Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History

2 God-Haunted

2 God-Haunted The South in a way made a religion of its history. —Richard M. Weaver, ‘‘The South and the American Union’’ It would come to this: a liberating religion would turn confining and harsh, as hard as the lives of the people whose faith rode on the promise of ever after, not here and now. Their evangelical ancestors would scarcely recognize them. For in the forest clearings and towns of the late-eighteenthcentury South, the young, unmarried preachers spoke the Gospel and demanded their listeners to question all earthly authority, all hierarchy of man, all family ties, and all institutions derived therefrom. They treated women and African Americans as equals and expected the like from their congregations : all were equal before Christ. The Baptist and Methodist itinerants unsettled the complacent, challenged the norm, urged people to question, and held open the possibility and beauty of grace if they did. Most of all, they gave America one of its greatest gifts: religious freedom.1 Things change; young, zealous preachers grow old and give way to a new generation. People move to town. Respectability replaces righteousness; prosperity softens opposition to that which makes men prosper. And a religious movement comes in from the outside to become part of a culture. More converts mean more power to God, and to churches and their ministers. No need to offend; soften the Gospel; encourage, don’t despise; comfort, don’t confront; sins may be easily expiated, just reenlist and everything will work 43 44 Still Fighting the Civil War out fine. Convert the slaves, don’t free them. Teach your wives and daughters their proper roles; don’t encourage their independence. It’s God’s plan. Today’s religious homogeneity in the South belies a past of great diversity. Before the American Revolution, the southern colonies hosted Protestants of various persuasions, Jews, Catholics, and a good number of Moslem slaves. This spiritual mélange was unplanned, and the Anglican Church, which served as the established church of the colonial South, did not encourage it. But the Anglicans were much less finicky about religious dissent than were their Puritan brethren in New England, who came to the New World for religious freedom, got it, and then promptly denied it to everyone else. Practicing Anglicans, almost an oxymoron in some parts of the colonial South, viewed the church more as an appendage to their social and economic status than as an integral part of their lives. They held Anglican ministers in low esteem, and a number of colonial divines lived down to that estimation. British North America was a distant and dangerous territory; ambitious, talented, and pious Anglican clerics avoided the place. Word of religious toleration, or at least grudging acceptance, in parts of North America spread quickly, especially among Jews and Catholics, who were outcasts in many areas of the Atlantic world. By the time of the Revolution , Charleston boasted the largest Jewish population in the western hemisphere , and more Roman Catholics resided in the southern colonies than anywhere else in British North America. As early as the 1730s, evangelical Protestant groups that had encountered hostility in New England and the Middle Colonies began to migrate south. Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and German Moravians set out on the Great Wagon Road, which stretched from eastern Pennsylvania, down the Shenandoah Valley, and into the Carolina Piedmont. Settling along this natural highway, they cultivated farms and founded towns. They became the backbone of the southern yeomanry. While these groups created little notice or concern (except among the Indians ), another Protestant band stirred up trouble. Few settlers among the nominally Anglican majority had arrived in the southern colonies for religious freedom; most came to make money. When they made their fortunes, they enjoyed themselves with lavish entertaining, fine English manufactured goods, and extravagant food and drink. They partied a lot. And they seldom allowed Sundays or holidays to interfere with a good time. But a religious enthusiasm known as the Great Awakening swept through the colonies in the 1740s, and by the 1760s Baptists, the most zealous exponents of a new spiritu- God-Haunted 45 ality and morality, grew their following large and strong enough to confront the Anglican majority in a very forceful manner. The Baptists’ appeal was simple, especially to people residing apart from the more-settled coastal areas. They offered fellowship and promised salvation no matter how humble a person’s station...