| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Politics and Religion in the White South. Ed. by Glenn Feldman. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005. xiv, 386 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-8131-2363-1.)
Glenn Feldman has assembled a solid group of scholars and is to be commended for placing religion, albeit in conjunction with race, at the center of southern politics. Earl Black and Merle Black, leading scholars on the subject, in their recent The Rise of Southern Republicans (2002), slighted the role of faith in the region. Eight essays are historical studies and four the work of political science. Five chapters deal directly with the religious Right and southern whites, while the remaining seven include discussions of African Americans, gender, and southern Jews. The book could have been broader in its coverage. In light of recent immigration, southern Catholics and Asians warrant more attention.	1
Many of the essays follow conventional wisdom and argue for southern exceptionalism for white religious conservatives on race. Fred Arthur Bailey concluded that Southern Baptists around the turn of the century buttressed racial segregation. Feldman argued that Ku Klux Klan women, as well, perpetuated the racial status quo; in the concluding essay he asserted that southern conservatives, beginning in the 1960s, have switched from the old racism to a more subtle one based on moral issues. Paul Harvey pointed to a secular or "folk theology of segregation," not overtly religious arguments, that sustained resistance to civil rights in the South after World War II (p. 107). Billy Graham, a southerner, accepted civil rights, according to Steven P. Miller, but remained moderate on the issue, while he aided Richard M. Nixon's "southern strategy" and focused primarily on evangelism.	. . .

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