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

In his book Hard, Hard Religion: Interracial Faith in the Poor South, John Hayes manages to walk deftly along the water’s edge between the relatively solid ground of historical fact and the more fluid nature of recalled religious experience. As Hayes is quite aware, the folk religion of the impoverished rural South has rarely been examined outside of literary or folklorist sources and, when discussed historically, the subject is often remanded to a subset of the Baptists and Methodists, the prominent Protestant religions that took hold of the South after the collapse of Reconstruction. However, this assemblage of communal folk beliefs and recollections, which often span the racial divide, merits closer inspection as an entity unto itself, and Hayes does a fascinating, enjoyable job.

The story begins with the end of Reconstruction. The social and economic upheaval across the South, which Hayes defines as a swath of states from the Carolinas to East Texas, caused widespread uncertainty in every stratum of Southern society. For white small farm or tenant farmers and unpropertied former slaves, life went from hard to harder. The Baptist and Methodist religions spread quickly and easily across the South as people began to look for spiritual nourishment to offset their physical hunger. As an historian, Hayes creates a tapestry of religious history interwoven with the larger, more discussed areas of post-Civil War Southern concern, but his timeline and his explanations of the economic pressures on Southern religion are crucial to understanding the rest of his undertaking. As the South begins to engender or import different types of industry from mills to poultry to coal mines, small mill towns and railroad stops begin to grow. Hayes further weaves these social, economic, and religious threads dating back to the Enlightenment into a beautifully cogent thesis on the social stratification of the Southern church.

With the growth of these various towns, some Southerners began to create a new middle class across the region; their religion took on a similarly bourgeois—that is to say, capitalist—quality. As Hayes explains, the unity and then gentrification of these prominent denominations began to equate certain levels of economic fitness with a corresponding spiritual fitness. As this socio-economic stratification began to take hold, more economically stable populations, both white and black, began to ridicule the less affluent for their lack of “respectability,” a term that Hayes thoroughly defines in this context. With lives that balanced precariously on whether they could remain healthy enough to work and little to no economic standing in this post-Reconstruction world, Hayes concludes that “[t]heir folk Christianity spoke to the unfulfilled promise of the New South” (46). The impoverished rural population, both white and black, began to form community churches that focused less on being part of a denominational unity and more on personal spiritual relationships with a living Jesus.

The book is both informative and an interesting read. Hayes navigates not only the history of religion, but also the history of a select period of the New South, and a history of the actual beliefs that shaped a noticeable part of the South. This book could easily have devolved into a history of Baptist and Methodist expansion across the South with a condescending nod to the tribal remnants of the primitive folk Christians who developed along the fringes of these denominations; instead, Hayes paints a rich portrait of a liminal religion that thrived among a people who did not. He creates a history, a story rather, of a South filled with Christian magic and a visceral, present belief in the power of a vital and fierce Jesus who would aid them against the forces of the Devil and death.

Displaying both sides of the historical argument, Hayes intersperses his descriptions of the folk Christian beliefs and practices with the contemporary commentary of these churches’ more cultivated, seminary-bred brethren. In many ways more scholarly compelling...