Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial
Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925. Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Beginning in the 1960s, Samuel Hill developed four concepts
central to southern evangelicalism: the significance of individual
conversion, the centrality of the Bible as the source of truth, a
definition of morality that emphasized individual acts rather than the
state of society, and the notion that all people had direct access to God.
Hill has long recognized that the model had countless exceptions and
complexities. It fits whites better than African Americans, and according
to Hill it reached its greatest coherence in the late nineteenth century.
Many readers have wondered if the model applies to white Baptists more
than anyone else.
Thus, Paul Harvey's excellent study
of Baptists in the postbellum South provides a superb chance to explore some of
"Harvey shows that
Baptists were a complex group, full of questions and tensions and not a
group one can easily stereotype."
the most enduring ideas about southern evangelicalism. Studying all Baptists--African
Americans and whites, Southern Baptist Convention and National Baptist Convention,
Primitive Baptists, Landmark Baptists, and others--Harvey begins the book
with an antebellum background that stressed conversion and
congregationalism for all Baptists and conservatism for whites and
inspiration for change for African Americans. The work proceeds
along parallel and only occasionally intersecting tracks, showing how
whites and then blacks dealt with four broad themes: organizing churches
and associations, addressing and arguing over issues of middle-class
respectability, the place of preachers in a congregational polity, and
ideas and limits of progressivism. In doing so, Harvey shows that
Baptists were a complex group, full of questions and tensions and not a
group one can easily stereotype. Whereas Hill's model argued for a
religious center despite the complexities, Harvey emphasizes the
complexities themselves.
Stressing variety among Baptists, Harvey does an excellent job
describing the experiences of individuals. Proper names fill the book,
and we meet not merely well known church leaders but countless Baptists
from Thomas Dorsey to Thomas Dixon. The work details the lives of people
like Nannie Burroughs of the NBC Women's Auxiliary, NBC publishing leader
Richard Henry Boyd, and Charles Spurgeon, Southern Baptist Seminary
professor and social gospel figure. There was no "typical" Baptist.
Perhaps the least surprising feature of this successful
book lies in long sections on struggles for respectability among church
leaders interested in professionalism, seminary educations, standardized
church literature, and middle-class forms of propriety. The
folk-to-modern paradigm, accompanying an outsider-to-respectability
argument, is too predictable to produce many exciting ideas. Fortunately,
Harvey shows tensions within that paradigm. He dramatizes the ways
Baptists responded to the rise of holiness and pentecostal movements,
particularly by trying to distance their revival meetings and hymns from
the more expressive styles of the newcomers.
One major strength is the recurring theme of how the
congregational polity of Baptists often clashed with reformers' efforts to
centralize authority in the name of a more professional ministry. Most
obviously, Landmark Baptists and Primitive Baptists opposed the SBC
practice of requiring seminary educations for pastors. Congregations of
African-American Baptists kept up the practice of hiring their preachers
every year. The annual call allowed congregations to resist any
professionalizing trends they disliked and helped preserve "folk preaching
styles" (177). Many white and black Baptist congregations opposed
organized efforts to impose regional or national standards of music and
Sunday School literature on local churches.
A main achievement of Redeeming the South is to study how white
and black Baptists confronted similar issues. Chapter on Baptists and
progressive reform again stress variety. Many Baptists "rejected any
exclusive choice between purely individual redemption or social salvation"
(206) and pursued reforms ranging from prohibition and immigration
restriction to worldwide evangelism to a modest effort to limit child
labor. The chapter on African-American Baptists, far from making all
social actions point to the civil rights movement, stresses the wide range
of activism from opposition to segregation and lynching to ideas of group
uplift that ran parallel to the approach of Booker T. Washington. Despite
having similar theologies and religious practices, white and black
Baptists shared little in either religious experience or political action.
Readers who like a work with a strong thesis may have problems
with this book. In its laudable attention to variety, complexity, and
multiple perspectives, the book has no central argument. It complicates
Samuel Hill's model more than it rejects it, and ultimately does an
excellent job showing that being a Baptist could mean many things.
