Southern Religion, Southern Culture: Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson

By Darren E. Grem and Ted Ownby

Contributions by Ryan L. Fletcher, Darren E. Grem, Paul Harvey, Alicia Jackson, Ted Ownby, Otis W. Pickett, Arthur Remillard, Chad Seales, and Randall J. Stephens

Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson’s research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways.

This volume pays tribute to and extends Wilson’s seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the essays examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson’s model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South’s religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes.

The volume first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region’s fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, this book shows that Wilson’s groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South’s complicated history and culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Dec 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496820488

Book preview

Judgment, Grace, Race, and the Transcendental Blues

The Study of Religion in the South in the Era of Charles Reagan Wilson

PAUL HARVEY

Southern religious history from the age of European colonization begins with water, tragedy, and survival. It opens at St. Augustine, on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, and at the swampy mire of Jamestown. Early Virginians planted a colony in a microenvironment that virtually guaranteed death for the great majority of early migrants to a land that eventually became the American South. Early Virginians set a pattern, too, for the combustible mix of piety and avarice that powered much of southern history from the seventeenth century forward—what the brilliant journalist and writer Wilbur J. Cash outlined as the southern archetypes of the Puritan and the hedonist.¹ From Jamestown grew the wealthy and powerful slave society that would lead a nation into its bloodiest war.

Almost four hundred years later, in 2005, floodwaters nearly destroyed the city of New Orleans. The disaster was long foretold and well predicted by those who knew anything about the city’s inadequately constructed system of levees and water diversion canals. Hurricane Katrina is a tale in which largely man-made forces (interacting with environmental conditions and economic realities) created a society that could produce incredible wealth and an intellectual and a cultural life that defined a nation’s sensibility alongside a level of racial and social inequality that belied the myths upon which the society rested.

In the region’s origins in the swamplands of early Virginia, and in the destructive path of Katrina, determination, resistance, survival, and sometimes even transcendence mark the story. In both cases, religious institutions, beliefs, and faith played a key role in defining the differences between people in those societies. Over the last two hundred years or so, a broadly shared Christianity in the region could not transcend the deep social hierarchies that defined people’s lives, their hopes, expectations, and daily realities.

C. Vann Woodward wrote about the ironies of southern history. Here, the focus is more on the paradoxes of southern religious history. Here is one: namely, the region’s central role in fashioning a globalized world economy (including a circulation of people, as well as goods), along with the region’s tribal provincialism, marked by hostility to outside ideas and agitators. In few other places did such a diverse mixture of religious ideas and expressions result in a dominant establishment at once so internally focused and so productive of extraordinary cruelty and astonishing creativity. This was true especially in music, art, and all forms of oral artistry. Indeed, the solid South was religiously riven. In those cracks arose spiritually charged expressions that came to define American