A Coat of Many Colors: Religion and Society along the Cape Fear River of North Carolina (review)

In A Coat of Many Colors, Walter H. Conser, Jr., has greatly advanced our knowledge and understanding of religion and its role in the lives of North Carolinians of the Cape Fear region of the state. The Cape Fear area, embracing nine counties in southeastern North Carolina through which flow the Cape Fear River, Northeast Cape Fear River, and their tributaries, played a conspicuous role in the onset of the American Revolution, maritime commerce and railroading in the nineteenth century, the American Civil War, and the world wars and shipping industry in the twentieth century. Anchored by the port of Wilmington in the southeast, the region from the outset displayed a cosmopolitanism and hence a miscellany of religious sentiment unusual, if not unique, to North Carolina.

With a masterly grasp of his subject, Conser offers an inclusive examination of religion in the Cape Fear. He successfully recounts his story on three levels. First, A Coat of Many Colors is a regional history with a focus on Wilmington. According to Conser, over more than two centuries Wilmington was "something" of a microcosm of the religious growth and diversity evidenced throughout the Cape Fear. Second, the author places the religious experience of the Cape Fear against the larger backdrop of the American South, which permits the exploration of such themes as the religious establishment in the colonial era, the development of religious toleration, the experience of the evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening, the appearance of associations devoted to moral reform, the importance of race, and the increasing religious diversity occasioned by immigration. Third, and on a more abstract plane, Conser considers the dichotomous tension between the traditionalist and modernist approaches to religion, characterized as "a turn away from the authority of hierarchy, custom, and institutions . . . toward self-autonomy and individual expression"(p. 4).

Conser casts a wide net, at least chronologically. He opens with a chapter on Native Americans and concludes with the early twenty-first century, but throughout he centers on Wilmington and its environs, where currently religion in many manifestations may be found: various Protestant denominations; Roman Catholicism; Orthodox and Reform Judaism; Islam; Mahayana, Theravada, and Vajrayana Buddhism; the Metropolitan Community Church (a ministry to homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals); the Covenant of Cape Fear Pagans; and more. Variety indeed characterized the Cape Fear religious experience, justifying the title of this volume. Additionally, although properly cast as a monographic study, A Coat of Many Colors considers religion within the broad context of Cape Fear society. In the process the author provides the reader with a compendium of information about North Carolina life over several centuries, including subjects as diverse as archaeology, immigration patterns, architecture, sanitation, and World War II. This volume must be appreciated not only as a disquisition on religion but more broadly as a useful reference work for the Cape Fear region.

A Coat of Many Colors is a finely crafted, meticulously researched, and thoroughly documented survey of a subject that has received little attention in North Carolina and the Cape Fear region. Scholars particularly, but lay readers as well, will find this volume to be a valuable addition to their libraries.