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

AFTERWORD. What If?

163 afterword What If? caroline walker bynum has written, “My understanding of the historian’s task precludes wholeness. Historians, like fishes of the sea, regurgitate fragments. Only supernatural power can reassemble fragments so completely that no particle of them is lost, or miraculously empower the part to be the whole.”1 This book has investigated “fragments” of the post-Reconstruction South’s civil religious discourse, concentrating on the ways people created, defined, and defended their visions of the good society. It has examined the moral weight of daily discussions , private ponderings, physical places, and public pronouncements in relation to subjects like progress, race, gender, and religion. Civil religions took shape through memories of the past, hopes for the future, Judeo-Christian beliefs, and national-local loyalties. Operating either as imagined foils or as active participants, minority groups played no small role in the Wiregrass Gulf South’s civil religious identity. All told, these fragments of history show how visions of the good society existed in a perpetual state of tension, as many voices strove to actualize an understanding for how society ought to function. By limiting this book to a small subregion in the American South, during a small slice of time, I hope to leave readers wondering “What if?” If historians can agree on little else, at least they should rejoice in the realization that they have many true stories to tell about the human past. — mark t. gilderhus 164 afterword What if we discarded the pesky yet persistent definitions of civil religion that assume that American society shares a set of values around which all agree? What if we accepted that concepts like freedom, equality, and justice as enshrined in America’s sacred documents have dynamic definitions and applications? What if we accepted that civil religion is a valuable concept that refers to a particular vision of the good society, tied to a specific time and place and deployed for the purpose of legitimizing one set of values over another? And what if we applied this methodology not only to the entire New South era—a time when people of varying races, creeds, regions, and backgrounds engaged in redefining themselves and their social situation in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction—but also to America as a whole? I expect that the result would be a new wave of scholarship that would integrate new voices and new perspectives into new narratives. I have endeavored to represent the minority voices that participated in the civil religious conversation, not for the sake of “diversity” but rather because these “outsiders” were influential in shaping debates about race, gender, religious liberty, and the like. There are, of course, other minorities I have not accounted for, such as freethinkers, an anomaly in both the Bible Belt and the historiography of southern religion.2 In Kentucky, Charles Chilton Moore, the grandson of revivalist and reformer Barton W. Stone, left his pulpit in 1865 and announced that he was an atheist. In Lexington, he became a noted newsman who published the notorious Blue Grass Blade. In it, Moore criticized organized religion and made a number of outré claims. For example, Moore agreed with the biblical exegesis of Charles Carroll, whose The Negro a Beast argued that blacks were not human and were therefore subject to slavery for all of eternity. The choice for blacks, in Moore’s mind, was clear: either remain an enslaved Christian or, “if you are an intelligent and honest Negro and claim the right to be a free man you must be an Infidel.”3 Moore was by no means inviting blacks to join him and the freethinking community. He was not an advocate of racial equality. Indeed, he supported deportation as a solution for the “negro question.”4 Still, Moore was a controversial figure whose critiques of religion resulted in hostile exchanges with the Christian majority, who sometimes manipulated the law to silence the “infidel editor.” When federal authorities What If? 165 tried to censor Moore, he blasted that “no citizen, no institution, no paper or periodical, in America can be, or ought to be, discriminated against because of its anti-religious or anti-Christian utterances, as the Constitutional guarantee of religious liberty includes the right to express a non-belief in god as it does to express a belief in god.” For Moore, America was exceptional precisely because it allowed the freethinker to think freely...