Bishops, Bourbons, and Big Mules: A History of the Episcopal Church in Alabama by J. Barry Vaughn (review)

J. Barry Vaughn has written an interesting history of the Episcopal Church in Alabama that transcends narrow denominational history and places the church and its members squarely within the context of Alabama history. Vaughn contends that, despite constituting less than 1 percent of Alabama’s population, Episcopalians enjoyed a disproportionate influence in the state. By Vaughn’s estimation, 10 percent of the state’s “governors, legislators, congressmen, and other significant leaders have been members of the Episcopal Church” (pp. 1–2). The book’s title acts as its thesis. Bourbons (prominent post– Civil War planters) and “Big Mules” (influential industrialists, especially in the northern part of the state) controlled the state’s Episcopal Church much as they did the state’s politics and economy. That influence provided Episcopalians with a comfortable niche, Vaughn argues, but the church failed to leave a lasting “institutional legacy” on the state (p. 188).

Created in 1830, the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama enjoyed steady, if not spectacular, growth during the antebellum period. By the Civil War, Episcopalians had built schools and parishes and increased their influence statewide. The bishop, his priests, and the laity were divided on secession, but when the Civil War came “clergy and laypeople of the diocese entered wholeheartedly into the war effort” (p. 50). After the war, Alabama’s Episcopalians embraced the Lost Cause mythology that reinterpreted the Civil War for defeated white southerners, and many grudgingly accepted a reunited national denomination only after northern dioceses proved eager to forgive and forget the religious division brought on by secession.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many Alabama Episcopalians easily accommodated the state’s growing industrialization, and the diocese’s response to industry’s concomitant social ills was mixed. In addition, the church—led by Bishop Charles Colcock Jones Carpenter from 1938 to 1968—eschewed the South’s most virulent racism but largely accepted the region’s racial status quo. For Vaughn, in race and other social and political issues, the Alabama Episcopal Church “has not been a great engine of social change” (p. 187). For scholars of southern religion, that lament is a familiar one and dates back to the civil rights era itself.

In fact, there is much here that scholars will already be acquainted with. For example, Charles Reagan Wilson has described Episcopalians’ leading role in Lost Cause mythology. Additionally, S. Jonathan Bass’s portrayal of Bishop Carpenter and Charles W. Eagles’s book-length treatment of the murder of Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels have both demonstrated the complicated relationship between race and Alabama Episcopalians’ religious identity. Vaughn’s scholarly contribution is to place those episodic events into context and show the continuity of the Alabama Episcopal Church’s history. Some questions remain unanswered, particularly about the factors that made Alabama Episcopalians, according to Vaughn, “members of a liberal denomination in a conservative state” (p. 169). A discussion of whether Alabama Episcopalians’ differences resulted from theology rather than politics would have enhanced this work. Nevertheless, the book contributes to our scholarly knowledge of Alabama’s diverse religious history.