Mountain Holiness: A Photographic Narrative

By Deborah Vansau Mccauley, Laura E. Porter and Patricia Parker Brunner

“A remarkable achievement. Mountain Holiness combines Warren Brunner’s poignant and sensitive photographs with a succinct narrative by Deborah McCauley, the preeminent authority on Appalachian mountain religion. This is a landmark study that sheds light on one of the most neglected subjects in American religion.”—Randall Balmer, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of American Religion, Barnard College, Columbia University

Hidden deep in the hills of central Appalachia, tiny churches have quietly carried on their worship practices in an unbroken chain for two centuries. Harking back to the camp-meeting movement of the early nineteenth century, independent Holiness churches are considered by some to represent Appalachia's single largest religious tradition. Yet it is one that remains uncounted in any census of American church life because of the lack of formal institutions or written records. Through vivid images and perceptive words, this book documents this rich history, showing how these independent churches have sustained both faith and followers.

The authors spent five years interviewing and photographing Appalachia's Holiness people and participating in their services. From thousands of photographs, they have selected nearly three hundred fifty images for this large-format volume. Here are small one-room churches—many built to hold no more than a dozen people—scattered in the hills of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Yet Warren Brunner's striking images depict not only buildings but also the people and their faith practices: river baptisms and homecomings, serpent handling and tent evangelism, radio preaching and special holiday services.

Deborah McCauley and Laura Porter's text combines descriptions of the pictures with the history of the churches and interviews with members. They create a representative window into the material and oral culture of central Appalachia's independent Holiness heritage. Mountain Holiness is a book that will fascinate anyone who cares about these traditions, as well as anyone concerned with the preservation of America's most vital folkways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2025
• ISBN: 9798895271780

Book preview

How This Book Came to Be

You know, so many times I wish I had kept a journal of our trips. But when I develop the prints for the book, I know that my photographs are my journal.

Warren Brunner

During october 1986, I was spending a month of research at Berea College in Kentucky, using the Weatherford-Hammond Mountain Collection, the grandmother of all resource collections on Appalachia. I was trying to gather information that would begin to allow me to place religious life distinctive to the mountain regions of Appalachia within the larger context of American religious history. Gerald Roberts, director of Special Collections, cautioned me that I would have to dig very deeply and for some time in order to come up with such material. Mountain religion is principally an oral culture. Apart from the writings of home missionaries and, at the time, a smattering of scholarly writing on the subject, we really knew very little apart from what we could observe today in mountain churches. From these first-hand observations we could attempt to identify the clues and hear the historical echoes that might help us begin to understand what is special and unique, or at least distinctive, about Appalachia’s mountain church traditions.

I soon started to comb Special Collections for photographic material of mountain worship life, realizing that not only oral literature but photography provided a record essential to our understanding of mountain religious cultures. The pickings were slim, and I began to feel even more perplexed about how to proceed with my research. Near the end of October I was wandering around downtown Berea, walking the short distance of Short Street, when I came across Brunner Studio. I saw the photograph in Plate 1 displayed in the front window. The photograph enticed me inside to ask the white-haired man sitting at the front if he knew the photographer and whether he had any more photographs of mountain church houses. Warren introduced himself as the photographer, said he had some other photographs on religious subjects in Appalachia, and thus began our collaborative work on documenting mountain churches and worship life in central Appalachia. Warren offered at our first acquaintance to take me with him on car trips to photograph mountain churches. I told Warren that I had no money to pay him for his time, supplies, and talent. But the project struck a deep chord within him and intrigued him. He absorb the costs himself. All I had to do was travel with him and offer direction on what to document. We began in January 1987 with Climax Church and the Scaffold Cane Road area near Berea.

Warren’s spouse, Patricia Parker Brunner, is an ordained Southern Baptist deacon with an M.A. in biblical studies; she is the sister of Gerald Keith Parker, whose doctoral dissertation was titled Folk Religion in Southern Appalachia (1970). Pat’s family was among the first settlers in the mountains of western North Carolina near Brevard. Pat was enrolled at Berea College where Warren met her, and they were married after her graduation. In the summer of 1987, I was invited to dinner during which Warren was going to ask Pat about our pursuing in greater depth our photography project of mountain churches and worship life. Pat looked directly at Warren and said, Warren, what are you getting yourself into? But Pat did give the project her blessing and encouragement. Her wisdom as a bona fide mountain woman about the religious character of Appalachia—from the mainstream Protestant side to the nondenominational traditions particularly characteristic of the region—has been indispensable to the entire project. Pat accompanied us on many of our journeys from January 1987 through August 1991, and her insights and humor have made our work that much better and have improved our understanding of what we are about with this book project.

A pair of white doors with black cross symbols, partially covered by climbing ivy and surrounded by overgrown vegetation.

Plate I

In the summer of 1987, Laura Porter, an M.Div. student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, spent two months as an intern in the Appalachian Ministries Educational Resource Center in Berea. She was placed at Cranks Creek Survival Center in Harlan County, very near the Virginia state border. Laura came to know Sister Mae June Hensley and Brother Coy Miser and learned about Cranks Holiness Church. That August she accompanied and introduced Warren and me to the annual revival and homecoming at Cranks Holiness Church. The personal touch and personal connections are indispensable to the work we were doing. Laura has accompanied Warren and me on a majority of our photographic journeys in eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, southern West Virginia, east Tennessee, and western North Carolina. Warren has said often of the three of us as a team on this project that I take their pictures, Deborah studies them, and Laura just loves them up. Nothing could be truer. My own reserve can create barriers to interviews and to my participation in worship services. I take great encouragement from Warren and Laura, who are both naturals in expressing their outgoing joy and genuine liking and affection for the dozens of people we have met over the years.

For the longest time this project overwhelmed my ability to create a coherent and representative narrative out of more than four thousand frames in black-and-white and color-slide film that we took over five years throughout central Appalachia. My decision to focus closely on the worship communities surrounding the areas of Cranks Creek and Pennington Gap made creating a book manageable and more intelligible to us and, we hope, to the reader. It attempts to tell a story about some very special people and places that are also representative of a prominent aspect of mountain religious cultures. The mass of material we did not use in this book awaits perhaps a future opportunity to create another photography book on religious life distinctive to the mountain regions of Appalachia.

It is important to emphasize to readers that most of the photographs in this book were taken from 1987 through 1991 and that most of the people portrayed were not young but represent the span of mountain Holiness traditions reaching back to the earlier decades of the twentieth century. As this book’s dedication page demonstrates, many of the people featured did not live to see the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, a decade and a half after the project began, these photographs and accounts are not outdated in what they represent. Appalachia’s numerical majority of the faithful in nonurban regions still claim for themselves either Baptist or Old Time Baptist and Holiness Pentecostal as their church traditions. This has been true since the nineteenth century and continues today. These church traditions are not frozen in time nor are they fading away. Even now in the twenty-first century, despite changing demographics and a new level of worldliness settling upon the most recent generation of young Appalachians through influences such as strip malls and satellite TV, these church traditions continue; they are vibrantly alive and adapt in their ongoing development. They remain very recognizable in the essential features that have characterized them over time and place. It is important to remember that Appalachia’s regional religious tradition has always been a hardy perennial, while its imminent demise has been predicted by observers since the mid-1850s. It continues to thrive as a significant part of the landscapes of American religions.

Deborah Vansau McCauley

January 2003

This photograph is of an unknown, dormant church house somewhere in eastern Kentucky (Plate 1). As of October 1986, Warren no longer recalled anything about the church house itself and had no other photographs of it to enlighten us. The doors are double doors and the building itself is made of cement block instead of wood. Whether it was likely a fairly large building and probably in a town, rather than in a hollow or out in the countryside, he could not recall. The doors are painted white with very simple black crosses, one on each door. No sign is above the door. None is needed. The crosses tell the story—This is a church house. The trailing vine growing over the doors tells us that, at the time Warren took his photograph of it, the building was not in use.

A regional map showing parts of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina, with labeled cities, highways, and state boundaries.

CENTRAL APPALACHIA

Cranks Creek-Pennington Gap Area

Description

The map focuses on a region in the southeastern United States, encompassing parts of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, and North Carolina. State boundaries are clearly outlined, and major cities and towns are labeled, including Richmond, Lexington, Knoxville, and Asheville. Highways and interstates are marked with bold lines and labeled with their respective numbers, such as I-75, I-81, and I-40, providing a clear depiction of the transportation network in the area. The map also includes smaller towns such as Pikeville, Norton, and Kingsport, highlighting the region’s local geography. The inset in the top left corner provides a zoomed-out view of the United States, highlighting the location of the mapped region within the broader context of the country. The map uses grayscale shading to indicate elevation and topographical features, with mountainous areas, such as the Appalachian Mountains, subtly represented. Rivers and other natural features are not prominently displayed, as the focus is on political and transportation boundaries.

Mountain Religions

West virginia put John F. Kennedy over the top in the presidential primaries of 1960. West Virginia saw hard, on-site campaigning by both Kennedy and his principal challenger, Hubert H. Humphrey. The Bostonian Kennedy encountered living conditions in parts of West Virginia he had never known existed in the United States. With the ascendancy of Kennedy to the presidency in 1961, the War on Poverty was born with Appalachia as its beginnings and its nexus at that time. At the height of institutionalization of the War on Poverty in the Johnson administration, Jack E. Weller, a United Presbyterian minister who had served as a home missionary in the coalfields of West Virginia since the early 1950s, published a small book, Yesterday ’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (1965). From its first day to the present, this book has served as the defining statement of Appalachia in the collective American consciousness, and in particular of religious life distinctive to the mountain regions of Appalachia. Yesterday \ People is still in print today, with nearly one hundred thousand copies sold.

Along with the publication of Weller’s book, 1965 marked the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which was federally mandated to promote regional redevelopment. To achieve this goal, the ARC took the step of establishing for the first time a political definition of Appalachia based on boundaries by counties, which soon expanded well beyond the areas commonly and historically understood to make up the Appalachian region. For the ARC, Appalachia now ranged as far north as Coharie County in New York State and south to Kemper County in Mississippi. State legislatures pushed to the limits the mandate’s boundaries for inclusion, so that more of their states’ counties would be eligible for federal funds. Many counties did resist being included in this new Appalachia. Appalachia, after all, meant poverty, yesterday’s people.

The more commonly perceived Appalachia is a region that has shrunk in upon itself over two centuries, concentrated today in the mountains and plateaus of eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, southern West Virginia, east Tennessee, and western North Carolina. The implications for Appalachia as a now federally delineated political entity often compel an artificial inclusiveness that obscures people’s historical and ongoing perceptions of the region. In its most literal and comprehensive sense, for instance, the religions of Appalachia range in West Virginia alone from a large, national center for the Hare Krishna movement to the Antiochian Orthodox Church. But these are not the traditions people commonly have in mind when thinking about what is special and unique, or at least distinctive, about Appalachia’s religious cultures, especially in its mountain regions that largely shape much of its people’s history and character.

Two defining features set off Appalachia’s religious life. It has, first, the largest regional religious tradition in the United States. This status stands apart from the expanded regional boundaries so recently established by the ARC. It is delimited instead by Appalachia’s long-established but never rigid historical boundaries. In addition, its historical breadth makes Appalachia second only to New England as having the nation’s oldest regional religious tradition in terms of Christianity in general and American Protestantism in particular. In this book, American Protestantism is broadly understood in terms of denominational categories that historically made up the nation’s dominant religious culture with regard to its social, political, economic, and cultural influences until the mid-twentieth century.

The more commonly held perceptions of what is distinctive to religious life in Appalachia and the geographic areas where that distinctiveness is found are what Weller wrote about. And he wrote about it in the context of more than a century of white home missionaries being sent to provide social uplift and to evangelize Appalachia’s people. Largely white and already long established in their own Protestant religious cultures, Appalachia’s people shared the same earlier heritages as that of the home missionaries sent to help and evangelize them, an anomaly unique in the history of American home missions.

Weller wrote about religion in Appalachia from the point of view of a highly institutionalized and influential national religious culture that was seeing the long, inevitable dissolution of its collective purposes understood in the nineteenth century as American benevolence and in the twentieth as ecumenism and the imperative of the social gospel. For these defining movements of American Protestantism, Appalachia’s religious cultures had served and continued as a sign of radical contradiction. They were an affront to a powerful national religious culture that was neither tolerant nor forgiving of the image it saw in the mirror that mountain religious life held up to it. Weller’s indictment of the varied yet cohesive religious heritage and culture so vital to the identity of a majority of Appalachia’s people was harsh and simplistic, frustrated and exasperated, and above all, uncomprehending.

But Weller was not uncaring. He cared very much. After the publication of Yesterday's People, Weller went on to found the Coalition for Appalachian Ministry (CAM), an organization of Reformed-tradition denominations, from various Presbyterian bodies to the Reformed Church in America. CAM sought to train clergy and church workers new to Appalachia about its characteristics that have direct impact on denominations’ abilities to be effective in their ministerial efforts in the region. CAM continues in its purpose as of this writing. But through Weller, we hear in the voice of a single individual the national religious culture’s historical perceptions of Appalachia, its people, and their religious identity that have continued to prevail to no lesser extent up to the present. The national preeminence of American Protestantism, especially in the guise of denominationalism and all that it entailed, had never truly taken hold among an intensely religious people living in the small valleys, mountain regions, and plateaus of Appalachia. Nor does it today.

If Weller summed up the denominational perspective of Appalachia persisting today, so did Rupert B. Vance sum up the perspective of the academic study of religion towards mountain religious life in his introductory note to Weller’s Yesterday's People. A sociologist of religion at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Vance gave voice to the preeminent indictment of Appalachia’s religious life current throughout its history and up to the present, that of fatalism. Early-nineteenthcentury Baptist church historians such as David Benedict had intoned the same charge against the Old School Primitive Baptists who were predominant