Christine Leigh Heyrman. Southern Cross:
The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1997. Pp. xi + 336.
This is a book that penetrates beneath surfaces. Heyrman has explored an impressive
array of sources, synthesized them into an intriguing narrative, and offered us a set of original
and provocative insights. She takes us as close to the grassroots of southern religion as we have
ever been taken, and her graceful account alters the way we look at the subject. Like any other
significant contribution to a field of scholarship, moreover, the book also raises difficult
questions of method and interpretation.
The argument is that it took a
long, hard struggle for the South to become the Bible Belt,
not only because the eighteenth-century Anglican establishments ridiculed
and hindered the
Methodist and Baptist exhorters who eventually prevailed but also--and this
is the heart of the
matter--because the first generation of zealous evangelicals seemed to
subvert the values that
most southerners of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries held dear.
To become an evangelical Protestant
meant joining an exclusive and demanding
"Undoubtedly some of the surprise--and appeal--of the
book lies in its ironic
revelation that one of the strongest critics of "family values" in the early
South was the revivalist
wing of the Protestant churches."
movement that estranged people from their natural communities, undermined
hierarchies that
most people valued, drew converts into religious exercises that seemed
morbid and superstitious,
and lowered barriers between blacks and whites.
The evangelicals almost gave the game away,
moreover, by relying on young and boyish preachers who made one mistake
after another and by
trying to usurp the social functions that southerners had learned, by hard
experience, to assign to
tightly-knit families. Undoubtedly some of the surprise--and appeal--of the
book lies in its ironic
revelation that one of the strongest critics of "family values" in the early
South was the revivalist
wing of the Protestant churches. At the same time, the evangelical clergy and their followers
subtly upset the balance of gender relations by forging alliances between the preachers and pious
women and by giving women the authority to resist their families, whether in choosing their
husbands or deciding where and when to join a church.
As a continuing threat to southern social mores, the evangelical churches would probably
have remained marginal and troublesome communities, but gradually after 1800 preachers and
laity hungry for wider influence made the collective decision to accommodate themselves to the
region's deep-seated attitudes and practices. They opted for an older and more domesticated
clergy; they ceded authority to the family and its patriarchs; they placed limits on the initiatives
of women and sanctified the social distance between blacks and whites; and they promoted an
image of the preacher as a man's man, a tough-minded and tough-bodied paragon of masculine
and military virtues. They changed the image of the evangelical. While holding on to an
evangelical message distinctive enough to make them stand out from the crowd of good old boys
sitting around the courthouse, they won the culture by becoming more a part of the culture.
For the most part, I am convinced. Heyrman has put flesh on the great sociological
abstractions of Weber and Troeltsch about how sects become churches by embracing and
accepting more and more of the surrounding culture. The book will serve the classroom well; it
will also serve well the guild of historians, partly because of its success in weaving neglected and
obscure sources into a plausible and revealing narrative but also because it raises questions with
which all of us struggle. My reflections on the book's methods and strategies, therefore, are not
really criticisms of the book. They are musings on issues that bedevil all of us who try to give
plausible accounts of the past.
The first issue is what I might call the problem of "everydayness." In brief: when people
write things down, they tend to record the unusual, not the taken-for-granted. It is
understandable that nineteenth-century southerners would take special note of contests with the
devil, family conflicts, fights and confrontations, spiritual despair, and threats of suicide. The
routine, the ordinary, the unremarkable--all of this fades into the background. But when the
historian collects these dramatic reports and puts them together on the printed page, they can
seem to represent the ordinary. Was it ordinary for conversion to result in family conflicts? Or
were these the unusual instances that ended up in letters and journals precisely because they were
unusual? And how would we know in the absence of the quantitative evidence that lies beyond
our grasp?
The second issue is what I would call the problem of "collective action." When select
members of a group decide and act in a particular way, how much do they represent the mind of
the larger group to which they belong? The question emerges, for instance, when we speak of
"the clergy." Heyrman speaks of "the clergy" wanting to "have it both ways" by discounting
belief in demons while playing on other supernatural beliefs (p. 76), but maybe the clergy were
as baffled and divided by this as anybody else. She concludes that "most" of the clergy after
1800 denied that the devil could take visible form (p. 72), but since we have no way of asking
them, I'm not sure that we know how they would have answered. She writes that "the clergy"
were quiet about how the devil appeared because they thought it "much better to allow the laity
to believe in whatever sort of demon they chose" (p. 58), but maybe they were quiet--if indeed
most of them were--because they were themselves baffled and divided about the question. I have
often made similar kinds of claims on the basis of the same sort of evidence, but I continue to
puzzle about the matter.
The third issue is the problem of how we assess motives. Did evangelicals change their
attitudes and practices in order to make their message acceptable to other southerners? Or did
they change not because they wanted to attract others but because they had simply become more
like the others, apart from any evangelistic motive?
But this is enough. The book is clearly important, informative, and wonderfully
entertaining. It provides in many ways a model of careful research, imaginative interpretation,
and marvelous literary facility. Heyrman has given us colorful and detailed insights about
human emotions and actions that have remained surprisingly hidden from us. This is a style of
religious history that stretches the boundaries of the genre, and all of us profit from it.
