1800-1860: Religion: Overview. But in liminal spaces—in novelty acts, revivals, and the creation of new religious and musical traditions—the bars of race came down, if only temporarily. In North Carolina, Latinos and Asians constituted less than 2 percent of the population in 1990, but that figure rose dramatically in the subsequent decade. This is evidenced in the rich literary tradition of figures such as Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, and Walker Percy; in the musical sounds of shape-note singing, the black spirituals, and white and black gospel; in the oratorical artistry of countless chanted sermons and well-known evangelists such as Billy Graham; and it is also wonderfully expressed by the visionary art works of figures such as Howard Finster. Certainly converts gathered together in warmly supportive church communities, but seldom did Southern white Christians conceive of their religion as having a social or reform dimension other than the reformation of individual sinners (which, it was believed, would translate into a better society). The evangelical churches in the first decades of their existence in the South had been critics of slavery, but Every summer there was a scheduled week-long revival, with services each night. Consider two very prominent women in American politics whose approach to religion I suggest exemplifies the distinction I have been trying to make between the Northern and Southern ways of religion. The distorting influence of racial segregation is being dissolved as scholars attempt culturally complex histories of southern religious cultures. Religion definition, a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs. What Do pagan and heathen Really Mean? No historical snapshot, as it were, can fully capture its dynamism or reveal the full complexity and range of its power, but several useful generalizations can be offered. The civil rights struggle re-formed southern denominations, splitting them along the lines of conservatives, moderates, and liberals that typically form cross-denominational alliances. You can help us by contributing! Hardly any substantial scholarship exists on some key figures, such as Charles Harrison Mason, founder of the Memphis-based black Pentecostal Church of God in Christ. What does it mean to call a region an evangelical belt when, according to the 2000 census data, 40 percent of those surveyed were either uncounted or unaffiliated with any church? The Negro—as a beast, a burden, or a brother—was there to be dealt with by whites, who were the actors in the racial drama. Southern religion came to conform to norms of “proper” society—its founding sense of being countercultural abandoned and its words of condemnation aimed at infractions of personal morality. The Civil War proved the great dividing line in southern religious institutional history. For example, white religious institutions and practices in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries reflected and reinforced racism. That change would be the effective introduction The textbook history was clearly at variance with my own historical experience. This tendency of ministers and churches not to become engaged with societal institutions was the result of more than just a practical emphasis on seeking converts. The church was widely acknowledged to be at the center of African American social and cultural life, and it remained so through the era of segregation and, much later, the civil rights movement. The Journal of Southern Religion is a fully peer-reviewed academic journal reflecting the best traditions of objective and critical scholarship in the study of religion. Hispanics gravitate toward specific locales where work awaits them—for example, in the carpet factories in and around Dalton, Georgia, the gigantic hog farms of North Carolina, and the migrant labor crop-picking camps in the Southeast. You have read 1 of 10 free articles in the past 30 days. Within a three-decade period, in unlinked but successive movements, Presbyterian, Baptist, and then Methodist churches and networks of ministers were developed in Virginia and, in rudimentary form, throughout the rest of the Southern colonies. Church services were held Sunday morning and evening, with Wednesday night prayer services. It must be for some divine purpose. Moreover, I want to describe the historical origins of this Southern way of religion and indicate its broadest features, and I hope in the process to help explain certain aspects of the religious landscape of the late-20th-century South. Worship, moral conduct, right belief, and participation in religious institutions are among the constituent elements of the religious life. But beneath that ran the powerful stream of black Protestant ideas (translated sometimes through Gandhian and Catholic Worker notions of civil disobedience and active resistance) that moved southern folk and pushed forward a leadership that otherwise remained cautious and circumspect. Unlike the Presbyterians who insisted on educated ministers and organized themselves hierarchically in presbyteries and synods, the Baptists utilized spirit-filled, often unpaid ministers who were at best educated only in a rudimentary sense, and the Baptists made much of the complete autonomy of individual churches (although they did organize regionally into loose associations). In gospel, then, the steams of southern religious music, white and black, flowed alongside one another, sometimes exchanging tunes and lyrics and styles, while remaining distinct. John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 2d ed. It was in this context that a young Presbyterian minister named James McGready, a son of North Carolina and a veteran of a localized but intense interdenominational revival in central Virginia in the fall of 1788, moved to Logan County, Kentucky, in 1796 and organized fasting and prayer societies in his three small churches, motivating his parishioners with promises of providential intervention. She is not blind to social evils, but her approach is aimed less at structural reform and more toward charity: she advocates feeding the hungry through local church-run agencies but not critiquing the institutional or economic structures that produce or contribute to poverty. Indeed, southern religious influences lay at the heart of much of 20th-century American popular culture. Personally devout, her orientation is in the social gospel tradition. CRCC’s research on religion in Los Angeles traces it roots back the faith-based response to the L.A. riots. This faith took shape partly under the suspicious eyes of watchful but devout whites, but, more importantly, it developed in the sacred spaces the slaves created for themselves in private worship. In June 1800 at a meeting of the most devout of his parishioners from all three churches in preparation for a three-day sacramental celebration concluding with communion, there were several cooperating ministers present, including a Methodist minister, John McGee, brother of a Presbyterian minister McGready had converted back in North Carolina. That penalty, now paid in full, means God offers forgiveness and new life as a free gift. While there had in the past been large gatherings of Presbyterians for Indeed, despite their reputation for stalwart conservatism, southern evangelicals in fact led the progressive movement in the early 20th century. Lieu de culte juif: Grande synagogue de Belz, Mur des Lamentations. When some African American men exercised rights of political citizenship, it appeared to white conservatives as an overturning of a divinely ordered hierarchy. The South’s own self–image of being at ease in Zion has been shaken in recent years. For an outstanding collection of primary writings from the 18th century to the late 20th century, including slave narratives and memoirs, denominational histories, reminiscences, didactic and polemical material, hymn books, programs, and church records, the best place to start is Documenting the American South.8 One subsection of the Documenting the American South collection, titled “The Church in the Southern Black Community,” includes a treasure trove of primary source material for southern African American religious history, and it also includes a “guide to the religious content of the WPA Slave Narratives.” Much excellent material is available digitized from the Duke University Library and Special Collections, including oral histories collected as part of the “Remembering Jim Crow” project, as well as a vast array of African American history materials gathered in the John Hope Franklin Research Center.9 Highly recommended also is the best denominational library and archive in the country, the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives.10 Besides containing as expansive a record of Southern Baptists as may be imagined, the archive also has collected a significant body of materials from the colonial and early national era, and has microfilmed nearly every known record of black Baptist church history. Radio became their most effective medium, for it reached out-of-the-way places where many parishioners lived. Hence when Northern abolitionists began attacking slavery as a sinful institution and charged the Southern churches with neglecting their spiritual duties, the Southern churches felt rebuttal was necessary. Southern Baptists believe that the Bible is the word of God and contains no … Increasingly studied, Southern religion is traditionally defined as evangelical Protestantism as expressed by Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. That is, individual Puritan believers and their individual churches were part of a great Providential plan: even act was filled with transcendent meaning. Measured either in terms of intensity or the numbers of people involved, the three separate waves of religious activity in Virginia never reached the threshold of any meaningful definition of “great” awakening. Black Catholics, too, have grown out of their Louisiana base and have found homes elsewhere. 14. In particular urban regions—Atlanta, Charlotte, the North Carolina Research Triangle, and even in the evangelical Vatican of Nashville—Catholics have assumed a regularized presence in the southern landscape, such that to be southern and Catholic no longer seems the anomaly that it was in the past. Hence Puritans engaged the world; they vised the power and authority of governmental institutions and officials to put into law their interpretations of Biblical commands: ministers employed fast day and election day sermons to instruct their parishioners politicall v. It should be no surprise that Puritans and their intellectual and cultural heirs in New England and across New York State into the Midwest were actively involved in disciplining and “Christianizing” the Northern frontier. The origins of the Northern religious tradition lie in the well-known Puritan migration to New England in the 17th century. Instead, here were the necessary foundation stones for the later Great Revival that, as a South-wide religious quickening in the decade after 1800, may accurately be described as the South’s “First Great Awakening”—some 60 years after the Northern and more famous First Great Awakening. Recent compact disc collections of formerly rare and inaccessible recordings have opened up this part of southern religious history to nearly any researcher. Yet the parishes were geographically large, transportation was primitive, and few of the ministers were very effective at communicating the faith or engendering warm attachments to particular churches. We do what we do together voluntarily. X, 2007 Hard, Hard Religion: The Invisible Institution of the New South John Hayes n late July 1963, a 65 year-old former coal miner stood alone on the stage of the Newport Folk Festival. 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