The Land of Misfit Relics

This chapter addresses the fascinations of Protestants with certain “relics” of racial, political, and communal violence. In contrast to Catholicism, blatant Protestant relics are rare. While the ones they have are significant, there are not enough of them to comprise a Protestant tradition of devotional use of relics. However, there are southern Protestants who have had two major sources of relics as understood as the sacred remains of the dead: those produced by death in the Civil War and those made through the lynching deaths of African Americans. There are three possible options for the presence and persistence of religious relics in popular culture. The first is the importance of religious relics to subcultural memory. The second is the significance of religious relics to the cultural production and ritual construction of racial difference. The third is the power of those relics to resurface and strain against historical amnesia.

Race and the Visions of John Lafayette Girardeau

This chapter focuses on John Lafayette Girardeau, a Presbyterian leader who, after the Civil War, simultaneously worked to shape churchly reform and Lost Cause religiosity. Girardeau's postbellum ecclesiastical reform in ordaining African Americans and pushing for their ecclesiastical equality places him among emancipationists. However, his work on the battlefield as a Confederate chaplain, his aid to the public in coping with death and destruction after the Civil War, and his service as pastor of an integrated church places him in the reconciliationist camp. Meanwhile, his work as a defender of the Lost Cause, which helped justify the racial violence perpetuated by Lost Cause adherents, places him within the emerging norms of a white supremacist vision. Ultimately, Girardeau's life and world presents a much more complex picture than his missionary activity, representative Calvinism, efforts toward ecclesiastical reform, or Lost Cause ideology reveal.

Judgment, Grace, Race, and the Transcendental Blues

This chapter discusses the past, present, and future of southern religious history and suggests how much of Charles Reagan Wilson's academic lifetime of work has foreshadowed, shaped, and developed work in the field over the last generation. Scholars of Wilson's generation tried to understand the origins and dominance of evangelicalism. The present and future of historical writing in this field is about incorporating a diversity of southern religious stories, ranging from the Powhatan Confederacy in early Virginia, to Moravians in North Carolina, Spiritualists in New Orleans and elsewhere, and Catholics throughout the region. Another major theme of southern religious history is the centrality and constant interplay of the revolutionary and the revivalist traditions in southern history, and a parallel interplay between racialized particularity and Christian universalism in southern religious thought and practice.

Afterword

This afterword looks at a few of the features of Charles Reagan Wilson's scholarship that led so many people to gather to talk about southern religion and southern culture. Of the several ways Wilson's scholarship was doing work that later gained a name of a scholarly movement, one stands out. Wilson was studying historical memory before the field of memory studies existed. To be more specific, Wilson linked the study of memory to the study of religion. A great deal of Wilson's work analyzed roles religion played throughout southern history, especially beyond the churches and religious organizations. That willingness to learn and think well beyond one's specialties has characterized much of Wilson's work.

Spirit in the Air

This chapter traces out the long and complex relationship between Holiness-Pentecostals and technology, innovation, and mass media. One of the most significant religious phenomena of the 1980s was the emergence, or at least widespread public awareness, of the electronic church. Indeed, in 1987, four of the most-watched religious programs on television were hosted by southern Pentecostals. In coming years, African American Word of Faith and Pentecostal ministers like T. D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar would join the ranks of these highly visible religious stars. The link between Holiness and Pentecostal faith and tech savviness was not accidental. Pentecostals have used these resources to spread the movement. While media-driven Pentecostalism made enormous headway in the Global South, it also gained ground in other unlikely places as well. Pentecostal ministers outside the states proved just as adept at using radio, TV, and, later, social media to champion the cause.

Having Our Own

This chapter details the educational institutions and efforts of the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church. Education was a key component of freedom to many blacks, and African American churches worked tirelessly to establish their own educational institutions. For the CME Church, determination to make their own schools mirrored their determination to make their own all-black denomination. Established in 1870 in Jackson, Tennessee, the CME Church arose from the soils of the Deep South, drawing the bulk of its membership from Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The story of the establishment of the Mississippi Industrial College by the CME Church exemplifies southern blacks' collective efforts to educate their communities; it represents their continual struggle to maintain funding for their education, to govern the direction of their institutions, and to escape their dependence on paternal white supporters.

The Riverbank Politics of Uncommon Prayers in Antebellum Arkansas

This chapter examines slavery and finance among Episcopalians in Arkansas. It reconsiders the historiographical paradigm that pairs the flourishing of evangelicalism with the declension of the Episcopal Church in the antebellum South. Evangelicalism's ascendancy neither caused nor signified the vanishing of Episcopalians in the antebellum South. Historians must remember that the Episcopal Church inherited centuries of Anglican expertise in imposing “supremacy” and “uniformity” upon dissenters. The southern frontier pitted disciplined Episcopalians united around slaveholding conservatism against antebellum evangelicalisms that suffered from bouts of classless consciousness, denominational cannibalism, emotional incontinence, and doctrinal dementia. Episcopalians armed with labor power remained ascendant in Arkansas until the Civil War because the identity politics of evangelicalism and white supremacy fragmented the common prayers of laboring people.

“The Pure of Body Are Pure of Soul”

This chapter assesses how religion worked through sports in the years between the Civil War and the 1920s. The standard narrative starts by noting that in the North at this time, progressive reformers embraced the “muscular Christian” movement, as they promoted sports as means of “toning” both body and spirit. In the South, however, evangelicals were wary. The story of southern white evangelicals denouncing sports connects to broader national and international discourses over questions of athletics, race, and public morality. Put another way, southern white evangelicals were not entirely distinct in their mobilized opposition to sports like prizefighting. Meanwhile, on the fields, among the fans, and in the print culture, athletes and athletics continued to develop a mythic stature. They too deployed not only evangelical language in the elevation of physical activity, but also a generalized discourse of the sacred.