| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Religion in Mississippi. By Randy J. Sparks. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. xiv, 374 pp. $40.00, ISBN 1-57806-361-2.)

Recently, African American residents of Laurel, Mississippi, defended their fellow townsman, Charles Pickering, an outspoken conservative, against the opposition that his nomination to the federal court of appeals had aroused among national liberal organizations such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Pickering enjoyed respect in the town as a good man who worked toward racial reconciliation. What weighed heavily in his favor among Laurel's black residents was that he was a Christian and a past president of the Baptist state convention (New York Times, Feb. 17, 2002). 1

Turn back the clock to the 1950s and 1960s, and Randy J. Sparks confronts us with a different and more painful spectacle: white ministers and leading white laymen not only resisting integration but in some cases voicing the most scurrilous kind of racist sentiment. Paradoxically, evangelical religion, as much as it has undergirded injustice, has also bound Mississippians of both races together in a powerful, if often invisible, fellowship that sprang from shared traditions of conversion, baptism, faith, and worship—even when they sat in segregated or separate churches and drew different ethical implications from their faith. Sparks's gracefully written survey of religion in Mississippi makes believable those rare but remarkable instances when being a Baptist or Methodist mattered more than race. . . .

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