Response to Sam Hill, "Fundamentalism in Recent Southern
Culture"
Betty A. DeBerg /
University of Northern Iowa
I am fascinated by Sam Hill's analysis of the contemporary South. Since
I am not a Southerner, and therefore do not know and feel Southern
culture deep down, I hesitate to dispute his conclusions that today the
South stands divided in unprecedented ways by the "culture wars" that
plague the rest of us. That, if old Southern culture was a kind of
tribalism that excluded African Americans, Northerners, and Roman
Catholics, the new tribalism is based instead on a nationwide cleavage,
or set of cleavages, formed by polarization on social and political
issues, such as abortion, which have been taken up by resurgent
Protestant fundamentalism. This polarization leads the more
conservative white Southern Protestants to exclude other white Southern
Protestants, those more liberal on the important issues, from their
tribe, and to include any Northerners and Roman Catholics, at least, who
agree with them ideologically.
I want to raise several issues about these general conclusions. First,
I think that race, the exclusion of African Americans from Southern
". . .my sense it that
the current wave of politically active fundamentalism essentially
excludes African Americans in all parts of the country. "
culture, is still a very central and continuous part of the story.
Although we still need a lot more research on what, for lack of a better
term, we might call black fundamentalism, and the participation of
African Americans in the contemporary Religious Right, my sense it that
the current wave of politically active fundamentalism essentially
excludes African Americans in all parts of the country. It is by and
large a movement of white reaction, ready to use and respond to
Willie-Horton kinds of appeals, and to oppose affirmative action at all
levels. In my view, white reaction against the civil rights movement is
not limited to the South, and to the extent that both Northern and
Southern whites participate in these reactionary religious and social
movements and groups, it is a case of the North becoming more like the
South than it is the South losing its regional identity.
Further, the white Southern Protestants that have been excluded by the
conservative forces in the South do not seem to me to embody traditional
Southern culture. I don't see this situation as traditional white
Southerners turning on other traditional white Southerners. One of the
reasons for the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist
Convention (SBC), for example, was the growing number of professors at
Southern Baptist seminaries, colleges, and universities who had been
trained in and taught versions of the historical-critical method of
biblical interpretation. Perhaps the "moderate" Southern Baptist
establishment was ousted because they seemed too Northern, too liberal,
too trained-by-university-divinity-schools. This would not be a new
development in the South. In the 1920s a Vanderbilt biblical professor
was accused of heresy by Southern Methodists. What strikes me about the SBC is not its recent
ejection of "liberals" but how well it's done in the North lately. Once
again, I see this as indication that what's going on is the North
becoming more like the South in matters of religion and political
ideology--General Lee's revenge. We see this not only in the rise of
the Religious Right, but in Northern insistence on states rights and
criticism of the federal government. But perhaps all this is a merely a
matter of a glass half full rather than half empty. Is the South
becoming more like the North, or the North like the South?
Regardless, I am hard pressed to credit religion for the death of
traditional Southern culture, however that is defined. I firmly believe
that the New South is a product of central air conditioning, of
air-conditioned offices and labs; that is, of the rapid expansion in the
South of modern corporate capitalism and post-industrial,
technology-based business and research. The material conditions of life
in the South have, therefore, become more like those in the North.
Couple economic factors with population mobility, which moves
Northerners south and Southerners north, and national mass media which
tend to reduce cultural forms and sensibilities to the lowest common
denominator, and therein lies the death of traditional USAmerican
sub-cultures of many kinds.
Other issues I want to raise are questions about Hill's depiction of
the first wave of Protestant fundamentalism in the South. I was
surprised by his characterization of it as apolitical and socially
marginalized. Fundamentalists in the 1920s, on the contrary, were well
organized in the South, and only in the South were successful campaigns
launched to pass state legislation banning the teaching of evolution.
There was also well organized support for prohibition and opposition to
the Smith presidential candidacy. And Hill's description of "classic"
(Northern) American fundamentalism as socially marginalized and
isolationist does not ring true to what historians of fundamentalism
since Sandeen have discovered. The issue for the vast majority of
USAmerican fundamentalists since the movement began has been not whether
to withdraw from political debate and "ordinary society," but instead
has been on just which political and social issues to stake their claim
and make their stand. And recently I have come to think that the
depiction of heightened fundamentalist political activity as occurring
in two "waves" lasting a couple of decades each--the first 1910-1930 and
the second 1980 and on--ignores the anti-Communist activism of
conservative religious groups in the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps both
sexual revolutions, one in the 1910s and the other in the 1960s, did
provoke more fundamentalist ire and organizing than usual, but we must
be careful not to oversimplify.
