Gods of the Mississippi

FOREWORD

FOREWORD This engaging collection of essays assembled by Michael Pasquier explores and exploits the manifold diverse ways that the Mississippi River and the Mississippi River valley have impacted historical, religious, geographical, social , and cultural realities in mid-America and continue to do so today. After working through these essays, one will never again be inclined to limit the Mississippi to any one single category of experience. These essays collectively challenge the standard simple definitions of “the Mississippi.” Pasquier has brought together a selection of historians whose expertise ranges widely across the subfields of American history. Most also possess focused research interests on specific religious traditions, geographical regions, and/or cultural patterns with some link to the Mississippi or to the regions surrounding the river. These scholars bring their expertise to bear upon those waters and the religious contexts of this great river as well as upon the diverse ways the river has impacted our understanding of American history, especially the portions of the national narrative dealing with the religious experiences of Americans. The nature and character of those relationships form the substantive center of this collection. The authors of the essays in this volume, for example, challenge a number of the older ways of organizing American religious history, a narrative that rather standardly moves on an east/west axis. The river’s path, however, flows from north to south and features religious stories located in the Midwest , a neglected area in the nation’s history, including its religious history. In these essays we encounter the religious traditions held by African slaves in the Mississippi River valley in the antebellum period, the religious changes introduced into the worlds of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Native American tribes when Christian missionaries entered the river valley, as well as the tensions and conflicts that surrounded the members of new religious movements who settled in the valley, including the Mormons at Nauvoo, Illinois. In the x | Foreword case of the Latter-day Saints, they experienced dramatic empowerment from the river but also ultimately tragic conflict with others in the region and the murder of their prophet and founder, Joseph Smith. Another part of the Mississippi River valley was the delta region which in the decades following the Civil War became a shaping force on Christian worship and liturgical patterns within the expanding holiness and Pentecostal movements as well as a productive context for African American fraternal orders and societies. Religion in the lower Mississippi River valley and in the New Orleans region also included the powerful presence of Roman Catholicism , which was involved in the construction of racial boundaries, the formation of the culture of Jim Crow, and the empowerment of laywomen in the genesis and transmission of Catholic piety. This rich account of Mississippi religion and culture takes a turn to the contemporary with an essay on Johnny Cash. It is an account of the inner life, the public career, and the biographical twists and turns that this prominent performer and entertainer experienced and the diverse ways in which he responded to religion at various times during his career. Mississippi culture clearly figured in his life at times in very troubling ways. As he introduces the essays that follow, Pasquier speaks of “the collision and coalescence of religious peoples and ideas” shaped by and shaping the world of the Mississippi. He is correct to underscore the shaping character of the Mississippi upon the religion and culture of the people who moved to, across, or up and down the river. Thus the river becomes a rich metaphor for the process of cultural mediation carried out by religious people who were in the region of the river. The net result of the religious forces operative in the Mississippi River valley was very mixed. Some of the traditions prospered precisely because of the advantages—geographical location, abundant resources, expanding population, and the like that the context provided. Other religious communities were the victims of problems as a result of their presence in the valley. Pasquier did not intend that this collection would be an uninflected tribute to the Mississippi. This volume closes with an important afterword by Thomas A. Tweed, a set of reflections subtitled “Repositioning the Narratives of U.S. Religious History.” Tweed uses the occasion of the publication of this collection of essays to praise the contributors who have expanded the substance and complexity of the narrative of American religious history by means of the attention they have directed to a region that has received...