Book Description

Over the past twenty years there has been a dramatic increase in the number, scope, and quality of studies of religion in the American South. This new work has been inspired and furthered by a growing acknowledgment of the importance of religious studies in general, by the conviction that religion has always been basic to popular discourse in the South, and by an awareness of the bearing of religion on the political, economic, and social spheres of life. The authors represented in this collection are professors of religion, sociology, and his-tory, and are all part of a new wave of scholars with fresh orientations toward the study of southern religion. The essays cover a wide variety of subjects, ranging chronologically from John Boles's work on white-black relations in antebellum biracial churches to William Martin's treatment of what he calls the electronic church of the 1980s - the television-audience congregations who follow evangelists such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. The book encompasses a wide range of points of view, socioeconomic classes, and denominations. In addition to C. Eric Lincoln's essay on the history of the black church in America, there are J. Wayne Flynt's on the social gospel among southern Protestants from 1890 to 1920, David Edwin Harrell's on plain-folk religion in the South from 1835 to 1920, Randall M. Miller's on southern Catholicism, and Ralph E. Luker's on the ideas of the Episcopal theologian William Porcher DuBose. Wade Clark Roof shows how the unchurched in both the South and the rest of the nation reflect the general modernizing process, and Richard L. Rubenstein treats the relationship between slavery and the Holocaust in William Styron's Sophie's Choice. Clarence C. Gen writes on the sectional splits in the major denominations prior to the Civil War, and in his introduction and conclusion to the collection Samuel S. Hill places these ten essays clearly in the context of our current understanding of southern religion and suggests the ways in which this work breaks new ground and points to important new interpretations. These essays reflect the central assumption that there has been a distinct South for a long time, and they also reveal and examine the genuine diversity of that region's religious his-tory. The book is effective and engaging in its treatment of southern religion as an identifiable cultural entity, as well as in its evocation of the rich diversity of the parts of that entity.