Making the Bible Belt

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Locke
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Religious Support ◽  
Bible Belt ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Face ◽  
The American South ◽  
Shared Commitment

By reconstructing the religious crusade to achieve prohibition in Texas, Making the Bible Belt reveals how southern religious leaders overcame long-standing anticlerical traditions and built a powerful political movement that injected religion irreversibly into public life. H.L. Mencken coined the term “Bible Belt” in the 1920s to capture the peculiar alliance of religion and public life in the American South, but the reality he described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. Through the politics of prohibition, and in the face of bitter resistance, a complex but shared commitment to expanding the power and scope of religion transformed southern evangelicals’ inward-looking restraints into an aggressive, self-assertive, and unapologetic political activism. Early defeats forced prohibitionist clergy to recast their campaign as a broader effort that churned notions of history, race, gender, and religion into a moral crusade that elevated ambitious leaders such as the pugnacious fundamentalist J. Frank Norris and US senator Morris Sheppard, the “Father of National Prohibition,” into national figures. By exploring the controversies surrounding the religious support of prohibition in Texas, Making the Bible Belt reconstructs the purposeful, decades-long campaign to politicize southern religion, hints at the historical origins of the religious right, and explores a compelling and transformative moment in American history.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Locke
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bible Belt ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Southern Religion ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
The American South ◽  
Major Argument

The introduction presents the book’s major argument that, through the politics of prohibition, ambitious evangelical leaders were able to inject themselves into southern life and create the political conditions that would later identify the American South as the Bible Belt. H. L. Mencken coined that term later, in the 1920s, to capture what he saw as the South’s peculiar alliance of region and religion, but the reality that Mencken described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. To explore that process, the introduction establishes key concepts such as clericalism and anticlericalism, argues for Texas as the proper focus for a targeted study, and previews major characters and milestones in the development of a politicized brand of southern religion.

scholarly journals A Vigorous Affirmation of Life: Slaves in the Face of Dehumanization

Elements ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Danielle Nista
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Musical Instruments ◽  
Power Struggle ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Affirmation Of Life ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The American South

For a slave living under the system of chattel slavery in the American South during the nineteenth century, avenues of self-expression were extremely limited. One of the few ways slaves could exert control over their own lives was through singing and dancing. These arts gave slaves a chance to relieve stress and establish a culture through the creation of musical instruments, songs, and dances. All of these contained hints at the true nature of slaves’ feelings towards the system that oppressed them, feelings that they had to frequently repress. However, despite slaves’ efforts to make this culture entirely their own, masters tried to find ways to use it to their advantage instead of to the slaves’ benefit. The resulting covert power struggle sometimes ended in favor of the masters, taking the form of regulations on slaves’ dances, requirement of the performance of songs and dances for the masters’ entertainment, and even abuse of slaves by using their own arts. Ultimately, however, slaves emerged victorious because of the hidden messages in their songs and dances. Though this method of coping could not erase all the masters did, it was at least one glimmer of hope.

The Road to the Bible Belt

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Locke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Bible Belt ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Witch Trials

By the turn of the twentieth century, a cohort of clerical activists, plagued by notions of a widespread spiritual crisis, realized that religious authority in public life could be bolstered by the construction of new and powerful denominational bureaucracies, the pursuit of moral reforms such as prohibition, and by tackling head on the widely held anticlerical fears confronting religious activism in public life. Activists such as Methodist minister George C. Rankin would learn, for instance, that reclaiming historical memory—abolishing hostile associations with witch trials and inquisitions–could convince more and more Texans that government could—and should—be run along religious lines. Moral reform was only the most public manifestation of a brewing clerical movement that targeted the popular religious attitudes of everyday southerners to enable the construction of the Bible Belt.

Pimps and Pied Pipers: Quality Television in the Age of Its Direct Delivery

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 813-844 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL SZALAY
Keyword(s):  
American South ◽  
Digital Information ◽  
The Face ◽  
True Blood ◽  
Direct Delivery ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Time Warner ◽  
Direct Distribution ◽  
Material Form

This essay examines the fascination with bodily conversion that characterizes recent HBO programming. Dramas and comedies like True Blood, Veep, Silicon Valley, and True Detective describe human forms in various states of transformation: into a menagerie of supernatural creatures, polling data, digital information and, even, the landscape of the American South. These transformations anticipate and seek to rationalize the exchange of the programs in which they appear into and out of diverse forms of Time Warner brand equity – even as they rehearse anxieties that the network's famed “quality” diminishes in the face of such exchanges. Female characters bear the brunt of this reflexivity; their forcibly contorted and monetized bodies figure the temporary material form assumed by otherwise liquid equity as it moves within Time Warner and, ultimately, over Internet lines and into the viewer's home. The network's famed misogyny is, in this respect, self-conscious and idiosyncratic, and reveals something essential about the incoherence of HBO's parent company at the moment that the network discovers new pathways for the direct distribution of its product.

Labour repression in the American South: corporation, state, and race in Alabama's coal fields, 1917–1921

1994 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-364 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn Feldman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American South ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coal Miners ◽  
Business Press ◽  
The Face ◽  
Advantageous Position ◽  
The American South ◽  
Coal Fields

ABSTRACTThis article is a case study of labour strife in the Alabama coal fields from 1917 to 1921. It speaks to the broader issue of labour repression in the American South by examining the patterns of repression in one industry and in one state. Several revisionist works have been written recently refuting the alleged distinctiveness of the South on the labour issue. This article supplies evidence for a surprising degree of labour militancy; the type of militancy that has been used to buttress revisionist interpretations of the similarity of southern labour to that of other American regions. In this study, however, labour militancy is understood more as a function of the desperation of southern workers confronted with distinctive issues and degrees of racial acrimony, communal antipathy toward labour, and the advantageous position of southern coal operators vis-a-vis their northern counterparts. In the face of overwhelming odds of governmental, business, press, religious, communal, and legal opposition, Alabama coal miners mounted a militant, prolonged, and biracial protest against what have been described as the worst conditions in the United States at that time.

Race, Culture, and Religion in the American South

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Rocky Mountain ◽  
The South ◽  
Bible Belt ◽  
Large Area ◽  
American Popular Culture ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Evangelical Culture ◽  
The American South ◽  
Mountain West ◽  
Religion In The South

The South still commonly appears as the land of the Bible Belt, of evangelical Protestant hegemony. Despite the rapidly increasing immigration from all parts of the world to the region, there is still justification for such a view. 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 no other widely dispersed region, save for the Mormon regions of the Rocky Mountain West, does one family of religious belief and expression hold such sway over so many people and throughout such a large area. The biracial nature of evangelicalism in the South, as well, lends it a distinctive history and culture that alternately puzzles, repulses, and fascinates outsiders. The South may be the Bible Belt, but, like Joseph’s coat, it is a belt of many colors, embroidered with a rich stitching together of words, sounds, and images from the inexhaustible resource of the scriptures. The rigid Bible Belt conservatism associated with the common understanding of religion in the South contrasts dramatically with the sheer creative explosiveness of southern religious cultural expression. Indeed, southern religious influences lay at the heart of much of 20th-century American popular 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.

scholarly journals Ellen Glasgow’s In This Our Life: “The Betrayals of Life” in the Crumbling Aristocratic South

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Iulia Andreea Milică
Keyword(s):  
Family Relationships ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
American South ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The South ◽  
The Face ◽  
The American South ◽  
Ellen Glasgow ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractEllen Glasgow’s works have received, over time, a mixed interpretation, from sentimental and conventional, to rebellious and insightful. Her novel In This Our Life (1941) allows the reader to have a glimpse of the early twentieth-century South, changed by the industrial revolution, desperately clinging to dead codes, despairing and struggling to survive. The South is reflected through the problems of a family, its sentimentality and vulnerability, but also its cruelty, pretensions, masks and selfishness, trying to find happiness and meaning in a world of traditions and codes that seem powerless in the face of progress. The novel, apparently simple and reduced in scope, offers, in fact, a deep insight into various issues, from complicated family relationships, gender pressures, racial inequality to psychological dilemmas, frustration or utter despair. The article’s aim is to depict, through this novel, one facet of the American South, the “aristocratic” South of belles and cavaliers, an illusory representation indeed, but so deeply rooted in the world’s imagination. Ellen Glasgow is one of the best choices in this direction: an aristocratic woman but also a keen and profound writer, and, most of all, a writer who loved the South deeply, even if she exposed its flaws.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Locke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American South ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Ku Klux Klan ◽  
Frank Norris ◽  
Religious Politics ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The American South

The epilogue looks forward from the triumph of prohibition in Texas and the American South by exploring the rise of fundamentalism, the growth of the Ku Klux Klan, and the spread of a “Texas theology” across the nation. When white southerners poured out of the region during the remainder of the early twentieth century and settled especially in the Midwest and ever-rising West, they carried the clerical culture with them. Fundamentalist leaders such as J. Frank Norris and Robert Shuler exported the South’s fighting faith, normalized religious politics, championed a new hard-line theology, and laid the early groundwork for the coming rise of the religious right.

Biblical Literacy and Two Classical Sociologists

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-240
Author(s):  
David Chalcraft
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
American South ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Biblical Literacy ◽  
Black Folk ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Souls Of Black Folk ◽  
The American South

This article explores aspects of the biblical literacy of two classical sociologists, Max Weber (1864–1920) and William Dubois (1868–1963) and after discussing two examples in some depth and drawing comparisons, briefly reflects on what kinds of biblical literacy is required of contemporary readers of Weber and Dubois, if they are to make sense of their sociology given the continuing legacy of the Bible in their work. The examples of their use of biblical ideas, themes and figures are taken from Weber’s lectures, “Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation,” and from Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk. It is argued that whilst Weber uses biblical quotation to share with his audience a situation with some sociological analogy to their own case, Dubois utilises the continuing authority of the Bible amongst his White and Black audiences to affect social change and to provide an identity and purpose for Black folk post emancipation in the American South.

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