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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews, editors. Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. vi, 340. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.
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| The role of region in influencing currents in American religious culture represents an area of inquiry that has mushroomed in recent decades, moving well beyond studies of New England and the South, particularly the evangelical cast in the latter associated with the image of the Bible Belt. One indicator of the coming of age of regional studies is this revisionist collection of ten essays, edited by Beth Barton Schweiger and Donald G. Mathews, that revisits the sweep of southern Protestantism but nudges analysis in fresh directions. |
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Jon F. Sensbach opens the volume with a stunning historiographical piece. He identifies four areas where recent scholarship has broadened the way religion in the South, particularly evangelicalism, is conceived. The first is a reminder that there was a dynamic pluralism that prevailed among Native Americans and immigrants long before the Bible Belt emerged. He proceeds to highlight the transatlantic character of southern religious life in the colonial period, enhanced by a steady undercurrent of Catholic presence as well as by the slave trade, which linked coreligionists across the ocean. This larger perspective paves the way for Sensbach's third point: the way religion stimulated cross-cultural connections before evangelicalism became dominant. Finally, he probes the extent to which gender was a defining factor in colonial religious life, from Native American societies to the Christian patriarchy of immigrants. |
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No one doubts the import of revivals in spurring the growth of evangelical Protestantism in the South. Schweiger, however, argues that revivalism transcended region in the antebellum period because it served as the incubator of Protestant denominationalism and made the denomination, with all its bureaucratic baggage, the basic structural form for American religion. Precisely how strong that evangelical presence became and the covert ways in which it penetrated non-Christian religious cultures comes to light in Emily Bingham's account of the religious experience of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus. From a prominent and committed Jewish family in the South, Rachel was intrigued by the ethos of southern evangelicalism and often attended Christian services while maintaining a traditional Jewish home. Before her death she underwent a gradual but real conversion to the Christianity that dominated the world around her. Her story reveals much about the challenges minority religions confront in any culture where a single religious style has hegemonic power. |
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Two essays draw on theories of violence advanced by Rene Girard to rethink dimensions of southern religious life during the Civil War and the decades after. Kurt Berends acknowledges that the traditional interpretation emphasizes the ways in which evangelicalism sustained a white southern identity even as it may have challenged its racism, and how evangelicalism became a useful device in creating a "civil religion" that glorified the Lost Cause. But his signal contribution comes in arguing, following Girard, that the most enduring impact of southern Protestantism came in its valorization of violent sacrifice, which in turn ritualized the violence of racism in postbellum culture. Mathews takes Girard's theories a step further when he demonstrates that lynching was not simply a manifestation of racial bias but an essentially religious act grounded in that same violence. Hence he appropriately calls lynching "part of the religion" of white southern Christians. |
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