Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South

Nine. Apocalypse South: McKendree Long and Southern Evangelicalism

9 Apocalypse South McKendree Long and Southern Evangelicalism In a “Sermon on St. Peter,” recorded around 1950, the Reverend McKendree Robbins Long preached on the need for revival during a wicked time. “A great Southern preacher once said, ‘There are plenty more Pentecosts in the sky,’” Long noted. He added, however, that while that might be true for “mere revivals,” the times required a new kind of awakening, “the foundation of faith in terms of infinite power.” He feared that “not a handful really believe we can have one,” and yet he insisted on the need to look beyond “the apostasy about us” and to rely on the “loving-kindness of the Lord” to bring about a revival. A revivalist for almost three decades at that point, Long realized he faced new, unsettling times in the 1950s. His sermon came not long after the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear weapon, bringing thoughts of the end times to believers rooted in biblical authority. He would soon begin painting his series of works based in the Revelation to John, using his artistry to try to alert the world to the imminence of doom without repentance. People who had known the young McKendree Long would have likely been surprised that he had spent his life preaching an evangelicalfundamentalist faith and that he would now use his artistic talents to 166 Chapter Nine deliver the apocalyptic message that he visualized. Long, and the southern region from which he came and in which he preached his gospel, traveled a long road from the post-Reconstruction era of his birth into the atomic age. He was born into a world whose people had every expectation of Victorian-era certainty and stability. His father was a member in good standing of the commercial-civic elite that emerged in the South after the Civil War to direct its fortunes into a New South period that would promote progress for the region. Long grew to become a creative artist, trained in the formal techniques of Western art. Eudora Welty once described herself as a “privileged observer” of life who made art, and that description fits Long as well. He attended art schools, studied overseas in London, Amsterdam, and Madrid, and became accomplished , if not recognized as he wished. He came to maturity as modernism emerged as the driving artistic movement in the early twentieth century. But modernism was the problem for him, suggesting a morally confused and turbulent outlook that led ultimately, in the 1920s, to his rebellion, to his drastic change of course to enter evangelical ministry, and eventually to his decision to use his artistic abilities to express a profound vision of end times. Long remained very much the southerner throughout his changes, but they indicate the complexity of identity for those people living in the South as the region entered the modern world. The post–Civil War South, though, had its own turbulence, while the twentieth-century South inherited social attitudes, economic realities, and political arrangements that would be the backdrop for Long’s religious and artistic development . Reconstruction had been a violent and unsettling time, with intense conflicts among newly freed African Americans, defeated Confederate whites, and northerners bent briefly on attempting serious changes in the region’s social system. The 1890s witnessed economic disaster and renewed political conflict, centered on the Populist rebellion , with its attempt to raise economic issues and make them more central than the racial issues that had emerged as the dividing line in southern life after the Civil War. The Populists failed, however, to overturn the political establishment, thanks to considerable intimidation, electoral chicanery, and outright violence. Out of these dramatic developments came a restricted electorate, a racially segregated society, and the Apocalypse South 167 triumph of a New South ideology that sought economic development, segregated but harmonious race relations, improved education, and sectional reconciliation with the rest of the United States. McKendree Long came to maturity as the South entered the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, and Progressive reformers had considerable impact in the South, bringing governmental reforms, educational improvements, scientific realism, and business efficiency to government and public policy — making a society that surely seemed closer to modern ways than it had been only a few decades earlier. Long was the talented son of a well-off and respected family, a mainline Presbyterian — the religion that was...