Religion and Protest in the Postwar South

Since the emergence of Southern religious studies in the mid-1960s, scholars have wrestled with the nature and distinctiveness of faith traditions in the U.S. South. In his trailblazing works Southern Churches in Crisis (1966), Religion and the Solid South (1972), and The South and the North in American Religion (1980), Samuel S. Hill championed a vision of a distinct and relatively homogenous Southern religion characterized by the evangelical Protestantism of the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian denominations. Drawing primarily on the religious worlds of white Southerners, Hill cast Southern religion as more emotional, privatistic, and conservative than its Northern counterpart. Others asserted that Southern churches were mired in “cultural captivity,” stifling organized opposition to the status quo.¹

Almost as soon as these distinctions were drawn, scholars began to highlight important contradictions, recovering moments of religiously inspired protest and building a case for the diversity of Southern religion along lines of race, class, and region. The three books under review contribute to this growing understanding of the variety of Southern religious traditions, focusing on the period that extends from the Great Depression to the modern Civil Rights Movement. Their findings reinforce an alternative interpretation of Southern religiosity as a dynamic and contested terrain in which the faithful cultivated a wide range of theological responses to the upheaval wrought by economic crises and war. Far from passive observers, Southern believers could be found on all sides of the region’s sharpest conflicts, from the picket lines of the New South’s industrial heartlands to the pitched battles over desegregation and racial equality.

In Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South, historians Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf provide a masterful account of the role that the religious culture of white Southern workers played in Operation Dixie, the Congress of Industrial Organization’s (CIO) effort to unionize key industries in the postwar South. Following the Great Depression and the initiation of FDR’s New Deal, thousands of Southern workers fled the region in search of better wages and conditions in Northern industries and defense plants. Those who stayed behind utilized new federal labor protections and the growing power of national unions to chip away at the South’s low-wage economy, launching an unprecedented wave of organizing drives. These efforts reached their zenith in 1946 with the CIO’s initiation of Operation Dixie: a concerted attempt that ultimately failed to recruit Southern industrial workers to the ranks of organized labor. For many, Operation Dixie’s failure represents a watershed that solidified the South as a closed-shop and bolstered the power of conservative politicians who would go on to champion federal anti-union legislation and massive resistance to civil rights for African Americans. In light of these stakes, historians have contributed much intellectual energy to identifying the causes of Operation Dixie’s failure, with the CIO’s embrace of Cold War anticommunism and refusal to adopt a principled stance on racial segregation singled out as prime culprits.

The Fones-Wolfs take a new and innovative approach by “making the sacred a major element in the story of the CIO’s crusade for unionism and economic justice” (p. 5). The evangelical Protestantism of Southern white workers, the authors contend, played a vital role in shaping responses to Operation Dixie as well as to the broader concepts of unionization and New Deal liberalism. As the CIO’s seasoned activists faced south after WWII, their success hinged on their ability to negotiate the religious cultures of Southern workers...