Alabama in the Twentieth Century

10. What Would Jesus Do? Religion

10 What Would Jesus Do? Religion Of course you can’t all go out hunting up jobs for people like me, but what I am puzzled about when I see so many Christians living in luxury and singing “Jesus I my cross have taken, all to leave and follow thee,” is what is meant by following Jesus? I remember how my wife died gasping for air in a New Y ork tenement owned by a member of a church. I suppose I don’t understand, but what would Jesus do? —Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps The 20th century began with a virtual Baptist-Methodist monopoly on religion in Alabama. The 1906 religious census listed nearly 400,000 black and white missionary Baptists among a total church membership of 832,000. Another 243,000 black and white Methodists of various af¤liations meant that Baptists and Methodists accounted for more than 3 of every 4 church members. Roman Catholics claimed 50,000 and Presbyterians 24,000, the only other denominations in double ¤gures. Episcopalians, Churches of Christ, and Disciples of Christ lagged with 9,000 members each, and Jews numbered only 1,100. As for Pentecostals and Holiness people, they barely appeared on the religious landscape, with the Assemblies of God accounting for 200, a mere fraction of the Greek Orthodox, who claimed 1,500 within their ethnic religious enclave. Although Alabamians were institutionally religious, they were barely more so than other Americans. In 1906 10 states (including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Utah) had higher rates of church membership. Alabama’s 62 percent rate of adult church members compared to the U.S. average of 56 percent. During the next two decades, Alabama evangelicals labored as if the end of the world was just around the corner (and an increasingly large number believed it was, a hope fueled largely by the apocalypticism of the First World War). Their efforts paid off. The percentage of adults belonging to churches increased to 66 in 1916 and 71 in 1926. By 1926 only the two Carolinas and Utah boasted higher church membership rates than Alabama . Nearly four in ¤ve of the state’s 1.2 million church members in 1926 were black and white Baptists or Methodists. Other groups experienced rapid growth as well: Jews from 1,100 to 9,200; the Church of God from zero to 2,200; the Church of the Nazarene from zero to 1,300; Churches of Christ from 9,200 to 30,000. Some denominations headed in the opposite direction. Black and white Primitive Baptists , who as hyper-Calvinists believed human efforts to convert the heathen at home or abroad were a waste of time, suffered the obvious consequences of such belief, declining from 25,000 to 21,700. Congregationalists declined by a third to 3,600. Cumberland Presbyterians, like Primitive Baptist a mainly rural denomination, lost more than half their 8,600 members between 1906 and 1926. Ethnic churches generally declined as immigrant workers—especially in the steel, iron, and coal industries—sought better economic opportunities elsewhere. Catholics declined from 50,000 to 36,000, and the tiny Russian Orthodox church lost half its members. Such statistics reveal a good deal about religion in Alabama while obscuring nearly as much. For instance, Jews and Catholics exerted much more economic in®uence than their size might suggest, just as Presbyterians and Episcopalians wielded far more political power than their numbers indicate. In a state completely dominated numerically by white Southern Baptists, a 1984 newspaper survey of the 19 most in®uential leaders of Birmingham listed only two Baptists, and one of them was the African American mayor Richard Arrington, who belonged to Bethel Primitive Baptist Church. Ten of the 19 were divided equally among Episcopalians and Presbyterians , 4 were Methodists, and 3 were Jewish. Five Birmingham congregations claimed 13 of the 19: Temple Emanu-El, Cathedral Church of the Advent, and Canterbury United Methodist led with 3 each. South Highlands Presbyterian and Independent Presbyterian claimed 2 each. Even if 444 CHAPTER TEN evangelicals had less in®uence than their numbers suggest, southerners in general and Alabamians in particular believed they were uniquely and distinctly Christian. They believed they adhered to a stronger, purer, deeper, more personal, evangelical, Protestant faith than other Americans. By and large, data support their beliefs. Going to church regularly, making the profession of faith that de¤nes one as a born-again (that is, adult) believer, and translating that...