In 1999, more than one in five affiliated with some faith outside of Protestantism. Media Coverage of Religion in America 1969 - 1998 S. Robert Lichter Linda S. Lichter Daniel R. Amundson April 2000 Center for Media and Public Affairs 2100 L Street, N.W. More than any other region of the country, the South has been defined by its close identification with evangelical styles of religious expressions, and its intense relationship with scriptural texts, one simultaneously literalist (hence the association of southern religion with fundamentalism), visionary, and musically creative. Keywords: The 1960s, it seems, are always with us. (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. As a result, many of the works discussed here date from the last decade. White southern religious ideas of the social order of the races, moreover, could be intellectually grounded in a conservative vision of the role of hierarchy in preserving order and staving off anarchy. They dug up references to “render unto Caesar” and formulated obscurantist renderings of Old Testament passages such as the Son of Ham mythologies (the story from Genesis 9:18–27 when Noah condemns the “sons of Ham” to servitude). The only other group coming in at a figure of over 10 percent were the Catholics. 6. Milton Sernett, ed., African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Cornel West and Eddie Glaude, eds., African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (Westminster, KY: John Knox Press, 2003). Today’s conservatives, for the most part, have repudiated the white supremacist views of their predecessors. African American Protestantism empowered the most important social struggle in 20th-century American history, one that fundamentally redefined citizenship for disfranchised peoples. Despite the heroic efforts of some priests and the attempts by Catholics to avoid the segregated church model of the Protestants, Catholics increasingly fit into a southern mold as well. The white southern theology of class, blood, and sex was premised on God-ordained inequality. After an initial phase from 1945 to about 1958, in which … If the numbers crunched above show an evangelical belt that is, at best, holding its own, other tales from the tables suggest a different conclusion. 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. Questions remain as to whether studies in post–Civil War southern religion will add detail to, or fundamentally change, dominant paradigms for understanding southern history. Thus, the South may be colored with a dominant background of white and black Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Pentecostals along with a sprinkling of other groups in particular areas. The story these scholars tell is complex and, in some measures, contested. Southern churches mostly remained separated by race, but in other areas of social life pluralism came to the once solid South. In particular, the evangelical individualism that was such a deep part of southern white religious history prevented many good-hearted white southerners from seeing what their black brethren knew very well, that the deep racial and structural divide in American life would not be broken down by “changing hearts” or other nostrums dear to the hearts of evangelicals. Knowing that a perfect society cannot be achieved, churches have long sought to shape social order in an ongoing process consistent—as they saw it—with the will of God. The best starting point is the six-CD collection Goodbye Babylon (Dust-to-Digital Records, Atlanta, Georgia, 2003), a sampler of nearly every kind of southern religious music recorded earlier in the 20th century. A large proportion of the “unchurched” in the region still believes in God and afterlife. For two hundred years before it grew into a region dominated by a conservative form of Protestantism, the South was a place where diverse religious traditions from around the world met, sometimes in coexistence and sometimes in conflict. Indeed, it is southern religion that was at the heart of much of 20th-century American culture. And it contrasts with a rapidly changing contemporary South in which Buddhist retreat centers and Ganesha temples are taking their place alongside Baptist and Methodist churches. 3 The ideas of nonviolent civil disobedience first had to make their way from the confines of radical and pacifist thought into African American religious culture. Historically, the South has been distinctive for its overwhelming predominance of a biracial culture, with relatively few “white ethnics” or other groups to muddy the mix. _____. This kowtowing by ministers to the slave-owning class was obvious to slaves in attendance. In other words, even if 40 percent of southerners are uncounted or unaffiliated, many register as believers if counted by other measures. The migration of black Americans from the South to the rest of the country through much of the 20th century, moreover, ensured that African American sermonic forms that developed over two centuries in the South would spread and become known in national politics through the likes of Jesse Jackson, a native of South Carolina. Despite the rapidly increasing immigration from all parts of the world to the region, there is still justification for such a view. Meanwhile, the diversification of the contemporary South brings religious pluralism to the region. Even this interaction of religion and public life appears likely to change, however, as (for example) Hispanic Catholics and Pentecostals make their voices heard, and highly educated Asians in the university and medical communities grow more assertive in public expression of their Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic, Sikh, or other faiths. Since the 1970s, religious diversity in the South has intensified. This is Bob Jones Sr.’s politics/religion in 1960. The biracial nature of evangelicalism in the South, as well, lends it a distinctive history and culture that alternately puzzles, repulses, and fascinates outsiders. To study religion in the South, then, is to examine the influence of a dominant evangelical culture that has shaped the region’s social mores, religious minorities (including Catholicism, Judaism, and non-Christian immigrant religions), cultural forms, charged racial interactions, and political practices. In the late 18th century, as evangelical revivalism spread through the region, a brief moment of opportunity for a biracial religious order seemed to present itself. The distorting influence of racial segregation is being dissolved as scholars attempt culturally complex histories of southern religious cultures. Learn more on HISTORY.com. It is intimately bound up with the rise of a slaveholding republic, the national Second Great Awakening, the coming of “civilization” to the rustic southern backcountry and newly opening states of the Deep South, the innovative methods (such as circuit-riding preachers and mass-produced pamphlet literature) employed by the newly rising evangelical denominations, and the concerted (and partially successful) effort to evangelize among enslaved people. . But it was also a time of rapid social and cultural change when Christianity faced challenges from Eastern religions, from Marxism and feminism, and above all from new ‘affluent’ lifestyles. Fears of unseen powers—signified by specially concocted mixtures of roots, plants, and bags—compelled frequent recourse to conjure men. Southern evangelical culture also varied greatly by subregion—between city and country, the Southeast and Southwest, Virginia and Texas, Florida and Kentucky, the Appalachian Mountains and the Lowcountry, the piney woods and the Black Belt, the Dust Bowl and the Florida swamplands. The desire for deeper understanding and spirituality greatly influenced the 1960s generation. American Missionary Association Records. Many of the black gospel pioneers came out of the Baptist and Methodist churches, but the influence of Holiness/Pentecostal performance styles broke through the stranglehold of “respectable” music that had defined urban bourgeois black services. Only a proper ordering of the races would maintain white southern purity against defilement—the sexual metaphors behind the race politics were obvious and restated endlessly. It is too soon to say, however, how Asian religions will change the southern religious landscape. Indeed, the very term southern identity itself has been called into question. 1. Vitality is seen both in the resurgence of moretraditional, conservative expressions of Christianity and in the sustained interest in non-Christianalternatives. Ironically, it is those evangelicals who feel, as a recent book title puts it, “uneasy in Babylon,” as they see a formerly almost monolithically evangelical culture gradually slipping from them. Cash, Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941). White and black Pentecostal musical styles remained distinct, but they intersected at many points. A total of 14 percent of Texas residents and 17 percent of Floridians were born outside the United States. Pop John XXIII, Robert Ellwood's new book mixes religion with history, politics and culture. Later in the 20th century, however, Pentecostalism became one of the fastest growing religious groupings in America, confounding a generation of interpreters who condemned it as the opiate of the dispossessed. By the 1970s, many white southern believers accommodated themselves with remarkable ease to the demise of white supremacy as fundamentally constitutive of their society. Churches as institutions were conservative, but progressive Christians drew different lessons from the Bible than regional religious leaders often understood. The African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) The African-American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s grew out of biblically based and nonviolent methods used by people like Martin Luther King, Jr. Sit-ins, boycotts, and protest marches were among the weapons used by persons fighting for equality of the races in the South. White ministers tutored black protégés for missionary work, on occasion even setting these ministers free. These primitives instead provided much of the soundtrack and expressive forms that reshaped American cultural styles later in the 20th century. No one could have known who would end up as the political or religious victor in a multipolar world where Natives and non-English Europeans possessed advantageous geographic control. new theology, I am reproducing the entire text here so that google will pick it up for anyone researching. All Rights Reserved. The civil rights struggle re-formed southern denominations, splitting them along the lines of conservatives, moderates, and liberals that typically form cross-denominational alliances. To justify the state-mandated inequality of segregation, they resorted to constitutional arguments (“interposition”), appeals to tradition, and outright demagoguery. Important questions and avenues of scholarship remain. Many southern believers, black and white, engaged in a Pascalian wager, trusting in their Christianity but also keeping one foot in the world of spirits invoked by conjurers and narrated in popular tales. For many ordinary southerners, nothing else besides a religious vision of redeeming the South sufficed for the sacrifices required by the struggle. However, the impact of a new generation of scholarship and the recent establishment of the Journal of Southern Religion will provide an agenda for the scholarly future. As a result, scholars have been able to speak of a “solid South” in religion, one that has room for High Church Christianity for the elite and for Catholics in particular regions, but one that is fundamentally defined by Southern Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and (more recently) Pentecostals. In these private gatherings, the deepest desires for freedom found expression among people otherwise compelled to dissemble before old master. Charismatic Movement, Works by scholars such as Samuel S. Hill Jr., John Boles, and Donald Mathews ushered in an era of serious historical inquiry that continues today.5 Meanwhile, the burgeoning field of slavery studies produced classics in the study of antebellum southern religion, most notably Eugene D. Genovese’s provocative Roll, Jordan, Roll (1973) and Albert J. Raboteau’s synthetic Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (1978).6 Most recently, Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt,7 focusing on the early days of southern evangelicals and their accommodation to the moral reality of a patriarchal slave society, shows how much can still be gleaned from rereading the sources with a fresh set of questions. The South, then, is the most solidly evangelical region of the country, and the South’s evangelicals are the most conservative in terms of voting patterns, views of biblical authority, and attitudes toward significant social issues. Immigration accounts for part of this; more significant, however, is migration, as national firms draw in increasing numbers of workers from other parts of the country. Jews held a respected spot, too, in the cultural imaginary of southern evangelical Protestants, since Jews were, after all, descended from Abraham and Moses and David. In these white-run antebellum churches, blacks participated to a larger degree than historians once understood. Even that story must be complicated and studied in specific subregions, for immigration patterns are intense in very particular areas and nonexistent in others. This Study Guide consists of approximately 43 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of America 1950-1959. In such activities, students of religious culture have discovered a rich tradition of black expressive culture underneath the smothering rhetoric of “uplift” pervading black church organizations. Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study. This fit into the Counter Culture set of ideas because buddhism was a religion of peace. It quickly became evident that whites valued the blossoming of their evangelical institutions and would make the necessary moral accommodations to align southern religious institutions with slave owning. Do remember, however, to properly cite any references to this transcription. These notions were not merely hypocritical cant intended to void the clear biblical message, for particular biblical passages clearly explained why spiritual equality does not (and must not) imply temporal equality. Pioneered by Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1997), scholars have addressed subjects such as ring shouts, conjure rituals, chanted sermonizing, and blues hollers. Statistics can tell many stories, of course. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983. But even in Louisiana, once traveling far enough northward Baptists and Methodists displaced Catholics. In a few particular cases, such as New Orleans and surrounding regions of Louisiana, Catholics were actually predominant, and evangelical Protestants were the relative upstarts. Holiness/Pentecostalism provided fertile ground for musical interchange among white and black southerners, just as the great camp meetings of the early 19th century provided a similar forum for cultural interchange. ... from 57 percent of the U.S. population in 1950 to 63.3 percent in 1960. In many ways, southern religious expressive forms, with their deep intermixing of white and black forms and styles, became America’s cultural sensibility. Thus, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the South was relatively free of overt anti-Semitism. While religious institutions were resistant to change, many religious folk devoted themselves to social change precisely because they perceived God as the author of it. The chart below (Religions of the World, p. 3002) provides an overview of American religion in 1970 and in 2010 alongside data about what percentage of the population each group comprised in 2010 and the annual growth rate for each during the most recent decade. Perhaps because they are still a relatively small percentage of the population yet, or perhaps because they have filled vital niches in the southern economy, Asian immigrants to the South have experienced surprisingly little of the harassment that traditionally greets newer foreign-born groups. Through black and white variants of gospel music and in the rhythmic intensity that black and white Pentecostals carried forward through the 20th century, Americans recaptured a deep soulfulness and spiritual dance and listened avidly to thinly veiled secularized versions of those forms in the popular music of the post–World War II era. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). White southern Christians viewed their Redemptionist activity as essentially religious, an extension of the cosmic struggle between order and disorder, civilization and barbarism, white and black. 1960s, Hugh McLeod, author 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. Journal of Southern Religion (1998–). Southern sermonic and oratorical forms reverberated through the majestic cadences of Martin Luther King Jr., and American revivalism took a distinctively modern form through southern barnstorming preachers such as Billy Sunday and, later in the century, Billy Graham. But Catholicism has found its way into the Deep South as well, and increasingly it mixes in unobtrusively with the familiar landscape of evangelical Protestant churches. No one could have guessed where history was headed. Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Religion. The combination of its unique history and the fact that many Southerners maintain—and even nurture—an identity separate from the rest of the country has led to it being the most studied and written-about region of the U.S. You can see the original printed format here. 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. Recent compact disc collections of formerly rare and inaccessible recordings have opened up this part of southern religious history to nearly any researcher. In the Christian churches, it was a time of innovation from the ‘new theology’ and ‘new morality’ of Bishop Robinson, to the evangelicalism of the Charismatic Movement, and of charismatic leaders, such as Pope John XXIII and Martin Luther King. After the war, independent churches and denominational organizations sprung up quickly in black communities, including thousands of small local congregations and major national organizations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the National Baptist Convention. From the early 1920s through the 1960s, the accent was put on the variety of religious traditions and rituals of the antebellum Southern slaves, but without them receiving the credit for these traditions, which were considered as being adaptations of European beliefs and rituals. Like the first Reconstruction, then, the civil rights movement, sometimes called the second Reconstruction, is an unfinished revolution—nowhere more so than in southern religion. As Virginians and Marylanders had established as early as the 1660s, freedom from the bondage of sin did not equal freedom from human bondage. Although drawing in multiple influences both secular and religious, the freedom struggle was sustained through the religious vision of the ordinary black (and a few white) southerners who made up its rank and file, braved harassment and intimidation, and transformed the consciousness and conscience of the country. Defining the “long 1970s” as the period between Richard Nixon’s entrance in the White House in 1969 and Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection in 1984, Schulman counters popular conceptions that the 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. Using oral history, this book tells in detail how these movements and conflicts were experienced in England, bu ... More. For example, white religious institutions and practices in the South in the 19th and 20th centuries reflected and reinforced racism. The South still commonly appears as the land of the Bible Belt, of evangelical Protestant hegemony. The largest percentage of these consists of Latino immigrants, especially to Texas and Florida; but they have increasingly been joined by Asian immigrants to southern cities. Belief in conjure—or at least a willingness to suspend disbelief—pervaded much of the Deep South. The dominant understanding of evangelicalism in the South since the Civil War, the so-called cultural captivity thesis, explains how southern Christians were “captive” to southern culture. This sanctification of segregation was important in making the white South so obsessed with purity and concerned with defending (in the words of scholar Jane Dailey) the sacred triad of sex, segregation, and the sacred. Later in the 19th century, Protestant denominations began extensive home missions work in the mountains, disparaging the vital religiosity of the people while ignoring the tradition of native preaching. Suite 300 Washington, D.C. 20037 (202) 223-2942 Since the civil rights era, Jews have joined Catholics as increasingly “blended in” to the southern religious landscape, especially in the largest urban areas and in university communities. For many white southern theologians, defeat in the Civil War also shored up orthodoxies of race and place. Conseravtive white Evangelical perents were against the kids listenign and dancing to black Rythem & blues, which later became Rock and Roll. 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. David Hilliard, among the first to investigate the “religious crisis,” found that the sense of religious decline in Australia was heightened by it following a period In this sense, the cultural captivity thesis damns both white and black churches. Nowhere is this more evident than in the self-described “conservative resurgence” inside the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. Southern orthodoxy, according to Hill, sees individual conversion (rather than social reform or any larger purpose) as the central role of religious institutions—an argument later dubbed the “conversionist paradigm.” Southern believers historically have seen their own region as a Zion, set apart from the secularizing currents of the rest of the country, and thus more pure, more godly. Tilt the prism another way, and yet another perspective emerges. Can southern religion remain “distinctive” in such settings? Important questions remain in understanding religion in the present-day South. The number of regular Christian worshipers began to decline in Britain in the 20th century. The irony, of course, is that it was New England, not the South, that was the Bible Belt of early America. It was more pervasive among southern laymen and laywomen and among ministers outside the denominational hierarchy than in the circles of denominational leadership. John Boles and Donald Mathews, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Nevertheless, evangelicals largely captured the culture of the region. Teachers of the 1970s had many cultural factors that affected how religion was taught. (Oakland: University of California Press, 1992–2014). John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 2d ed. Finally, some mention should be made of the recent demographic explosion of Asian religions in the South. 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. 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