The Changing Face of the Catholic South

Of all European faiths transplanted to what became the U.S. southern states, Roman Catholicism came first. Southern Catholicism was mostly confined to the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys, leading a Glenmary priest to dub the interior “No Priest Land.” This chapter depicts the Catholic filling of the southern interior in four waves: first, select immigrant towns were established like Cullman, Alabama in the 19th century, home to a Benedictine monastery; a second wave came in the early and mid-20th century with the Glenmary Home Missioners and a colorful nun named Mother Angelica, determined in different ways to evangelize and serve the South; the third wave came from rustbelt transplant Catholics moving south for jobs, especially with the auto industry in the 1980s forward; finally, the fourth and largest wave is composed of Hispanic Catholics helping making the South’s states the fastest growing in Hispanic population 2000-2010. This chapter features visits to two fast growing Hispanic congregations, one largely Mexican in ethnicity, the other pan-Central American. The principal emerging religious feature for Catholicism in the South that it has quickly become the most immigrant-embracing form of Christianity in the region.

Washed in the Blood in the Red States

From a national congressional map the political makeup of the southern United States appears to be solidly red, or Republican, with a few small urban blue, or Democratic, districts surrounding state capitols and major cities. At the state and local levels, however, contemporary religion and politics continues to be an interesting contest between remnants of the old civil rights coalition on the left and the family values coalition religious right. This chapter focusses on former Alabama jurist Roy Moore as an example of the religious right, on Rev. William J. Barber’s Moral Monday’s in North Carolina as a revival of the coalition politics associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and on the remarkable stand of four Protestant and Catholic bishops in Alabama against making rendering humanitarian aid to undocumented immigrants a felony. The bishops won by appealing to the religious obligations to follow the teachings of their faith—to the frustration of some of their own coreligionists.

Rattlesnakes, Holiness, and the Nearness of the Holy Spirit

Although the outside image of southern Pentecostal Holiness is often sensationalized by associations with serpent handling believers, that actual practice is confined to roughly a thousand individuals in an Appalachian crescent in the South. The story of Wesleyan Holiness belief in the nineteen century transforming in the twentieth to a wide variety of Pentecostal bodies is an important one that gains importance in the contemporary era wherein the South’s growing number of “bapticostal” black churches and other churches effecting the prosperity gospel far outnumber the formal number of Pentecostal churches. Furthermore, the convictions that the Holy Spirit is nearby and waiting on believers’ calling have come to characterize even many mainline and evangelical churches’ practice to the point where one can speak of the Pentecostalization of southern Christianity.

The Religion of the Lost Cause, Reloaded

This chapter examines the ways the ancestral memory of Civil War service by such groups as the Sons of Confederate Veterans became hotly contested in the second decade of the 21st Century. What for some southerners was personal heritage, particularly as represented in the Confederate Battle Flag, was for many others a symbol of slavery and a continued belief in white supremacy. Matters came to a head in the killing of nine parishioners at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church during a Bible study. Yet the deeper issues of reverence or revulsion for the southern past continued with religion and religious leaders playing key parts.

Megachurches and the Reinvention of Southern Church Life

The phenomena of megachurches—churches with approximately two thousand in weekly worship attendance—is especially prevalent in the South. Not only is the South a region of many churches, but the likelihood that a given person attends a large congregation with giant screens, many services, ministries, programs for all ages, and perhaps even multiple locations is higher than anywhere else in the U.S. Not everyone in the South attends a megachurch but because so many do the strong megachurch model affects the general experience of church attendance and belonging, even in small churches. To examine southern megachurches in their variety, this chapter visits four churches that introduce important aspects of this innovative form: Bellevue Baptist Church just outside Memphis, Tennessee; Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, a church that grew the nation’s largest Christian college, Liberty University; New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, associated with the prosperity gospel; and, St. Andrew AME, a neighborhood church that has grown into a multifaceted resource for its largely impoverished neighbourhood in south Memphis.

Our Church Is Cleaning Up after Katrina

Hurricane Katrina inundated southern Louisiana and Gulf Coast Mississippi with devastating storm surges and flooding, resulting in death, displacement, and untold destruction. Survivors felt let down by the federal government’s ineptitude at emergency management and by their insurance companies. The only counterpoint to the pervasive experience of abandonment was the unending efforts made by people of faith and other voluntary groups. As helpful as outside volunteers proved, the disaster also led to new imaginative efforts at community building and overcoming poverty, distrust, corruption, and racial injustice in which religious leaders from inside the community took leading roles.

Southern Christianities in Harmony and Conflict

The conclusion poses the question whether the dominant religious dimension of South is basically charitable and hospitable or morally judgmental and hostile to difference? It argues, based on the evidence introduced, that the answer is that the South is both and more. The Christianities encountered in this book are several, plural, and manifold. As such they fund the instinct to both help strangers and anathematize them. The extension beyond self and clan—a value the disparate Christians all learn from their Bibles and churches—is not perfect, and honoured sometimes more in the breach than in practice. Biblicism and moralism divide, yes, but the sources of reconciliation and change come from the very same sources. And from this dynamic strangers meet, and sometimes, are enabled to become friends.

Christianities in the Now South

This book explores the extent to which there still is a distinctive southern religion, characterized by a predominant evangelical Christianity, composed of white and black representative churches. Recognizing the overdrawn quality of such evaluations even for the southern past, the argument is offered that intra-Christian diversity in the American South has reached the point where the term “Christianities” is more appropriate to capture the range of beliefs and practices visible in the 21st century. Christians in the Now South are so diverse as to sound at times more like a cacophony than the supposed southern harmonies of the past.

Southern, Christian, and Gay

In no area is contemporary southern Christianity more deeply divided than over the issue of sexuality. Younger people (including many self-described Bible-believing Christians) do not think that being gay has anything to do with one’s status before God, nor should it have before the law or in the family of faith. Baby boomers may be the last generation to feel otherwise, but for now gender identity and sexuality is a battleground. This chapter, however, is not about the southern Christians who exclude and decry their LGBT neighbors. It is about the several million gay southerners who bear up under that pressure while often holding on to the Christian faith that supposedly drives those who would exclude them. The chapter focusses on the LGBT Christians in the South and their allies who in the contemporary period have decided to be quiet no longer but instead to be proudly Christian and gay, and the growing minority of congregations that have staked out a publicly affirming identity of welcome. For these LGBT people of faith and their allies, the Christian message has sometimes proved stronger and more redemptive than all the resistance they have encountered from other Christians because of their identities.

Christian Homeschoolers

Framed by a visit to the Teach Them Diligently Christian Homeschooling Convention, the largest event of its kind, this chapter explores the large and growing phenomena of Christian homeschooling. Christian homeschooling differs from its secular, alternative lifestyle counterpart by a strong commitment to biblical teachings about family, science, and a concomitant conservative antipathy to so-called “government schooling.” At its oldest and simplest it embraces Anabaptist groups, who offer the most basic lessons to the rest of the community. Ken Hamm, and “young Earth creationists” (who argue for six actual days of creation and a maximum Earth age of 10,000 years are even more influential in the community, as are the Family Research Council, and groups urging women to have as many children as possible for biblical reasons. One of the interesting features of the movement is how many of today’s southern homeschooling parents were themselves the products of an earlier generation of the “Christian academies” devised in the 1960s and 1970s to avoid racial integration. Now that these same academies are mostly integrated, there is some evidence that the contemporary practice of educating one’s children at home (an activity differentially preferred by whites) has the effect of furthering educational segregation.