Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South by John Hayes (review)

John Hayes’s highly readable work takes the reader below the surface of “respectable” middle-class religion in emerging New South towns to view what he argues was a set of faith practices common to poor African Americans as well as whites. As he tries to traces the evidences of Christianity as it was practiced on the fringes of a region in transition, he chides nineteenth and twentieth observers for dismissing the religious practices of poor blacks and whites as escapist, insisting that practitioners of folk religion were quite focused on the world in which they lived.

“Perhaps ironically, the New South furnished the material basis for such an interracial alliance by fostering a modern poverty of landlessness and low wages that touched millions of whites and blacks,” Hayes concludes near the end of Hard, Hard Religion (195). The point is a running theme throughout the book. In an instructive introduction and first chapter, Hayes builds a picture of the conditions that, he argues, were the germinal ground for a set of faith practices and a worldview that reflected the marginalization of those caught on the bottom rung of industrial transition. As the post–Reconstruction South, including portions of Appalachia, moved toward manufacturing and extraction industries that pulled the region into larger markets, Protestant denominations—in particular Baptists and Methodists—began to emphasize what Hayes refers to as an “ethos of respectability and domesticity” that reflected a growing middle class (31–32). With the growth of towns, a class-based segregation began to emerge along with race-based Jim Crow, and in the process middle-class African American and white southerners began to denigrate their poorer, rural counterparts mired in debt and tenancy as lazy or irreligious. Hayes argues that the insults were groundless, pointing out that rural areas had networks of lay preachers who supported themselves as farmers or laborers in addition to preaching to rural congregations. These groups of people spread hymns, songs, and other practices across wide swaths of geography as well as between ethnicities.

Following the first chapter are four chapters covering a series of topical themes. Chapters two and three deal at the micro level with rural southerners and their treatments of mortality, Christian conversion, and God’s call to preach, in one portion examining in detail variations on a song about death most likely transmitted by traveling preachers and peripatetic workers as they found various means of income in different locations. Examining similarities between songs about death and medieval Danse Macabre, Hayes concludes that unlike middle-class evangelicals whose faith was becoming increasingly articulated in domestic terms, poorer southerners, whose lives were often marginalized, focused on death as a reminder that life was fragile and precious as they saw themselves as living in a liminal space between the transcendent and the mundane. A fourth chapter, titled “Sacramental Expressions,” builds on the difference even further; as middle-class evangelicals focused on the home as a sanctuary, poorer Christians saw the sacred throughout their landscape, as evidenced by the practices of grave decoration and river baptism away from houses of worship. Chapter five, titled “The Ethics of Neighborliness,” explores how poorer Christians, white and African American, valued hospitality and community as a means of meaningful survival.

Immanence is one of the running themes of the book, as Hayes observes that the sacred was never distant from the daily worlds of people for whom survival was a constant struggle (113). Hayes’s concentration on the spiritual opens up another avenue for the study of faith expressions examined by other historians in more temporal contexts; for example, in chapter four, Hayes touches upon the use of clocks to adorn graves, a practice examined in Mark Smith’s seminal work Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, 1997).

Hayes’s expansion beyond class analysis does not mean that he abandons class or race as a lens through which one can...