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

INTRODUCTION. Competing Visions of the Good Society

1 introduction Competing Visions of the Good Society this book is about the diverse and competing ideal visions of society existing in the post-Reconstruction South (ca. 1877–1920). Blacks, whites, men, women, northerners, southerners, Democrats, Republicans, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews all spoke of social unity, peace, and prosperity . Their preferred means for achieving these ends, however, often differed. When articulating these differences, people drew ideological lines between those who they believed were good for society and those they believed were not. The good society of the southern “redeemer” politician, for example, lacked the supposedly debauched influence of northern “carpetbaggers.” Similarly, southern Catholics living in the 1910s cast nativists as “untrue Americans,” whose presumed contempt for religious freedom ran contrary to democratic ideals. Whether redeemers or northerners, Catholics or nativists, each side’s moral vision for society took shape through mutual opposition, making it all the more important for us to understand both perspectives. This book situates itself at the nexus of religion and public life, where social values, beliefs, and symbols assume a transcendent status. From blacks describing emancipation as a divine gift, to prohibitionists equating alcohol consumption with a defiance of God’s law, the rhetoric of You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on. — heraclitus 2 introduction faith saturated the southern landscape. More, this language often punctuated a given speaker’s assertion that his or her vision for society was righteous, going beyond individual interests and serving a higher good. Other historians of the South have similarly used the idea of civil religion as an interpretive tool in their work. Chief among this body of literature is Charles Reagan Wilson’s Baptized in Blood. “Without the Lost Cause,” Wilson remarks, “no civil religion would have existed. The two were virtually the same.” From Virginia in the east to Texas in the west, monuments devoted to Confederate heroes such as Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis represented stone manifestations of a southern white civil religion. This common faith created from “the heritage of the Southern past,” explains Wilson, became a defining feature of the era and region.1 While Baptized in Blood details the civil religious mind of the South’s white Protestant power elite, this book has a more varied focus, looking beyond the white majority—as well as within it—to uncover the competing moral codes of the era. It breathes new life into an established subject, making the Lost Cause one civil religious topic among many. Some groups had more political influence, economic strength, or numbers than others did. Still, the politically disfranchised, the economically alienated, and the numerically diminutive had the will and imagination necessary to envision on their own terms what society ought to be. These social ideologies interacted with others, agreeing on some points and differing on others. Accordingly, this book is a comparative, nonlinear, decentered history of southern civil religious discourse. From Lumpers to Splitters The fractured approach of this book draws from trends influencing both southern religious history and civil religion theory. Scholars in these fields have begun looking beyond majority groups and focusing instead on the contributions of those formerly left on the periphery. In his overview of southern religious history, Paul Harvey explains how the “splitter ” historians of the 1980s and 1990s upended the accounts of their “lumper” forbearers.2 Samuel S. Hill, one of the “lumpers” Harvey cites, had argued in Southern Churches in Crisis that the revival culture of the Competing Visions of the Good Society 3 early nineteenth century came to define southern evangelicalism for generations. Practitioners of the faith, Hill had lamented, became overly concerned with conversion and ignored social matters.3 Crisis influenced a generation of “lumpers,” who, Harvey summarizes, “understood southern evangelicalism as a solid and singular formation.” By contrast, the contemporary “splitter” historians, such as Beth Barton Schweiger, have redirected attention to the “contrasting layers and individually interesting pebbles” of the South’s faith patterns.4 The preachers depicted by “lumpers” were ignorant, backward, and concerned only with converting the unconverted. In contrast, Schweiger’s ministers were erudite, ambitious , modern, and decidedly progressive.5 For Harvey, the writing of southern religious history has undergone a transition from emphasizing singularity to detailing diversity. Accordingly, he explains, Wilson’s Baptized in Blood “contrasts with much of the newer ‘splitter’ scholarship.” This is less of a rebuke and more of...