bentancourt Hardy, “Papists in a Protestant Age: The Catholic Gentry and Community in Colonial Maryland, 1689–1776” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 1993), 214, n. 68. Charles Carroll of Annapolis owned 386 slaves in 1773. Henry Darnell owned 100 in 1711.↩

44. Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Political Thought, 1820–1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992), 6, 17; Lacy K. Ford, Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 372–373. For more on how Protestants used anti-Catholicism to define the parameters of American freedom, see Elizabeth Fenton, Religious Liberties: Anti-Catholicism and Liberal Democracy in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).↩

45. Farrelly, “American Slavery, American Freedom, American Catholicism,” 92–94, n43; and Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: New Press 1992), 46, 29.↩

46. Ibid., 165.↩

47. Ibid., 4.↩

48. Peter N. Moore, World of Toil and Strife: Community Transformation in the Backcountry South Carolina, 1750–1805 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 3.↩

49. Spangler, Virginians Reborn, 87.↩

50. Nelson, A Blessed Company, 285.↩

51. Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 323.↩

52. Recently, the insurrectionary plot of Denmark Vesey has come under fire by historian Michael P. Johnson who raises questions about historians’ use of sources and methodology in reconstructing the details of the plot. In particular, Johnson argues that the plot was the creation of paranoid court officials and modern historians who unwittingly adopted a “heroic” tale of resistance and projected it onto Vesey. The best explication of this debate, and indeed a thorough and convincing rebuttal by the principle parties, can be found in a two-part series, Robert A. Gross, ed. “Forum: The Making of a Slave Conspiracy,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., 58:4 (Oct. 2001): 913–976; and William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., 59:1 (Jan. 2002): 135–202.↩

53. Robert Starobin ed., Great Lives Observed: Denmark Vesey, The Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970), 3, 5; and Rucker, The River Flows On, 164–66, 169, 182.↩

54. Zephariah Kingsley, A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-operative, System of Society as it Exists in Some Governments, and Colonies in America and in the United States, Under the Name of Slavery, with its Necessity and Advantages, 2nd ed., (Tallahassee: n.p., 1829), 13.↩

55. Starobin, Denmark Vesey, 102.↩

56. Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life; My Bondage and My Freedom; Life and Times, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: The Library of America, 1994), 586.↩

57. Ibid. Interestingly, neither Douglass nor Sandy suffered physical abuse at the hands of abusive masters after having utilized the protective root.↩

58. Robin D. G. Kelley, “How the West Was One: On the Uses and Limitations of Diaspora,” The Black Scholar 30 (2000): 32.↩

Author’s Reflection

Reflections on “Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights”

Clive Webb

Clive Webb is Professor of Modern American History at the University of Sussex.

In 1992, the Journal of American History published an article by University of Cambridge historian Tony Badger titled “Confessions of a British Americanist.” Badger reflected on an important methodological conundrum that confronts overseas historians of the United States: is their outsider status an asset or a hindrance to their scholarship? For some Americanists based outside the United States, the answer was that it could be a virtue since they bring a dispassionate eye to their subject that affords new analytical perspectives. Yet other foreign scholars, including Badger himself, took the opposing view. These historians believed that for their scholarship to be taken seriously in the United States they must go native, making themselves indistinguishable from home-grown academics. This approach necessitated extended travel to and within the United States to allow their immersion in archival sources. The result, they hoped, would be research that American readers would appreciate on its own terms rather than prejudging on the basis of the author’s national origin.[1]

I had reason to reflect on these issues when I arrived at the University of Cambridge in October 1992 to research a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Badger. His article was one of the earliest pieces I read. I had not in all honesty pondered the dilemmas of being a British Americanist when embarking on my research. To some extent this owed to my being unable to conceive of a readership that consisted of more than my supervisor and examiners. It was not clear to me at the outset of my research that I wanted to pursue an academic career so the notion of publishing a revised version of the thesis in book form did not occur to me. My only ambition was naively to recreate the events I described in something approximating their historical reality. (Unsophisticated as I was, even I balked at the idea of establishing “the truth.”) Even when I did start amending the thesis for publication, my main anxiety about not being American was learning how to spell (or, as some on this side of the Atlantic would mischievously assert, misspell) and punctuate differently. Although it is sometimes claimed that British scholars are attracted to American history because it allows them to study an experience different from their own without having to learn another language, experience has sometimes taught me otherwise.

The book based on my thesis, Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (University of Georgia Press, 2001), demonstrates both the strengths and the shortcomings of foreign scholarship on American history. Although I do not believe it is possible to be entirely objective, my status as a white English Gentile provided me with a relatively impartial standpoint. I had no interest in acting as an apologist for southern Jews but sought to explain the broader societal forces that shaped their action or, as was often the case, inaction during the civil rights struggle. Nor did the contemporary tensions between the Jewish and African American communities have any influence on my reading of their historical relationship. Yet to some critics this detachment also rendered me unable or unwilling to make a tougher moral judgment of the historical actors I studied. As one reviewer of the manuscript advised, what it needed was “more piss and vinegar.”

What some reviewers saw as fence straddling was to me sympathy for human frailty. The central argument of Fight Against Fear is that a history of anti-Semitic persecution around the world sensitized many southern Jews to the plight of African Americans oppressed by Jim Crow. In the oppressive political climate of the South, it was nonetheless difficult for them to express public support for desegregation. Southern white opposition to civil rights reform, what became known as “massive resistance,” was a combustible compound of elements that included racism, violence, patriarchy, and a substantial measure of anti-Semitism. Confronted by the threat of physical reprisal, social ostracism, and economic boycott of their businesses, most Jews kept their heads below the parapet during the civil rights conflict. A few critics believed I should have been bolder in condemning Jews for not being brave enough to answer the call of their consciences. By contrast, I interpreted the paralysis of such men and women as all too understandable.

Other reviewers challenged my interpretation with an alternate thesis that the failure of Jews to support black civil rights stemmed from their acculturation into white southern society. Prejudice, they argued, not fear motivated their conduct. The book does in fact embrace this interpretation. It included a controversial chapter on Jews who were in the front ranks of massive resistance including states’ rights legal strategist Charles Bloch, South Carolina politician Solomon Blatt, and Sol Tepper, one of the possemen who brutally assaulted civil rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Had I known more about him at the time, I would have added another profile to this rogues’ gallery, that of lawyer Will Gerber, a member of Boss Crump’s Memphis political machine who represented school boards resisting the admission of African American students.

These Jewish segregationists were nonetheless exceptional personalities. Although Jews joined segregationist organizations such as the Citizens’ Council, it was more often under duress. While historians such as David Chappell and Jane Dailey have debated the extent to which southern Christians drew on biblical doctrine to support segregation, I uncovered no evidence of rabbis who used their pulpits to propagate racist doctrine or of laypersons who espoused a Jewish equivalent of the “segregationist folk theology” described by Paul Harvey.[2]

Another way to approach this debate might be to ask a counterfactual question. To what extent would Jews have taken an initiative in encouraging civil rights reform if less constrained by political circumstances? Answering this question would allow us to determine whether southern Jews were ideologically more committed to segregation or integration. The reality, however, is that we will never know. What is nonetheless evident is that in those communities where white racial attitudes were not monolithic, Jews often tended toward moderate or progressive opinion. Moreover, in the most reactionary political cities there were Jews prepared to take serious personal risks to support reform, most conspicuously rabbis such as Perry Nussbaum of Jackson, Mississippi, whose home and synagogue were bombed by Klansmen. Jewish women also made an important contribution to facilitating school desegregation through their active involvement in numerous community organizations.

One of the harshest critics I have always contended with is myself. Although none of the reviews of the book raised the issue, in retrospect I wonder whether Fight Against Fear falls into the trap of constructing a simplistic dichotomy between the conservative South and the progressive North. One of the book’s chapters focuses on the clash between southern Jews and their liberal coreligionists who travelled below the Mason-Dixon line to participate in civil rights demonstrations and voter registration drives. Some southern Jews opposed the incursion of these outsiders into their communities on ideological grounds. Others feared more practically that their presence would provide political ammunition to anti-Semites within the ranks of massive resistance, who accused all Jews of fomenting racial agitation. In either case, southern Jews often tried to dissuade northern activists from intervening in local conflicts; failing that, they publicly dissociated from them. What I did not consider was the extent to which the northern activists commanded the support of their own congregations back home. Although their contested presence in Dixie raised the issue of sectional divisions between Jews, it remains uncertain whether the liberal racial politics of the campaigners were representative even of their fellow northerners. Northern Jews performed an important role at the organizational level in promoting civil rights but further research is needed to dig to the grassroots to determine the depth and breadth of community support for racial reform.

Fight Against Fear covers a regionwide canvas that contains many points of detail but still necessarily relies on broad brushstrokes. Although I travelled to more than twenty archives in ten different states (as someone who has never learned to drive, the vagaries of American public transport was one of my severest culture shocks), there are large areas of the South, especially the border-states, which receive little or no mention. Other scholars have filled in some of these lacunae, most notably Raymond Mohl, Leonard Rogoff, and Bryan Stone, who have respectively produced studies of Miami, North Carolina and Texas.[3]

One development that has not occurred during the last decade is the integration of the southern Jewish experience into the narrative of the civil rights movement. The desegregation crisis unleashed a torrent of prejudice against Jews who were accused of secretly financing and strategizing civil rights activism. A series of terrorist attacks on Jewish institutions, culminating with the dynamiting of the Atlanta Reform Temple, influenced passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which, among other provisions, authorized federal investigation of white supremacist bombings. These events may be peripheral to the black freedom struggle, but their omission from much of the new scholarship on white resistance to civil rights reform is disappointing. With the exception most notably of Karen S. Anderson’s superb study of the Little Rock school crisis, the history of southern Jews remains below the radars of most civil rights historians.[4] I tried to address this issue in a sequel of sorts to Fight Against Fear. Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (2010) focuses on militant segregationists who claimed the African American freedom struggle was a conspiracy masterminded by communist Jews to destroy the social fabric of the United States.[5]

What also still needs to be done is for someone to produce a comparative analysis of religious minorities’ response to the civil rights movement that would allow us to see what, if anything, was exceptional about southern Jews. We now have important works on other non-Protestant groups including Andrew Moore’s study of Catholics, The South’s Tolerable Alien (2007), that demonstrate points of convergence with and divergence from the southern Jewish experience.[6] I confess, however, that I look forward to one day reading rather than writing such a multi-faith study of religion and race. Now that I myself am a supervisor of doctoral students, what advice would I offer to an enthusiastic postgraduate who wanted to undertake a project of this kind, other than honoring academic tradition by trying to dissuade them from being too ambitious? In response to the issues raised by my own supervisor twenty years ago, I would encourage a student to build their analysis on a strong empirical foundation and hope that in rooting through the archives their foreign identity would lead them to interrogate the material in new and unusual ways.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

2. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 157.↩

3. Philip D. Morgan, “Religious Diversity in Colonial Virginia: Red, Black, and White,” in From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia,ed. Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 75.↩

4. Bruce E. Steiner, “The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 387–409.↩

5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp↩

6. There is some excellent new work on toleration. For the early Republic see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); for the colonial period see Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Evan Haefeli wrestles with Dutch contributions to American ideas of religious liberty; see Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am also intrigued by the possibility of an Atlantic history of toleration. See Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).↩

Before the Journal of Southern Religion

The Center for the Study of Southern Religion and Culture: A Historiographic Analysis

Emily Suzanne Clark

Emily Suzanne Clark is a Ph.D. candidate in religion at Florida State University. She is also the managing editor and former webmaster for the Journal of Southern Religion.

Forty years ago, cultural geographer Wilbur Zelinsky published what would be one of the first studies on religion and region. Based on his analysis of church membership data from 1952, Zelinsky identified seven major regions and five sub-regions in the United States. Largely based on census data, Zelinsky’s study presented a traditional view of religion that did little to account for beliefs and practices that fell outside the institutional walls of Christian churches. Despite this approach, his initial geographic study demonstrated to religion scholars that regional studies could help elucidate trends, patterns, and themes previously unrecognized. Regional studies might also provide new or different theoretical frameworks. One of Zelinsky’s regions was the “large Southern Region” which could be “readily identified as one in which Baptists are strongly dominant and Methodists form persistently large minorities.” The South also contained various sub-regions of interest, such as the “Carolina Piedmont” and “islands of Catholics.”[1] As a cultural geographer, Zelinsky did not dig deeply into the religious intricacies of his defined regions but rather created a broad map. The task remained for future scholars of American religion to investigate these regions and see if Zelinsky’s geographical classification scheme would last.

In 1973, a group of professors in the Religion Department at Florida State University (FSU) established the Center for the Study of Southern Religion and Culture (Center). According to the Center’s advisory board, the reasons to study southern religion and culture were relevant to the entire nation at large. Many of the rising “evangelical Protestant denominations” had “strong roots in the South,” and the Center’s founders believed the religious culture of the region and its influence on the rest of the country disproved the current secularization thesis and notions of religious declension.[2] When the Center’s funding ran out eight years later in 1981, it stopped sponsoring lectures and symposia and ceased publication of The Bulletin of the Center of the Study of Southern Religion and Culture (Bulletin). The Religion Department at FSU (the Center’s home base) eventually forgot it ever existed, until the summer of 2010. While reorganizing their basement storage space, department staff unearthed two over-stuffed file folders containing the grant applications, the Center’s small periodical, and other printed material about the former Center. The materials in these folders provide an image of the state of the field of southern religious studies in the 1970s and early 1980s, as well as an opportunity to consider how the Journal of Southern Religion has extended the mission of the Bulletin into the 1990s and 2000s.

Originally founded by faculty members at FSU and Florida A&M University, the Center quickly expanded to include scholars from other fields, illustrating the Center’s early interdisciplinary focus. Center director and FSU religion professor Richard L. Rubenstein (professor of Judaism and literature) described the Center’s founding members as scholars “who were convinced that the South had its own distinctive history, culture, and religious life.”[3] Other members of the Center’s advisory board included Robert A. Spivey (Provost of the FSU College of Arts and Sciences and professor of New Testament and Hellenistic studies), John J. Carey (FSU professor of contemporary religious thought), Joe M. Richardson (FSU history professor), John F. Priest (1967 Executive Director of the American Academy of Religion, FSU professor of Old Testament and Ancient Near East studies), Jerry Chance (Florida A&M University professor of religion), and Bruce Grindal (FSU anthropology professor). Some of the founding professors and advisory board members studied southern culture, but much of their interest came not from their personal research agendas but rather from living in the South.

Three years after its start, the Center applied for a grant through the Rockefeller Foundation and received $104,000. In their successful 1976 grant application, the Center provided synopses of proposed research topics that the grant funds would help support. These included religion and criminology, religious life in prisons, social networks and religion in black rural communities, and the religious status of women in the South. The Center also hosted various symposia and conferences; for example, Harvard theologian Harvey Cox and Yale historian Sidney Ahlstrom each led a colloquium in the Center’s earlier days. At the time of the grant application, topics for future events included southern folklore, oral history methodology, Cuban-American communities, and the Lost Cause. Though these possible future topics indicate an emerging popularity of social and cultural history, many of the published articles in the Bulletin reflected an intellectual history approach.

One of the primary reasons the Center applied for grant funding was to make the Center’s activities and related research available through print and electronic media. With the 1976 Rockefeller grant money, the Center began to print the Bulletin. By 1981, the Center claimed a circulation of eight hundred copies per issue. The list of libraries that subscribed to the Bulletin included predictable southern universities such as Auburn University, Louisiana State University, and the University of South Carolina. But it also mailed to several institutions outside the region, with Loyola University Chicago, Brigham Young University, and Harvard College Library on the subscription list. The Bulletin mailing list also included international subscribers: the Instituto Nacional de Anthropogica e Historia in Coroba Mexico, National Taiwan University Library in Taipei, and Palace of Culture and Science in Warszawa, Poland. Reader feedback comprised part of an unsuccessful 1981 grant application, in which respondents called the Bulletin “very informative,” “unique,” and “provocative.” Theologian James H. Cone called the “quality” of the Bulletin “excellent,” and the contemporary Director of Research for the National Endowment for the Humanities called it “informative and intelligent.”[4]

For its fairly short length, the Bulletin covered extensive territory. Printing three issues a year for five years (1977–1981), the Center’s Bulletin ranged from eight to twenty pages and contained essays, transcripts of lectures at the Center, and book reviews. Unfortunately, the hidden stash of Center Bulletins is missing a few issues, but even with these absent publications, one can get a sense of the Center’s work and interest.[5] In these Bulletins are 17 articles, six transcriptions of Center related lectures, 13 book reviews, and three other pieces (for example, two poems on Elvis Presley appear in Vol. 3, No. 3). Of the 23 essays (articles and lectures), half were historical analyses or literary criticisms, and the other half covered contemporary issues, some with a nod to anthropological methods. Many of the landmark texts from the late 1970s made their way in the Bulletin’s book reviews, which became a standard part of the Bulletin starting in the winter issue of 1978. The June 1979 issue reviewed E. Brooks Hollifield’s The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology is Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (1978), which famously examined the development of southern theology and placed it in the context of southern culture. Albert J. Raboteau’s landmark Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (1978) received a five-page review, which lauded the text for its groundbreaking work and Raboteau’s dedication to the developing field of African American religion. Furthermore, Donald Mathews’s “pioneering book” Religion in the Old South (1977) indeed became a “standard work” in the field, as reviewer Leo Sandon Jr. predicted.[6]

The articles in the Bulletin explored a variety of topics, but a few subjects, patterns, or themes appeared with more frequency than others. Of the 23 articles, four focused on race via African Americans and African American religion, and two specifically examined slavery and religion. One particularly noteworthy article came from historian Peter H. Wood. Wood’s award-winning Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974) was pacesetting among many revisionist monographs of the 1970s that treated slaves as subjects worthy of study and as active agents rather than passive objects.[7] His Bulletin article built on themes from Black Majority and likewise focused on the colonial period. Wood’s essay, “‘Jesus Christ Has Got Thee at Last’: Afro-American Conversion as a Forgotten Chapter in Eighteenth-Century Southern Intellectual History” was a video-taped address at the Center in April 1979 later published in the Bulletin. In his lecture, Wood opened with an encounter in 1769 in South Carolina between the famous evangelist George Whitefield and a free black man named John Marrant. Marrant became intrigued by the “crazy man” he heard “hallooing” (Whitefield), and after hearing Whitefield preach, Marrant was quickly converted. With this interaction in mind, Wood tracked the early relationship between African Americans and Christianity (and, in a way white culture in general) from the “era of pervasive mutual distrust” (1700–1730), to “the period of initial convergence” (1730–1760), and finally ending with “the era of black preaching” (1760–1790). The First Great Awakening played a key role in Wood’s narrative because the early revivals introduced slaves to the more “subversive and radical aspects of Christian doctrine,” in which “authority could be challenged through Christian doctrine itself.”[8]

Wood was hardly the only highly awarded scholar to speak at the Center.[9] One of the Bulletin’s two articles on slavery addressed antebellum justifications for and arguments against slavery from the standpoint of moral progress. David Brion Davis won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966), and the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award (1975) and the Bancroft Prize (1976) for The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975).[10] In early 1979, Davis presented a lecture to the Center published later in the Bulletin on the relationship between slavery and ideas of progress.[11] According to Davis, Enlightenment ideas about progress—moral, economic, and social—informed anti-slavery arguments, proslavery religious theorists, and anti-slave trade rhetoric.

While race was a common topic in the Bulletin, the problem was only framed in terms of black/white relations or slave religion. By contrast, Native Americans appeared once in a short November 1979 article by FSU professor and anthropologist J. Anthony Paredes titled “Kinship and Ethnicity among the Eastern Creek Indians.”[12] It explored the “modern ethnic reassertiveness” of Creeks remaining in the southeast, who were mainly the descendants of the mixed-blood “friendly” Indians of the 1813–1814 Creek Civil War. Paredes’s article investigates terms such as “kinship,” “ethnicity,” and “genealogy” in his attempt to understand the meaning of these social scientific ideas in modern Creek society as they conceptualize their own modern identity.[13]

The “Culture” part of the Center’s name largely connoted a focus on the literary and musical arts, with three articles on southern writers and religion.[14] FSU religion professor Lawrence Cunningham’s “Catholic Sensibility and Southern Writers” examined the premodern worldview—imparting “sacramental value” on the “natural world”—in the work of Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.[15] Though overtly Catholic themes did not overwhelm their writing, Cunningham found “the confrontation of modernity” in these works to be part of a wider Catholic tradition. Similarly, another article argued that the “spirit or attitude of Calvinism” filled the pages of William Faulkner’s Light in August, which spoke to Calvinism’s larger influence on the region in general.[16] “The Sacred and the Profane in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘The Comforts of Home’” returned again to this famed southern author’s work, though this time via Mircea Eliade’s popular binary.[17]

Other than the articles on Creek kinship and the Catholic sensibility of southern writers, the Bulletin contained only one other reference to non-Protestant religion. In 1980, the Bulletin reviewed Nathan M. Kaganoff and Melvin I. Urofsky’s edited volume “Turn to the South”: Essays on Southern Jewry (1979), a book that convinced reviewer John Priest that “further study of the Southern Jewish experience can enhance our understanding of the Southern experience as a whole.”[18] Still, the Protestant focus of the Bulletin does not come as a surprise. As Wilbur Zelinsky noted, evangelicalism largely presided over the religious geography of the South, and early regional studies continued to distinguish the South by its traditionally Protestant temper. Shortly before the Bulletin’s launch, geographer James Shortridge identified a small area of “Super Catholicism” in French Louisiana (reminiscent of Zelinsky’s “islands of Catholics”), but other than that, he distinguished the South as an area of “intense, conservative Protestantism.”[19] For many scholars during the Center’s duration, southern religion was overwhelmingly Protestant.

Though gender studies was still in its infancy in the 1970s, the Bulletin included both a discussion of southern feminism and the construction of contemporary southern masculinity.[20] The March 1979 issue featured an article on “Feminist Women in the Southeast,” which was based on survey information gathered by Center-sponsored doctoral student Carolyn Hadley. Hadley concluded that the distinctive characteristic of southern feminists “is that they are ostracized or considered curiosities in their immediate environments because they are feminists at the same time that they are ostracized or considered curiosities by feminists elsewhere because they are Southerners.” Many of the interviewed women reported that the promised legal and social changes of the Equal Rights Amendment struggled to gain currency in the region due to ignorance, a “Bible Belt” mentality, and “entrenched conservatism.”[21]

The following year, the Bulletin featured an article by Laurin A. Wollan Jr., an FSU School of Criminology professor, on cockfighting in contemporary Florida. In his research, largely informed by personal interviews and conversations with local cockfight gamblers and gamecock breeders, Wollan raised many questions about gender, sexuality, violence, and honor culture. Rather than answer any of these questions, Wollan’s goal was to generate discussion and introduce possibilities for future research. In fact, Wollan asked his readers point-blank: Is cockfighting interesting because there is something implicitly sexual about it? While he did not provide a straightforward answer, he presented background information on different cultural styles of cockfighting. Wollan analyzed the various preferences for lighter, agile birds versus heavier birds and explored debates between those favoring artificially shorter bouts or longer, more natural fights.[22] He found the expression of these preferences in sexually tinged language, and like Ted Ownby in Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865–1920 (1990), Wollan called attention to the cultivation of southern masculinity in a way that took the material circumstance of southern life and recreation seriously.[23]

A few articles in the Bulletin made sweeping regional claims about the South rather than analyze a particular element of its religion and culture. Samuel Hill—former Center advisory board member and current JSR advisory board member—also published in the Bulletin. His article “The Strange Career of Religious Pluralism in the South” explored the implications of the conclusions cultural geographers like Zelinsky and Shortridge made regarding religion in the South. In 1980 “religious pluralism” was hardly the buzzword it would become by the 2000s; rather, it was “understudied” during the Center’s existence. Hill notes that while the South had historically been distinguished by “the relative absence of diversity,” the region’s “cultural mainstream” has always included a variety of Protestant denominations. Despite this Protestant mix and the small “special cases” of Catholics and Jews, religious pluralism was not “a cultural fact” in the South until the “abrupt and wrenching social revolution” of the 1960s, which forced the region to confront the “inevitability” of religious pluralism. The South, as a largely homogenous society, had a preoccupation with stability and normativity, which further reinforced its own traditional homogeneity. Conceptualizing the South as a fairly consistent, Protestant-dominated region, Hill understood why southerners perceived outsider groups who challenged the traditional “southern way of life” and “prevailing social norms” as particularly threatening. Though contemporary pluralism had arrived in the South and “the traditional forms of religious monism” were “weakening,” the emergence of the New Right quelled the fears of southern traditionalists.[24] Due to the southern “feel” of many of the televised evangelical “Electronic Church” ministers, many southerners could comfortably place these televangelists within their religious culture.[25] Part of Hill’s 2009 inaugural Sam Hill Lecture in Southern Religious History at the University of North Carolina at Asheville returned again to the “strange career” of pluralism in southern religion. Hill argued that the South is a region typified by both “presence” and “absence” of diversity. Though the region has been historically marked by “a pervasively bi-racial culture, African and European … the significant absence of European immigrant sectors of the population, with their distinctive cultures” also characterized the region in past and present.[26]

Academics were not the only speakers who gave lectures at the Center. In late 1977, William Styron, the noted author of The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979), spoke at the Center.[27] He was a stranger neither to southern culture nor to controversy. The Confessions of Nat Turner won Styron the 1967 Pulitzer Prize and thrust the white author of the provocative book into the not-always friendly spotlight. Though his characterization of the historical figure in Nat Turner is largely sympathetic, Styron received much criticism for the creative liberties he took with his characters. Famed African-American authors James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison defended Styron’s portrayal, but for other critics Styron’s depiction of Turner’s sexuality was too strongly reminiscent of stereotypical, racist assumptions of depraved, inherent black sexuality.[28] In discussing his book at the Center, Styron first told the audience of his childhood in the South in order to contextualize his creative interpretation of Turner’s life. While in grammar school in Virginia, teachers and textbooks taught Styron that Nat Turner was a “fanatical” slave who “led a terrible insurrection” and was hanged for his “cruel deeds.” Styron described his writing experience and finished novel as an attempt “to know the Negro,” unlike the majority of southern white culture which chose to ignore the presence of African Americans in southern culture and southern history. He admitted to being ill-prepared for the “vehement attacks” he and the book received, and after a decade of reflection, he had “no apologies” for his portrayal of Turner. Styron felt his book sympathetically depicted how Turner was a victim to the horrors of slavery and the “absolute hegemony” of white society.[29] Styron’s visit to the Center and his inclusion in the Bulletin demonstrate the political and social stakes of research in southern culture. Both lauded and severely criticized for his work, Styron and Nat Turner illustrated the volatility of and emotionality attached to such subjects of study. Furthermore, Styron’s reflections on growing up in the South in the 1930s illuminated the dynamic nature of race in popular southern culture.

It has been thirty years since the final Bulletin publication, and as a field, the study of southern religion has greatly expanded. Catholicism in the South, though still in need of much more scholarship, has developed far beyond the Bulletin’s depiction of Catholic sensibilities in literature.[30] Many of the Bulletin pieces investigated either white religious culture or black religious culture—two strands of southern religion that now typically influence one another in historical narratives.[31] In addition to scholarship that engaged multiple points on the black/white racial spectrum, studies on southeastern Native American cultures and religions have also developed from a nearly non-existent 1970s historiography.[32] Visual and material culture studies have also developed since the Center’s organization. However, considering how many of the now-popular “folk” artists of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were from the South, it is noteworthy that the Center presented nothing on any religious “self-taught” or “outsider” artists, particularly since the visual worlds of these artists can complement the intellectual worlds of other southerners.[33]

With these advances in mind, the Center and its Bulletins are an academic time capsule that provides us with snapshots of the historiography of southern religious history from the 1970s to the present. In the inaugural issue of the JSR (1998), Samuel Hill opened with an essay containing a “provocative hypothesis”—“Contemporary Fundamentalism (since the 1970s) has changed or challenged traditional forms of Southern culture far more than did the Civil Rights Movement that immediately preceded it.” Additionally, the growing power of fundamentalism made “Southern religion less Southern, that is, less culturally influenced or even less culturally captive.” Fundamentalists downplayed “the old tribalism of Southern life,” for they saw the need to live in accordance with biblical ethics as the main structuring element of everyday life.[34] When the Center was founded in the early 1970s, the original members were “convinced of the importance of the South to America’s economic, political, religious and cultural life.” They felt that “something new was indeed happening in the South” and that this something “deserved scientific and scholarly attention.”[35] This “something new” sought by the Center’s founders might have been the growing fundamentalism that Hill argued was undermining “southern-ness.” Whether or not this “southern-ness” is disappearing, fourteen volumes of JSR indicate that the study of it remains strong.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

2. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 157.↩

3. Philip D. Morgan, “Religious Diversity in Colonial Virginia: Red, Black, and White,” in From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia,ed. Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 75.↩

4. Bruce E. Steiner, “The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 387–409.↩

5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp↩

6. There is some excellent new work on toleration. For the early Republic see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); for the colonial period see Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Evan Haefeli wrestles with Dutch contributions to American ideas of religious liberty; see Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am also intrigued by the possibility of an Atlantic history of toleration. See Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).↩

7. ,For example, see John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), and Edward Bond’s chronically underappreciated Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000).↩

8. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).↩

9. On Patrick Copeland, see Edward D. Neill, Memoir of Reverend Patrick Copeland: Rector Elect of the First Projected College in the United States: A Chapter in the English Colonization of America (New York: Charles Scribner & Co, 1871); Shona Vance, “A Man for all Regions: Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World,” in Shaping the Stuart World 1603–1714: The Atlantic connection, ed. Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 79–116; Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–254.↩

10. Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). For another biographical account of West African Moravianism, see Ray A. Kea, “From Catholicism to Moravian Pietism: The World of Marotta Magdalena, a Woman of Popo and St. Thomas,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 115–136.↩

11. Governor William Berkeley to Richard Nicholls, 20 May 1666, in The Papers of William Berkely, 1605–1677, ed. Warren M. Billings (Richmond, VA: The Library of Virginia, 2007), 279–280. Berkeley’s contempt for “the Brethren” was probably common among Virginia elites after the Restoration.↩

12. Jewel L. Spangler, Virginians Reborn: Anglican Establishment, Evangelical Dissent, and the Rise of the Baptists in the Late Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008).↩

13. Randolph Ferguson Scully, Religion and the Making of Nat Turner’s Virginia: Baptist Community and Conflict, 1740–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).↩

14. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632.↩

15. Juliana Barr, “How do you get from Jamestown to Santa Fe? A Colonial Sun Belt,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 553–566.↩

16. Alan Gallay, Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 104–109.↩

17. Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” 632–633.↩

18. Emily Clark, Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).↩

19. Mark M. Smith, “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion,” Journal of Southern History 67 (August 2001), 513–534.↩

20. See Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 116–123.↩

21. On Estebanico as a Muslim, see Andres Resendez, A Land so Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (NY: Basic Books, 2007), 55–56.↩

22. David Beers Quinn, “Turks, Moors, and Others in Drake’s West Indian Voyage,” Itinerario 14 (1982): 97–104.↩

23. Reverend John Clayton (Præbendary of St Michans), The Defense of a Sermon, Preach’d upon the Receiving into the Communion of the Church of England, the Honourable Sir Terence Mac-Mahon Baronet and Christopher Dunn: Converts from the Church of Rome (Dublin, 1701), preface, n.p.↩

24. Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 60–61. See also Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998); and Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).↩

25. Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).↩

26. Attorney General vs. Lumbrozo, 23 February 1658/59, in The Archives of Maryland: Proceedings of the Provincial Court of Maryland, 1658–1662, ed. Bernard Christian Steiner (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1922), 203.↩

27. On the Sephardic diaspora in Dutch Brazil and in the Atlantic World, see the excellent essays in Richard L. Kagan and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic Diasporas: Jews, Converso, and Crypto-Jews in the Age of Mercantilism, 1500–1800 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).↩

28. On Jewish settlers in Charleston and Savannah, see William Pencak, Jews and Gentiles in Early America, 1654–1800 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), 117–141. For an encyclopedic overview of Jews in the Americas, see Jacob R. Marcus, The Colonial American Jew, 1492–1776 III vol. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970).↩

29. See for example Timothy R. Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (New York: Viking, 2009).↩

30. John Carroll, “John Carroll’s Letter on Trusteeism,” (1786), in Mark Massa and Catherine Osborne, eds., American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 32; Rodger van Allen, “Lay Distrusteeism,” Commonweal, 12 September 12 2008. Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has argued that Carroll was an opponent of lay trusteeism, but Carroll’s letter to the trustees of St. Peter’s Church in New York City makes it clear that he saw lay trusteeism as an important means by which the Catholic Church in early America might be sustained. See Dolan’s lecture, “Right from the Start: John Carroll, Our First Bishop.”↩

31. Thomas J. Shelley, “When Catholics Were Congregationalists,” Commonweal, 12 September 2003, 29; Dale B. Light, Rome and the New Republic: Conflict and Community in Philadelphia Catholicism between the Revolution and the Civil War (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 241; Carey, Priests, People, and Prelates, 214.↩

32. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 59, 19.↩

33. Ibid., 68, 65–66.↩

34. For more on the growth of Catholic devotionalism in Europe—particularly English-speaking Europe—see Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Bill McSweeney, Roman Catholicism: The Search for Relevance (New York: Palgrave, 1980); and Derek Holmes, The Triumph of the Holy See: A short History of the Papacy in the Nineteenth Century (Shepherstown, WV: Burns and Oates, 1978).↩

35. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the United States did experience a wave of Catholic devotionalism that was cultivated by the Church hierarchy as a way of shepherding Catholics to the margins of their predominantly Protestant society and, in so doing, preserving the unique features of the Catholic faith. This manifestation of devotionalism was a deliberate reaction against the move toward “Americanization” that Catholic converts like Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson were pushing for, and in this sense, its origins were very different from earlier varieties of Catholic devotionalism along the frontier. See McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 27–29; and Ann Taves, “Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” Church History 54 (1985): 482–195.↩

Panel Review: The Color of Christ

Review: The Color of Christ

Jennifer Graber

Jennifer Graber is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 281 pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-3572-2.

The Color of Christ opens with a chilling story. In 1963, white supremacists infamously bombed the historically black Sixteenth Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four African-American girls. Along with the human destruction, the bomb shattered a stained glass window that featured a white-skinned Jesus. Outraged citizens responded, including Welsh schoolchildren who collected money for new windows. But a question hung in the air: what color should Jesus be?

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey evoke this story of shattered lives and shattered images of Jesus to introduce their claim that representations of Jesus have “played a leading role in the saga of race in America” (5). To support their argument, the authors establish an ambitious set of inquiries. They look at the physical forms, placements, and refashionings of Jesus images throughout American history. They focus not only on the most popular and widely disseminated images, but also on minority voices that have offered striking alternative visions and responses.

The authors then make a set of claims about the intertwined development of Jesus images and race in America. Their thesis unfolds through a narrative history. Blum and Harvey argue that white Jesus images came to power and prominence in the nineteenth century and that these images’ ubiquity demanded that everyone contend with them. The prominence of these images, however, did not imply their stability. The authors contend that the images shifted as definitions of whiteness changed and as marginalized communities developed new rhetorical tools of protest against an increasingly racist status quo.

Blum and Harvey lay out their claims in historically organized chapters that begin in the religiously and racially diverse setting of colonial America. They note that some believers were occupied with iconoclasm, while those interested in Jesus images were drawn to red (i.e., bloody) ones rather than white ones. Things changed, however, in the early republic and antebellum periods as concerns about citizenship and racial categorization came to the fore. In this setting, the white Jesus emerged as a “cultural icon of white power” (78). Even so, the authors pay close attention to voices offering alternative visions. Blum and Harvey carry their investigation of the ascendant white Jesus through the Civil War and age of American imperialism, arguing that images of Jesus took on a Nordic character as definitions of whiteness narrowed. Bringing the narrative fully into the twentieth century, the authors explore the ways that “race and physical identity had become crucial markers of Christ’s spirit” among citizens ranging from Hollywood producers to YMCA leaders to early civil rights advocates (202). They conclude with reflections on Jesus images in the digital age, a period in which many Americans acknowledge that the historical Jesus was probably not white but nevertheless continue to consume from a global marketplace of white Jesus images.

This is an ambitious book and it does many things well. Without saying so, the authors place themselves in a stream of scholarship that explores how contact and encounter have fuelled religious creativity throughout American history. The book includes encounters between racially and religiously different people, as well as these peoples’ encounters with racialized Jesus images. These meetings generate new formulations about religion and race generally, and Jesus and whiteness specifically. The book’s unyielding emphasis on encounter makes it stand out in a field where such contacts typically occupy the chapters on the colonial era and the decades after 1965. Contact tends to drop out in the big middle sections of narratives that emphasize nineteenth-century evangelical consensus.

Even as they keep a variety of voices and contacts in their field of vision, the authors rely on a fairly standard narrative structure: colonial era diversity, nineteenth-century standardization, leading to the radical reformulations of that standard in the second half of the twentieth century. To be sure, the authors emphasize the instability of the white Jesus images that emerged so powerfully in the early republic. Their chapter on the Civil War reminds readers that imagining a white Jesus did not bring agreement, even among white Protestants. Even so, the narrative follows a pattern we see in studies of American evangelicalism as well as scholarship on the construction of racial categories. In both literatures, big developments in the early nineteenth-century drive the story. The authors’ narrative choices align with the literatures on evangelicalism and whiteness, helping them account for the ascendency of a white spiritual mediator in a nation increasingly divided over the enslavement of American Americans.

This periodization focused on evangelicalism and whiteness is less effective, however, as the authors bring American Indian responses to Jesus imagery into the narrative. To be sure, Blum and Harvey have clearly immersed themselves in the secondary literature on Native American Christianity. The result is a work that highlights Indian voices more effectively than almost any synthesizing work in the field. One need only think the resounding absence of native voices in Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God became a National Icon (2004) and Richard Wightman Fox’s familiar constraint of Indian peoples to chapters on the colonial era on his Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession (2005). The Color of Christ is very different and most welcome.

However, including these voices does not mean that they are easily incorporated into a narrative structured around developments in the nation’s black-white racial divide. Further, it seems to me that American Indian encounters with Jesus—including many of the stories in this book—center on questions about Jesus’ spiritual power and communal status as opposed to his racial particularity. For instance, did Indians in the early republic reject the “white Jesus” (89) because he was white, as the authors suggest, or because they could not imagine that a being killed by his own followers had adequate power? When Nicholas Black Elk recalled a vision with a figure who was painted red, but was neither a white man nor an Indian, was that a “Jesus figure of racial ambiguity” (193) or a spirit being ritually prepared for war? I do not think we can be sure. I worry, therefore, that some of Blum and Harvey’s conclusions force Indian responses into the story of racial definition and categorization that drives their book.

I am also convinced that Blum and Harvey can hardly be faulted for these possible missteps. Unlike our scholarly literature on African-American Christianity, we simply do not have many detailed studies that show us how everyday American Indians have practiced Christianity generally and engaged white Jesus images specifically. Our best studies of native Christianity focus on the colonial era, before the white Jesus burst onto the scene. Even though many American Indians established various relationships with Christian churches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the scholarship on them is limited. The literature, instead, inordinately focuses on more colorful stories, such as ghost dancers and peyote practitioners. The difficulty of making these stories work stands in stark contrast to the powerful arguments that Blum and Harvey can marshal about African-American appropriations and reformulations of the white Jesus in the ages of slavery, reconstruction, and civil rights.

This leads me back to the story of the shattered window. White supremacists murdered black girls and destroyed an image of a white-skinned Jesus. The story fits perfectly with the book’s thesis: that looking closely at images of Jesus tells us much about the saga of race in American history. It is hard, however, to find such a fitting story in Indian country. The authors tell us that the Seneca prophet, Handsome Lake, had a vision of Jesus. But we should remember that the same vision included other powerful objects, such as the moon and stars, as well as more befuddling items, including George Washington’s dog. Nicholas Black Elk saw not only a red-painted figure, but also a flaming rainbow tepee in the sky. These stories are difficult to integrate into narratives driven by developments in evangelical Christianity and the black-white racial divide. To tell the story of Native Americans and Jesus images will require many more close studies of the myriad ways Indian communities have had Jesus presented to them in the last two centuries, as well as the multiple and sometimes mystifying forms that Indian visions of Jesus have taken. I commend Blum and Harvey for featuring the Indian voices that our scholarship has made available. But to integrate Indian voices and experiences into our works of synthesis, we will need more scholarship.

Review: The Color of Christ

Darren E. Grem

Darren E. Grem is an assistant professor of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi.

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 281 pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-3572-2.

With The Color of Christ, Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey provide a fascinating history of Jesus as a racial powerbroker in America. It is certainly not the first critical biography of an Americanized Son of God. But it is the first to consider—in as comprehensive a way as possible—why Jesus became the “holy face” of whiteness by the mid-nineteenth century, a status routinely challenged since then but not fully overturned today.

The authors convincingly argue that the making of the white Christ was intertwined with the making of the nation itself. For nearly two centuries after Jesus first crossed the Atlantic, the raceless, disembodied Jesus of European colonists and African slaves stood alongside or in conflict with the blood-soaked suffering servant who became “a symbol of [Native American] experiences” since “[i]f the sacred bled, then their bleeding could be meaningful as well”(66). After the revolution and into the early nineteenth century, this pre-white Christ gave way to a powerfully white Christ who called the nation to war over the status and substance of enslaved black souls, many of whom were themselves recasting the white Jesus as “a suffering white man who undermined white authority” and backed what the authors see as the earliest version of black liberation theology (93). The newborn white Christ, then, was not “a stable or completely unifying symbol of white power,” as his whiteness simultaneously defined the politics of slaves, secessionists, abolitionists, and unionists before and during the Civil War (8). Moreover, while white and black soldiers used the race of Christ to fight over the meaning of slavery and freedom, Latter-Day Saints unabashedly worshipped a white Christ and European immigrants reworked his whiteness to suit their own religious needs or political aspirations.

Into the twentieth century, Jesus continued his ascent as a conflicted, white messiah, at once a champion of racial order, an advocate for racial imperialism, and a catalyst for racial and political disturbance. Fundamentalists and liberals, socialists and capitalists, saber-rattlers and pacifists, New Dealers and Cold Warriors, segregationists and civil rights workers, folk artists and race-conscious writers crafted a Christ “for every crusade,” generally casting him racially in their own image (224). Because of the resilience of the white Christ and the proliferation of his non-white counterparts, by the end of the twentieth century, Jesus’s appearance and identity had become a fitting religious example of what Daniel Rodgers has recently termed “the age of fracture” (2011). Despite Barack Obama’s entering the White House as a victorious black Christ figure, tragedy, dressed as comedy, remained as well. The target of Hollywood satire and butt of late-night jokes, Jesus was no triumphant national savior. Because of his racial past, the American Jesus was “unable to resolve racial tensions of hundreds of years of discrimination, of civil rights victories half-won and half-avoided, and of dynamic changes to the demography of the nation” (265).

Blum and Harvey’s story is at once a case study and synthesis. They travel many roads familiar to most historians of American religion, albeit with a fresh set of questions. How did millions of Americans come to believe in the outright falsehood, namely that a Galilean Jew (which Popular Mechanics in 2000 concluded probably looked like this) was somehow white? And why did others reject this white Christ for the sake of revering a—similarly inaccurate—black or Indian Jesus more suitable to their personal and political purposes? In addressing both questions, Blum and Harvey delve into the processes of religious production, consumption, inclusion, exclusion, negotiation, normalization, enforcement, and resistance. The racial history of the American Jesus shows how “the sacred has been racialized and how the spiritualization of race has given notions of human difference not only a life beyond scientific studies or anthropological insights but also a sense of eternal worth” (15). There is a hint of convention to this conceptual focus that some readers may find unsatisfactory. To study religion’s public and private power, Blum and Harvey focus on what most scholars would deem an obviously religious figure. This is not a radical reinterpretation of what constitutes “the religious” and will probably not impress those who seek to expand “the religious”—or, to use that squishier term “the spiritual”—to subjects and sites such as those generally detailed in the recent Frequencies project. (Full disclosure: I contributed an entry for this project.) But by relating the religious to more than individualistic experience or the scholar’s definitional delight, The Color of Christ also does a service—like the work of Tisa Wenger and David Sehat—in reminding scholars that the process of religious construction often comes with high stakes: for free exercise, for citizenship, for even life or death. Indeed, religious terms and conditions matter for defining “acceptable” persons and for determining the legal, political, or national limits of human value.

Blum and Harvey, however, find some saviors as more worthy of study than others. This is not the case for their treatment of the colonial era and nineteenth century. The sheer number of Jesuses covered and analyzed is impressive, as is their careful explanation of the white Christ’s origins and his public empowerment and proliferation. It is when the authors reach the twentieth century, however, that gaps in coverage appear and chances to explain historical change and continuity go by inexplicably. For instance, there is little discussion of the crusading Christ of Prohibition and an odd silence regarding the militaristic and often racist Christ of World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt, arguably the most important messianic figure of the 1930s and 1940s, is barely mentioned. This seems like a missed opportunity to explore the nature of those whom Americans deem political messiahs and how conceptions of “white saviors” fit into that construction. The authors do a fine job of elucidating the multiple uses of Jesus during the civil rights struggle among a wide range of activists, but one wonders how a Christ of civil rights connects to contemporary black religious communities and practices. Recent reflections on masculinity and femininity in African American churches and among black televangelists have drawn attention to a Jesus who seemingly sides with complementarian gender roles and entrepreneurial values. Is this a new Jesus or an old one?

More distressingly, there is no clear Christ of conservatism presented in The Color of Christ, nor a clear indication that the authors have worked out how race related to whatever “rightward turn” has or has not happened in postwar American politics and Christology. Presumably, upstart conservatives defended the white Christ of the Cold War, the civil rights era, and early and late culture wars. This we can deduce or assume from the research provided by a slew of recent political and cultural histories of American conservatism. But without a Christ of the right in sight, it is unclear how Christ operated in conservative popular culture, especially in terms of what their Jesus reveals about how racial politics intersected with consumerism or gender in the conservative movement. Why were FDR and the New Deal, the political white Christ and gospel of liberalism, imagined as both anti-Christ and anti-Christian among those on the right, as Matthew Sutton has recently documented? Why do conservative women warm to their vision of Christ, and why is a white Christ necessary for their romance? Why is there so much literature in conservative evangelical circles about spiritual polyandry, as seen in the common practice of “inviting” a white Christ into a heterosexual marriage? And how would a non-white Christ upset the marital arrangements that conservatives promote, especially in terms of their advocacy of “male headship” at church and in the home? In a different context, why do Relevant-reading white hipster conservatives and middle-aged conservative whites such devotees of the long-haired, womanly “rebel” Christ, as the authors seem to suggest? Or, put a different way, why do conservatives advocate strongly against homosexual unions or public displays of homosexual affection—especially between men—while at the same time trumpeting “Real Men” as those who enjoy a deep, committed, and public intimacy with a muscular, white god-man (and not, presumably, a god-man of another race)? In what ways do these conceptions of a white Christ overlap with pro-gun lobbies or tax cuts or deregulation or AM radio fandom, as the cartoon satirized here? How might they overlap with the various “white saviors” of the conservative movement, clearly denoted by political deference to promise-filled leaders from Jerry Falwell to Anita Bryant to George W. Bush to Rick Warren to Sarah Palin? How might a non-white Jesus muck with the outright worship of Ronald Reagan among conservatives and, nowadays, among many other Americans? These are no mere academic questions, but something that strikes to the heart of Blum and Harvey’s understanding of the white Christ’s prevalence in contemporary public life. In many ways, the white Christ has ascended and keeps ascending not just in the conservative movement but because of the conservative movement. To be sure, the authors adequately laid the groundwork for understanding the rise of the right’s Christ, but as with much of their treatment of the twentieth century, they suggest connections rather than necessarily argue for them.

Another odd privileging of certain Christs occurs with two other groups: Mormons and Latinos. To be honest, it is not quite clear why the Mormon Christ receives several sections of artful and attentive analysis while the many Christs of American Latinos (after about 1750) get little more than brief interludes on Gustavo Gutiérrez, Cesar Chavez, and gang tattoos. True, we may be in a “Mormon moment.” And Blum and Harvey offer their own perspective by linking the construction of the white Christ to the Mormon Christ. But it is arguable that the Latino Christ has been vastly more important in terms of public culture, economic history, and racial politics in American history. Moreover, regardless of whether Republican Party candidate Mitt Romney can become the first Mormon President, the fate of his party and much of the course of the twenty-first century will be decided by a Latino population whose Christs have been in dialogue with and even dominant in creating, curtailing, commanding, and killing the white Christ. The Mormon experience with Jesus is a necessary and instructive part of the book; the Latino experience, however, remains a relatively unexamined story, at least in Blum and Harvey’s otherwise fine treatment of Jesus’s American faces.

Such a sweeping reevaluation of Jesus and American religious history like The Color of Christ will have its gaps and missed opportunities. And, at the end of the day, this book is memorable for what it achieves, not for its unevenness. Blum and Harvey’s book should be in the running for several awards, if nothing else for documenting a central dynamic in American religious experience—the construction and use of an iconic religious figure—as a way of traversing what they aptly term “the saga of race in America.” The Color of Christ also serves as a good model for future research into messianism and American culture and politics. It is certain to arrest or anger readers who worship the white Christ or revere those politicians and public figures who assume this is the “normal” face of “their America.” So too will its relatively dour conclusion disturb those who hope for clear paths to racial reconciliation. But then again, this book is not fatalist. It merely questions whether some wounds can ever heal, especially those caused by Jesus himself.

Review: The Color of Christ

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp is a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 281 pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-3572-2.

The Color of Christ is the latest in a number of studies in recent years that examine how Americans have encountered Jesus. Nearly a decade ago Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus (2003) and Richard Wightman Fox’s Jesus in America (2004) mined representations of Jesus in American history. In different ways, those studies explored the permutations of images within a deeply religious society. But neither focused extensively on the significance of race, and this is the gap that The Color of Christ seeks to fill. Edward Blum and Paul Harvey examine how Americans from early Euro-American contact with indigenous peoples gave Jesus physical form, refashioning him as a symbol of their deepest fears, hopes, terrors and dreams. Framed by the narrative of the stained-glass Jesus shattered by the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963, it is also a study deeply imbued with a post-civil rights morality, challenging its readers to explore divine embodiment as intrinsically linked to struggles for social and political equality.

Working chronologically, the authors situate the American Jesus in multiple frames, moving from the colonial era to the digital age. They focus primary attention on white Protestant images, but also include extensive discussion of African American, Catholic and Latter-day Saint representations. In an expansive account, they argue that Jesus received relatively scant notice from the Puritans and French and Spanish Catholics, but became increasingly popular by the early national period. Inevitably, they explain, his portrayal served as a lens into the power of race and its increasing salience and malleability in American society. Jesus stood up for white supremacy and challenged it; he embraced the dictates of slavery and called for liberation. By the early twentieth century the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon, masculine and heroic Christ was nearly complete, and had eclipsed the cultural reach of contending images proposed by cultural outsiders.

A major strength of this sweeping study is the plethora of evidence provided about the qualities of Christ, from Moravian views of the “bloody” Jesus to Phillis Wheatley’s poetry to contemporary film and even humor. The book is a tremendous resource for teachers seeking to educate students about the myriad movements in the U.S. that have taken Jesus’ name and image, as well as general readers seeking a lively introduction to the topic. The narrative is also admirably inclusive both racially and confessionally, weaving a synthetic account at once expansive and politically pointed.

Yet the issue of Christ’s color is also confusing, conflating as it does race as a social category, a phenotype, and a theological statement. This mixed message proves confounding when discussing, for example, the Moravian Jesus as “red” because he is represented as drenched in blood (61). The authors conclude that “Before Jesus rose to dominance as a white figure in America, he was red”(66). But what does this mean, exactly? And how is it necessarily related to the issue of race? The Jesus of enslaved Africans, even when depicted as light-skinned, is deemed to “affirm blackness” because theologically he was thought to have sided with the oppressed (94). This leads the authors to conclude that the slaves “bent” whiteness in order to subvert the Euro-American Jesus; he was still white, but with “subtle differences” (99). In related manner, the authors use “whiteness” as a provocative category in places where other descriptors are historically more accurate, such as in their assessment that Samson Occom was critiquing “whiteness” when talking about “Christian nations” (59).

The conceptual slippage, rather than making the authors’ point about the significance of race in our understandings of Christian history, actually works against this goal, because the multiple meanings of color are juxtaposed but never fully analyzed. What purchase do we gain on understanding race by calling the Moravian Jesus “red” or the Jesus of the slaves only marginally “white”? Similarly, the authors tend to use Jesus himself—variously named as Savior, Christ, Son of God, and even “the Cross” (166–67) as a synecdoche, a stand-in for Christianity in its entirety. In this sense, the book prompts important insights about the ways that race consciousness and categorization have shaped American Christianity, yet it elides theological distinctions. A more robust parsing of the many elements of color (and belief) under discussion could have sharpened those notions.

The relatively loose interweaving of images, devotional life, and political convictions as material for analysis also has both advantages and disadvantages. Certainly, the authors emphasize (as did Fox and Prothero) that this Jesus is ubiquitous, is not easily equated with the creation of cultural similitude (since African Americans and Native Americans have at times revered a “white” Jesus), and bears profound political significance. Yet the intermixing and virtual equation of these elements also makes for a curiously flat concept of culture, begging some of the most critical questions: Are images of Jesus (or anyone else) that are white in color necessarily racially white? What is the relationship between seeing, consuming, or even worshipping an image that is rendered as white, and a political commitment to white racial superiority? What does it mean for the authors to note that some people have “defended the whiteness of Jesus”? (256) All of these questions, so central to the last thirty years of critical race theory, would have been useful to consider in light of the documentary evidence.

Stories of the Mormon Jesus demonstrate the density of images that is flattened (and in this case, misrepresented) by the under theorized concept of color. The authors argue that Mormons “became some of the most powerfully committed to Jesus’ (and their own) whiteness and strength” (136), and they base this claim on a reading of images of Christ beginning in the early twentieth century. Yet the evidence cited provides many more wrinkles to the narrative, including the fact that Mormon visual images of Jesus (largely borrowed from Protestant Europeans until the mid-twentieth century) were dismissed as inaccurate and even foolish by some LDS because of the Teutonic qualities believers knew to be misleading. Similarly, much is made of the large Christus statue fixed in the LDS Temple Square Visitors’ Center in 1966, presumably (according to the authors) as a symbol of racial dominance. No evidence supports this claim, and neither do the authors discuss the possibility that white marble statues are, well, white marble. Others may read the racial symbolism in any manner of ways, but it seems a leap to claim that Mormons are engaged in “rhetoric-versus-image magic” (253) because they discuss racial integration but keep a white marble Jesus in their vestibule.

My point is not that race is unimportant. Quite the contrary. Characterizing every sighting of Jesus’ color as racially and thus morally significant devalues the importance of race when it matters most. And it also avoids the most interesting lines of inquiry for the cultural historian: Is it possible for whites, in a racist society, to portray a white Jesus that is not stamped with the oppressor’s mark? Is any representation by whites of Jesus necessarily racist? One strategy would be to present these questions as compelling puzzles with unclear outcomes, and highlight the ironies and disjuncture of various portrayals. But the morally infused tone of this work sends a different, less variegated message. Indeed, The Color of Christ is a jeremiad, a lament for the impossibility of Christian imagery about Jesus ever to be free of the taint of the racist society in which it is produced. Liberation theologians, we learn, tried to free the trapped Jesus, but even they failed to create a unifying image and fell prey to the own “blind spots” (241). The authors seem to want to preach to us—to give us the moral tale. But they do not quite articulate the compelling moral, even theological, concerns that underlie their narrative.

Ultimately, the lessons of this story, other than showcasing sheer variety of representations, are not entirely clear. What should the reader take away, for example, from the framing narrative: the 16th Street Baptist Church replaced its shattered white Jesus with a dark-skinned icon. “The holy face of Christ,” the authors lament, “had to have a race.” In this sense, they echo a much longer strand of Christian moralizing. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica states in an expressly theological register the puzzle that animates The Color of Christ: Was it fitting that God should become incarnate? In other words, what was the point of the Divine taking bodily form? The downsides seem so numerous: bodies are flawed, flesh is prone to failure, and physical forms are read through temporal eyes, the eyes of limited societies. Aquinas knew that bodies are read through culture and history, and he argued that Jesus’ body suffered that fate for a salvific purpose. The Color of Christ suggests, simply, that no matter this purpose, Christ’s incarnation is a racist realization. Such an observation must be considered alongside the accounts of believers who have seen more in Christ than the designated color of his skin.

Review: The Color of Christ

Reggie L. Williams

Reggie L. Williams is an assistant professor in Christian ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary.

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey. The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 281 pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-3572-2.

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey’s The Color of Christ presents readers a detailed engagement with contentious subject matter. Religion, politics, and race are often taboo conversation topics, especially in mixed company. But this work is neither shy nor pretentious about bringing all three subjects into conversation.

The authors bookend the narrative with riveting images from the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. On a Sunday morning in September, 1963, four African American girls were killed when the church was infamously bombed—not many days after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his captivating “I have a dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The blast also damaged the face of a stained-glass image of a white Jesus. Blum and Harvey’s prologue demands that we ponder the implications of the presence of that white Jesus in that space and in that moment. Were there any connections between Jesus, the lives of the killers, and the lives of the children? What was Jesus doing there?

After the prologue, we encounter an abundance of historical content to assist us in answering those questions. But, if one were not careful, one could read the book and come away thinking of Jesus in the United States as primarily a figment of creative American minds. In Blum and Harvey’s account, Jesus may seem to be nothing more than a shape-shifting, community fetish of time-bound ideas, tooled by specific groups, at specific times, for power grabs. But that would be too narrow a read.

Instead, those who read The Color of Christ might note how the authors pay attention to the rhetoric surrounding aesthetic representations of Christ that demonstrate the potency of the relationship between race, religion, and politics in American history. Indeed, race, religion, and politics have been so bound together in the U.S. that, as Blum and Harvey so eloquently describe, images of Jesus have served to represent divine rights to white political, cultural, and social authority, as well as hope for the racially oppressed.

For example, Blum and Harvey make note of the fraudulent “Publius Lentulus” letter. They describe the “letter”—a document supposedly written by a governor of Judea during Jesus’ of Nazareth’s life, a man named Publius Lentulus, who was an eyewitness to Jesus’s appearance. But Blum and Harvey point out that it was in fact written centuries after Jesus (between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries), and served primarily to describe Jesus visually as a European male, physically and morally. That is precisely the letter’s value; it was a device meant to legitimize white power and authority from the era of slavery through to the civil rights struggle.

I agree with the authors’ take on the letter, but its significance demands a deeper engagement. The fraudulent letter’s white interpretation in America grew out of a longstanding European racial ethos. This ethos held Europe as more than a geographical location or a collection of empires. Instead, Europeans saw themselves as burdened with the task of civilizing the rest of the world in the age of discovery. As Charles Mills argues in The Racial Contract (1997), Europe was also a people-making process through which so-called “savages” in the uncharted territories were brought into existence (supposedly discovered), and simultaneously Christianized, as they were “civilized.” Willie Jennings’ The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010) has shown that European empires fused Christian sensibilities with imperial interests, mingling colonial desires with their distribution of Jesus. This imperial drive produced an added result of birthing the modern language of race, which worked to situate native bodies in colonized spaces, in relationship to the divine authority of European empires over colonized subjects. Empires proclaimed themselves as saviors of the world. However, multiple European empires competed for ownership of Jesus. From the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century Iberian Peninsula in the south, to the seventeenth century British Empire in the north, Europeans conflicted over differing interpretations of Christ for their missionary endeavors and quest for legitimacy in their claims for power. I will say more about the international reach of the white Christ below.

The Color of Christ introduces us, in the first chapter, to the European power struggle over Jesus, in the early stages of European colonization of the Americas. The Spanish Empire, and its Catholicism, was first to assert influence in the Americas. When the Puritans arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the conflict present among the Empires in Europe became one that was present within the colonies in America. And in Blum and Harvey’s analysis, that conflict fueled the drama of religion and politics that occupies the remainder of the book.

Native Americans and enslaved Africans were caught in the middle of the European struggle for Christ, played out in new religious movements and wars. Catholics (Iberian Christians) in the “New World,” and the later arriving Puritan colonists (north European Protestants), set the stage for the long-standing contest between Europeans in America that made Jesus into a totem of the powerful. In contrast to the Catholics, the Puritans were iconoclasts, and like the Native Americans and the Africans, Puritans also knew the sting of physical abuse by Catholics and the Anglican Church. Yet, as Blum and Harvey indicate, for Africans in the colonies the struggle for Christ began in the transatlantic slave trade as cargo.

For Puritans, Christ was represented in the community by nothing more than a disciplined Christian lifestyle. But in their interaction with Native Americans and Africans, leading Puritans like Cotton Mather had difficulty seeing the life of a Christ-follower as one that was possible for them. For Mather, they were perpetually the religious and cultural other. This notion justified Africans’ status as cargo. The theological performance of race, with its connection of white to Jesus, included non-white people in its Christian worldview as subordinates.

At this point in their argument, Blum and Harvey claim that a white Christ was not yet present in America. But it is clear that his absence was purely aesthetic. The rhetoric and worldview of the white Christ had crossed the ocean with the Europeans. Cotton Mather’s stated assumptions about the potential for Native Americans and Africans to be Christians indicate a devotion to a racist white Jesus that was performed in customs and rituals unfamiliar to non-whites. This devotion to the religious performance of whiteness occurred prior to its being depicted artistically as white. It was not long before the rhetoric of power, race, and religion was indeed aesthetically identified in images of the white Jesus, portrayed in artwork, literature, and later in film. The impact has been nothing less than epic.

But Blum and Harvey also point out that oppressed people were also acquainted with a hermeneutic of Jesus. The power of The Color of Christ lies within the way the authors juxtapose the oppressive white “Publius Lentulus” Jesus with the Jesus of the oppressed who see him as co-sufferer. The white Jesus cannot impose himself in such a way that disallows him from being interpreted organically within the experience of oppressed communities. Ironically, even Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ (1941) painting, the quintessential representation of the Publius Lentulus letter, served to illustrate the power of theological reinterpretation within a black experience; a Jesus made by and for oppressors, reinterpreted by and for the oppressed.

Historically, however, the people oppressed by the white Christ were not only in America. Here I want to return to my claims made above. Blum and Harvey briefly mention Dietrich Bonhoeffer and, alongside the struggle laid out in each chapter, it indicates an implicit attention to the global influence of the racialized Jesus in their analysis. The author’s arguments could be strengthened by more explicit attention to the international presence and reach of the white Christ.

Bonhoeffer’s theological education in post-imperial Germany was dripping with the rhetoric of politics, power, and religion. He became a theologian in that German environment. What he saw from leading intellectuals, artists, poets, and preachers during the Harlem Renaissance—while he was a postdoctoral student in Harlem, New York, from 1930 to 1931—was instrumental in disrupting the work of the German white Christ in his theological imagination. The language of the die Herrenvolk, or “master race,” alongside die Untermenschen, or “the subhuman races,” in interwar Germany proved deeply problematic to Bonhoeffer, but not to his other German Christian colleagues. His exposure to the impact of the white Christ on oppressed people in America was not an experience they shared. But it made him capable of seeing the white Christ and its danger in Germany. Just as he did in Harlem, Bonhoeffer chose devotion to the Christ who knew the experience of maltreatment by the imperial white Christ. In Germany, that belief him to advocate solidarity with oppressed Jews, rather than safety with powerful Aryan Christians. Hence, the American white Christ proved to be no less than a sibling of the white Christ in Germany. The two were at least related, if not the same person.

Response to Panel Reviews

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey

Edward J. Blum is an associate professor of history at San Diego State University and Paul Harvey is a professor of history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

We are honored to have the Journal of Southern Religion host this group forum on The Color of Christ, from scholars for whom we have so much respect and admiration. We are thankful for their time, care, and challenging critiques.

We ask readers to forgive the length of this response. The questions and points get to the depth of how and why we do scholarship and only a long answer would take seriously the points raised here.

Since we cannot respond to each particular question, we have lumped the critiques into three categories: selections and formats (which we titled “Choose You This Day”); evidence (which we titled “The Evidence of Things Unseen”; and gaps (which we title “Hidden Since the Beginning of the World”). Our conclusion honors the Paul Harvey with “(Not) the Rest of the Story.”

“Choose You This Day”: Inclusions, Exclusions, and the Art of Historical Narrative Arcs

In 1770, America’s first African American poet Phillis Wheatley ventriloquized evangelist George Whitefield (whom she had ventriloquize Jesus) to write that Africans in the New World could “chuse” to walk in God’s path. If they did so, they could become “sons, and kings, and priests to God.” In a realm where African Americans had few choices, this was an important one (perhaps the most important one to Wheatley). The choices she had, and the ones we have more than 200 years later, are distinct and historically contingent. This is true even of scholarship. The choice of sources, groups, and formats is different today than it was fifty years ago, or even ten years ago. For this reason, any book that transverses more than 400 years of history in our era of massive amounts of secondary and primary data must account for its choices.[1]

As Wheatley intoned, choice mattered—a lot—when it came to Jesus. Where, how, and with whom shall we walk? As Stephen Prothero and Richard Fox have pointed out, Jesus has been ubiquitous throughout much of American history.[2] Our approach was to balance inclusion with influence. We were committed to demonstrating the various and complex ways that people interact (as individuals, families, and groups) so we felt compelled to include as many participants as we could. Yet we always had our eyes on the influence certain groups and particular images could and did obtain. This is why, for as much as we focused on diversity, we also stayed attuned to infrastructure improvements, technological developments, commercial adventures, capital acquisition, and time. The Color of Christ shows that particular people at certain times were able to harness those factors more than others to control the production and distribution of imagery, as well as the interpretation of that imagery. This invariably accounted not only for which images of Jesus have obtained notoriety, but also for which ones we highlighted.

But before the issue of inclusion can be reckoned with, the problem of format must be explained. The Color of Christ is an historical monograph: not a poem (like Wheatley’s), not a survey, not a website, not a novel, not a painting, and not an edited volume of essays. The monograph format lends itself to certain voices and kinds of narrative arcs. We proceeded chronologically with the following convictions: figures act within particular contexts; prior events, experiences, and structures influence those contexts; and actions (that are built upon the past) then influence possibilities, behaviors, and choices for future individuals and groups. This may all sound rudimentary to historians, but it is important to establish for the multiplicity of readers of The Color of Christ.

Chronological narrative was not the first version of The Color of Christ. In embryo, the idea was conceived as a collection of essays where different scholars would probe the confluence of race and religion vis-à-vis particular Christ images (such as Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ” or the Christus).

After we ditched the collection idea and decided to write our own monograph, we structured it thematically. Distinct chapters followed iterations of red Christs, black Christs, and white Christs from the colonial period to the present. The result was a mess. While it showcased many of our key points (such as the ways many people of color followed and created images of white Christ figures and the ways many so-called white individuals turned to non-white representations of Jesus), it had too many problems. Scholars may have liked it, but general readers would have ignored it. The thematic approach had us marching over the same historical terrain repeatedly. The manuscript also segregated people of different racial and religious classifications in ways we know lived realities did not follow. With the help of excellent external peer reviewers, we scrapped that approach and turned to what we know best: chronology, change over time, and causation.

Jennifer Graber points this out nicely: Color of Christ is a narrative history with historically organized chapters. Our chronological approach stemmed in large part from our training as historians. Our scholarly discipline drives us to the central elements of change over time and of what forces make (or inhibit) change.

This should not indicate that it lacks theory or critical analysis. We subjected each topic and subject to concepts within critical race theory, past and current trends in religious studies, cultural anthropology, childhood psychology, and sociological insights. Foucault is not quoted, but his writing on metaphysics and materiality influenced us. You will never read us parsing out Martin Buber’s I-it and I-Thou theories, but they drove us and compelled us to revise him, and to focus our book on we-Thou relationships where groups create images of Jesus that then influence individuals.

One drawback to the chronological approach is jamming people and events into broader contexts that may not represent them or their time as the people themselves would. For instance, did Wovoka and his Ghost Dance followers see themselves as having anything to do with post-Civil War Reconstruction (where we situate them)? Or, did Mormons see themselves at all connected to the civil rights debates when they erected the Christus (where we situated them)?

Another drawback is that we could not tarry long with any particular image to discuss the multiplicity of its meanings. Without doubt, there are many, many meanings within any visual image—whether art, sculpture, or song. The excellent works of David Morgan and Kirk Savage demonstrate those points marvelously, and each image, film, or statue we discuss should be studied more deeply for its mass of meanings.[3] We agree wholeheartedly with Laurie Maffly-Kipp in that emphasis.

Another reviewer (Christophe Ringer of Vanderbilt University) at another venue put it this way, The Color of Christ is a saga with contingent sagas within it. In an age when any metanarrative must be questioned, we are glad to see the one we constructed already dissected for analytical purposes. Certainly there are other ways to tell the narratives of race, religion, and their multitude of intersections. Ours was consciously chosen to highlight the broader points we were trying to make about race and religion in United States history: that no story can be told in a racially segregated fashion; that continental and regional histories are crucial if we want to claim to study the United States; that scholarship on religion must take race and critical race theory seriously (even if one’s subjects never mention key words or terms in racial lexicons); that technology and modes of production are essential; and that religion is not purely about ideas in the abstracted mind, but also about experiences of the body, which are considered to touch deeper recesses of emotions and souls and that are linked to material objects.

Professor Graber is also right to mention that inclusion is not the same as incorporation. The Color of Christ follows the particular narrative arc of the American nation-state (a history largely defined by and for certain groups). This makes some stories emblematic and others more difficult. For instance, when some white Americans of the late twentieth century had visions of Jesus as a lone figure and with no other supernatural items in view, how exactly is this distinct from Native American visions that contained so many other envisioned beings? Put simply, each is complicated in its own way, but our narrative doubtless explains the first better than the second. Although we endeavored to respect those differences as best we could (such as examples from Shekomeko natives singing about the bloody side wounds of Jesus, or Hurons envisioning Jesus as Manitou, or of Cherokee encountering Jesus as one of their “little people,” or the recent artist Norval Morriseau portraying Jesus in sacred robes), we could not detail each of these moments. We look forward to reading the works of others who not only analyze more comprehensively those stories, but also approach them from the historical trajectories of the person or group.

Graber also asks where could The Color of Christ have begun if we started from the perspective of Native Americans. Within the narrative, there are a number of such places and the narrative flow would have been quite similar. We could have begun with Wovoka, his shell game of personal, spiritual, and religious identity, the violence over the Ghost Dance, and then one of his followers shocked that he could ever die. We could have begun with the cognitive dissonance and spiritual confusion Native American boys felt when sitting in a boarding school, having their hair cut short to become “civilized” as they peered at a painting of a white Jesus with long hair who represented the paragon of civilization. Or we could have started with Native American responses to The Passion of the Christ or the Jeremiah Wright media spectacle to address why discussions of their racial pasts and present are so often left out in public discussions.

And now to the particulars of choice, as Phillis Wheatley explained, which are so important. Darren Grem asks why we included more on Mormons, for instance, than Latinos? Put most simply, this is a book about Jesus, not about Mary. Regarding Latino/as, we were influenced by Thomas Tweed’s, Robert Orsi’s, and Robert Treviño’s works on the Madonna that showcase clearly the profound impact of Marian art in various Catholic communities. To fully respect Latino/a cultures and history, we would have had to include much more on the histories of the Madonna—not just for them, but for others as well (including the pop singer “Madonna” herself). Even more, The Color of Christ is not principally about political, economic, or numerical might; it is about how different factors have driven how Americans represent Jesus and how those representations then rebound to influence political, economic, and social factors.

Since we did not have room for this, we leave it to others to further the discussion and hope to have a forum at the blog Religion in American History on it. (At our talk at Vanderbilt University, moreover, a listener similarly challenged our lack of focus on Asian American imagery of Jesus, or Asian American history more generally; while the book discusses that history more than the listener realized, it is certainly not a primary focus, and we plan to have also a forum at Religion in American History on it to further develop this aspect of the book)

Professor Grem’s question could be fashioned from another angle: how could we separate Jesus imagery from those that depict his family and friends? Family historians, for instance, could revise our entire work to show how Jesus in community was telling and when he was isolated into “Head of Christ” paintings, it spoke to a spiritualized individualization that has a history. These rich and complex stories need more storytellers and we look forward to hearing them.

In that same vein, our desire to respect the sources we included and not to devalue others with little thought led us consciously to avoid messianic figures who were rarely conflated with Jesus. A prime example of this is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the figure Matthew Avery Sutton has recently identified as crucial to Fundamentalist conservative political culture of the 1930s and 1940s as an “anti-Christ” figure whose New Deal liberalism served as their antithesis.[4] Vis-à-vis Jesus, one could study the resonance between political cartoons of FDR that presented him as a tall man among child-like organizations or people and the depictions of Jesus with little children (representations we study as they emerged from the Gilded Age in song and art). Again, this is another avenue for scholarly work that we eagerly anticipate done by others.

There are many other examples from politics and culture we could have included. There is the cinematic character of Neo (or the “One”) from The Matrix (1999). When we are first introduced to the sci-fi messiah, a drugged-out program hacker exclaims, “my own personal Jesus Christ” and then “you look a little whiter than usual.” Or, even more recently, although Jesus is never visualized in the film Prometheus (2012) (spoiler alert) it is his crucifixion that led humanity’s original creators to wish to exterminate them, and this unseen Jesus is presumed to be white by the film’s visual effects.

In the end, we acknowledge that our format, structure, and selections limited how much we could include, but we also believe that moving chronologically and paying close attention to who and what made change over time showcased how racial concepts and religious cultures wrapped themselves so tightly together in the bodily form of Jesus that to try to separate them in scholarly studies only warps what happened in the past.

“The Evidence of Things Unseen”: The Omnipresence of Race and the Embodiment of Religion

Only a few decades after Phillis Wheatley’s use of George Whitefield to appeal to “Africans,” the Pequot Methodist William Apess tried to construct a “looking-glass” for white Americans to see what seemed unseeable: how emerging racial categories, discriminations based upon classifications, and perspectives on human differences were being built upon claims about the race and body of Jesus. In his “Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” he castigated white Christian men for refusing marriages between Native American men and white women, for segregating church life, and for limiting life chances for people of color. To Apess, the creation of Jesus as white and the rejection of him as “colored” was essential to white power.

Racial dominance was contingent upon that which could no longer be seen: Jesus himself.[5]

We followed Apess by trying to create looking-glasses for Americans to see race and religion in new ways. The Color of Christ examines the material to understand how others considered the immaterial. We focused upon the embodied to comprehend concepts considered by many to be disembodied. In short, we looked for the ways race has been imbued with religious values (in part, made omnipresent and timeless) and how religion has been fashioned with racial tools (mapped onto and into bodies which are defined, classified, and placed into hierarchies).

Professor Maffly-Kipp is right to point out that we conflate “race as a social category, a phenotype, and a theological statement.” And that is exactly a central point of the book (as is embodied in the image from the photographer William Gedney which graces the cover of the book). As scholars, we recognize the distinctions between social categories, presentations of bodies, and theological viewpoints. We recognize the fluidity of symbols. But many of our subjects do not and they often fold them together seamlessly. Children do not recognize the distinctions; laypeople do not necessarily as well. The Color of Christ is intended to show that notions of groups, bodies, and beliefs have been so intertwined that it is impossible to make sense of one without considering the others. This is another reason certain pieces of evidence are highlighted and others are not.

According to Grem, unlike our treatment of Latino/a culture, our examination of Mormonism is extensive and he credits this to the so-called Mormon moment. But The Color of Christ was written with no forethought to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential aspirations. Our attention on Mormonism stems from its theological insights (or whatever one wants to call them, “revelations” or “creations”) and notions of corporeal bodies. Joseph Smith claimed to have a theophany. He agonized over representing it in written form, and even described what he deemed “indescribable.” As Mormonism developed, its focus on the body in a century when bodies were being bought and sold, moved and violated, was crucial. We take Mormon theologies quite seriously, and when they collapsed divides of heaven and earth, claimed there is no spiritual matter (but only physical), and viewed not only Jesus, but also God the Father, as incarnated beings with physical bodies, we were compelled to analyze how that theology played out in the terms of an America growing in its obsession with defining, separating, and creating hierarchies about bodies.

This brings us to the Christus, only mentioned within one paragraph of the book. Since Jamie Reno’s story on The Color of Christ in The Daily Beast and then the more academic discussion in our cover story for the “Review” magazine of the Chronicle of Higher Education, there has been a great deal of discussion about this white marble Jesus first erected in Salt Lake City in the middle of the 1960s. Responses have been vociferous on all sides. Many thoughtful scholars and believers have responded that the Christus had nothing to do with race, that it is purely white marble. Others, such as those we spoke to in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia, thought it was obvious that the image was racialized and has current racial meaning. Public discussion indicates to us that the Christus speaks to the power of insider/outsider differences when it comes to matters of religion.

To say that the Christus is white only in the color of its marble is to slight other racial markers: the long, straight, flowing hair; the forked and straight beard; the thin nose. In the 1960s, would anyone have called this individual “black” or “African”? Obviously, not. The broader point is this: while Americans in other places in the country battled over images of Jesus (painting icons much like the Christus with black paint or setting up new, darkened images of Jesus), LDS leaders erected a gigantic, muscular Jesus with long straight hair. It is not the case that we have “no evidence,” as Maffly-Kipp charges. The Christus is the evidence. It is not necessary for Mormons at the time to consider it or to say it is racially-charged for it to be so. The fact that the statue was first designed by a European does not address what it meant in the 1960s.

Certainly, the Christus has had and has other meanings. It was an icon to “Mormon Christianity” as John Turner has explained. But it was also a huge, white marble Jesus with flowing long hair placed at the heart of a religious tradition that until 1978 segregated African American men from many sacred tenets. For us to interpret this as having something to do with race seems almost over-determined.

Let’s consider this from another tack: Thomas Jefferson may not have considered his phrase “all men are created equal” to have racial meaning in 1776, but it certainly did to Richard Allen and David Walker. Would we be wrong to point out that “men” in the case of the Declaration did not include all men? If we offered a feminist critique of the word “men” in this context, would we be told it had nothing to do with gender and that we had no evidence? If we wrote a history of how capitalism infused American culture and included sections on language (such as “borrowed time”) or sports (such as football versus baseball) or childhood development (such as the resonance between baseball cards and stock trading), would we be challenged for missing the times when capitalism really affects society?

The Christus is emblematic of the much larger point we were making: that notions of Christ’s whiteness became so normative that backlash is almost inevitable when one points out the whiteness or offers another image. None of this should suggest that the Christus or any other image of Jesus cannot have other meanings. Encounters with whitened Christ figures, as we document time and again in the narrative, can lead to profound anti-racist behaviors or to experiences that are not particularly racialized (such as dealing with a drug addiction or the death of a loved one).

The privilege of saying that race matters more in certain circumstances than in others is a racialized privilege that some people have and others do not. For instance, neither Blum nor Harvey feel the experience of driving as racialized because they are deemed white by society (and the police). But if they had different phenotypes, they may worry when a police officer pulls up behind them or if they passed by la migra.The benefits from whiteness can be there even when we do not speak or acknowledge them, and defenses of the Christus as “non racial” or beyond race seem to fit that kind of myopia.

This brings us back to Professor Maffly-Kipp’s points. Scholars may want to look at more than just our paragraph on the Christus. In Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus, he makes almost the same exact point about the Christus and writes, “Mormons have always imagined Jesus as a white man.”[6] The Color of Christshows this was not the case. At first and in the official version of the first vision, Joseph Smith provided no racial markers for Jesus or God. The whitening of Jesus for Mormons was a historical move, and Mormons could have chosen other avenues (as they did in other long-standing European cultures, such as in marriage).

One wonders what William Apess would say to those who claim the Christus has nothing to say about race. What would an “Indian’s Looking-Glass for Mormons” look like? Is the point of our scholarship to close windows or to open them? Or are we to build them?

The Mormon examples, and many other points more fully developed throughout the book (like our detailed attention to Jesuits, Moravians, and southern folk artists, unmentioned in any of these reviews), should lead to more work on American racial and religious imaginaries in the world. In this regard, we echo Reggie Williams in his call for more scholarship, as well, on how these American images and debates then played a role in theological developments beyond the United States and material experiences with the sacred throughout the world. In many parts of the world, Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ,” Jim Caviezel’s depiction of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, and Campus Crusade’s film “Jesus” (with its accompanying website catch phrase, “because seeing is believing”), are venerated as capturing the image of the supposed son of God.

“Hidden Since the Beginning of the World”

More than one hundred years after Apess’s essay, Martin Luther King Jr. was presented explicitly with the problem of Christ’s whiteness. A writer asked him in 1957 why God would make Jesus white. In his answer, King offered his emerging political theology: it was the content of Christ’s character that mattered and not the color of his skin. But King then proceeded to acknowledged that Christ’s skin “was white.” Another reader responded that he was “disturbed” by King’s claim and asked for the evidence. King had none. Although King had read the Bible and knew there were no references to Christ’s whiteness there, and although King was busily challenging white supremacy in various forms, the notion that Jesus was somehow white seemed to be hidden so deeply within him that he even voiced it in response to a direct question about Christ’s race. By honing in moments like this, The Color of Christ tries to reveal the moments when racial perspectives have wrapped themselves in religious guises and presented themselves as existing, proverbially, from “the beginning of the world.” We endeavored to mine the gaps between utterances and assumptions, much like the hidden ones King exposed in his answers.

Many of the reviewers used the words “gap” or “gaps” when referring to The Color of Christ. Some praise us for filling the gaps of Prothero’s and Fox’s marvelous works. On other occasions, the groups or approaches we did not extensively cover are used to point out gaps in our work. In their recognition of what we missed (usually for reasons listed above), they may have missed our ultimate objectives—again, perhaps reading sometimes through the lens either of media presentations of our work or the well-worn historiographical thoroughfares we travel upon at times but run away from at others.

We were trying to examine those things hidden by many typical approaches to U.S. religious history. Search Mark Noll’s epic works for anything on childhood development or comedic culture or James Cone’s studies for how white Jesus figures could be used by blacks and whites alike to advance the liberation of people of color: you will be left disappointed.[7] It is not that they should have studied these facets, but the overall thrust of American religious history and its emphasis on religion as something of the mind has kept other powers and forces hidden.

Similarly, The Color of Christ was a resurrection program for whiteness studies among historians. Like it or not, one element of the study is the seeming ubiquity of whiteness and white power. To seek to rush it away is to ignore why certain people are targeted by the police and why others are not and to refuse to listen to voices past and present who speak truth against its power. If American historians abandon whiteness studies and they continue to neglect the role of religion in its constructions and re-constructions, they will miss much of why racial notions continue to survive despite the academic onslaught against the constructed concept of race.

We agree completely with Maffly-Kipp that one of the “most interesting” questions is this: “Is it possible for whites, in a racist society, to portray a white Jesus that is not stamped with the oppressor’s mark?” That, in fact, is a major element of the book. As we write on page 8 of the introduction: “The white Jesus, however, was never a stable or completely unifying symbol of white power. … Drawing Christ as white, moreover, could undermine the very authority of whiteness. Christ’s words of justice and mercy and his sacrificial crucifixion ran counter to white power and privilege. … This book charts the places where Christ’s whiteness was secretively transformed to undermine white power or to create experiences that mediated and challenged racial discrimination.”

The Color of Christ most certainly engages with the familiar topics of our disciplines: the roles of religion in the Spanish, French, and English adventures in the Americas, emergence of black Christianities, the politicization of religious values, the role of religion in the civil rights crusades and the rise of the New Right.

But more deeply, The Color of Christ tries to make sense of what sacred imagery in a race obsessed land means to children who have yet to learn how to say grace. It tries to connect how and why jokes about Christ’s body emerged only in the 1970s and exploded throughout American culture in the 1990s and then the new millennium (and why there are so few jokes, if any, about Jesus being Native American). The book tries to explain how the sexualized blood of Jesus in the colonial period drew attention away from the skin and hair of Jesus figures for Indians and Moravians alike. And it seeks to tell stories about America by linking technologies, cultural expressions and forms, personal experiences, and material objects in and around the body of Jesus.

Those who want to find insights to the well-trod questions of colonization and puritanism, the revolution and new republic, slavery, abolitionism, and land wars, imperialism, economic depressions, civil rights movements, and new political conservatism will find them here. But our hope is that our emphasis on childhood and technology, embodiment and the spirit, and laughter and tears will allow historians of American religion to pivot and face other topics, human experiences, and historical trajectories. These are the powers and forces hidden, too often, in American religious history and in critical race theory.

(Not) The Rest of the Story

When one of Howard Thurman’s white professors at Rochester Theological Seminary recognized his immense intellectual talents, he cautioned Thurman: “You are a very sensitive Negro man,” the well-meaning scholar began, “and doubtless feel under great obligation to put all the weight of your mind and spirit at the disposal of the struggle of your own people for full citizenship.” But, and this was an important but, “let me remind you that all social questions are transitory in nature and it would be a terrible was for you to limit your creative energy to the solution of the race problem.”

Thurman may have appreciated the concern, but was left to wonder: “what kind of response could I make to this man who did not know that a man and his black skin must face the ‘timeless issues of the human spirit’ together.”[8]

This is one of the tricks of studying race and religion throughout American history. “Skin” became a contingent factor in the “timeless.” The Color of Christ endeavors to unpack how “skin” is unavoidable when approaching “spirit” (both of which have so many meanings that change over time).

But this is not the rest of the story, even the moral rest of the story that one can take from The Color of Christ. We documented many moments in American past where people stopped looking at one form of Christ’s body and fixed their gaze on another: actual living human beings.

We leave readers to find their own moral meanings within The Color of Christ, but one for us is that obsessions with the body of the supposedly divine can blind us from seeing the actual bodies of hurting, striving, and living people. Another lesson would be that faith has been and is too powerful to escape embodiment in our culture. James Baldwin suggested that when we make new faces of Jesus, our goal should be to make “Christian love a reality.” With minds, eyes, and hands moved in that direction, images of Jesus can certainly be made to move beyond racial structures and prisons.[9]

Furthermore, the goal of The Color of Christ was never to be the last word on any of these subjects. We wanted to provide scholars and everyday people with resources to analyze the swirl of sacred imagery around them, and to have analytical tools to ask new and exciting questions. We did not want jargon or almost-impenetrable academic-ese to get in the way. We expected LDS members to defend themselves against the whiteness of the Christus, yet we also hoped that they would ask new questions about the racialization of their theologies and expressions of the sacred. We expected African Americans to rehearse their struggles over what kinds of images to have, yet we also hoped they would reckon with the distinctions between now and previous decades.

Megachurches, televangelism, economic growth, and new immigration have all transformed many African American churchgoers’ lives and we wanted those folks to have a more robust history to draw upon. We expected white evangelicals to claim that race no longer matters, yet hope that when they select books for their children, movies for missionary use, and how they display their nativity scenes, they may think of the portrayals and what it means for baby Jesus to have blue eyes.

And to our fellow southern historians, we wanted to offer them examples to include religious struggles and forces throughout the key moments of how that history is often taught. Conceptions of Christ in the South—from whites and blacks, slaveholders and slaves, musicians and artists, preachers and skeptics—are central to the book, for nowhere in the United States has Christ played a more central role than in the South.

We thank the reviewers here for asking so many of the questions we ourselves wrestled with and look forward to the works of others who do the heavy lifting and bear the burdens of uncovering more of the complex yet incomplete history traced in this book.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

2. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 157.↩

3. Philip D. Morgan, “Religious Diversity in Colonial Virginia: Red, Black, and White,” in From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Freedom in Virginia,ed. Paul Rasor and Richard E. Bond(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 75.↩

4. Bruce E. Steiner, “The Catholic Brents of Colonial Virginia: An Instance of Practical Toleration,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 70 (1962): 387–409.↩

5. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp↩

6. There is some excellent new work on toleration. For the early Republic see Chris Beneke, Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); for the colonial period see Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda, ed., The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Evan Haefeli wrestles with Dutch contributions to American ideas of religious liberty; see Haefeli, New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). I am also intrigued by the possibility of an Atlantic history of toleration. See Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).↩

7. ,For example, see John Frederick Woolverton, Colonial Anglicanism in North America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986), and Edward Bond’s chronically underappreciated Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000).↩

8. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).↩

9. On Patrick Copeland, see Edward D. Neill, Memoir of Reverend Patrick Copeland: Rector Elect of the First Projected College in the United States: A Chapter in the English Colonization of America (New York: Charles Scribner & Co, 1871); Shona Vance, “A Man for all Regions: Patrick Copland and Education in the Stuart World,” in Shaping the Stuart World 1603–1714: The Atlantic connection, ed. Allan I. MacInnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 79–116; Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219–254.↩

Reviews

Review: Southern Civil Religions

Edward L. Ayers

Edward L. Ayers is president of the University of Richmond.

Arthur Remillard. Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. 248 pp. ISBN 978-0-8203-3685-5.

Arthur Remillard argues that southerners wrestled over the meaning of the “good society,” appealing to transcendent conceptions of justice and truth as they tried to imagine what the South might become after its trials of slavery, war, and reconstruction. Despite its secular power, he argues, the white Protestant majority could not persuade, or force, their Jewish, Catholic, or African American neighbors to accept its monopoly on defining that good society. And neither could white males prevent the women of their own households from having visions of their own.

This is a refreshing perspective, more refreshing for showing—rather than merely asserting—the agency, resistance, and pride of those who could not control public discourse. Remillard’s book is richly populated by a cast of real people, stubbornly unique and stubbornly unwilling to fit into formulas. The author’s gift is to allow them to speak, to give us a chance to hear their own voices. He presents both “civil religion” and “the South” in quotation marks, acknowledging that those words do not mean all that they have seemed to mean in the past. He graciously thanks those who inspired him before he gently revises, expands, and perhaps even displaces their work. He shows that for all its apparent power—in historiography perhaps more than in its own time and place—the “cult” of the Lost Cause was often simply ignored by those who did not share in its allure.

The book focuses on one corner of the South—the wiregrass region of southern Georgia, northern Florida, and coastal Alabama. That corner embraced enough diversity and change to capture much of what was unfolding throughout the New South. It was a place crisscrossed by railroads and sprinkled with towns, firmly rooted in the slave South but pulled toward the power and money of the North, disdainful of Reconstruction but eager to set aside hard feelings for the reconciliation of white Americans. For Remillard, civil religion cannot be understood without a thorough grounding in civil life; here, the world of politics and economics serve not merely as background for the religious story, but constitute the charged and concrete world in which religion must live. Progress and reaction wrestle for people’s secular and sacred lives.

Remillard’s account of relations between blacks and whites is searing, filled with lynching and murder. He warns, however, that “the South’s moral and physical geography remained unsettled even though white authority was pervasive.” African American southerners defiantly imagined a “place for themselves built on a vision of the good society that emphasized freedom and equality” (77). The degree of uncertainty surrounding gender and religion was perhaps more surprising. Remillard evokes the subtle but persistent tensions surrounding ideas of moral progress and women’s place. “A devoted woman was both socially active and socially reticent,” he observes. “She was also a social progressive and an Old South romantic” (95). Remillard captures, too, the surprisingly large role played by Jews and Catholics in this part of the New South. Using civil religion as his focus, he shows that “some outsiders were not outsiders at all” (105). They made the case for their place in American society with “alternate vision of the good society using unique cultural resources” (169).

This portrayal of the New South is humane and affirming, clear-eyed and yet refusing cynicism. In Remillard’s hands, civil religion becomes not a smothering uniformity but a vocabulary in which people of all backgrounds, even in the repressive South, claimed a place for their vision of a just America. This book is itself an example of the benefits of a broader and more inclusive vision of what civil religion might mean.

Review: Religion Enters the Academy

Kelly J. Baker

Kelly J. Baker is a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

James Turner. Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. 124 pp. ISBN 978-0-8203-3740-1.

In Religion Enters the Academy, James Turner traces the earliest American formulations of religious studies as a discipline distinct from European forbears in both motivations and eventually practice. This short book, based upon Turner’s George H. Shriver lectures at Stetson University, moves from colonial contact, to American “disinterest” in what Turner terms “non-European religions,” to American surveys of world religions, to William James as the narrative’s culmination (7). The aim is to display the “specifically American background of the academic study of religion” (7). Turner begins by examining European encounters with indigenous peoples in the New World. He points out that the “Spanish invaders” showed “great curiosity” as well as “confusion and contempt” when encountering the “religions” of Native Americans (8). The English colonists ignored the question of religion until the eighteenth century, and French missionaries learned languages to communicate and to convert. In spite of these early encounters often fraught with violence and intolerance, Turner argues that “the American response to any and all non-European religions before 1800” could be categorized as “nearly utter disinterest” (12). What becomes clear is that Turner’s formulation of disinterest exists in the realm of study rather than lived interactions between colonists and Native Americans, which was anything but disinterested. This scholarly disinterest transformed into interest in the hands of deists, seekers of the universal qualities of religious truth. Yet deists were also not disinterested. They sought to criticize Christianity by turning to other examples of religion globally. When rare discussion of non-European religions by Christian ministers (like Cotton Mather) appeared, Turner writes that it “repeated traditional, abstract censure of treacherous Muslims and benighted heathens” (18). Americans before 1800 lacked desire for the study of religions, but they did not hesitate in their condemnations or caricatures of “non-European religions.”

Turner appears bothered by this lack of interest in what we now term “world religions,” especially from the intelligentsia of the American Enlightenment. “Enlightened inquirers,” he notes, “ought to have hungered to know of the religions of any and every non-European culture” (21). Turner continues, “They utterly failed to live up to our expectations” (21). Perhaps they fail to live up to the author’s expectations of intellectual life and curiosity. What remains, according to Turner, is that some Americans, particularly Christian ministers, were interested in comparing Christianity and world religions for less vaunted scholarly aims. These efforts sought to glorify the supposed material and spiritual riches of Christianity compared to the poverty and decline of “non-European religions.” Interested comparison occurred for more sectarian goals rather than academic ones.

The comparative streak continued through many authors of early world religion texts in America. The Unitarian Hannah Adams, for instance, compiled a dictionary of world religions with three revisions that began as a “compendium of Christian disputes” but included Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, paganism, and Native American religions (27). Her Alphabetic Compendium (1784) proved to be “the first American attempt to survey religions throughout the world” (28). Yet Turner is dismissive of Adams, as he is later of Lydia Maria Child, as an amateur, who proves not quite scholarly enough to be labeled a “pioneer” of the academic study of religion (31). To do so would “seriously . . . overestimate her competence” (31). To further his critique of Adams, Turner notes that her motivation for writing was problematic as she attempted to sort out Christian disputes and schisms. Her obvious Christian leaning overshadows her compilation of the first American survey text. Intriguingly, religious attachment does not seem quite as unsettling in Turner’s valorizing descriptions of male Transcendentalists who sought universal truth in other religions to see “how their doctrines fit with Christian teaching” (38). While male Transcendentalists were not engaged in “disinterested scholarship,” their approaches “ultimately had big consequences for learning” (39). Yet he does not make the same comparison of Adams or Child. Turner further suggests that the Reverend James Freeman Clarke’s work was “far more erudite” than Child’s work because “he did not need to write quickly to keep his pantry full” (47). Clarke appears as a “more serious student of religions” (47). Thus, the Unitarian and Transcendentalist approaches become the central component of Turner’s argument as well as the more likely beginnings of the academic study of religion, which is an interestingly gendered position. Historian Bonnie Smith writes poignantly of the assumptions about male historians as professional and female historians as amateurs in The Gender of History(1998), which Turner, unfortunately, appears to replicate here in his claims about the seriousness of male compilers of survey texts.

In Turner’s genealogy, liberal Protestantism becomes the basis of the earliest American academic inquiries to world religions. It should be noted that these early scholars employing disinterest or engaging other religions respectfully still held views of Christian superiority. Even as world religions emerged as an academic study, the “anxieties and hopes of a liberalizing Protestantism” remained firmly entrenched (55). This characterization of the American study of religion is a tantalizing glimpse of the religious impulses latent in the study of religion. What might this argument suggest about the development of the study more largely in the U.S.? How might this claim relate to current discussions of the study of American religions in particular?

The strongest part of Religion Enters the Academy is the brief history of the professionalization of religious studies as a discipline in the late nineteenth century at Harvard, Princeton, Boston University, and the University of Chicago. Turner ably documents how the study of comparative religion was “closely tied to academic world of Christian theology and biblical studies” (63). The American Academy of Religion, the author reminds us, was founded in 1964 emerging out of the National Association of Biblical Instructors (63). The earliest moments of this budding discipline focused on ideas and scriptures, which meant that religions with texts mattered more. Non-textual or “primitive” religions only became significant in their relationships with scriptural traditions. The early distinctions between words and practice, history and anthropology, still resonate in the academic study of religion today, refracted through an endless variety of subfields and methods for study. That legacy, however, is not Turner’s concern. His work ends with a meditation of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) as groundbreaking because of the focus on individual (interior) religious experience, which is becoming a much more strident conversation in the twenty-first century than it was in the early twentieth.

Overall, Turner’s volume is an intriguing study of the origins of religious studies in America and its relationship to liberal Protestantism that might be of use to any religious studies scholar. His reflection proves suggestive of current conversations about what “religious studies” is—or if the discipline should exist at all. However, Turner’s renderings of interest, disinterest, and engagement left this reader more frustrated than enlightened as the singular focus on “academic” approaches ignored the ways in which “religion” as a category was worked out in encounters in everyday life. Americans were seldom disinterested as they engaged each other and labeled what could count as “religion.”

Review: Dark Faith

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner

Jill Peláez Baumgaertner is a professor of English and dean of humanities and theological studies at Wheaton College.

Susan Srigley, ed. Dark Faith: New Essays on Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. 219 pp. ISBN 978-0-268-04138-0.

An unfortunate development among many contemporary critics of the fiction of Flannery O’Connor is a propensity to skate right over her theology. Several examples of this oversight are extant, the most dramatic being Brad Gooch’s 2009 biography, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor,which presents O’Connor’s faith as a mere peripheral and idiosyncratic aspect of her personality. Fortunately, Dark Faith is not one of these books. Rather it is a collection of essays by critics who are careful to relate O’Connor’s fiction to her profoundly Roman Catholic faith, delving deeply into her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, to reveal the intricacies of an aesthetic that is both grounded in theology and true to the most stringent demands of the art of fiction.This is a book that will appeal to the reader who has been attracted to O’Connor’s grotesque characters but who has also struggled with the apparent darkness of her vision. As a student once said to me after reading his first O’Connor story: “How could she be Christian?” The answer is complex, but it is directly connected to the scandal of the cross and its attendant violence. The authors of this collection of essays start from that point of understanding and develop angles of vision that peel open a novel permeated with both suffering and grace.

Richard Giannone shows how O’Connor has respect for the humanity of even the darkest of sinners and the most adamant of unbelievers. In fact, he insists, in her fiction unbelief becomes “one way to God” (31). John F. Desmond develops the importance of the protagonist Rayber’s early life in forming him as a contradictory figure—highly rational yet subject, because of his baptism, to feeling an overwhelming and non-rational love that floods his being. He is a theodicist, an Ivan Karamazov, who rejects any God who allows children to suffer. Unlike most other critics, Desmond sees ambiguity at the end of the novel as Rayber, knowing his child has been drowned, waits for the hurt to begin and instead feels nothing. Desmond posits that, as is the case with so many of O’Connor’s anti-heroes, the possibility is left open that Rayber might suddenly turn back and accept the grace of God. Another approach to the novel is developed by Gary M. Ciuba, who explores the pervasiveness of forsaken children in O’Connor’s fiction, including The Violent Bear It Away. He connects this theme with the Fall and the soul’s resulting orphan state, but he also shows that at the end of the novel the orphan becomes a child of God.

Jason Peters emphasizes the importance in O’Connor’s work of the particular rather than the general, the concrete rather than the abstract, and the person of Jesus rather than an abstract idea of God. In this novel, Rayber is drawn to the abstract, and Peters demonstrates how abstraction violently separates individuals from each other and from themselves. Ruthann Krechel Johansen explores the influence of Simone Weil on O’Connor, delving into Weil’s thinking to consider how easy it is for the individual to choose affliction rather than God. Scott Huelin feels that the novel explores the question of what it means to be made in the image of God. Focusing on three characteristics of imago Dei—reason, will, and love—Huelin shows how three of the novel’s major characters embody those qualities, even if they also represent perversion of those qualities. P. Travis Kroeker presents a strong argument linking the novel with the apocalyptic vision of John, the prophet, and tying this vision closely to the Eucharist and baptism. Working not only with the title of the novel but also with the epigraph and what he feels is the pervasiveness of the influence of the Gospel of Matthew on the work, Karl E. Martin shows how Tarwater’s prophetic calling is transformed by his exposure to Bishop, the idiot child, who represents the messianic kingdom of heaven. Finally, Susan Srigley, the editor of this fine collection, explores the development within The Violent Bear It Away of the doctrine of the communion of the saints which stands side by side next to the high value placed upon the individual soul and the necessary tension and balance between the double movement of self-renunciation and self-fulfillment.

After immersing oneself in this rich variety of theological points-of-view regarding O’Connor’s work, one cannot help but marvel at the depth of O’Connor’s thought, the pervasiveness of God’s grace in her work, and the love she bestowed on even the most unlovely of her characters, who all fall short of the glory of God but who, even in their unbelief, believe.

Review: Apples and Ashes

Gina Marie Caison

Gina Marie Caison is an assistant professor of English at Georgia State University.

Coleman Hutchison. Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-8203-4244-3.

At times it can seem as if the U.S. Civil War overdetermines considerations of the nineteenth-century South with all other events subsumed into either an inevitable lead-up or a necessary postscript to the war. While this singular focus can occlude other important events such as Indian Removal, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish American War, it also manages to obscure some aspects of the Confederacy itself. As Coleman Hutchison demonstrates in Apples and Ashes: Literature, Nationalism, and the Confederate States of America, Confederate cultural productions, particularly literary ones, have remained significantly under-examined despite an otherwise vigorous discourse about the meaning and legacy of the Confederate States of America. Hutchison’s study argues against the prevailing notions that the Confederacy produced little in the way of literary material and that even what does exist is not worth the serious scholar’s time. Withholding judgments on merit, Hutchison takes Confederate literature seriously and does so without sidestepping important questions of race, class, and gender in the South. He makes a compelling argument for why studying the literature of a failed national project yields valuable results.

In the introduction, Hutchison explains how a study of Confederate literature illuminates questions of nationalism, vectors of a transnational and international imagination, and issues of futurity and memory in popular culture. The book uses these nodes of inquiry to argue that perhaps more than any other moment, the spectacular failure of the C.S.A. allows scholars to examine in exacting detail the making and unmaking of a nation. Using a diverse archive that includes novels, poetry, popular song, and other print materials, Hutchison offers a literary analysis that draws from work in history, religious studies, and political theory. Although Apples and Ashesrelies heavily upon close readings, the range of material and the conclusions Hutchison draws should speak to scholars in disciplines outside of literary studies.

Even though Hutchison makes the case for the extent and scholarly value of literature produced from 1861 to 1865, he opens the study by examining earlier material from the Southern Literary Messenger. He uses this material to limn the preoccupations of the emergent southern literary imagination as it took on the concerns of “American” literature more broadly. In so doing, Chapter one highlights the ways in which regional discourse contributed to “a history of the future” as it attempted to justify an untenable racial and economic order (19). Challenging any neat teleology of secession, Hutchison shows how numerous events in the literary culture of the U.S. and the South, including the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), served as catalysts for the Civil War. Catalysts, Hutchison reminds the reader, only increase the rate of the reaction between components already present, and venues such as the Messenger showcased the varied elements of an emergent southern literary nationalism long before secession.

From there, Hutchsion moves on to examine a variety of cultural artifacts including Augusta Jane Evans’s novel Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice (1864), numerous Confederate poems, and the popular song “Dixie.” Chapters two through four move recursively through detailed analyses of individual genres, and from a methodological perspective, this organizational structure allows Hutchison to make productive speculations about the probable audiences and receptions of this body of work. Chapter two delivers a strong argument about the dangers of dismissing literary productions under the classification of “mere propaganda.” In Chapter three, Hutchison takes on the ways that poetry anthologies obscure the material histories of poetic works and their readers. Chapter four uses the single object of “Dixie” to complicate reception and publication histories that privilege the binaries of North/South, local/national, form/content, oral/written and ante/postbellum. In each of these chapters, Apples and Ashes offers a nuanced analysis of theories of nationalism using grounded, text-based analyses.

The final chapter turns towards the Confederate memoir, focusing almost exclusively on Loreta Jane Valesquez’s The Woman in Battle (1876). It is here that Hutchison’s arguments about the Civil War as an international phenomenon with contemporary transnational resonances most clearly come through. Segueing from the previous chapter on “Dixie,” this portion of the book also offers the most sustained discussion of how Confederate literature gave rise to the civil religion of the Lost Cause. Forgoing a conclusion, Hutchison offers a Coda to each chapter. The coda for chapter five generously opens up more room for future studies as Hutchison admits from the beginning that his is not exhaustive study of Confederate literature. Rather, using The Woman in Battle as a final case study, he proposes that studying this body of work will generate new stories of the region that are less “exceptionalistic and romantic” (202).

Apples and Ashes will certainly interest readers from many disciplines. As the first study of its kind, the book breaks important ground, but some readers may wish for more discussion of the entirety of the literary archive in question rather than the intensive focus on a few core examples. However, in this case, perhaps through these close readings we can see the relevance of this understudied body of work. While those in literary studies will appreciate the fine-tuned textual analysis, others may find themselves more interested in the larger archival and theoretical questions that Hutchison poses. The book makes a strong case for why the Confederacy matters for scholars interested in nationalisms and transnationalisms. Most admirably, Hutchison manages to take Confederate cultural productions seriously while not shying away from a strong critique of the indefensible racial politics they promote. He reminds his readers that although we may not like what this literature says or does, it is at our own peril that we ignore its existence.

Review: American Christianities

Bret E. Carroll

Bret E. Carroll is a professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus.

Catherine A. Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin, eds. American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 544 pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-7213-0.

Fifteen years ago, Thomas Tweed suggested that the time had come for Retelling U.S. Religious History (1997) in ways that decentered Christianity and proposed new narrative approaches grounded in the realities of cultural complexity and diversity. Yet Catherine Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin of the University of Chicago remind us in their introduction to American Christianities that Christianity remains at the center of most books on U.S. religious history, a reality only thinly cloaked by titles that use the generic term “religion.” Sparked initially by Tweed and handful of other leading religion scholars, Brekus and Gilpin attempt to advance the decentering process by relocating American Christianity’s dominance in this new framework. Their hefty anthology acknowledges Christianity’s ascendancy but exposes its enormous diversity and complexity and examines how the nation’s web of Christian traditions and practices have operated in its intricate cultural, social, and political matrix.

Two key arguments frame the book: that Christianity has shaped American life through “diversity and debate” rather than through a single unified message (2); and that American Christians have influenced the nation’s identity through informal coalitions and strategic alliances that have given them the appearance of acting as a unified bloc. Any appearance or assumption of unity not only represents an oversimplification but effectively mystifies Christianity’s place in our national life by obscuring these complex realities. Brekus and Gilpin propose an unpacking and demystification of a Christian presence that has been at once “omnipresent and invisible” (1).

The book’s twenty-two essays by scholars in history, religious studies, and American studies represent a wide range of topical and methodological lenses that the editors arrange under four broad headings. They begin with essays examining the dynamics and driving mechanisms of “Christian Diversity in America.” Catherine Albanese’s opening piece sketches a narrative in which a colonial era diversity of Christianities unfold while subjected to disestablishment, voluntarism, and “combinativeness” (41–42). Michael McNally suggests that different Native communities, in a process of religious “change” rather than “conversion,” improvised locally on a range of missionary traditions to generate the nation’s many Native American Christianities. Timothy Lee traces a trajectory “from the coercive to the liberative” among Asian and Latino Christians who, in the process, “help[ed] to de-Europeanize American Christianity” (84). Curtis Evans uncovers the doctrinal, denominational, class, cultural, and geographic fault lines that define the diversity of African American Christianities despite pressures toward uniformity imposed by the “burden of race.” Jonathan Sarna, arguing that state power has favored Christianity in the marketplace of American religion, advises that non-Christian religions “have enriched American Christianity” most fruitfully when competition has been truly free (129). And James Bennett, honing in on Puritan New England, the Second Great Awakening, the modernist-fundamentalist controversy of the early twentieth century, and mid- to late-twentieth century ecumenism, explores how American Christians have constantly renegotiated their relationships with one another, in ways ranging from violence to cooperation to compassion, amid an ever-expanding variety of Christian expression.

Part two, “Practicing Christianity in America,” considers change and diversity in the symbols, rituals, and texts that have made up Christian practice. W. Clark Gilpin observes Protestant and Catholic theologians varying widely and sometimes clashing dramatically as they approach issues of modernity from different intellectual perspectives and denominational traditions. Sally Promey looks past the simple notion of binary difference between Protestant and Catholic visual and material cultures to reveal more finely grained similarities and differences within and across individuals and groups. David Kling considers appropriations of the biblical Exodus theme, debates over the Bible in public education, and controversies over English translations of Bible to expose cultural tensions about identity, status, and power in a nation of competing Christianities and religious pluralism. Jeanne Halgren Kilde illustrates the variety of American Christianities by delineating differing practices of baptism, communion, and the sermon. Edith Blumhofer identifies in the historical process of competitive evangelizing among Catholics, Mormons, and initially dominant Protestants a mechanism by which American Christians have sharpened their own beliefs, tested the limits of religious freedom, clarified religious rights, and helped fashion a public space where religious discourse could flourish.

Part three turns attention to Christianity’s interactions with American cultural forms and institutions. Adapting to a modernizing, capitalist, and individualistic culture, American Christians generated an expanding diversity of interpretations by engaging in cultural debates and staking out their respective interests. After reflecting on how eighteenth-century evangelicals, Catholics at the turn of the twentieth century, and the late twentieth-century Word of Faith movement responded to the individualism, self-interest, and material emphasis of consumer culture, Catherine Brekus proposes that capitalism has driven the vitality and variety of American Christianities. Kristina Bross surveys a diverse captivity narrative tradition ranging from popular frontier tales of physical prowess that celebrate dominant groups to tentative and hesitant personal accounts of regeneration through affliction that make “Christian heroism possible for the relatively powerless” (319). Jon Roberts examines how the scientific community’s commitment to naturalistic method and detachment from biblical considerations during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries triggered new divisions within American Christianity as mainline Protestants, conservative evangelicals, Christian Scientists, Holiness and Pentecostal churches, neo-Orthodox Protestants, and neo-scholastic Catholics responded differently to its cultural authority. Rebecca Davis uses Norman Vincent Peale as a window into the diversity and complexity of mid-twentieth-century Protestant heteronormativity, seeing in Peale’s therapeutic method a liberal shift away from sin-based understandings of homosexuality and a model eventually adapted by conservative Protestants. Stewart Hoover outlines a transformation from an institutionalized and limited religious media presence that tacitly assumed a Protestant establishment to a fully blown, technologically driven media marketplace, pioneered by televangelists, that is catering to new generations of media-oriented religious seekers, leveling the cultural playing field, destabilizing religious authority, and radically rebalancing power relations. And Mark Noll suggests that New World conditions generated different American “distinctives” in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada (387).

The final section of the book, “Christianity and the American Nation,” focuses on how American Christians have contributed to national conversations about key social and political issues. Behind colonists’ responses to Quebec Act, mid nineteenth-century conflicts between Protestants and Catholics over education, and the activities of the Christian Right, Tracy Fessenden perceives an ongoing pattern of pluralism that emphasizes individual rights and has thus privileged Protestant Christianity as pluralism’s “accommodating frame” (422). Dan McKanan exhibits the diversity and hybrid character of Christian social reform through case studies of abolitionism, the Catholic Worker movement, and Saul Alinksy’s congregation-based community organizing—all of which have been freed by the First Amendment to blend in their activism the broad concern of the ‘church’ with the zeal of the ‘sect.’ Jon Pahl uses the Pequot War, Civil War, world wars, Cold War, and war on terror to argue that a state-sanctioned religion of patriotism has diffused the logic of Christian sacrifice across American cultural institutions and practices, underwriting war and discouraging hard policy questions, while also recognizing countervailing efforts to disentangle Christianity from American militarism. Ann Braude uses Methodist, Catholic, and Mormon positions in the woman suffrage and ERA campaigns to explore the complicated interplay between religiously based assertions about women’s nature and evolving concepts of equality informing definitions of U.S. citizenship. And Kathleen Flake closes with an examination of state approaches to religious life from the informal Protestant establishment of the nineteenth century, within which non-Protestant groups secured First Amendment protection only by acting Protestant through an increasing state emphasis on “procedural fairness and substantive neutrality” that challenged Protestant power during the twentieth century, to a “final disestablishment” in which American Christianities are, at least in the federal courts, becoming generalized with all other American religions and their legal status is becoming equated with that of other social institutions (501).

This effort to relocate American Christianities culturally, socially, politically, and legally covers a lot of ground. It gives the topic the “fresh, rigorous, serious attention” the editors want and will no doubt succeed in its goal “to stimulate a new conversation about America’s dominant religious tradition” (4). “Conversations” might be more accurate, however, since, at least in the near future, attempting a single conversation might unavoidably generate a din. Indeed, the essays in this collection themselves suggest as much, for one can hardly glean from them a single “history of dominance and diversity.” All of them point to the enormous diversity of American Christianities, but only some explore strategic alliances among different Christians and few carry their analyses to conclusions about the dynamics of Christian dominance. In many cases, readers looking for links between diversity and wider issues of power will have to settle for hints rather than finding explicit proposals. Nor, with only scant exception, does the collection pay as much attention to Christianity’s engagement with non-Christian religions as a “history of dominance” demands. Most of the treatments of Christianity are decidedly insular, intended largely to reveal internal diversity and debate. But these observations are intended less as critiques than as indications of where this book points – as useful and perhaps necessary results of the editors’ efforts, which after all are about moving the retelling process along rather than completing it, and about providing “not comprehensiveness but texture” (21). Importantly, they are up front about the volume’s focus on Christianity—an essential phase in the development of the discussion. The ambitious project of recasting the history of American Christianities has just begun; we should be grateful to Brekus, Gilpin, and their many collaborators for so effectively mapping a path and taking the first steps.

Review: Press, Platform, Pulpit

Colin B. Chapell

Colin B. Chapell in an instructor in history at the University of Memphis.

Teresa Zackodnik. Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. xxv, 339 pp. ISBN 978-1-57233-826-5.

Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Amanda Berry Smith are some of the better-known African American women activists of the nineteenth century. Yet while their names, their causes, and even their stories are familiar to many scholars, these women are frequently mentioned as marginal to the main political and social movements of their periods. In Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform, Teresa Zackodnik encourages her readers to think beyond this interpretation, and look instead to the ways that these women stood in the center of the politics of their day. Additionally, Zackodnik argues that nineteenth-century African American feminists not only appealed to specific audiences but that they created their own “publics” (xxxv).

In order to examine these twin arguments, Zackodnik studies a variety of women who were in the public eye over the course of the nineteenth century. The first chapter examines a number of black preaching women over the course of the century and the audiences they encountered. Zackodnik argues that these preachers were not on the edges of society during the nineteenth century. Rather, “nineteen-century African American preaching women took their ministries to the center of American and African American religious life” (46).

The following chapters are similarly bold in proclaiming the centrality of female African American speakers in the nineteenth century political realm. Chapter two moves outside the American sphere, showing how African American speakers were received as they addressed issues of American slavery in Great Britain. Sojourner Truth’s place in the United States, and her status as “‘the’ black feminist of the nineteenth century” is the subject of Zackodnik’s third chapter (94). Here, the author tries to show how important the locations of Truth’s speeches and audiences were in creating her enduring status. In contrast to Sojourner Truth’s status as the prototypical nineteenth century black feminist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett provides a different image for many scholars—that of a “marginalized militant.” Zackodnik attempts to challenge this standard interpretation in chapter four, arguing that on her British speaking tour Wells (she had not yet remarried) was far from being marginalized; rather, she was “in the thick of British reform and a figure of note in British newspapers” (164). The author presses the idea that Wells was “adept at appealing to and managing an existing public in order to gain a hearing, interest in her cause, and material support for her politics”; no simple task considering that most of the British public were concerned instead with “white slavery” when Wells first arrived there (165).

The last two chapters turn to the challenges of black feminism. Chapter five examines African American nationalism, a tradition that Zackodnik traces to the “journalism of black women as early as the 1830s,” arguing, “early black feminists actively created a public for their politics in this media [the press]” (168). Zackodnik’s concluding chapter focuses on Frances Harper and Anna Julia Cooper’s diverging responses to the links white American women made between African Americans and other “dependent races” (225).

Throughout the book, Zackodnik stresses the importance of place and the ways that the remarkable women she studied crafted their speeches, letters, articles, and other forms of communication to the audiences they addressed. These women spoke in specific ways in order to best communicate to their audiences. Yet, far too often, Zackodnik argues, scholars forget this point as they examine their historical subjects. Instead, human beings are turned into automatons that merely spit out, albeit eloquently, a single message despite the audience in front of them. Zackodnik’s work is a wonderful reminder to combat this tendency in interpretation.

Yet, even with this important insight, there are problems with Press, Platform, Pulpit. Though Zackodnik consistently talks about the multiple publics that these nineteenth century feminists engaged, there is no sustained investigation of who made up the audiences and very little done to define these separate publics (though there is a discussion of public sphere theory). The reader is left only with the assertion that these women really did confront multiple publics, rather than appearing before similar types of people from different parts of the English-speaking world. Without a clear investigation into this problem, or a working definition of exactly what was meant by the term “publics,” it was unclear to this reader whether African American feminists actually created their own audiences as the book argues.

Additionally, this reviewer found it troubling that Press, Platform, Pulpit rarely takes into account the differences in historical context in which these women lived. For example, when talking about Jarena Lee, Zackodnik notes, “In 1824 Lee’s itinerant ministry saw her deciding to travel to the slaves states to preach” (8). On the following page, the author continues with some surprise, “Remarkably, Lee’s opposition to slavery seems not to have endangered her in the south and yet her preaching did not tempter her antislavery politics: Lee joined the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840” (9). The differences in the political climate of the slave states between these years is remarkable, yet there seems to be no difference presented in the book. In another example, the final chapter presents a dichotomy between two women’s views on how African Americans were included in speeches on “dependent races.” However, the comparison is between the perspective of one black woman in the 1860s and another’s from the 1890s. Again, there were vast differences in the political climate between the years immediately following emancipation and those in the nadir. These differences, though, are not discussed; and, strangely for a study examining black feminists in the nineteenth century, nowhere in the volume is there a sustained discussion of the impact of the American Civil War or emancipation.

Yet, while there are potentially significant problems in Press, Platform, Pulpit, the book offers important insights, and reminds scholars of the importance of examining not merely the words that our subjects say, but also to whom they were speaking.

Review: Almost Free

Abigail Cooper

Abigail Cooper is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Eva Sheppard Wolf, Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. 192 pp. ISBN 978-0-8203-3230-7.

This is a story of one slave and his family told through legal petitions. The first petition succeeded: mixed-race tavern waiter Samuel Johnson of Warrenton, Virginia, won his legal freedom and permission to remain in Virginia as a free person of color in 1812. Every subsequent petition Johnson filed failed. Legal freedom for his wife and daughter, both of whom he came to own, was of the “almost” variety. In piecing together a narrative from a sparse but evocative source base of deeds, wills, tax records, court papers, and an astonishing eleven petitions to the Virginia state legislature to facilitate the Johnson family’s legal freedom, Eva Sheppard Wolf has performed a valuable service. She forges through the record that is available rather than “fret over the difficulties of telling Samuel Johnson’s story” from a paucity of texts (2). Wolf’s slim, accessible story will be a welcome contribution to undergraduate seminars and lay readers looking for a manageable read, and teachers will appreciate the way Wolf takes us through the process of dissecting and connecting sources. There is an interactive quality to this book that guides the reader through the revelatory petitions text by text. Wolf then dexterously contextualizes them with her knowledge of Virginia law and custom as it progresses from the late eighteenth century through the 1840s. Wolf deserves special congratulation for doing something much harder than it looks—telling a story. Still, Wolf’s effort raises questions about the limitations of exercises in historical imagination and the tensions that emerge between historical empathy and historical analysis.

Oriented toward a broad audience, Almost Free wears its scholarly engagement lightly. She pushes back against Ira Berlin’s classic characterization of free blacks as “slaves without masters,” seeking to portray Samuel Johnson as surprisingly independent (51). But this is not an argument-driven book. Instead, it draws on her previous work, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (2006). There, Wolf first examined Samuel Johnson, inspired by his persistence in trying to liberate his family. Almost Free digs deeper into this story, exposing the fluid nature of race in Virginia. Specifically, Wolf seeks to problematize the slavery-freedom binary by exploring all the “almosts.” She interprets family and home as the foremost motivating forces in Samuel Johnson’s legal actions, and she utilizes genealogical tools to emphasize family and to give Johnson the personal history that slavery threatened to obliterate.

As the story goes, Samuel Johnson bought his freedom with five hundred dollars, saved from tips. He bought his wife and children soon after, and they became his slaves. His son died; his efforts then focused on freeing his wife and daughter. Complicating matters was an 1806 law that required manumitted slaves to leave Virginia within a year after they had been liberated. Violators risked being sold back into slavery. Pennsylvania and permanent freedom were only 80 miles away, but Fauquier County, Virginia, was home. Johnson was a property owner, and he had powerful white friends. As Wolf explains, he “challenged the notion that Virginia belonged to white people” and gambled that white patronage in a slave state was better than residence in a “free state where white people would have little reason to pay them any special attention or offer any help” (107–108)—a testament to how both geographical identification and white patronage stand at the center of this story. As a man yearning for legitimacy and respectability, Johnson took the only action available—petitioning the state legislature to make an exception to allow his family to remain in Virginia after he emancipated them. Johnson himself was illiterate, but an impressive array of white elites spoke on his behalf as “loyal Diligent sober accommodating faithful and honest” (93). And his daughter Lucy, who came into the foreground as his wife aged and passed, became known over time as “a respectable & useful member of this Community” (109). Johnson emancipated his daughter just as she was about to be married to a free man of color. She remained in the state with her husband and had a family of her own, living in violation of the 1806 residency law. As the Virginia establishment clamped down on the free black community in the wake of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, Lucy’s husband, suspected of distributing abolitionist literature, fled to Pennsylvania and did not return. Samuel Johnson’s petitions then turned toward securing a divorce for his daughter and distancing himself from abolitionist ill repute. Lucy did remarry (a slave) and remained in Faquier County, but her freedom was always precarious, more secure through custom than law. After Samuel Johnson’s death, Lucy and her family moved to Washington, D.C., and Wolf proceeds to track her progeny into the present day.

While this book has much to commend it, it also has some significant flaws. At the outset, Wolf calls this work “an act of [historical] imagination,” declaring her desire to grant Samuel Johnson his “rightful place in the grand American story” (xi). She invites readers to use their own critical abilities to recognize that she has been necessarily selective in her interpretations of evidence. She also invites the reader to make Johnson’s journey a personal one, invoking an exercise in historical empathy that is both instructive and troubling. She succeeds in giving dimension to a historically marginalized character, but in her enthusiasm, she molds Johnson into a hero beyond reproach.

Furthermore, Wolf’s critical analysis of race and family will disappoint scholars. She seeks to highlight the fluidity and contingency of race in daily life, but the story of Samuel Johnson and his genealogy threatens to leave the reader with a far different impression—the power and desirability of whiteness. Johnson’s privileges are predicated on loyalty to the white community. By 1942, a Johnson descendant passed for white, “perhaps something that Samuel Johnson had yearned to do” (137). This is a problematic speculation not because it lacks plausibility among Wolf’s many “perhaps,” but because it stands alone on the book’s penultimate page without the rigorous analysis such a statement begs. Here, narrative and imagination, especially framed as inspirational story, make for dubious history—the linear progression of a legacy elides the subjectivity of genealogical technology. It becomes clear that “race” is “slippery” when skin color is ambiguous; race “matters” in descendants’ lives when they fail to make the obituary column of the Washington Post (137). Scrutinizing Wolf’s selectivity is crucial—Lucy, for instance, is unfailing as the dutiful daughter. What Wolf interprets as Lucy’s choice could well be compulsion. The hierarchy and coercion of “family” is invisible. If race is an unstable category for Wolf, family is a remarkably stable one. Family is made by blood and marriage—nuclear, male-headed, two-parent, loving. Samuel Johnson works tirelessly for the good of his family; Spencer Malvin, Lucy Johnson’s abolitionist husband, deserts his family, and promptly becomes the story’s villain. Wolf emphasizes Samuel Johnson’s role as devoted father, minimizing his role as master. In a good teacher’s hands, these tensions could lead to fruitful discussion. But Wolf leaves much of the analytical heavy lifting to the reader.

The relationship between race and family in the African American experience is due for reassessment. Wolf admirably highlights how human intimacies blurred legal lines. More than anything, her own imaginative adventurousness should push more scholars to grapple with the shards of evidence so that we might recover the history silenced by the selectivity of the textual record.

Review: Sam Jones’ Own Book

Joe Creech

Joe Creech is director of the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University.

Sam P. Jones. Sam Jones’ Own Book: A Series of Sermons. Reissued with a new introduction by Randall J. Stephens. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 539 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-827-3.

The title—Sam Jones’ Own Book—points loudly and with wit to the style and manner of the author. It is “Sam Jones’” not “The Rev. Samuel P. Jones’” book, marking Jones’s emphasis on his connection to common folk guided by conscience not book learning or, in Christian matters, doctrine or decree, conference or council. It is his own book, the emphasis on own a subtle rebuke to those who—and there were many—imagined him not up to the task. It is his own story—literally beginning with his autobiography and then moving to sermons that seek foremost to testify to God’s acts in his own life, not to church pronouncements or even biblical exegesis. The title thus bears witness to Jones’s ability to convey so much with so few words.

The University of South Carolina Press has published the first reissue of Sam Jones’ Own Book since its first edition in 1887. At that time, Jones was regarded the “Moody of the South.” After Dwight L. Moody’s death in 1899 and up until Jones’s untimely death in 1906, Jones was the best-known evangelist in America. Jones was born in 1847 in Alabama to a slave owning family of middling wealth that moved to Cartersville, Georgia, in 1857. Jones first studied law and was admitted to the Georgia bar in the 1860s, but finding salvation from sin—his favorite of which was drink—at his father’s deathbed, he became a Methodist minister and by the middle of the 1880s was preaching to overflowing crowds at revival meetings. Randall J. Stephens, author of the book’s new introduction and The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (2008), notes that although widely known in his time, Jones is largely forgotten today. Unlike his contemporary, Moody, Jones did not innovate theologically as did Moody with dispensationalism, premillennialism, and Keswick holiness; neither did he build lasting institutions.

The sermons in Sam Jones’ Own Book offer a window into his ideals and style as well as into the wider public discourse of southern evangelism in the late nineteenth century. Though he preached hell and the devil, he did so with humor and sarcasm rather than fire and brimstone. Primarily a storyteller, Jones captured sentiments with pithy sayings added at the end of each sermon—we are told he coined the phrase, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” (xii). His was a “sunny gospel” that stressed testimony, common sense, sentimentality, and anti-elitism (xiv). This anti-elitism and sentimentality, along with the “coarse” nature of his wit and the common vernacular with which he preached, drew, not surprisingly, criticism from elites like Mark Twain as well as from those favoring their gospel message in the King’s English (xiv). In terms of content, the sermons reveal little interest in biblical exegesis or the exploration of doctrine. Most stress the impact of conversion on the way one should live. “Quit Your Meanness”—his most famous sermon—captures this sentiment, which, as Stephens notes, marked his affinity with the emerging holiness movement.

From Stephens, and also from Kathleen Minnix’s Laughter in the Amen Corner: The Life of Evangelist Sam Jones, we learn something of Jones’s wider significance and context. Jones was typical of southern minsters of his station on race. While always claiming “to be friend to the colored race,” he supported Jim Crow, opposed miscegenation, and was ambivalent on black disfranchisement and lynching. Politically he was a friend of Populists like Tom Watson but generally remained committed to laissez faire, pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstrap capitalism that linked financial struggle to sinful living. On other matters he was more unique. According to Minnix, even though he was a staunch nativist, even a xenophobe, he was surprisingly irenical towards Roman Catholics and Jews. Although he opposed evolution, heresy, and especially the manufacture, distribution, and use of alcohol, he did not run in northern Fundamentalist circles, neither did he profess what would become the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, believing instead in “progressive theology,” a position that moved him to be quite forward looking on women’s rights, especially the right to preach.[1]

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

Review: Dixie Dharma

John L. Crow

John L. Crow is a Ph.D. candidate in Religion at Florida State University.

Jeff Wilson. Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 281 pp. ISBN 9780807835456.

In his numerical assessment of the religiosity of the South historian Ted Ownby writes, “What makes the South religiously distinctive is the large portion of evangelical Protestants.”[1] Jeff Wilson’s new book about Buddhism in the South takes this regional truism and examines how a minority religion in the South negotiates its surroundings. More generally, he asserts that regionalism plays a significant role in shaping American Buddhism, noting that “people in different parts of America experience Buddhism through lenses and circumstances supplied by the surrounding culture, and Buddhism impacts how these people navigate their regional culture” (218). The southern brand of this faith, however, has the unique challenge of adapting to a region where Buddhism is very much a minority. In documenting these adaptations, Wilson broadens both studies of American Buddhism as well as religious regionalism.

Wilson begins with surveys of studies related to his topic. He notes that Buddhism receives little attention in southern religious historiography.And in studies of American Buddhism, the regional focus tens to be on the West Coast or in New England. With these two observations in mind, he writes, “this book is an exploration of two themes—pluralism and regionalism” (4). Wilson pursues these themes through a case study of a multi-tradition Buddhist temple called the Ekoji Buddhist Sangha of Richmond, Virginia. Because Buddhism is such a small part of Richmond’s religious landscape, Wilson demonstrates the ways various Buddhist traditions share space and practices while also creating a place for newcomers, many of whom come from a Protestant background. For instance, he notes how there is little advertising and many of the new members refrain from sharing their newfound religious leanings with their family and friends. Similarly, the temple had to fight for years to obtain tax exempt status because the practices did not match the congregational model that the city government expected. This was such a contentious issue that the temple building itself was almost auctioned off to pay for the back taxes that the city claimed the temple owned.

Among the more compelling illustrations of the book comes when Wilson recounts a slave trade meditation vigil held in 2008 to “bear witness” to the legacy of slavery in Richmond. Taking place near a statue at Richmond’s Slave Trade Reconciliation Triangle, a group of about twenty Buddhists from Ekoji and other temples, gathered on a Saturday morning to silently walk the trail slaves trod to the auction house, and then sit meditating in the noonday sun, contemplating the suffering of so many sold into slavery.

In addition to examining isolated instances such as these, Wilson also addresses broader themes at work in American and southern Buddhism. For example, he spends a great deal of time looking at the practice of Pure Land Buddhism by both Euro-Americans and Asians. Pure Land rarely gets attention in studies of American Buddhism, and when it does, it is usually regulated to Asian immigrants. Wilson demonstrates how Pure Land co-manifests with Zen, Vipassana, Tibetan, and other traditions by a predominantly Euro-American population that generally converts to Buddhism as adults. Wilson claims that this environment generates much more liberal and hybrid Buddhists. He calls these individuals “pluralistic Buddhists.” “They may strongly identify with a particular lineage,” Wilson explains, “but have one or two practices picked up from other sources, or they may actively seek to incorporate multiple forms of Buddhism into their religious life” (148). Two primary factors for this kind of pluralism, significant to southern Buddhism, are the small size of the groups and the lack of full-time, resident teachers.

Despite being an excellent examination of one Buddhist temple in the South, one could hardly summarize the state of southern Buddhism based on one temple. Wilson would be the first one to acknowledge this. Atlanta, Houston, and Charlotte are a few of the booming metropolitan environments where Buddhism has grown and adapted to its surroundings. Indeed, urbanization, immigration, and economics all contribute to determine where Buddhists congregate. As such, Wilson suggests that America can be divided into eight different regions, each of which Buddhism “seems to differ in discernible ways from that in the other regions” (36).

Overall Wilson’s contribution to American religious history and American Buddhist studies is admirable. He successfully demonstrate that regionalism is important and a useful lens when studying religious tradition. Additionally, Wilson asks those on the West Coast or New England to pause and consider regionalism as they generalize about the state of Buddhism in America. And to scholars of southern religion, he challenges them to examine religion outside the evangelical Protestant stronghold. No doubt, Wilson is only beginning a conversation that he hopes others will join.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

Review: St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel

Carolyn R. Dupont

Carolyn R. Dupont is an assistant professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University.

Ellen Blue. St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel: Methodist Women and Civil Rights in New Orleans, 1895–1965. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011. 303 pp. ISBN 978-1-57233-824-1.

St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel: Methodist Women and Civil Rights in New Orleans tells the story of a community center and the women who staffed it over seven decades. Motivated by their faith, these white, middle-class, southern women lived among New Orleans’s poor, became involved in their lives, and served their spiritual and physical needs. Ellen Blue’s presentation of these women and their work upends many received assumptions about the character, chronology, and regional basis of the Social Gospel movement, and it makes important contributions to gender, religious, and civil rights history. In particular, scholars often identify the Social Gospel too exclusively with northern male leaders—thinkers and writers like Walter Rauschenbusch, Josiah Strong, and Washington Gladden—and end the movement with the onset of World War I, when these leaders died. As Blue demonstrates, however, the Social Gospel resonated powerfully with a significant group of women in the Southern Methodist Church (MECS). Through service in the office of deaconess, they lived out this understanding of their faith well into the middle decades of the twentieth century, and they often challenged the racial boundaries that many male leaders preferred to leave intact.

Beginning in 1895, the women of St. Mark’s offered a variety of services to the poor and immigrant communities around them. Initially conducting home visitations and Bible studies among the poor and isolated, the center expanded over the years to employ several full-time staff and to offer health and dental care, child care, community education, and “wholesome” recreation opportunities. Blue effectively demonstrates that these women’s work undermines the argument that Social Gospel practitioners reinforced racial boundaries and paternalistic modes of service. As the community around St. Mark’s changed, the center maintained somewhat fluid racial practices in a segregated setting. For example, light-skinned blacks who could “pass” for white enjoyed access to programs and services with the full knowledge of the staff. In a remarkable exception to its otherwise general observation of segregation, St. Mark’s health care clinic served a clientele about one-third black, and did so without maintaining racially distinct waiting rooms, examination facilities, or instruments.

Since most of St. Mark’s records have been lost, Blue faces a formidable obstacle in telling this story. Though she demonstrates thorough and painstaking research in a variety of material, this dearth of necessary sources limits her ability to describe these women’s lives in detail and to make well-supported arguments about the effects of their work. The narrative often feels disjointed and difficult to follow. This problem is especially acute on the issue of civil rights, despite the suggestion in the subtitle that the book will focus on this topic. Blue describes the racially progressive impulses that came from many Methodist women and their national organizations, and her subjects’ ideological commitments to racial equality seem clear. However, the story does not offer much rich detail on activity they pursued in New Orleans to make racial equality a reality. When the story reaches the civil rights years, it tends to focus on the work of male leaders with only tangential connections to St. Mark’s, like James Dombrowski of the Southern Conference Educational Fund. Blue devotes an entire chapter on this period on St. Mark’s pastor, Rev. Lloyd Anderson Foreman. Despite extraordinary hostility from New Orleans whites, Foreman walked his five-year-old daughter to William Frantz Elementary school every day after it integrated and most whites forsook the school. The pastor’s story is rich, and Blue critically entertains the variety of forces at work in it—his theology, church politics within the Louisiana Methodist conference, and popular sentiment. Yet, we want more about the women she hoped to put at the center of this account, and learn only that they supported Foreman. They showed courage by continuing to live at the center in spite of a flood of hate mail and vigilante violence, but there simply seems to be no record of sustained, direct civil rights activism on the part of these women. Their work at St. Mark’s in the civil rights years apparently differed little from what they had offered all along. Indeed, in the end, St. Mark’s did not integrate until 1965, and even then, only as the result of financial pressure that overcame the conservative resistance of the board.

Blue has examined many themes that other scholars will want to flesh out. Future accounts may want to examine the ways that the work and thought of these deaconessses shaped ordinary lay Methodist women who worked actively in Methodist Women’s organizations. Her discussion of how these women’s work and ideas fit in the Wesleyan tradition also offers an important point of departure for other scholars, given that conservative Methodists who overtly favored segregation also laid claim to the theological heritage of the Wesleys. In sum, St. Mark’s and the Social Gospel demonstrates the rich nuances of the story of gender, religion, and racial equality and points to how much we have to learn about the ways white religion shaped the path and progress of black civil rights.

Review: Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape

Clyde Ellis

Clyde Ellis is a professor of history at Elon University.

Joel W. Martin and Mark A. Nicholas, eds. Native Americans, Christianity, and the Reshaping of the American Religious Landscape. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xiii, 325 pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-7415-4.

This wide-ranging collection of essays on religious encounters between Natives and non-Natives in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century North America jettisons the usual tired tropes in favor of an extraordinary range of responses and consequences. Disquieted by what they perceive as a failure to truly appreciate the nuanced and complex nature of such encounters, the authors stake a claim to a truly cross-cultural, inter-disciplinary approach that reveals a deeply contested world in which religiosity was constantly renegotiated and revised by Natives and non-Natives, and by Christians and non-Christians alike. In his excellent conclusion (with which readers ought to begin), Mark A. Nicholas notes that these essays are bound by an interest in religious encounter as a form of cultural capital that was expressed in an astonishing variety of ways. “Our authors,” writes Nicholas, “look at the indigenization of Christian material objects and Christian texts; the physical settings for encounter…; Natives in dialogue with Christian precepts and practices; and Native Christians’ emotions, senses, and intellectual worlds” (276). Moreover, continues Nicholas, while religious encounters in the early republic had an amazing array of forms and an equally wide variety of meanings, scholars have been reluctant or unwilling to fully examine how Native people shaped and interpreted those encounters. While some readers will think that this argument is pressed rather too aggressively in places (scholars have, in fact, been increasingly aware of and interested in the very things discussed in this book), Nicholas is certainly correct in reminding us that “Scholars have to find the ways Native spiritual leaders sought to create religious ideologies to salvage themselves, educate their own people, and engage in white American religious forums. Native Americans did think about religion on their own” (282).

The book is divided into four sections. Each problematizes the usual list of assumptions about encounter, adaptation, and accommodation that have attached themselves with unfortunate vigor to the hallowed but ultimately unsatisfying notion of the “middle ground.” As most of these essays suggest, because we so rarely look deeply and reflectively at the multivalent nature of the supposed middle ground, we tend to overestimate its meaning and to understate its complexities. One of this volume’s strongest contributions, then, is an assault on the comfortable lines of inquiry that ignore religion’s role as an agent of colonialism, or that stop short of asking how and with what consequences Native people responded to Christianity’s often disruptive but also galvanizing presence in their communities. In part one, for example, “Negotiating Conversion,” Joanna Brooks, Daniel Mandell, and Joel Martin examine the responses of three very different communities—Mohegan; a collection of southern New England tribes; and Cherokees, respectively. Brooks’s commentary on Samson Occom is especially instructive. Without ignoring the often corrosive effects of Christianity’s aggressive demands for spiritual and cultural conversion, she reminds us that Native churches led by people like Occom “became places where Indian people could connect and process the extreme pressures they shouldered as well as the difficult feelings that accompanied them” (35). Mandell’s survey of the life and work of Frederick Baylies likewise confirms a complex pattern of interaction and agency in which Native people clearly appreciated Christianity’s possibilities for positive change, while Martin’s intriguing essay on the Cherokee convert David Brown shows how Brown adroitly used his newfound celebrity as a Native Christian to convert whites into defenders of Cherokee sovereignty by appealing to their sense of decency and compassion. In all, Brooks notes, these kinds of stories reveal “Christianity in the indigenous communities as a tumultuous, variegated, highly differentiated field of activity fraught both with zones of soul-harming subjugation, coercion, and indoctrination and with opportunities for vision, innovation, imagination, and articulation.” Thus, in addition to being carefully constructed discussions of Native conversion, for example, these essays also “bring us face to face with indigenous feelings about colonialism” (24). This is an important revision of the middle ground approach in that its emphasis on religion as an overt extension of colonialism puts the sharp edges back into play.

In part two, “Practicing Religion,” part three, “Circulating Texts,” and part four, “Creating Communities,” we see a variety of narratives that confirm and extend the ideas that come to the fore in part one. While these three sections are valuable to the book’s larger conversation, the essays in part two are especially notable for their insights into the varieties of lived experience. Part four’s essays (Rachel Wheeler’s excellent piece on the Mahican prophet Hendrick Aupaumut, and David Silverman’s thoughtful examination of missionary work in the Brotherton and Stockbridge communities) might have been easily folded into part two’s commentaries thus giving that section a really robust stance. The weak link in the collection is part three, where the essays—which are otherwise excellent—seem a bit out of place. Laura Stevens’s piece on Scottish missions and the eighteenth century British Empire, for example, suggests a transatlantic frame that is sensible, but ultimately undeveloped anywhere else in the collection. As a result it tends to have limited utility for the larger conversation. Likewise, Steven J. Hackel’s and Hilary E. Wyss’s comparative piece on California and New England missions seems out of place.

The essays in part two are particularly useful. Douglas Winiarski, Emma Anderson, and Tracy Neal Leavelle confront the diverse varieties of lived experience as Native and non-Natives alike sought to come to an understanding of what these encounters and changes meant. In a fascinating and agile discussion of New England’s Old Colony and its “sprawling religious culture,” for example, Winiarski finds Wampanoag people who were “fully acquainted with Christianity yet anchored in an ancient cosmology” reflected in kinship, mortuary practices, folk religion, and the supernatural—things not unfamiliar to their white, Christian neighbors. Leavelle’s discussion of gender in New France reveals similar patterns of agency, in this case the use of the rosary as the focus of “creative cultural convergences” that “represented new forms of gendered religious practice and increased female power.” In Leavelle’s hands, these developments were not evidence of conversion as whites understood the term so much as they were the signs of “the translation of Christianity into a local idiom” (161). Leavelle’s essay, in which there are echoes of Kenneth Morrison’s work on Montagnais conversions, reminds us that context is everything.

By far the most powerful essay in this section—and in the entire volume—is Emma Anderson’s reassessment of Jean de Brébeuf’s 1649 death at the hands of the Haudenosaunee. Long celebrated as a classic case of Christian martyrdom, Anderson’s work entirely challenges the theological and historical threads that defenders of the faith have created, and instead examines the event through a three-way cross-cultural lens: Brébeuf and his followers; his Haudenosaunee captors; and a group of Wendats who forsook their conversions and allied themselves with the Haudenosaunee. In a stunningly effective assessment of motive and purpose, Anderson suggests that while Brebeuf’s faith was no doubt a factor in the larger story, it was not the factor; the decision to kill him likely had nothing to do with “in odium fidei”—martyrdom prompted by the hatred of the faith—and everything to do with Haudenosaunee views about political power and influence. This is not only a corrective to the long-held interpretations of the story; it inverts the entire paradigm surrounding it, and suggests a much more complex expression of Native agency. If readers have time for only essay, make it this one.

This is an important, wide-ranging, and insightful collection of essays. Readers interested in cross-cultural exchange, and in the history of Christianity in early America will benefit from its ideas and findings.

Review: The Accidental Slaveholder

Daniel L. Fountain

Daniel L. Fountain is an associate professor of history at Meredith College.

Mark Auslander. The Accidental Slaveholder: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2011. 383 pp. ISBN 978-0-8203-4042-5.

American Methodists split into regional denominations following the 1844 General Conference of the Methodist Church held in New York City. The event that precipitated the split was a resolution passed by antislavery Methodists requesting Bishop James Osgood Andrew of Georgia to suspend the activities of his office until he had remedied himself of his association with slavery. Bishop Andrew was a slaveowner, having inherited or acquired without purchase more than a dozen slaves from family members, former parishioners, and, most notably, his wives. For most Methodists in the South the resolution was a grave insult to the man and the region and the final straw which necessitated the creation of a separate, regional denomination. In particular, since the Bishop had acquired his slaves through “no fault of his own,” the resolution dishonored an honorable man. It thereby demonstrated the radical and unreasonable attitudes of northern Methodists concerning the role of slavery within the church. In making this argument, southerners particularly focused on the Bishop’s ownership of Kitty, a young, biracial woman, who he claimed had been willed to him by a former parishioner with the instruction to allow her to either emigrate to Liberia or remain his slave in as free a condition allowed by the laws of Georgia. According to accounts given by Andrew, biographers friendly to him, and his past and contemporary admirers, the bishop not only lived up to the parishioner’s request but treated Kitty as a family member, so much so, that she preferred to remain a slave rather than live free in Africa.

According to author Mark Auslander, for more than a century the story of Kitty (more appropriately known as Catherine Boyd) has meant many things to many Methodists, white southerners, and, most importantly, to the residents of Oxford, Georgia, where the bishop and Kitty resided during the time of the Methodist split. For these groups, this story has served as proof of the bishop’s personal honor, a defense of slavery as a benevolent institution, an idealized model for race relations, and the basis for an historic house museum in the cottage that the bishop had built for Kitty to live in behind his home.

In contrast to the interpretations white southerners have given to the history of Bishop Andrew and Kitty, the African American community of Oxford has long maintained an alternative version of this story. Kitty was the Bishop’s forced mistress, many black residents assert, that he shamefully housed nearby to facilitate his loathsome abuse of his enslaved lover. Accordingly, the white community’s warm embrace and public promotion of their version of the story via the restoration of “Kitty’s Cottage” and erection of cemetery makers has stirred deep emotions in the African American community. As Auslander argues, African Americans are frustrated that whites are still attempting to defend slavery, saddened that Kitty’s victimization is denied, and angry that their story has been ignored or silenced.

The disparity between the white and black interpretations of Bishop Andrew and Kitty’s relationship is the focus of Mark Auslander’s analysis in The Accidental Slaveholder. Auslander, a professor of anthropology, uses an interdisciplinary approach to try to explain how such competing myths can emerge and what their promulgation tells us about the communities in which these mythical constructs exist. He methodically analyzes published and recorded versions of the story to determine how the existing narratives developed through time, while also documenting the evolution of “Kitty’s Cottage” as an historic site. Additionally, Auslander traces the genealogy of the Boyd family into the modern era, draws upon his extensive oral history interviews to thoughtfully portray Oxford’s African American community, and describes how service-learning projects conducted by his students directly benefited Oxford and his research. The resulting book functions like a cross between Timothy Tyson’s Blood Done Sign My Name (2004) and James Loewen’s Lies Across America (1999). As with Tyson, Auslander’s book is a deeply personal reflection about his direct experience with a community’s struggle over its racially charged past. Simultaneously, his focus on public history sites and the mythological characteristics informing the public’s interpretation of them is strikingly similar to Loewen’s analysis of the often inaccurate or contorted representation of the nation’s past.

Ultimately, Auslander’s work is an unusual but interesting local history featuring a central story that has regional importance. Its greatest contribution is its clear portrayal of the lingering debates over slavery, the Civil War, and the meaning of freedom that regularly occur at the local level where community and family identity are quite literally a very public and personal matter. Academic and general readers who are interested in the history of slavery, southern religious history, anthropology, genealogy, and public or local history will likely find this book to be useful and interesting reading.

Review: No Sympathy for the Devil

David W. Stowe

Darren E. Grem is an assistant professor of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi.

David W. Stowe. No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 291 pp. ISBN 978-0-8078-3458-9.

With No Sympathy for the Devil, David W. Stowe provides a new history of the formative years in Christian pop music. This is ground covered before by Jay Howard and John Streck’s Apostles of Rock (1999) and Eileen Luhr’s study of Christian youth culture in southern California, Witnessing Suburbia (2009). But Stowe adds to this scholarship by focusing on Christian pop music’s political output, a point of emphasis that requires—as he argues—“a more expansive definition of politics than is often assumed by people analyzing U.S. history” (4). Drawing from theoretical models that cast musical or artistic forms as “cultural politics” that flow “from both social affiliations and aesthetic ideologies,” Stowe concludes that the boomer and countercultural ethos of spiritual rebellion, self-discovery, and self-fulfillment—which Mark Oppenheimer’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door (2003) showed was pervasive in American religion during the 1960s—shaped the early Christian folk-rock-pop scene. By the late 1970s, Christian pop musicians and an ascendant Christian music industry had laid the cultural groundwork for evangelical musicians and listeners to bind with an ascendant conservative movement while ironically ending up “hermetically sealed in its own new niche, the parallel universe of Christian popular culture”(9).

Stowe begins conventionally enough, opening with the Californian “Jesus People” scene that Lisa McGirr and Darren Dochuk have also documented. (Unlike their archive-based works, Stowe mostly relies on secondary sources and interviews to reconstruct the Jesus People and their music, as he does with his other subjects in the book.) Focusing primarily on how music created a sense of community alongside and intertwined with congregational communities like Calvary Chapel, Stowe chronicles the early and later careers of musicians like Larry Norman, Randy Matthews, Keith Green, and Barry McGuire. Praise bands like Love Song and Children of the Day also appear as important vehicles for evangelical expression, as do Andraé Crouch and the Disciples, an African American soul group who Stowe contends were “the first to achieve crossover success outside a Christian music audience” (93).

Stowe convincingly describes how musical and theological porosity defined the Jesus People in the late 1960s and Christian pop by the mid-1970s. Borrowing theoretical insights from Thomas Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling (2006), Stowe details the spiritual interests and voyages of numerous artists generally considered by musical taxonomy as “outside” the boundaries of Christian pop. For instance, though not technically produced by evangelicals, Broadway hits like Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar were vital for clearing the way for Christian musicians to believe they had an audience for their message and countercultural stylings. Top 40 artists like Johnny Cash, Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Marvin Gaye also represented a kind of Christian pop music, simultaneously dwelling in black and white spiritual traditions and crossing “back and forth between spaces understood to be properly religious and spaces thought to be profane or worldly” (141). The mid-career interest of Bob Dylan—himself “born again” in 1979—in demons and the apocalypse also bespoke of a popular theology roughly “consistent with the conservative Christian worldview reshaping American politics” (235). By framing his argument around such religious interchanges, Stowe maps out the multiple roads into and out of Christian pop music and expands the definition of “Christian pop,” showing it to be a distinct but dynamic musical genre more pervasive than previously thought.

In the book’s last chapters, Stowe moves into a consideration of Christian music’s influence in a political age defined by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Explo ’72, Campus Crusade for Christ’s “Godstock” youth festival in 1972, showed the potential payoff to conservatives for appropriating rebellion and countercultural self-expressiveness for the sake of evangelical identity politics. And, by the mid-1970s, the “Religious Right was starting to beat the New Left at its own game, using methods developed by sixties activists” (214). Advanced by the rise of Christian music stations and corporate labels, the “Jesus Movement-spirituality affected the way many evangelicals defined themselves politically” (248), encouraging a union of individual self-interest to moral restorationism to Christian nationalism, especially among younger voters who began to tilt into the GOP camp in the late 1970s.

Stowe’s book is most persuasive when considering the contours of Christian pop and rock in the 1970s and 1980s, namely the various ways that Christian musicians understood themselves and their self-defined purpose in promoting revivalism and religious boundary crossing before and after 1976, famously called the “Year of the Evangelical.” He is less persuasive when trying to connect the “cultural front” that Christian music advanced with the political restructurings of the day, bordering on reductionism of the “rightward turn” or “rise of the Christian Right” in American politics to youthful verve for spiritually-inflected music. There is also an odd omission of certain hot button issues of the 1970s and 1980s—such as the controversies over sexual normativity—among the Christian musicians that Stowe studies. Stowe mentions Marsha Carter and Lonnie Frisbee, both Jesus People who later came out of the closet to cold-shoulder opposition from many of their contemporaries in the Christian music scene. But such curtailing of sexuality by Christian musicians and by the industry itself is not detailed further; rather, marquee Christian Right activists and high-level politicians, not Christian musicians, remain the primary agents in Stowe’s account—as they are in countless other accounts—for pushing a heterosexual agenda. Thus, sexuality and, to a lesser extent, race, appear not as analytic tools for understanding the boundaries that Christian musicians may or may not have wanted to maintain in modern America but as the lines crossed by the musicians. This sets up Stowe’s analysis of Christian music to overlook, rather than explicate, the cultivation of legitimizing and de-legitimizing power by culture-making institutions and individuals. It also limits his book’s ability to explain the tendency of Christian pop to dwell in its own sub-market of like-minded producers and consumers instead of crossing more often and more fully into the broader music market.

Still, Stowe has provided an intriguing, important, and readable book, ably showing both the sympathies that conservative Christians held toward the “devil” of rock ’n roll and countercultural affectations. Though it might not have “transformed” evangelicalism into a cultural front or political force as thoroughly or as fundamentally as Stowe implies, Christian pop music has been suitably recaptured by the author as an important facet of the contemporary religious marketplace.

Review: Father Mercer

Keith Harper

Keith Harper is a professor of Baptist studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Anthony L. Chute. Father Mercer: The Story of a Baptist Statesman. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2011. 146 pp. ISBN 978-0-88146-262-3.

Mention Jesse Mercer’s name to someone from Georgia and reactions may vary from puzzled looks to acknowledging nods. Mention Mercer’s name to a Georgia Baptist and you are apt to receive a much different reaction. Anthony L. Chute’s Father Mercer: The Story of a Baptist Statesman chronicles the life of one of the state’s most influential ministers and the early republic’s quintessential Baptists.

Mercer’s story is familiar, thanks largely to Chute’s earlier work A Piety Above the Common Standard: Jesse Mercer and Evangelical Calvinism (2004). The son of Silas Mercer, a respected eighteenth-century Baptist minister, Jesse Mercer (1769–1841) followed in his father’s footsteps. He played a crucial role in rallying the state’s Baptists to support missions in the early nineteenth century. His peers recognized his leadership abilities and tapped him to be the president of the Georgia Baptist Convention, a position he held from 1822 until 1841. In addition to missions, Mercer used his talents and position to advance sunday schools, temperance, and education. In fact, Mercer was so influential in educational matters that when Georgia’s Baptists organized a school to train young ministers in 1833, they named it the Mercer Institute. Later, when the institute became a university the trustees retained Mercer’s name, hence Mercer University.

While they articulate similar themes, Father Mercer differs from A Piety Above the Common Standard in several respects. At 146 pages, Father Mercer is brief: one may think of it as a general-audience companion to A Piety Above the Common Standard. Father Mercer has neither footnotes nor endnotes. Hardcore academics may carp that Chute failed to follow citation protocol, but the author is clearly aiming at two distinct audiences and ultimately provides interested readers with the best of two different worlds. On one hand, those searching for a thorough, more technically nuanced biography of Jesse Mercer will profit by reading A Piety Above a Common Standard. On the other hand, interested readers, especially lay people and non-professional historians, will benefit from Father Mercer. Chute obviously wanted to produce a short, readable volume that “humanized” Mercer, Tthough one might wish that he had included more of Mercer’s correspondence.

It is hardly novel for authors to produce short editions of larger works. Such slimmer books allow greater access to a broader readership. Still, trying to reach two different audiences with similar material is a bold move. But Father Mercer is such an easy read that it is suitable for the most general audience. Chute attempted to assess Mercer favorably without turning him into a superhero. The volume is a success on all counts.

Review: The Makers of the Sacred Harp

Ralph Hartsock

Ralph Hartsock is a senior music catalog librarian at the University of North Texas.

David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan. The Makers of the Sacred Harp. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 321 pp. ISBN 978-0-252-03567-8 cloth; 978-0-252-07760-9 paper.

Musical notation has been produced in several formats: lute tablature, numbers, letters, and graphic notation. Most typical scores for classical musicians today employ staff notation. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, shape notes were used as a means of simplicity in teaching pitches to be sung. In congregational singing, churches utilized the Sacred Harp and similar tunebooks prevalent in early American psalmody. Tunebooks were oblong quartos, folded to approximately 16 x 25 centimeters. During the nineteenth century, this design was typical of a tunebook, though today it is a rare sight.

The Makers of the Sacred Harp is an account of people who made the Sacred Harp: composers, poets, and singers. In Part One, David Warren Steel presents essays on the Sacred Harp and its creators in the context of the region, migrations, the Civil War, and family traditions. In Part Two, Richard H. Hulan discusses the camp meetings and hymnody. Part Three provides a biographical dictionary. Part Four lists songs of the Sacred Harp by page number. Steel and Hulan originally conceived this book to contain biographical sketches of all poets for songs of the Sacred Harp. But since much of this would duplicate John Julian’s 1892 Dictionary of Hymnology, Hulan contributed narrative sections to cover this sufficiently.

Brief chapters trace the origins and history of the Sacred Harp and Indian removal. The author situates the Sacred Harp in the political history of Georgia during the 1820s and 1830s: from George Troup’s governorship to the various treaties with Indian tribes, which eventually forced Creeks and Cherokees to migrate west.

The ancestors of composers and compilers of the Sacred Harp—S. M. Denson and T. J. Denson in Alabama and E. J. King in Georgia—had moved into the new acquired western territories of the early republic.

The Civil War exerted a strong influence upon Sacred Harp. The original songbook, issued in 1844, with new editions in 1850 and 1859, expanded from 263 to 432 pages. At least fourteen Sacred Harp composers and song leaders served in several capacities in the Confederate Army, while others fought for the Union. B. F. White served in the Confederate militia, and later as the mayor of Hamilton, Georgia, during the Civil War. William Hauser was a preacher, chaplin, and physician. Canadian-born W. E. Chute, for example, joined General William T. Sherman as he marched to the sea in 1864.

As was famously the case with the Bachs in Germany, musical activity in the South drew on familial traditions. Sacred Harptestifies to this reality, and Steel lists numerous family relationships in the narrative texts. In eighteenth and nineteenth-century America, many compilers of tunebooks taught psalmody or sacred music. Full time musical employment was not frequently found, as exemplified by William Billings (tanner), Daniel Read (comb maker), Timothy Swan (hatter), and Jeremiah Ingalls (innkeeper). Nearly all Sacred Harp musicians were farmers at one time or another. Among those who owned plantations and slaves were Leonard P. Breedlove and James Lafayette. Also represented were schoolmasters, ministers, and carpenters.

The energetic camp meeting was significant to nineteenth-century music. Steel discerns differences between arrangements of southern compilations and those of New England (such as Billings). He notes how various singing masters employed songs, as various compilers maintained books of older repertory, and experimented with the less formal camp meeting hymn. Part of this simplification involved eliminating notational signs, like sharps and flats, with some tunes being rendered as modal. To understand this chapter completely requires some musical knowledge. Steel explains that while several tunebooks of the 1840s and 1850s use three-part settings and fuging (fuguing) tunes, the first two editions of The Sacred Harp avoided both, concentrating on plain tunes, often derived from folk music. Four-part songs found their way into the 1859 edition, with compositions by Albsalom Ogletree and H. S. Reese. The 1870 edition added more of these fuguing tunes. The next wave was gospel music—during the twentieth century, and especially the Great Depression, many Sacred Harp musicians sang gospel music to gain income.

Hulan’s essays address the fact that over 75 years, while scholars analyzed the* Sacred Harp* as music, few explored the hymnology or text. He traces the evolution of a folksong and spiritual to their printed manifestation, a broadside without music, but sung to a familiar tune. Camp meeting songs appeared in revival songsters, like Richard Allen’s A Collection of Spiritual Songs and Hymns Selected from Various Authors (1801). Hulan elucidates the other tunebooks published during the early nineteenth century, and their significance. Most hymn writers remain anonymous. As a source of additional income, many itinerant preachers would sell copies of their songsters as the traveled. Hulan then describes five poets/hymn writers: John Leland, John Adam Granade, Caleb Jarvis Taylor, George Askins, and John Poage Campbell.

The book includes three genealogical charts, and ten plates, but no facsimiles of music. The biographical dictionary is very detailed (81–172), presenting the hymn titles associated with each person. One then searches for the “Songs of the Sacred Harp,” (179–245) by the number indicated in the biographies. Steel presents data on text and music sources, their meters, and their history in the Sacred Harp. This proves to be an indispensable source for those studying the music of the South.

Review: Southern Prohibition

Paul Harvey

Paul Harvey is a professor of history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

Lee L. Willis. Southern Prohibition: Race, Reform, and Public Life in Middle Florida, 1821–1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. 209 pp. ISBN 978-0-8203-2927-7.

This informative and entertaining study, full of maps and photographs of the paraphernalia of nineteenth-century alcohol culture and consumption, revisits an old question in fresh ways. Willis traces the “long temperance movement” in the South, with Florida as his focus—and not just alcohol but also other psychoactive substances as his target as well (4). The key to understanding this long history is to shed the assumption that antebellum reform, because of its associations with abolitionism, never “hit” the South, and thus that temperance and Prohibition were relative latecomers to the region. Willis begins by pointing out that many southern states, including Florida, did have state-enforced Prohibition for some residents, namely, black residents in the antebellum era. Further, Willis demonstrates that temperance societies came to middle Florida with the settlement of the region by whites, and it was precisely fears of the accessibility of alcohol to blacks and rowdy poor whites that spurred much of this early movement to restrict alcohol sales, set rules for taverns and grog shops, and tax liquor. Moreover, political divisions between Whigs and Democrats, the former favorable to temperance and the latter initially not, mirrored national political divisions, and Florida’s politics over time grew both less democratic and less violent as Whig proponents of progress and reform regularized the governance of the young state and cracked down mostly on lower-class drinking habits and establishments.

The Civil War and Reconstruction saw the single greatest setback for the cause of temperance: with emancipation came the legal ability of new black citizens to obtain alcohol if and when they wanted it. Together with the political disturbances of the Reconstruction era, this transformation in the accessibility of alcohol to the “dangerous classes” fueled a renewed interest in Prohibition. Willis traces this story in Leon and Franklin counties in his final two chapters, concluding that “the evolution from temperance to prohibition reflected a desire to bring order to a society that reformers regarded as disturbingly unstable” (103). Unlike other parts of the country, the male-led Sons of Temperance and groups such as local option leagues took the lead in spreading the gospel of temperance; the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union came later, and plays a relatively smaller role in this book. Willis also finds that campaigns for children’s safety and welfare were central to the rise of Prohibition, and that whites were interested in alcohol control as part of a program of social control for blacks, but that black reformers “viewed prohibition as a means to social improvement, not social control” (105).

Throughout the book, too, Willis sets alcohol within the broader context of opium, tobacco, and other narcotics. The deleterious effects of alcohol drew constant, and justified, attention from reformers, but “opiates such as laudanum and paregoric were hallmarks of the global psychoactive revolution, and their availability in territorial Florida indicates that in terms mind-altering substances, this region was hardly a frontier” (25). Narcotics later demonized as “dangerous drugs” drew few comments in the nineteenth century. Teetotalers had no problem taking their tinctures of opium, and dipping into an entire range of pharmacopeia. The war on drugs amounted to a war on alcohol, one with frequent twists and turns through the course of the century. Early twentieth-century Prohibitionists were the first to take on opiates beyond alcohol, and developed the regime that separated “alcohol” from “drugs,” a distinction with enormous consequences down to our day.

Conspicuously absent from most of this story is women, whether as individuals or organized into the WCTU. Willis concludes with some questions about the notable fact of “women’s marginalization in temperance organizations” in middle Florida: “By not giving due consideration to the men’s organizations, have women’s historians overemphasized the role that women played in the movement? What consequences do varying degrees of male and female participation in reform have on political culture”? (158) To my mind, the most important conclusion is the clear connection between the relative weakness of the WCTU in the region and the lateness of the state in adopting women’s suffrage.

Willis tells a complex, nuanced story, in the best tradition of using local history to ponder larger questions. The focus not just on alcohol but on psychoactive substances generally gives the study an originality beyond other works on alcohol control in the South, and the use of archaeological evidence from recent digs in Florida, including evidence drawn from major fires as well as digs that turned up French champagne bottles and Bordeaux was labels from territorial-era Apalachicola, will appeal to enthusiasts of material culture. Students of southern religion will note that the work of evangelicals was necessary, but very far from sufficient, in accomplishing their treasured goals of temperance, for Willis’s work presents a multi-causal history that cannot be reduced to any one factor.

Review: Recovering the Margins of American Religious History

Charles H. Lippy

Charles H. Lippy is the Martin Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

B. Dwain Waldrep and Scott Billingsley, eds. Recovering the Margins of American Religious History: The Legacy of David Edwin Harrell Jr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. 160 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-5708-5.

These essays honor distinguished historian David Edwin Harrell Jr., longtime member of the Auburn University faculty, known to colleagues simply as Ed. Some chapters appeared as conference papers as sessions marking Ed’s retirement. The four comprising the first section focus on Ed’s scholarship. The three in the second, all by former graduate students of Ed, take concerns in his work in fresh directions. A foreword by Wayne Flynt, preface by Grant Wacker, and epilog by Beth Barton Schweiger complete the volume.

Some themes link the first four essays together. All praise Harrell’s work for its meticulous scholarship and attention to detail. Ed left no page unread nor source ignored. Because of this thorough research, Ed’s critical judgments were, these writers insist, fair and without bias, even when Harrell was a player in events about which he wrote.

In addition, all note that Ed pulled off a feat few have duplicated: he combined rigorous historical analysis with a deep religious faith, one informed by the Stone-Campbell restorationist tradition, more specifically by that associated with the ultra-conservative, non-institutional Churches of Christ. When pressed, Ed readily affirmed his commitment to the “Truth-with-a-capital-T” at the heart of this restorationist impulse.

This passion for the Truth of the faith that “was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3, KJV) may help explain the precision in Harrell’s scholarship. Discerning (and receiving) pure Truth demands accurate translation, interpretation, and understanding of Scripture. Imprecision hurls one into falsehood. It follows that attention to detail in historical inquiry yields the fairest results. Faith and history are thus united.

The opening essay by Sam Hill, another giant in crafting southern religious history into its own disciplinary endeavor, ponders what whets Harrell’s scholarly appetite, observing (as do other writers) that Harrell cultivated a sensitivity to phenomena on the margins of southern religion, whether his own Churches of Christ, Pentecostal healing evangelists, or sectarian movements that revealed ways race and social class shaped the region’s religious consciousness. Hill also notes the American history survey text that Harrell co-authored with three others, Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People (2005). In one sense, this work may be Ed’s most enduring achievement; it weaves the story of religion and its influence into the fabric of American history. In contrast, most survey texts ignore religion altogether.

James Goff, who studied with Harrell, emphasizes how Ed, although not Pentecostal, wrote with sympathy and clarity about the healing revivals in post-World War II Pentecostal and charismatic experience. Harrell took seriously what others treated as exotica. In the more than four decades since his All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (1975) first appeared, trends have shown Harrell right in his assessment of the importance and ascendancy of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity that now dominate Christian life in some regions of the world. Goff also reviews Harrell’s biography of healing evangelist Oral Roberts (1985), whose theatrics brought scorn and dismissal from both religious leaders and scholars. Harrell used Roberts to illuminate the Pentecostal surge, crafting a model for religious biography in the process.

Richard Hughes—another of restorationism’s premier historians—explores the skill with which Harrell probed that tradition, from the two-volume history of the movement through the nineteenth century, A Social History of the Churches of Christ (1966, 1973), to his more recent book on Homer Hailey and the Churches of Christ in the twentieth century (2000). Reading the first volumes years ago, I concluded that they exemplified how denominational history should be done—emphasizing not triumphalism, but social and cultural context. Hughes concurs, noting that Harrell writes even-handedly about internecine controversies in which he was a player.

Charles Reagan Wilson echoes others who laud how Harrell found what others ignored. Wilson emphasizes Harrell’s insistence that social class mattered as much as race in energizing southern religion. Besides his histories of restorationism, Harrell’s early White Sects and Black Men in the Recent South (1971) expanded the boundaries of what got included in southern religious history. Harrell refused to refract southern religion solely through the lens of evangelicalism.

In his essay, Scott Billingsley moves beyond Harrell’s interest in Pentecostalism, race, and class adding an emphasis on gender in discussing Kenneth Hagin and his “Word of Faith” movement. Hagin did not attract media hype like Oral Roberts, but, Billingsley demonstrates, he left a deep imprint on popular Pentecostalism, influencing especially African American and female preachers. The Word of Faith’s “prosperity gospel” empowered both blacks and women to jettison race and gender bias. In addition, the thousands linked through Hagin’s Rhema Bible Training Center offer a cognate to the Churches of Christ—a “non-denomination” with the trappings of a nascent institution.

How the Churches of Christ function without denominational apparatus informs John Hardin’s discussion of B. C. Goodpasture. Analysts often suggest that the Churches of Christ has maintained structures holding the movement together, especially colleges and campus lectureships. Periodicals have also been vital. Hardin portrays Goodpasture, editor of the influential Churches of Christ Gospel Advocate from 1939 to 1977, as the effective power broker within a movement eschewing formal authority. Authors of articles carried his unofficial imprimatur of orthodoxy, while those aligned with other publications might not speak the Truth.

The final piece, by Dwain Waldrep, examines how northern fundamentalism infiltrated what became the Bible Belt. Using tools similar to those Harrell applied to the post-war healing revivals, he shows how the Bible conference movement, and then a network anchored in Dallas Theological Seminary, planted millenarianism in the region, succeeding in part because southern millenarianism had no “siege mentality.”

Drawn to figures and movements on the margins of American—especially southern— religious life, Ed Harrell took the presumably peripheral and showed how important it really was. These essays testify to how groundbreaking his work remains. Together they tell a story of one who is mentor, friend, and scholar par excellence.

Review: A More Noble Cause

Alecia P. Long

Alecia P. Long is an associate professor of history at Louisiana State University.

Rachel L. Emanuel and Alexander P. Tureaud Jr. A More Noble Cause: A. P. Tureaud and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Louisiana: A Personal Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8071-3793-2.

Rachel L. Emanuel and Alexander P. Tureaud, Jr. have joined forces to co-author a biography of Louisiana’s most notable twentieth-century civil rights attorney, Alexander Pierre Tureaud. Their research and recollections are supplemented by a series of oral history interviews with the venerable attorney recorded by the late University of New Orleans professor Joseph Logsdon.

Tureaud was born in New Orleans in 1899. As a young man he sought better opportunities outside the Jim Crow South. He traveled first to Chicago, then New York, before finally settling in Washington, D.C., where he landed a civil service job as a clerk in the U.S. Department of Justice’s law library. By enrolling in evening classes, Tureaud finished high school, took college courses, and ultimately entered Howard University’s law school where he completed his degree in 1925. At that time, Howard had trained more than 75 percent of all African American lawyers in the United States.

During this period Tureaud also became involved with the NAACP. Because of his commitment to achieving racial justice and equality, Tureaud chose to return to New Orleans in 1926. As an adult Tureaud was very formal, referred to by his last name even by close friends and family members. At court, he used his initials A. P. to thwart the common, disrespectful Jim Crow practice of referring to African Americans by their first name.

Though he worked doggedly throughout the 1930s to build a law practice, this was not easy. Even the local NAACP chose to use white lawyers, believing they would be more successful within the Jim Crow judicial system. With persistence and patience, Tureaud challenged and ultimately changed this policy. He continued to work in a federal civil service job until 1942, when he dedicated himself to the practice of law full time. Subsequently, Tureaud served as lead council for a dizzying number of Louisiana civil rights cases. His legal victories helped to achieve “integrated schools, universities, buses, parks, and public buildings” in Louisiana (ix). He also fought long and hard to secure voting rights and to equalize the salaries of teachers regardless of race. Tureaud accepted cases not only in New Orleans, but also in the most rural parts of the state where he and his plaintiffs literally risked life and limb in the push to achieve even a modicum of social justice and de jure racial equality.

Tureaud’s story is a critically important one, especially in Louisiana history. The authors have done a particularly good job of putting the nuanced circumstances of his New Orleans Creole heritage into context. In this instance, Creole is used to describe mixed-race people, often with light skin, who were descended from informal unions of whites, slaves, and free people of color in the colonial and antebellum periods.

Tureaud was proud of his Creole heritage and his ancestors from both sides of the color line. He also identified with Creole activists like the members of the Committee of Citizens who engineered and fought the landmark case, Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). After the disappointing outcome in Plessy, even elite, educated, and light skinned Creole people were legally lumped in with their darker-skinned African American counterparts. In response, four of Tureaud’s own sisters left the family and passed into the white community. Tureaud could also have crossed the color line but he chose, instead, to identify with the Creole and Negro communities. Later in life, Tureaud self-identified as “black” instead of “African American,” since, for him, the latter term was neither descriptive nor accurate.

Tureaud was also initially uncomfortable with the public protests of the 1960s. Despite his misgivings, his commitment to pushing for change led him to take the case of student activists from Southern University who had been arrested and later expelled for sitting in at a segregated lunch counter in Baton Rouge. Tureaud won a victory for the students in Garner v. Louisiana (1961) which “was the U.S. Supreme Court’s first decision concerning lunch counter sit-ins” (240).

In their attempt to be thorough, the authors provide a welter of specific details about Tureaud’s personal life and institutional affiliations. Some of it, like the painful inside story of A. P. Tureaud Jr.’s experiences as the first African American undergraduate to attend LSU, is instructive, unforgettable, and available no place else. Other details, such as those related to Tureaud’s institutional and professional affiliations, are sometimes distracting and might better have been consigned to footnotes.

More troubling are the significant number of historical inaccuracies in the book. Pages four and five are riddled with errors large and small. They include the claim that most slaves were “freed by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863” (4). That was not the case in Louisiana because the Proclamation applied only to slaves in Confederate-held areas. Another example occurs when the authors write that William Tecumseh Sherman resigned his post at the Louisiana State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy “to lead the Union Army” (129). Sherman ultimately became an important Union officer, but his initial attempt to enter service on the Union side was rejected, and he worked in private industry for several months before entering the U.S. Army as a colonel.

The presence of so many small errors of fact is particularly troubling in a book produced by a university press, since such manuscripts generally receive a close and careful reading from other scholars. These errors will distract and confound the knowledgeable reader, and make it inadvisable to assign the book for classroom use. Sadly, such errors will also misinform those seeking an introduction to this critically important era in the state and nation’s history

Tureaud’s decades-long and sometimes dangerous commitment to change Louisiana law and society is an important lesson to offer to young people. All readers can learn a great deal from the lifetime of courage and effort it took to bring about racial and social change.

This book succeeds as a loving tribute filled with the kind of detail about Tureaud’s personal and family life not available elsewhere. Errors of fact aside, it certainly serves this purpose well, while also complementing the standard history of civil rights in Louisiana, Race and Democracy by Adam Fairclough (1999).

Review: The Richmond Theater Fire

Xaris A. Martínez

Xaris A. Martínez is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Meredith Henne Baker. The Richmond Theater Fire: Early America’s First Great Disaster. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012. 368 pp. ISBN 978-0-8071-4374-2.

On December 26, 1811, the Broad Street Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, caught fire during an evening show. The actors and audience attempted to flee the theater, only to find their egress obstructed by narrow lobbies, winding staircases, and deficient exits. Despite heroic rescue efforts, seventy-two people perished in the blaze, including Governor George W. Smith and other prominent city residents. In The Richmond Theater Fire, Meredith Henne Baker provides a detailed account of the fatal evening’s events and argues that the conflagration served as a catalyst to transform the religious life and landscape of Virginia’s capital city.

Baker begins her chronological narrative by describing the social life of the state capital. Known for its joie de vivre, Richmond was “an isolated spot of urbanity” that attracted affluent people from across the South to its entertainment venues (9). No site was more popular among the gentry—and more criticized by evangelicals—than the city theatre, a rare public space in which a wide array of urbanites socialized openly. Throughout her account of the event, Baker intersperses biographical sketches of several of the theatergoers—white, black, rich, and poor—who attended (and survived) the deadly flames. Her vivid and dramatic prose allows the reader to smell the smoke in the air and hear the ensuing cries of “Fire!” that filled the theater that evening.

Using newspaper articles and personal accounts, Baker describes the efforts made by mourning Richmonders to make sense of the aftermath. The local governing board immediately proclaimed a four-month moratorium on public entertainment and appointed John Marshall, a local resident and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to help organize the construction of a memorial monument. The first day of 1812 was set aside as a day of fasting and prayer, providing the city’s religious leaders with an opportunity to preach about the meaning of the fire, namely, that it was a sign of divine disfavor and an opportunity for the city’s residents to repent from the immorality that the theater had epitomized. While the communal ritual hoped to promote religious fervor among Richmonders, it drew attention to the city’s lack of religious resources. The state capital had only four church buildings for its 10,000 inhabitants and boasted of few charitable organizations that could administer aid to fire victims.

Baker focuses on how this disaster particularly affected Richmond’s Protestant Episcopal congregation. Prior to the fire, which took the lives of many of their upper-class congregants, Episcopalians worshipped jointly with the Presbyterians, practicing a “gentle ecumenicalism” (152). By 1812, however, the blaze, along with the election of a new bishop and the ascendancy of evangelical enthusiasm in the area, led congregants to adopt the anti-theater stances and dramatic preaching style prevalent among Baptists and Methodists. This, in turn, led to a change in the public behavior of the influential Richmonders who became members of the new Monumental Church, built over the theater wreckage in order to serve as a memorial site to the fire’s victims and used by local Episcopalians from 1814 to 1965.

The “newly held post-theater fire religious devotion and identity” of Richmond’s Episcopalians lent their consequent civic actions—such as the creation of charitable organizations and the city’s first Sunday school—state-wide and even national importance (178). But while these institutions helped to re-establish the denomination’s socio-cultural preeminence in the Commonwealth, they were not able to stave off a subsequent decline in religious fervor among its residents. Just eight years after the revival-bringing fire, a new theater was built in the city and Richmond soon became known as “the entertainment capital of the upper South” (236). Baker contends, however, that the “evangelical period of Virginia Episcopalianism” made enduring changes to Richmond’s religious life and landscape—changes that would continue to impact the Commonwealth well into the twentieth century (173).

Baker is at her best when describing the myriad social changes that occurred in the wake of the theater fire. Her narrative is replete with interesting minutiae, ranging from architectural innovations to advances in public building safety, developments in American theater, and improvements in medical care. However, the lack of a formal introduction and conclusion makes it difficult to place her account in historiographical context. This is especially noticeable when Baker discusses the development and expansion of evangelicalism, a movement she describes vividly but fails to analyze in-depth. This flaw does not ultimately detract from the book’s engaging and informative nature; Baker ultimately succeeds in bringing attention to an oft-overlooked historic event that served as “a major spiritual turning point for Richmond” (176–77). Those interested in the religious environment of Richmond, evangelical influences on the Episcopal Church, and the rise of evangelicalism in the early republic will find this volume useful.

Review: Rising Road

Andrew S. Moore

Andrew S. Moore is an associate professor of history at Saint Anselm College.

Sharon Davies. Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 327 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-537979-2.

On August 11, 1921, Father James Coyle, priest of Birmingham, Alabama’s St. Paul’s Catholic Church, was shot and killed on St. Paul’s rectory porch in broad daylight. This murder represented a notorious case of injustice that had been historiographically overshadowed by the Red Scare turmoil and the period’s many other sensational trials (Sacco and Vanzetti, The Chicago “Black Sox,” John T. Scopes). In Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America, Sharon Davies, a professor of law at Ohio State University, gives the Coyle case the attention it deserved. Rising Road does not advance a thesis, but it does capture in rich detail the irrational and complex interplay among race, religion, and “otherness” in the post-World War I Jim Crow South.

Catholics were a distinct and self-conscious minority in Birmingham. They were tolerated when Coyle first arrived in Birmingham in 1904, but new European immigration complicated the South’s racial order and threatened religious tolerance. By World War I, anti-Catholicism marked local politics with a secret society calling itself the True Americans and the Ku Klux Klan inflaming religious prejudice. Rather than shrink from public view, however, Coyle took up a vigorous defense of his faith. He responded to overt examples of religious prejudice with sarcastic, mocking, and defensive letters to the editor. He generated such a backlash that local Catholics appealed to the bishop to quiet the feisty Irishman.

There were threats on Coyle’s life, but it was not his defense of the Catholic faith that led to his murder. Instead, he performed the wedding of Ruth Stephenson, a recent convert to Catholicism, and Pedro Gussman, a forty-two-year-old Puerto Rican wallpaper-hanger who had been in Birmingham some fourteen years. Ruth’s father, Edwin Stephenson, was an ordained Methodist minister who made his meager living hanging around the courthouse and offering to perform the wedding ceremony of couples obtaining a marriage license. His daughter’s interest in Catholicism began in childhood. When Ruth was only twelve, Stephenson discovered her talking to Coyle in humiliatingly plain view of Birmingham’s anti-Catholic population. The Stephensons tried to keep tight reins on their independent daughter, but just after her eighteenth birthday, Ruth received instruction in the Catholic faith and was baptized. A few months later, Coyle performed Ruth and Pedro’s marriage ceremony. Stephenson found out later that day. He confronted Coyle, shot him, and then promptly turned himself in.

Stephenson’s lead defense attorney was Hugo Black, who in five years’ time would be elected to the United States Senate and then, in 1937, appointed by Franklin Roosevelt to the United States Supreme Court. Black was the only one of Stephenson’s four attorneys who was not at that time a member of the Ku Klux Klan—but he joined soon after the trial. The Klan picked up the legal tab for Stephenson’s defense, a fact that KKK members themselves did not confirm until much later. Davies’s description of the circumstances leading up to the murder takes up less than half the book. The rest is devoted to the legal proceedings and trial that followed the murder.

The book is strongest here, as Davies the legal scholar explains the intricacies of trial proceedings and the legal issues at play without those becoming tedious and heavy reading. Grand juries and preliminary hearings may look the same inside as well outside the South. As Davies demonstrates, however, the political, social, and religious atmosphere outside the courtroom could dictate outcomes inside it. Typically, according to Davies, “proof that a man had carried a loaded gun to another man’s home, pointed it at his head, and pulled the trigger sufficed” for a grand jury to indict (143). At least in this case, however, that process was not perfunctory. The grand jury finally returned an indictment on second-degree murder charges (the prosecutor wanted first degree murder), but not before the start of the preliminary hearing that Stephenson refused to waive.

Justice was not always the point of the South’s legal system, and it is here where the South’s otherwise ethnic and religious diversity was forced into binary categories—black and white, Catholic and Protestant. From the time that he turned himself in, Stephenson maintained that he had acted in self-defense. As specious as that claim was (witnesses saw no evidence of a struggle, and Coyle was unarmed), that defense prevented Black from placing Stephenson’s actions in their proper context. Black knew that a jury of Stephenson’s peers would understand and empathize with the defendant if he could highlight their common racial and religious identity. Thus Stephenson’s line of defense included a claim of self-defense and temporary insanity (brought on by the Catholic assault on his family). As Davies explains, Stephenson was responsible for his actions (he reacted to Coyle’s threat to his own personal safety) and not responsible (temporarily out of his wits) at the same time.

Black’s defense strategy was risky, but such incongruence could be made congruent in the emotionally charged environment of racial and religious prejudice. As Davies’s narrative illustrates, Black managed this feat because in most white southern minds there was a connection between religious and racial otherness. As scholars of racial construction have demonstrated, race was a fluid category, and its boundaries often depended on factors having nothing to do with biology or genetics. What is more, the category Protestant meant nothing without the presence of a Catholic other (after all, what would a Protestant be protesting, except for Catholicism?). The Catholic “other” therefore also reinforced racial otherness.

In this case, those issues played out in this way: prior to his marriage, Pedro Gussman was considered “white.” He dated white women, was registered to vote, and, he pointed out, “no one has ever questioned my color until I became mixed up in this case” (197). When Stephenson had worked as a barber some years earlier, moreover, Pedro was one of his customers. Most telling was this legal reality: Pedro and Ruth could never have obtained a marriage license if he were not white. Yet in court Stephenson claimed that Gussman was a “Negro.” In fact, he testified that he has said as much to Coyle during their confrontation. Black reinforced that notion when he dramatically introduced Pedro to the court, after having the room darkened so as to accentuate Pedro’s dark (tanned) skin. Black also insinuated that Pedro had straightened his curly hair so as to appear white. White jurors believed of course that they “knew” a Negro when they saw one, and Black encouraged them to “look at his eyes” (243). The damage to Pedro’s racial standing and the prosecution’s case was beyond measure. Stephenson was acquitted, and the courtroom erupted into cheers.

While not historiographically significant, Rising Road is compelling storytelling along the lines of Kevin Boyle’s Arc of Justice (2004). As a good story, it probes deeply as it captures the imagination. It will work well in an undergraduate classroom. One measure of Davies’s success might be the extent to which she captured the imagination of at least one segment of her audience. In February 2012 United Methodist Bishop William Willimon, and Rev. Mikah Hudson, senior pastor of Birmingham’s Highlands United Methodist Church, officially apologized for Methodists’ response to the murder. They hosted an Ash Wednesday service of repentance and reconciliation, with local Catholic participation as well.[1]

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

Review: The Achievement of Wendell Berry

Jason Peters

Jason Peters is a professor of English at Augustana College.

Fritz Oehlschlaeger. The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. 322 pp. ISBN 978-0-8131-3007-1.

The most recent book-length work on Wendell Berry includes one co-authored and two edited volumes. Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life, by J. Matthew Bonzo and Michael R. Stevens, appeared in 2008. Wendell Berry and Religion, edited by Joel James Shuman and L. Roger Owens, followed a year later. And now, in 2012, we have what is probably the most substantial of the three: The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, edited by Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter.

There is sometimes a certain unevenness to such books, likely though not inevitable, that makes Fritz Oehlschlaeger’s even and even-tempered Achievement of Wendell Berry a welcome addition to the growing corpus of secondary literature on Berry—who, as the 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecturer may at last be emerging from neglect into his rightful position as one of America’s preeminent men of letters. Critic, biographer, novelist, poet, and essayist, Berry is, as Ed McClanahan has written, a writer of many parts. And if in bellicose times peaceable men may be accounted patriotic, Berry may well be, as Bill McKibben has said, our greatest patriot.

But Professor Oehlschlaeger, to his credit, makes no such claims. The Achievement of Wendell Berry is a modest but intelligent and deeply informed book. It proceeds from the quiet sensible premises that have been implicit in Berry’s own work from the beginning: that placelessness is corrosive to social stability, whether local or national; that abstraction and oversimplification are devoutly to be avoided; that liberty is better-served not by wealth but by competence in fundamental tasks; that the desecration of nature is only the most obvious consequence of our presiding other-worldly religion; and that one responsibility of criticism is that it be useful—that it teach us to learn not only about but also from our books.

Oehlschlaeger makes this point early. Just as Berry acknowledges that there is a useful role for criticism—though he is usually distrustful of the literary explainers—so Oehlschlaeger attempts what used to be called a “practical criticism.” To it he adds “two further precepts,” also derived from Berry: “Part of the critic’s charitable practice is to enlarge the contexts in which a writer’s work can be considered” and “to point out directions for its further use” (5). Also to Oehlschlaeger’s credit is the fact that he makes no apologies: Berry “has given us what we rightly expect from a writer of his stature: a serious moral vision of life rooted in care, affection, and honesty. The critic’s task is not so much to ‘explain’ that vision—certainly not in any reductive way—but to point out ways in which it might be used kindly” (8).

Anyone attempting to explain Berry’s polemical work must find himself in a very uncomfortable position. Why clarify what is already clear? Why explain in less disciplined prose what is already perfectly intelligible in exacting prose? Oehlschlaeger’s command of Berry’s thought is good enough that he must certainly have found himself so positioned. So the task he proposes to himself in the book’s first three chapters, which deal with Berry’s essays, is to situate rather than delineate Berry’s governing themes. (Oehlschlaeger regards Berry’s agrarianism, properly, as “the implicit—and often completely explicit—context and condition” for all that the book attempts [6].) Oehlschlaeger proceeds in the first of these chapters by pointing to Berry’s emphasis on the natural limits that govern human practices and disciplines. He would have us—after Alasdair MacIntyre—understand those disciplines in the context of virtue and what Berry himself calls “kindly use.” In the second of these chapters Oehlschlaeger concerns himself with much of what, in Berry’s view, undermines American life: perpetual war sustained for economic growth; a corrosive division between politics and ecology (not to mention political discourse reduced to such useless distinctions as “red” and “blue,” which are wholly insufficient to the complexities of civic life); the power wielded by a national policy of endless debt; and the surrendering of self-rule by those who, unable to procure anything except by purchase, will in consequence do anything for money. Oehlschlaeger hears in Berry echoes of, among others, Alexis de Tocqueville, who worried about the fate of subsidiary institutions should democracy incline toward despotism, and also Christopher Lasch, who saw with particular clarity the assault perpetrated against the family by the modern planners. The value here, again, is not so much in clarifying Berry, who does not need clarifying. The value is Oehlschlaeger’s ability to enlarge the contexts in which to consider Berry’s work.

The third chapter is driven by a question that certainly needs asking—and then careful answering—namely, whether or not Berry’s ideas depend “on Christianity or at least a religious view of the world” (77). Oehlschlaeger confesses to have answered the question in class once with “considerable equivocation” (77). And by the end of the chapter he says, “I offer no definitive answer, only a little more complex story” (115). But the story he offers does add up to something like a definitive answer, and Oehlschlaeger handles it deftly. The answer for Berry lies in “our most important freedom”: freedom from ourselves (116). “Learning this is the lifelong work of love, the everyday practice of resurrection in making the self a gift” (116). Oehlschlaeger admits that he does not know “[w]hether self-overcoming in self-giving is a peculiarly Christian practice,” but he does claim that “wherever such self-overcoming is practiced, there something very like Christianity is being practiced” (116).

If that is principally an ethical pronouncement, it is not for this reason theologically uninformed. Oehlschlaeger again enlarges the context, situating Berry’s religious thought firmly within a decidedly anti-gnostic Trinitarian Christian orthodoxy. He rightly sees Berry’s dissatisfaction with a strand of Christianity that is merely “a technique for individual salvation [and] whose language is also available, when needed, for pious consecration of national purposes” (89). Oehlschlaeger is especially good (as is Berry) on the problem of religious complicity in the desecration of nature. He persuasively argues that there is a distinctly “biblical quality” to Berry’s thinking (108). Oehleschlaeger notes the importance for Berry of the Sabbath, both as idea and practice, and also to those passages, principally in Isaiah, that concern right land use and ownership. All of this requires delicacy, for Berry is not comfortable being called a religious writer; he is, as Berry himself has said, a writer who is interested in religion or one for whom religious concerns are important. Oehlschlaeger does not state his case in exactly these words, but he captures their spirit. I should add that Oehlschlaeger goes so far as to show how Berry’s thinking intersects with such documents as the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae (1968) and also with such Eastern Orthodox emphases as theosis and ecstasis. Oehlschlaeger’s handling of the topic is skillful and very broadly informed.

The remainder of the book is devoted to Berry’s fiction and poetry, with one chapter on the short stories (the “overall arc” of which is a movement “from hurt to charity” [6-7]), one on the five shorter novels (the theme of which is memory, which receives its “fullest treatment” in The Memory of Old Jack [157]), one on the three longer novels (stories of “love in a time of war” [7]), and a final chapter on the poetry.

The chapters on Berry’s fiction constitute, in my judgment, the main strength of this book. Except perhaps for finding a bit more seriousness in those places where Berry appears to be going mainly for laughs (and there are many such places in the fiction), Oehlschlaeger is carefully attuned to the underlying charity, to the rich sense of family, community, and place, and to the complexities and afflictions—such as internal disaffection and external predation—that characterize the Port William membership and that in sum compose the “hard history of love,” a phrase Oehlschlaeger borrows from “The Hurt Man” and uses as his subtitle. He sees Berry’s fiction—the long novels, especially—as “accounts of practical peace-making” (198). They invite us “to ask whether the nation cynically uses local fidelities for ideological purposes quite alien to the reasons young Americans enter military service. How legitimate is it,” Oehlschlaeger asks, “to depend on the commitment of young people to their own places on earth to wage wars for such abstractions as the extension of democracy or free markets?” (197).

The novels expose the dangers of a Protestantism that devalues the body. They show us that we suffer not only because of loss but also, perhaps especially, because of our incorrigible selves. They are governed, says Oehlschlaeger, by a Johannine sense of love and understanding, showing us the operations of kindness, the force of local life in work, and the salutary nature of local memory in the old local practice of story-telling. And, again, the context is large. Oehlschlaeger directs our attention to the biblical narratives that underwrite much of Berry’s fiction; he also brings to bear such disparate thinkers as Hans Urs von Balthasar, René Girard, and Søren Kierkegaard. All of this is done with a proper respect for the perils—ranging from the uncharitable to the tyrannical—attendant to literary criticism, of which Berry has often voiced his suspicion.

We await, still, a treatment of Berry’s poetry that is concerned principally with form. Oehlschlaeger’s final chapter attends to the task of poetry, which on Berry’s account, he says, is to preserve the particular and to uphold and remember goodness. We all know “that our language is never fully commensurate with what it seeks to describe or convey,” Oehlschlaeger writes (238). “Our descriptions are always abstractions from all that is, and thus the need is for responsive and responsible ones. Keeping language responsible is an ever more difficult task, and it is preeminently the task of poetry, as Berry sees it, to be the last refuge of the particular” (238). And it is appropriate to a book with the subtitle Oehlschlaeger has given his that it move toward this: “The Word for Berry is Love, there at the beginning and the end, standing over all, entering into all. The end for the poet, then, paradoxically, is to arrive at a kind of speechlessness, a silence before the Word that creates and sustains everything” (264).

Whatever minor quibbles I have with The Achievement of Wendell Berry are so small that they merit a kindred silence. This is a right-minded and intelligent book, one likely to draw a mixed audience but aware of this readership throughout. And it is worth noting that the Culture of the Land series to which it belongs, edited by Norman Wirzba (Duke University) and published by Steve Wrinn, is one of the best ongoing projects in the current world of academic publishing.

Review: The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century

Laura Rominger Porter

Laura Rominger Porter is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Notre Dame.

Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green, eds. The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 313 pp. ISBN 978-0-8071-3851-9.

The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century engages several longstanding questions about the southern social structure that historians have examined over the last decade. In such works as Frank Towers’ The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (2004), Frank J. Byrne’s Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820–1865 (2006), the recent anthology Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790–1860 (2011), and co-editor Jonathan Wells’s own The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1861 (2004), historians of the American South have been reevaluating the emergence, geographic concentration, and relative autonomy of southerners of the middling sort. In a timely examination of these themes, the essays here offer a portrait of social heterogeneity and conflict, geographic and economic diversity, and steady transformation over the course of the century—a South that, contrary to previous accounts and depending on one’s point of emphasis, was not all that unlike the free-labor North.

This anthology’s most illuminating essays remain attuned to the theoretical stakes of identifying a distinct southern middle class. Those stakes have to do with prevailing assumptions about conditions of middle-class formation that (theoretically) transcend time and place. Thus, to identify a southern middle class is to claim that the southern economy was sufficiently capitalist (or at least commercialized). It also implies that a distinct and significant group of southerners pursued interests in conflict with those of planter elites and that this group went on to attain consciousness of those conflicting interests. Finally, to examine the southern middle class is to say something about its relationship to slave labor, particularly if that relationship made the path to southern middle-class formation historically exceptional. As the editors aptly note, the main challenge when engaging such a web of historical issues is that of establishing an adequate definition of “middle class” that applies to the southern social context, yet yields useful comparisons to other cases of middle-class formation. Relying by turns on occupation, status and cultural traits to identify the southern middle class, the contributors productively engage the northern middle class as a historical baseline, even as their definitions remain flexible enough to accommodate their differences.

Combined, these essays demonstrate that middle-class southerners shared much in common with their northern counterparts. John Deal examines the middle class of antebellum Norfolk, Virginia, and finds participation in benevolent societies that was typical of middle-class urban activity outside the South. Frank Towers’s analysis of secession-era antiparty rhetoric helps to explain why middle-class southerners, although in many ways autonomous, accepted secession even as their interests remained distinct from those of the planter elite. And Angela Lakwete’s profile of three businessmen in the old Southwest presents a compelling case for the southern economy’s diversity beyond agricultural and manual occupations. These historians show that the occupations, interests, and culture of the southern middle class at least complicates notions of a monolithic South subservient to the planter aristocracy.

At the same time, the idiosyncrasies of the slaveholding states remained integral to southern middle-class formation. Jennifer Green argues that early southern professionals emerged from planter families, calling into question the typical occupational markers of southern bourgeois status. Likewise, Susanna Delfino’s examination of middle-class factory managers and clerks suggests that antebellum industrialization was compatible with slavery and slaveholding ideals. And, as Reece Mushal shows, if the relations between the middle class and aristocracy were often antagonistic, countervailing kinship networks served to mute class divisions. If the southern middle class was indeed autonomous, these essays raise the question of to what degree.

Yet in assessing the strength of the southern middle class, timing remains important. Martin Ruef persuasively argues that although a distinct middle class emerged in earnest in the late antebellum South, it did not mature into a class “for itself” until the end of the century. Jonathan Wells also carries the conversation beyond the Civil War, providing a useful examination of how the southern middle class adjusted to a postwar world that was eager to condemn their entrepreneurial virtues in terms of Yankee materialism.

By far, however, the most provocative treatment of the theoretical problem of a southern middle class appears in James Oakes’s conclusion. Essentially, Oakes asks if a proper middle class could have emerged from a slave society—“a society that could not be bourgeois because it was not capitalist” (286)—and one that (in principle) required subservience to the slaveholding enterprise. Oakes urges historians to transcend the false dichotomy of subordination and independence when describing the bourgeoisie’s relationship to slaveholders, particularly by appreciating how southern slavery might have created uniquely favorable conditions for middle-class formation. If southern society was not technically capitalist, it was at least commercialized to such an extent that “it is wrong to assume that a master class and the middle class were fundamentally incompatible” (293).

Collectively, the contributors provide a welcome balance of illuminating case studies with more synthetic and interpretive treatments of a thorny historiographic question. With their focus on the free white men who dominated the southern economy, however, key comparative frames remained noticeably absent, particularly women and the African American middle class (the sole exception being Sonya Ramsey’s examination of middle-class black women in the late-nineteenth century). Although the essays span a range of decades and regions, the reader is left to wonder, for instance, how ideals of domesticity compared with middle-class northern ones, and how racial boundaries shaped the southern middle class in distinct and perhaps exceptional ways. Nevertheless, the anthology is a helpful introduction to how historians’ current understandings of nineteenth century southern society defy earlier notions of homogeneity and stasis, as well as a helpful starting point to future studies of the southern social structure.

Review: The Anointed

Ethan Schrum

Ethan Schrum is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson. The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 356 pp. ISBN 978-0-674- 04818-8.

In The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson explore the sources of intellectual authority in contemporary American evangelical Christianity. They hope to offer an account of why evangelicals tend to follow the teachings of certain charismatic popular leaders with limited academic credentials—whom the authors dub “the anointed” based on the notion that these leaders and their followers believe God has anointed them for their roles—rather than the teachings of evangelical academics who are respected by secular authorities in their fields.

A collaboration between a historian (Stephens) and a physicist (Giberson), both of whom self-identify as evangelicals, The Anointed begins with four case study chapters covering the subjects of human origins, American history, family and child psychology, and eschatology. Each chapter follows a similar pattern. After an opening vignette, the authors present a brief background of evangelical thinking on the chapter’s topic. They then describe the ideas, methods, and influence of a charismatic popular “anointed” leader who claims to speak with authority on the topic, and provide a shorter treatment of a leading evangelical scholar on the subject who has great credibility in the academic world. The populist leaders are creationist Ken Ham, history activist and Texas Republican politician David Barton, psychologist and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, and best-selling apocalyptic authors Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye. The evangelical academics include biologist and director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins, historian and National Humanities Medal recipient Mark Noll, psychologist and leading textbook author David Myers, and renowned New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop N. T. Wright. These figures do not all receive the same amount of attention. For example, there is a significant and insightful description of Collins’s career and ideas, but just a brief overview of Wright’s.

The case-study chapters provide interesting material about how evangelicals construct and adopt beliefs, and will be valuable resources for courses on contemporary American religion, evangelicalism, and perhaps the sociology of religion. Each chapter contains nuggets that testify to the extraordinary popular success of evangelical leaders. Chapter 1 takes the reader on a vivid trip through the Creation Museum in Kentucky, which receives thousands of visitors each month. Tours conclude “at the Last Adam Theater, where visitors learn of Jesus’ sacrifice and receive a call to repent of their sins” (25). The authors describe the development of the intellectual framework that shaped the museum, including the work of Ham and his organization Answers in Genesis. Chapter 2 on amateur Christian historians is most insightful when it sets David Barton’s work in the context of the astounding earlier success of The Light and the Glory, a 1977 book by Peter Marshall and David Manuel that purported to chronicle God’s work in American history and sold almost a million copies. In chapter 3, the authors do well to highlight the importance of a now little-known work, The Christian Family (1970) by Lutheran pastor Larry Christenson, which sold two million copies and became “the manual for conservative Christian families” (106). The book’s best material is in chapter 4, where we get a helpful mini-biography of Hal Lindsey and an astute contextual analysis of how the rise of a Christian publishing subculture in the 1970s fueled the popularity of Lindsey’s works, especially the apocalyptic thriller The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), which had sold an astonishing twenty-eight million copies by the early 1990s. The United States had 725 Christian bookstores in 1965 and 1,850 in 1975, and “sales of Christian books climbed over 112 percent from 1972 to 1977” (158). Lindsey proffered ideas about Armageddon, and the authors suggest that Ronald Reagan’s public discussion during his presidency about how possibilities for Armageddon might affect foreign policy indicated just how much influence Lindsey and his ilk exerted on American life.

A prominent theme that cuts across the case studies is that many of the phenomena the authors highlight began or intensified in the wake of the turbulent 1960s. The Late Great Planet Earth, The Christian Family, and Dobson’s Dare to Discipline all appeared in 1970, the latter works indicating that questions about family matters “seemed urgent after the alarming 1960s assault on traditional values” (102). The Light and the Glory came a few years later, aiming at “restoring optimism to a nation crippled by doubts and fears” (75). Curiously, the authors do not develop this point further or engage the historiography, missing a chance to make a larger contribution to scholarship on recent U.S. history.

The last two chapters deviate from the case-study pattern. Chapter 5, which seems largely superfluous, describes the institutions of the parallel culture of evangelicalism by following the life of one evangelical from childhood through mid-20s. Chapter 6, however, is where the real action is. Here the authors present their explanation for “what confluence of factors empowers [the anointed leaders] to rise to national prominence until they wield intellectual authority over tens of millions of people? What winds carry them so comfortably past their credentialed and mainstream evangelical colleagues? . . . What draws followers—often well educated, sometimes with doctorates, employed in mainstream professions, raising wholesome families—to them?” (234).

Many of the answers are predictable: they cite characteristics of American culture and especially evangelicalism—such as anti-intellectualism, populism, and a religious free market. Stephens and Giberson also discuss strategies invoked by the anointed themselves—such as claiming endorsement by God or that they are countering threats from Satan. One, however, merits closer attention. In the book’s most notable attempt at innovation, the authors argue that the anointed use in-group and out-group dynamics to gain authority. In-group dynamics occurs when “people begin to think of themselves as part of a movement, inspired by a leader” (237). Out-group dynamics, by contrast, functions by creating an enemy (out-group) that helps unite groups that would normally be rivals in a common cause against the out-group. Drawing heavily on Yale law professor Dan Kahan’s account of cultural cognition, the authors coin “cue-based epistemology” to describe the process by which in-group dynamics influence belief and trump conventional expertise (245). They conclude that “by effectively exploiting cultural cues, evangelical leaders resonate with their audiences and quickly become insiders—members of the tribe” (248– 49). The authors place cue-based epistemology in the larger framework of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, claiming that cultural cues and our need to have a group identity and embrace leaders we can trust “are deeply rooted in our genes” (249).

Despite these efforts to explain intellectual authority, The Anointed will likely disappoint historians looking for a contribution to scholarship on expertise. Many historians will be unsatisfied with the extent to which the explanation is based on social science theory rather

than analysis of historical evidence. Bracketing the explanatory framework in a separate chapter does not help matters. The authors briefly raise the issue of trust in conjunction with cue-based epistemology, but they do not engage the substantial and important literature on trust that has arisen in the history of science and related fields in recent decades, as for example in the writing of Theodore Porter and Steven Shapin.[1] This literature insists that assent to scientific knowledge and methodology does not arise self-evidently but rather is mediated by sociocultural processes, which suggests examination of the rhetorical, institutional, and interpersonal strategies that scientists employ to gain trust and credibility. Stephens and Giberson also do not explain how their work relates to the scholarly literature in fields like sociology and history on in-group and out-group dynamics or the authority of experts in American society.

The authors also miss the opportunity to connect their discussion with moments in American history where credentialed secular expertise has been a serious problem for public policy. In the nineteenth century, early proponents of the human sciences offered expert knowledge about racial and sexual differences that bolstered efforts to marginalize women and racial minorities. In the early twentieth century, several presidents of elite universities, who were widely regarded as progressive experts, endorsed eugenics. During the 1960s, a near cult of technocratic expertise surrounded Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, but with disastrous results in Vietnam. These historical examples complicate a picture viewed simplistically as credentialed reliability versus populist irresponsibility.

One reason for some of these difficulties is that the authors have two goals that sometimes interfere with each other. On one hand, they want to assess how the anointed leaders have such intellectual authority among evangelicals despite their lack of scholarly qualifications. On the other hand, the authors want to condemn the views of the anointed and endorse the positions of the evangelical academics. Too often, the authors’ enthusiasm for the second goal inhibits their pursuit of the first. The Anointed is certainly not a dispassionate work of scholarship. It is a critique of the ideas espoused by the anointed. In fact, Giberson has personally participated in some of the issues mentioned in the book. The authors quote Ham from a debate on beliefnet.com, but fail to mention that Giberson was the opponent. They describe how Collins set up the BioLogos Foundation “to counter the antiscience message of the creationists,” but do not indicate that Giberson became BioLogos’s executive vice president for a time and wrote a book with Collins under its auspices (9). The Anointed thus raises important questions about the relationship of scholarship and advocacy.

The Anointed seems to be written for a general audience, and it mostly consists of fluid prose that should endear it to general readers despite its length. There are drawbacks, however, to the snappy style and quick-moving stories. One such drawback is a tendency to oversimplification, particularly in describing views on human origins. The authors’ language at times implies that everyone is either a young-earth creationist or a full-blown ateleological evolutionist, whereas in fact many evangelicals are somewhere in between. Too often they say things like Francis Collins “believes in evolution” without specifying what kind of evolution Collins affirms or how he thinks God might be related to evolution (55). Another drawback of the writing style is that it sometimes gives a patronizing tone to the descriptions of the anointed, perhaps to make the account more vivid. Despite these flaws, The Anointed makes an important contribution by prompting us to consider how human beings determine their beliefs on some of the most important questions in life.

1. The author wishes to thank Luke Harlow, Mike Pasquier, Randal Hall, and Salman Hussain for their comments on an early draft of this essay. For a succinct explanation of how the historiography developed this way, see Jon F.Sensbach, “Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire,” Journal of Southern History 73 (August 2007): 631–642.↩

Review: The Old South’s Modern Worlds

John David Smith

John David Smith is Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of American History at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, Frank Towers, editors. The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 331 pages. ISBN 978-0-19-538402-4.

Inspired by historian Michael O’Brien’s important writings on antebellum southern intellectual history, the contributors to this eclectic anthology examine the degree to which the Old South was “modern” in ambition and outlook. Most historians describe the Old South as insular, backward, and provincial, a pre-modern land wedded to tradition, to an agrarian pre-modern Weltanschauung, in order to retain the region’s political economy of slavery.

The fifteen contributors to The Old South’s Modern Worlds disagree, arguing that pre-Civil War southerners were a diverse lot, fully engaged in the cosmopolitan modernizing trends of the nineteenth century, including moral reform, urbanization, industrialization, and territorial expansion. The editors insist that the essays in the collection interpret the Old South “on its own terms and as an active participant in, and even promoter of, change and progress” (3). In doing so they add a new twist to the old debate over southern “exceptionalism.” Rather than “making Southern exceptionalism the analytical start or finish,” the authors in this collection assert that the Old South was “exceptional” to the extent that it “did not fit comfortably within the dichotomies that have historically defined the literature of the antebellum South” (19).

The editors arrange the fourteen essays (followed by O’Brien’s “Afterword”) into five parts. In Part One, Peter S. Onuf, Matthew Mason, and Brian Schoen contextualize the antebellum South within international ideas of “nation,” proslavery thought, and interdependent political economies. Next, Larry E. Hudson Jr., Steven Deyle, and James L. Hudson examine slavery in a modernizing context. Frank Towers, William G. Thomas, and L. Diane Barnes follow with essays on southern urbanization, economic modernization, and free and slave labor, respectively. In Part Four, Charles F. Irons, Andrew K. Frank, and Craig Thompson Friend treat missionary activity, Native American policy, and gender roles, respectively. Finally, Marc Egnal and Edward L. Ayers consider the “long view” of the South, addressing questions of modernization and suggesting how the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction figured into world history.

Though historians will find it disappointing that this anthology devotes so little attention to religion, they nonetheless will welcome Irons’s excellent essay “Zion in Black and White: African-American Evangelicals and Missionary Work in the Old South.” According to Irons, whites not surprisingly considered the conversion of enslaved men and women an essential initiative in the late antebellum period. His contribution is to document how African Americans participated in three key ministries—colonization, missions to evangelize the slaves, and international (African) missions. This activity, Irons writes “both adds weight to the emerging redefinition of antebellum Southern Protestantism as modern and reveals new lines of influence that blacks exerted on the development of Southern evangelism” (210–11). Beyond this, black participation in these ministries illumines “the difficult trade-offs that black Southerners were forced to make within biracial churches as they balanced sometimes-competing desires for racial uplift, personal fulfillment, and the redemption of corrupt social systems” (211).

Despite its strengths in underscoring degrees of modernity in the Old South, especially in its slave economy, The Old South’s Modern Worlds lacks a sense of dialogue between the authors and those contemporary historians who disagree with their interpretive framework. Egnal’s “Counterpoint: What if Genovese Is Right? The Premodern Outlook of Southern Planters” appears almost as an afterthought, the editors burying their explanation for its inclusion in an endnote, stating that Egnal’s piece “seeks to further debate on reinterpreting the history of the antebellum South” (283n).

Notwithstanding this imbalance, this collection highlights how today’s historians increasingly define the Old South as modern-minded. It should serve as an excellent teaching text.

Review: God-Fearing and Free

Matthew Avery Sutton

Matthew Avery Sutton is an associate professor of history at Washington State University.

Jason W. Stevens. God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010. 448 pp. ISBN 978-0-674-05555-1.

The 9/11 attacks on the United States and the ensuing “war on terror” has forced Americans to once again wrestle with the relationships between their military ventures and their public expressions of faith. It has also pushed scholars to think more deeply about the ways in which the United States has employed religion in past conflicts. In particular, scholars have been thoroughly reassessing the role of religion during the Cold War. Angela Lahr’s Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares: The Cold War Origins of Political Evangelicalism (2007) focuses on the ways in which evangelicals’ doomsday scenarios fueled Cold War ideology; William Inboden’s Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960: The Soul of Containment (2010) analyzes the impact of Christianity on Truman and Eisenhower’s foreign policy; and Jonathan P. Herzog’s The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War (2011) shows how Americans framed the fight against communism in religious terms.

The story of the United States’ pervasive deployment of religion in the Cold War is told again by Jason W. Stevens in his excellent God-Fearing and Free. He argues that in the two decades after World War II, “The American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country’s mythical innocence and thus fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism” and that “Americans represented both private and public life through a language of iniquity, guilt, and expiation that intentionally echoed the nation’s past religious awakenings” (vii). During this period, influential Americans sought to bury the theological modernism of the progressive era that had aimed to correlate “Christianity with the progressive elements in American society” (4). “Protestant countermodernists,” he explains, “(ranging from the neoorthodox to self-critical liberals to fundamentalists) argued that Christianity should testify against the world instead of accommodating it; Christians should recover the God of Judgment who stands over culture rather than pretend to find God in some dialectic of progress” (6). These countermodernists gave Americans a language with which to acknowledge their loss of innocence and then justify their actions in the Cold War.

To make these arguments, Stevens breaks his book into five sections of two chapters each. Each section takes a unique approach to interpreting the ways in which religion intersects with the Cold War. The first focuses on the ideas articulated by the nation’s most prominent theologians. Stevens sees numerous parallels between two major figures who have in the past been most often treated as opposites—Billy Graham and Reinhold Niebuhr. Similar to Andrew Finstuen’s recent Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety (2009), Stevens shows how Niebuhr and Graham’s emphasis on sin helped frame Cold War ideas about national innocence and naivety. The second section of the book examines the ways in which Americans dealt with guilt. Here Stevens offers a thoughtful analysis of sources ranging from former communist-turned-conservative Whittaker Chambers’ bestselling memoir Witness (1952) to McCarthyism as it was expressed and critiqued through film noir. The third section focuses on Americans’ struggles over mass culture and consumption. Here Stevens explores such sources as the play Inherit the Wind (1955) and then academic critiques of mass evangelism. The next section interrogates the integration of popular psychology and psychoanalysis with religion. Paul Tillich and Shirley Jackson serve as two of the many sources Stevens invokes in this discussion of Cold-War era therapeutic faith. The final section explores the work of “prophets” ranging from Flannery O’Connor to James Baldwin as they critiqued the United States’ Cold War strategies.

Ultimately, Stevens demonstrates how Americans’ acknowledgment of the nation’s loss of innocence in some ways made it easier to justify increasingly greater evils. Stevens concludes by applying his argument to the present: “In light of recent events” he writes, “we may take Jesus’ provocation—ye are liars, and the truth is not in you!—to tell us not simply to shed our innocence, but to put an end to ending our innocence. We must stop what has become a national ritual that functions as self-acquittal through self-accusation” (310).

One of the strengths of God-Fearing and Free is the wide-range of sources that Stevens uses to shape his argument, as well as the interdisciplinary approach he takes to understanding those sources. An English professor, Stevens draws on his own discipline as well as history and cultural studies to build his narrative. It is not often that an author can move comfortably from Whittaker Chambers to Night of the Hunter (1955) to Billy Graham to The Haunting of Hill House (1959).

God-Fearing and Free is not a quick or easy read. It is an ambitious book that makes an ambitious argument. Although Stevens (and/or his editor) could have worked a little harder to reduce the jargon and make the text more readable, it is still well-worth the challenge. In sum, Stevens has written an important book that adds a new and significant dimension to a story that has important ramifications for American life today.

Review: God’s Right Hand

David R. Swartz

David R. Swartz is an assistant professor of history at Asbury University.

Michael Sean Winters. God’s Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right. New York: HarperOne, 2012. 448 pp. ISBN 978-0-06-197067-2.

In 1980 Ronald Reagan told 18,000 conservative evangelical ministers in Dallas, “I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.” After decades of cultural exile, according to Michael Sean Winters, conservative evangelicals were receiving a blessing from a serious presidential candidate. In this page-turning biography, Winters argues that Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, was the pivotal figure who brought social conservatism onto the national stage and launched the culture wars.

The narrative is familiar to students of American religious history. Falwell was a driven religious entrepreneur who founded Thomas Road Baptist Church, where he preached salvation and fulminated against encroaching secularism, federal government, and global communism. He established a Christian day school in the 1960s, launched Liberty University in the 1970s, and began to preach a conservative political gospel in the 1980s. Despite Falwell’s devotion to Reagan, the president failed to deliver, and Falwell himself made a series of missteps in the 1980s. As his ministries careened between infusions of cash and insolvency, Falwell overreached, and his infelicitous language provoked a backlash from moderates.

But Falwell was more than a political operative. He was a sinner, according to his own spiritual narrative, a southern hooligan in need of Jesus. His conversion ensconced him in an all-encompassing fundamentalist world. After graduation from Baptist Bible College in Missouri, he became a preacher of the gospel, a calling that always superseded his political adventures. In fact, Winters shows that the vast majority of his sermons dealt with scripture, not politics. Despite a vituperative streak, he could also be gracious. He formed unlikely friendships with Hustler’s Larry Flynt and liberal Democrat Edward Kennedy. A devoted family man, Falwell never suffered a hint of personal scandal. Even as Winters clinically recounts a multitude of horrifying remarks about racial integration in South Africa and the American South, he humanizes Falwell with telling anecdotes and descriptions of Thomas Road’s numerous ministries of compassion.

Winters locates Falwell ecclesiastically and culturally as a fundamentalist. As a mid-century independent Baptist, he inhabited a separatist world. While this separatism eventually transformed into combative engagement, his basic views of homosexuality, government intrusion, abortion, support for Israel, and American superpatriotism did not change. As the decades passed, Falwell’s genius was revealed in his ability to invert certain fundamentalist methodologies, even while maintaining moral certitude on these issues. From cultural critic Francis Schaeffer, Falwell learned the strategy of cobelligerancy. Abandoning long-standing separatist tendencies, he linked fundamentalist networks with Catholics, Jews, and Mormons. Even as he practiced a nostalgic trope of national declension, he co-opted the methods of modern advertising. Falwell’s use of radio, television, and direct mail filled his coffers and expanded his empire beyond mega-church status. Finally, having preached the infamous 1964 “Ministers and Marches” sermon, which defended segregation by denouncing political activism, he turned many apolitical fundamentalists into political activists.

This account of Falwell’s transformations is both convincing and eminently readable, but it is not an original piece of scholarship. The paucity of archival sources is conspicuous, and Winters heavily depends on his subject’s own published accounts. Winters exaggerates Falwell’s significance, both as a driver and a representative figure of evangelical politicization. To be sure, the founder of the Moral Majority was an important figure in the resurgence of American conservatism. But Winters’ repeated claims that Falwell was “the face of American Christianity” and the architect of the mega-church movement are overplayed. Moreover, there is little recognition of the many varieties of evangelical politicization: Prohibition activists of the early twentieth century, Okie populists who lifted Barry Goldwater to the Republican nomination in 1964 and Reagan to the governorship of California in 1970, and the evangelical left of the 1970s. Winters does not acknowledge these important antecedents to the 1980s iteration of the religious right.

Those looking for a fine-grained, archives-driven cultural analysis of this important figure will have to turn to Susan Harding’s The Book of Jerry Falwell (2001). But this fascinating and lively narrative portrait of Falwell, the first comprehensive biography of this important figure, contributes significantly to the literature of American religious history.

Review: Ministers and Masters

Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait

Jennifer L. Woodruff Tait is an adjunct professor of church history at Asbury Theological Seminary.

Charity R. Carney. Ministers and Masters: Methodism, Manhood, and Honor in the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 188 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-8071-3886-1.

Both insiders and outsiders have noted the many contradictions in the study of American Methodism as a social movement. Not the least is the contradiction that a denomination so opposed in its early days to slavery—and so committed, if awkwardly, to spiritual equality of the races—accommodated itself over time so completely to southern slaveholding society. This important new book by Charity Carney goes a long way toward explaining this contradiction by shedding light on the complicated interplay of religion, masculinity, and honor..

As Carney notes, Methodism’s “recognition of the equality of souls” led ministers “to craft a new type of patriarchy in the South—a Methodist patriarchy that both preserved and undermined the social hierarchy” and “transformed the meaning of masculinity for ministers,” to whom traditional arenas of masculine honor-gaining were off limits (5). At the same time Methodist ministers were transforming southern patriarchy, though, they were also becoming southern patriarchs, even if it was with a twist. “Methodist ministers,” Carney elaborates, “could never be typical southern men; their profession simply prevented it. But they could take on vestiges of southern manhood and become patriarchs in their own right. The story of the creation of Methodist masculinity offers insight into the pervasiveness of southern patriarchal ideals and the resilience of evangelical notions of spiritual equality. These two forces met in southern Methodism and produced a new type of religious standard separate from but deeply connected to conventional social practices” (9).

Carney presents an overall picture of what ideal Methodist manhood looked like and how it was maintained. Methodists were enjoined by their governing text of church law, the Discipline, to “avoid the worldly (and typically masculine) habits of ‘laying up treasure upon earth’ through seeking fortune or fame, ‘fighting, quarrelling, brawling,’ ‘drinking spirituous liquors,’ and ‘taking such diversions as cannot be used in the name of the Lord Jesus,’ like politicking, frivolous socializing, dancing, and gambling” (13). Methodist preachers more often found themselves the subject of violence than the perpetrators of it, and gained a certain kind of honor in enduring it patiently. Yet they forcefully articulated their worldview in newspapers and sermons. Preachers also created a brotherhood of compatriot clergy through the deeply connectional nature of Methodist polity, while also transforming places like taverns into arenas of evangelism

Carney looks at four ways in which Methodism both developed and undermined patriarchy and hierarchy: denominational organization, marriage, child-rearing, and relationships with slaves. Through the “patriarchy of the pulpit” southern Methodist ministers understood themselves as part of a strongly hierarchical connection, subject to the will of bishop and presiding elder, continually following the models set forth by older and wiser clergy on higher rungs of the ecclesiastical ladder. They repeatedly rejected various agitations for more democratic reforms. It was therefore a patriarchy “centered on spiritual fatherhood rather than temporal mastery” (64).

In the other three arenas, though, the triumph of patriarchy was less sure. The relatively impoverished life of constant travel led by Methodist preachers meant that it was impossible for them to fulfill expected cultural norms as family providers. “Southerners expected patriarchs to provide for and protect their families and to establish an estate and a reputation in their community that could be passed on to the next generation” (90). Instead, preachers’ households “emphasized spiritual health over temporal needs and religious authority over patriarchal power” as itinerants depended on their wives to be in charge of family matters—financial, legal, and spiritual—for months at a time and their church communities to provide the basic necessities of life (90). Furthermore, while paying outward homage to the structures of southern society, Methodist rhetoric “created an inverted hierarchy in which young Christians proved their own spiritual authority over that of their parents,” and in which “at times, ministers took their message of spiritual equality even further and included slaves (the lowest members of society) in stories that condemned southern patriarchs for their spiritual blindness” (112). In the end, “Methodist writers crafted a complex dialogue that questioned the ultimate power of southern patriarchs while presenting the patriarch as vital to social and religious order” (141).

Many treatments of Methodism have tended to focus on its northern branches (with the notable exception of works by Cynthia Lynn Lyerly and Christine Leigh Heyrman), and this book provides a welcome “thick” description of southern Methodism—its ethos, its self-understanding, and its cultural adaptations. But it is not only of value to scholars of Methodism. It nuances our understanding of southern patriarchy and the ways in which that patriarchy could be questioned. It gives a window into how the roles of women and children functioned in southern society. And it implicitly asks broader questions about the place of religion in a slave-holding society—especially a religion which began with a biracial vision. It is recommended reading for all who wish for insight into those issues.

Review: Albert Taylor Bledsoe

Lucas Volkman

Lucas Volkman is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Missouri.

Terry A. Barnhart. Albert Taylor Bledsoe: Defender of the Old South and Architect of the Lost Cause. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 270 pp. ISBN 978-0-8071-3724-6.

Historians Eugene Genovese, David W. Blight, and Charles Reagan Wilson, among others, have ranked Albert Taylor Bledsoe as one of the leading theorists of southern nationalism before and after the Civil War. Until the appearance of Terry Barnhart’s excellent and comprehensive biography on Bledsoe, however, there has been no book-length profile of this important figure. He was an eminent defender of slavery and states’ rights before the war. After its conclusion, Bledsoe was a leading “architect of the Confederate interpretation of the conflict” (6). He began articulating the Lost Cause ideology, while retroactively justifying secession in light of southern defeat. Religious historians will find Bledsoe’s own religious story interesting. He was an Episcopal priest who became a Methodist minister later in life. However, while he is known for his ministerial career and his involvement in the critical theological controversies of the day, Bledsoe also held a number of other vocations in his life. Born in Kentucky, a graduate of West Point, a member of the Springfield, Illinois, bar with Abraham Lincoln before relocating to the South, Bledsoe was also a mathematician, teacher, editor, and Confederate official during his varied career.

The book is organized chronologically, but it also incorporates chapters exploring Bledsoe’s theological and political writings. Barnhart adequately details Bledsoe’s overall impact in his time, as well as how scholars have characterized his work.. The author does an excellent job discussing Bledsoe’s 1856 An Essay on Liberty and Slavery, as well as one of the first postwar treatises defending the right of secession, Is Davis A Traitor? (1866)—which became a springboard to his editorship of the Southern Review. Bledsoe eventually aligned that periodical with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. But, while Barnhart’s prose is generally sound, there are several instances where he seems to focus a bit too heavily on secondary sources and their assessment of Bledsoe, especially numerous direct quotations from them that distract from the overall flow of his arguments.

One of the more interesting aspects of the book is chapter four, which examines Bledsoe’s metaphysical and theological ideas. While Barnhart explains that Bledsoe wrote on these subjects throughout his life, Barnhart situates the chapter within the larger description of his antebellum corpus. It was during this time that he wrote two of his most important works, An Examination of President Edwards’ Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will (1845) and A Theodicy; Or, Vindication of the Divine Glory (1853). The central theme in this chapter, which is also successfully weaved throughout the book, is Bledsoe’s Arminian-influenced philosophy of free will. Barnhart proves that Bledsoe’s “works were original, learned, and well-argued treatises that earned him something of a following among advocates of free will who shared his disdain of Calvinism” (57). But these writings were not received without controversy in Calvinist circles, as Barnhart demonstrates. As with other parts of the book, Barnhart effectively summarizes Bledsoe’s work, and the broader reception to it.

Barnhart admits that there are gaps in his biography, which stem from limited sources. “Writing a biography of Bledsoe is a challenging endeavor because so few of his personal papers have survived” (211). Fortunately, Barnhart provides an informative five-page essay on the sources that he does utilize. Bledsoe deplored writing letters, and much of his correspondence before 1860 was lost. At the same time, several family members saved correspondence. Washington Post columnist David Rankin Barbee, moreover, compiled a multitude of materials in the middle of the twentieth century in anticipation of an unwritten biography on Bledsoe. Along with these sources, Bledsoe’s numerous writings and work, especially in the Southern Review, form the core of Barnhart’s sources, which are masterfully employed throughout his book.

Review: God’s Fields

C. Riddick Weber

C. Riddick Weber is an assistant professor of pastoral ministry at Moravian Theological Seminary.

Leland Ferguson. God’s Fields: Landscape, Religion, and Race in Moravian Wachovia. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011. 288 pp. ISBN 978-0-9130-3748-6.

Leland Ferguson follows up on his award-winning writing and research in archeology and colonial African American culture with a more narrowly focused study of the eighteenth and nineteenth century burial practices of the Unitas Fratrum. This religious denomination, more commonly known as the Moravian Church, settled the Wachovia region of piedmont North Carolina, which is roughly modern Forsyth County. The main title of this work is Ferguson’s translation of Gottesacker, the German term used by Moravians for their burial grounds, which rightly informs the reader that this work is primarily archeological. However, as the subtitle implies, the author also looks for both the contributing factors and resulting outcomes of changes over time in these burial practices. Thus, to explain these shifts, Ferguson also draws heavily on official church records and family communications. Despite the political and racial complexity of the subject matter, the end result is a very readable work that shows the changes in the ways Moravians dealt with race, which eventually led to spiritual and geographical segregation.

To make this work suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, Ferguson includes a brief, broad history of the Moravian Church. He discusses Moravian theology, socio-economic constructs, town planning, missiology, and racial awareness. Ferguson builds the case that Moravians arrived in Wachovia Region of North Carolina as a community-oriented, egalitarian society with very progressive views on race and inclusivity. He shows that over the course of the next century, Moravians shed much of their distinctive identity and adopted local approaches to liberty, gender, property, and race, including the willingness or desire to own people of other races. Ferguson illustrates how detrimental this course of events was for African Americans affiliated with the Moravians, either by ties of church membership or those owned as slaves. In painting an ever-bleaker picture of life for these African Americans, Ferguson avoids overly large brushstrokes, pointing out differences in practices between Moravians, sometimes even between members of the same extended family. Ferguson shows that many Moravians resisted the American values that emphasized work for personal profit over a sense of vocation that benefitted the community that were an important part of the changes in Moravian approaches to slavery and race. This nuanced account is situated in a larger explanation of how much the Moravians lost from their original utopian goals.

Though Ferguson notes that African Americans were members of other Moravian settlements in the Wachovia region, he focuses on the town of Salem. He devotes the bulk of this book to the relationship between Moravians of the originally integrated congregation of Salem and later the separate congregation of Saint Philips Moravian, which white Moravians established for African Americans. Ferguson’s archeological research both on the various church buildings and the burial practices that the white Moravians established for African Americans provided the foundational information for his writing.

The Saint Philips buildings and the God’s Acre—the cemetery—for this congregation are located within the historic district of Old Salem. Ferguson addresses the ways that relationship between Old Salem, the Moravian Church, and the Saint Philips congregation further complicates the representation of African American life in and around Salem, especially since Old Salem endeavors to deal with issues of history rather than religion. Furthermore, just as the physical layout of the eighteenth-century community of Salem and the various access points that visitors had to that Moravian town affected the understandings that historical “others” had of Salem, so too do the decisions that Old Salem has made regarding signage and historical interpretation affect the understandings that contemporary “others” develop regarding Moravians and race in previous centuries and possibly even in the present.

Ferguson deals with these complex issues with both accuracy and tact. Race, church property, and membership in various Moravian religious groups are not just relegated to history. Early in the book Ferguson refers to an official church resolution from 2006, and his appendices contain a 2010 news release, showing that the Salem Congregation had once again included the Saint Philips Moravian Church within its member institutions.

Ferguson is honest in acknowledging his personal history and interest. He notes at the outset his own contact with Moravians, his appreciation for certain customs and practices, and his discomfort with other racial and ethnic attitudes that he encountered earlier in his life, which were the eventual outcomes of the changes he addresses in this work. He ends by reciting many questions of history, race, topography, voice, participation, and past and present practice that still remain, and celebrates the value of these questions. With this book, Ferguson offers a wealth of historical and archeological evidence to help people enter into these questions as more informed participants.

Review: From Bible Belt to Sunbelt

Joseph Williams

Joseph Williams is an assistant professor of religion at Rutgers University.

Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. xxiv + 520pp. ISBN: 978-0-393-06682-1.

In October of 1970, Ronald Reagan met with several influential leaders of charismatic renewal in the U.S., including George Otis, Harald Bredesen, and Pat and Shirley Boone. When the group joined hands to pray at the conclusion of the meeting, Otis, who served as a general manager of the Lear Jet Corporation before committing to full-time ministry, felt compelled to deliver a message from God to the then-governor of California: “If you walk uprightly before Me,” Otis nervously prophesied, “you will reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” (370–71).

Reagan’s meeting with these charismatic leaders, most of whom lived in California at the time, graphically illustrated the powerful nexus between conservative politics and conservative evangelicalism that emerged in Southern California and eventually helped shape U.S. politics across the nation. Whereas Otis credited his prophecy to the spur-of-the-moment inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Darren Dochuk’s fascinating, thoroughly researched book reveals the extent to which this unique encounter represented a culmination of trends that were literally decades in the making.

Dochuk’s narrative begins in the western South. He details the plight of plain-folk southerners who sought to escape the dire economic conditions in the region during the 1930s and early 1940s. Drawn by the promise of better opportunities, numerous individuals migrated to Southern California, bringing their distinctive culture and outlook with them. In contrast to their counterparts in the Deep South, individuals from states such as Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas tended to embrace a “purer populist doctrine that combined a radical individualism, experimentalism, and egalitarianism with a willingness to unite in protection of their interests” (10). Religion, of course, was a crucial component in this culture, and Dochuk effectively demonstrates the way in which Baptists, Pentecostals, and other evangelicals from the region “folded the teachings of Jesus and Jefferson into a formula for participatory politics” (17).

If these southerners brought to Southern California a distinctive brand of God and politics characterized by an “innate inventiveness and combativeness,” they also changed in important respects as they established themselves as a permanent fixture on the West Coast (xvii). Transplanted evangelicals increasingly began to emulate some of the more cosmopolitan instincts of their neighbors. More often than not, they shed overt forms of anti-Semitism and racism, and also enjoyed the economic benefits of living in an area dominated by burgeoning defense-related industries. Of even greater significance politically, numerous believers came to question previous deeply engrained political loyalties. Their emergence on the California political scene brought to the fore tensions in the New Deal Democratic coalition, as social Democrats sought to curb the influence of the growing number of southern evangelicals in their midst. Dochuk skillfully outlines the competing interests and visions at stake in this battle for the soul of the California Democratic Party, calling attention to failed efforts during the 1940s to reconcile religious conservatism with an economic populism. Disillusioned by these internecine quarrels and by the success of progressive Democrats who championed a more robust multicultural nationalism, the door opened for southern evangelicals’ political realignment and their increasing identification with the Republican Right.

Having set the stage for southern evangelicals’ sharp rightward turn, Dochuk spends the remainder of the book detailing the efforts of a diverse and colorful cast of characters who spearheaded the formation of a united “evangelical front.” These individuals, all of whom had significant ties to the western South, pushed and prodded their fellow evangelicals to embrace the merger of political and religious conservatism by means of an increasingly dense “network of schools, interdenominational organizations, communication systems, and associations” (xxi). Demonstrating an impressive mastery of a wide range of source materials, Dochuk traces the influence of figures such as George Pepperdine, a wealthy auto supply salesman turned educator; E. V. Hill, a charismatic black preacher who criticized the civil rights movement; and the southern-born entertainer Pat Boone. Alongside discussion of these evangelical powerbrokers, Dochuk also skillfully interweaves the stories of individuals like Marie King, a legal secretary for MGM whose eventual embrace of the Republican Party epitomized his argument. Throughout he consistently demonstrates Southern California’s role as an ideal incubator for the kind of grassroots political mobilization that would come to define later evangelical forays into politics on the national stage.

Despite his otherwise exemplary attention to detail and nuance, it is fair to say that Dochuk never fully addresses noteworthy antecedents to the trends he describes that potentially complicate some of his claims regarding southern evangelicals’ unique contributions to Southern California religion and politics. He follows other historians in contrasting his protagonists and Southern California’s resident evangelicals, who “turned ‘serious, quiet, intense, humorless, sacrificial, and patient’ in the peak religious experience.” A significant proportion of California’s non-southern evangelicals may have resembled this description, yet a number of others clearly did not. Already by the 1920s the Canadian-born Pentecostal celebrity Aimee Semple McPherson established her ministry in Los Angeles, and around the same time the Oxford-educated pentecostal Charles Price also began attracting very large crowds in a variety of venues along the West Coast. Suffice it to say the style and substance of their ministries mirrored in many respects that of Dochuk’s “‘busy, vocal, and promotional’ and ‘task-oriented’” southern evangelicals (xvii). To be fair, Dochuk mentions the 1906 Pentecostal revival at Azusa Street in Los Angeles, highlighting the southern roots of some of its leaders, and he does make cursory references to both McPherson and Price. That said, the biographies of these two prominent Pentecostals, as well as their evident appeal, underline the degree to which non-southern evangelicals helped pave the way for the success of their southern co-laborers later in the century. In addition, McPherson’s forays into politics beginning in the 1930s and her efforts to mobilize her constituency on behalf of the U.S. government during World War II set an important precedent for the overt politicization of evangelicalism that Dochuk outlines, even if she did not align herself so clearly with the Republican Right. None of these observations negate Dochuk’s basic argument regarding the powerful impact that southern evangelicals’ large-scale migration had on the region, though the precursors to southern evangelicals’ style of religion mentioned above do merit greater attention in the text.

These comments should not detract from what Dochuk has accomplished. As he suggests, too many histories of the Religious Right treat it as an overnight phenomena that burst on the scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Dochuk’s meticulous history successfully focuses the conversation on an earlier era. In the process he shines a bright spotlight on Southern California and on the numerous individuals with ties to the region who eventually played a crucial role energizing politically active evangelicals nationwide.

Review: Southern Character

Amy Louise Wood

Amy Louise Wood is an associate professor of history at Illinois State University.

Lisa Tendrich Frank and Daniel Kilbride, eds. Southern Character: Essays in Honor of Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011. 301 pp. ISBN 978-0-8130-3690-8.

The fifteen essays in this collection stem from a conference organized in 2005 in honor of Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who held the Milbauer Chair in History at the University of Florida from 1983 until his retirement in 2004. Wyatt-Brown’s influence on the fields of southern cultural and intellectual history, as well as U.S. religious history and gender studies, has been profound. Southern Character is a fitting tribute to this influence, as well as his generosity as a scholar and teacher. The essays were all penned by former students, except for the opening piece, a loving personal and intellectual biography written by his friend and colleague, Charles Joyner. The collection as a whole, however, does not ruminate on Wyatt-Brown’s scholarship, but rather is meant to showcase his impact as a scholar and as a mentor in the profession. For that reason, the essays, which address a wide array of topics, many of which only indirectly relate to Wyatt-Brown’s work, will be of interest to scholars in a number of fields and sub-fields.

The diversity of the collection reflects the expanse of Wyatt-Brown’s intellectual interests. As Joyner points out, he read deeply into the fields of anthropology, literary criticism, psychology, and theology, and wrote numerous books and articles on slavery, abolitionism, southern literary culture, and the southern psyche. He is best known for his seminal book, Southern Honor (1982), which examined the persistence in the Old South of honor, that social concept upon which a man’s public identity and therefore his self-worth was based. In that book and more recently in The Shaping of Southern Culture (2001), Wyatt-Brown expounded on the ways in which honor gave shape to southern conceptions of manhood, race, violence, politics, war, and religion.

Several essays in this volume take up the issue of southern honor, bearing the stamp of their mentor directly. Daniel W. Stowell evaluates honor’s impact on Abraham Lincoln’s personal and political life. He argues that honor shaped Lincoln’s values in his early years, but as his legal career flourished, he became invested in the law to settle disputes, which ultimately led him to underestimate the honor-fueled southern outrage that precipitated secession. Lisa Tendrich Frank looks at how the conception of honor informed white elites’ responses to Sherman’s March. To southern white women, the ransacking of their cities felt like a personal assault upon their virtue, as union soldiers entered and rummaged through their private spaces. Unable to protect their women from this humiliating attack, southern men felt dishonored. These essays, while provocative, unfortunately exemplify one of the dangers of using honor as an explanatory concept: employed too loosely and defined too broadly, it can lead to reductionist arguments.

Christopher J. Olsen employs the concept more successfully in an essay that illuminates the role that honor played in antebellum southern politics. He argues that because political parties were weak in rural areas, politics was more personal, operating not through institutional bureaucracies, but “within networks of friends, neighbors, and extended kin” (45). Manhood, in that context, denoted not only power or mastery over others, but also signified one’s obligations and duties to others. A man’s reputation within these networks—his honor—thus mattered to his political fortunes more than it might in party-driven environments. In the vein of Stephanie McCurry and others, Olsen persuasively uses culture and gender to explicate electoral politics.

The essays that address various aspects of southern religiosity are also some of the strongest in the volume. Randall Stephens examines Wesleyan missionaries and their thwarted attempts to spread the holiness movement in the antebellum South. Their adherence to abolitionism was bound up with their belief in spiritual perfectionism, which led white southern Christians to reject and persecute them. Stephens carefully shows that southerners felt threatened by Wesleyan holiness because of their defensiveness about slavery; theological views became inseparable from the politics of slavery. Stephens thus furthers our understanding of why southern Christians rejected the liberalism of northern Protestantism, with its focus on spiritual and social progress. Glenn Crothers’ essay on antebellum Quakers in northern Virginia pairs well with Stephens’s study. Although their anti-slavery views set them apart from their neighbors, Crothers argues that Virginian Quakers adhered strongly to a southern identity, suggesting that proslavery views did not a “southerner” make. His evidence does not always support his argument, but he does disrupt any monolithic understanding of antebellum southern culture. Jeffrey Anderson similarly explores southern religious diversity in an astute historiographical exegesis of two influential studies of Voodoo—or Hoodoo—culture: Robert Tallant’s 1946 Voodoo in New Orleans and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1931 essay, “Hoodoo in America.” His essay challenges recent scholarly assessments of these works and, in doing so, questions many romantic myths that surround Hoodoo.

Finally, Andrew Moore offers a fascinating look at anti-abortion politics in the South. He shows that Southern Baptists initially had a nuanced view toward abortion, in part because they associated the pro-life movement with Catholics. He is most concerned, however, with the impact of the civil rights movement on both Baptist and Catholic struggles to determine “the proper role of faith and religious liberty in public life” (202). Catholics developed the pro-life movement in strained tandem with the civil rights movement. On the one hand, they blamed the movement for a new emphasis on individual rights, over and against communal obligations, which they believed had led to the liberalization of abortion laws, culminating in Roe v. Wade. On the other hand, they appropriated the secular rhetoric of “individual rights” to make their case for the protection of fetal life, deflecting attention away from theological arguments.

Other essays address topics ranging from early Creek and Seminole identities to the public fascination with marriages between Chinese men and white Women in the Jim Crow South to the politics surrounding the proposed construction of the Cross Florida Barge Canal in the 1960s. The diversity of the collection means that there are no common topics, themes, or interpretations put forward. In that sense, it does not quite hold together. But it does signify Wyatt-Brown’s prodigious and lasting imprint on the field of southern studies.

Review: A History of the Catholic Church in the American South

Kenneth J. Zanca

Kenneth J. Zanca is a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Marymount College.

James M. Woods. A History of the Catholic Church in the American South, 1513–1900. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011. 498 pp. ISBN 978-0-8130-3532-1.

In this volume, James Woods claims to be filling a void in the historiography of southern religion by creating an institutional narrative of the oldest Christian faith in the American South. Dismissing any claim to originality (he cites in the bibliography only three pages of original sources), the author states that his goal was to produce a synthesis of previous (mostly) Catholic scholars’ work (referred to in the remaining 32 pages of the source material). Given these intentions, I think he has only partially succeeded—depending on his audience.

The material is organized into three time frames. These are: “The Colonial Context, 1513–1763;” “American Republicanism and European Decline, 1763–1845;” and “Resistance, Rebellion, Reconstruction, and Regionalism, 1845–1900.” It is Dr. Wood’s privilege to organize his material according to his own sense of “natural groupings” that he thinks will help the reader follow the storyline. However, this reader does not see the wisdom of making the third section (a mere 124 pages) carry so much freight. It is precisely on this period where the majority of Catholic scholarship has been focused. As a result, the treatment remains in the realm of “fact-stacking” (well documented though it may be), and the summary does not do justice to the literature in the field. No “synthesis” could.

The book is cleanly written, but it reads like a text aimed at a lower division survey course, and if that is its target, the presentation will be found tedious by today’s instant-messaging, non-readers, who are uninformed and disinterested about most subjects historical or institutionally religious. The 66 pages of footnotes will not be examined. Supplementary material is helpful to non-scholars: maps, some population tables constructed from decennial census data, but there are surprisingly few sketches and photos of people and places for a book spanning 387 years.

If the target audience is not the college textbook buyer, then who might benefit from this formidable compendium of information? There does exist a market for this book. It is a book for adult generalists: clergy, seminarians, inter-faith discussion groups, Catholic parish adult education classes, book-clubs of religionists, and any journalist wishing a one-stop treatment of a religion which is professed by 23.9% of American adults (second only to the combined “evangelical churches” with 26.3%).

I commend Professor Woods for his seeing a need and working to meet it, his respect for the work of other scholars in the field, and his careful, patient reading of their work, but I fear that the medium he employed, a synthesis of so many secondary sources, is passé. The book is not for the scholar, and there are a shrinking number of readers interested in such a narrow topic presented this way, however important it may be to a select few.