Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era (review)

Recently, the notion of civil religion has been resurgent in the social sciences, and following in the footsteps of Wilson, this book attempts to bring the concept back to history as well.¹ Although the definition of the term has always been problematical, it refers to the way in which visions of the civic order can form into social narratives akin to religions—with their own civic saints, legitimizing myths, and moral arguments for society.

Remillard uses the concept to make sense of the complex and competing visions of the “good society” that developed in the post-Reconstruction South, specifically the wire-grass region of Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. The chapters trace a range of competing narratives of the good society—by the “New South” proponents of development and those advocating a return to tradition, by blacks and whites, by males and females, by Jews and gentiles, and by Catholics and nativists. Remillard uses letters, newspapers, and other archival documents, as well as secondary sources, to build a series of close-focus accounts of events and individuals to illustrate each of these narratives.

This attention to the competing visions of civil religion is the most important contribution of the book. The poles of each of these visions will be familiar to anyone who studies this era, even if the particular figures and events are new to them. What makes Southern Civil Religions worth a broader consideration is Remillard’s attention to how these competing visions were each tied to different claims about the placement of civic boundaries—about inclusion and exclusion. Civic-religious claims became a language that allowed many competing segments of society to make their own assertions about such boundaries.

The chapter about competing white and black visions is particularly interesting for its portrayal of the race problem as a “place problem”— that is, about who could control physical spaces and social hierarchies. In this context, the concept of civil religion does the important work of pointing to how these “religious” conceptions saw racial struggles as struggles about caste as much as they were about control of political or economic resources. The most surprising use of the perspective comes in the chapter about Catholics and anti-Catholic mobilization, which states that civic exclusion and social exclusion went hand in hand; religious prejudice was understood through the various languages of patriotism, race, social order, and politics.

The book suffers from a deficiency that is common to work using the concept of civil religion—ambiguity concerning whether the concept refers to a civic language using the metaphor of religion as an analytical tool or whether it refers to a civic language that actually rests on religious understandings. Remillard sidesteps the issue by pointing out (rightly) that even Bellah, the author who coined the term “civil religion,” grew fed up with the definitional debates about the term.² But the book makes a kind of backdoor case for the concept nevertheless. What broader concepts like “good society” might not do, and what “civil religion” potentially can do, is to point to divisions and exclusions as well as to unifying myths.