The Not-So-New Southern Religion

In an effort to win southern white voters, the GOP embraced the old southern religion turning the church faithful into the party loyal. They did so because in many parts of the South, the church remains the central institution defining, organizing, and politicizing its surrounding community. A “sacred canopy” drapes over the region, where there is a common cosmology that is intractable from southern white identity, including its reverence for white supremacy and patriarchy. In general, as a block, white southerners were more evangelical, Protestant, fundamentalist, and moralist than the rest of the country. The not-so-new southern religiosity satisfies an appetite for certainty, conformity, and even social status. As a means to solidify southern white support, the Long Southern Strategy framed southern white Christianity as under attack and cast the GOP as its protector, the price of which is increased cultural defensiveness, anxiety, fear, and distrust.

Southern Religion, Southern Culture

Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson's research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways. This book pays tribute to, and extends, Wilson's seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the chapters examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson's model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South's religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes. The book first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region's fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, the book shows that Wilson's groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South's complicated history and culture.

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.

A Match Made in Heaven? Southern Evangelicalism and the Rise and Fall of Agrarian Populism in the 1890s

The agrarian populist movement of the late nineteenth century remains among the largest social movement and third-party revolts in American history. It embodied a full-scale critique and mobilization against the inequities of the Gilded Age, and its influence stretched well into the Progressive and New Deal eras. While most accounts of the movement and party’s emergence and rapid demise have centered on economic conditions and interests, we link movement and third-party emergence and failure to the institutional arena second only to partisan politics in its impact on southern society at large, namely organized religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism. This article offers the first systematic analysis of the extent to which organized religion in the South channeled the mobilization of agrarian populism. The results both support and contradict the argument that agrarian populism was rooted in organized southern religion by suggesting that evangelical Protestantism channeled the mobilization of the Farmers’ Alliance movement but not the People’s Party. While white southern evangelical religion served as a potent cultural resource and mobilizing structure for the movement, the move to partisan politics helped create a disjuncture between movement and party from which Populism never recovered.