Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Notes

159 Chapter One. Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the Trickster 1. Data originally compiled from the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey and posted at http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports /aris_2008_report_contents.html. This research originally was conducted as part of a larger eight-volume Religion by Region series, with the volume on the evangelical South published as Charles Reagan Wilson and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the South: In the Evangelical Mode (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 2005). This volume, in which I participated, excluded some states from the western and upland South (including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, and others; inclusion of data from these states, grouped in this project as the “Southern Crossroads” region, would only accentuate the distinctiveness of the South as a whole in its evangelical orientation. Ted Ownby’s piece in the Religion and Public Life in the South volume provides a great deal more of the statistical/demographic context discussed here. Research on these statistics also came from generous access provided to the data of the North American Religion Atlas project (http://www.religionatlas.org) compiled in 2000. 2. Data for this and the following paragraph are from the North American Religion Atlas. 3. Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Origins of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). A survey of the literature on southern religion may be found in Randy J. Sparks, “Religion in the Pre–Civil War South,” and Paul Harvey, “Religion in the American South since the Civil War,” both in A Companion to the American South, ed. John Boles (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 156–75 and 387–406. 4. For murder rates, see the tables at http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org /murder-rates-nationally-and-state. For gun violence per state, tables were compiled from http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Homicide /State/OneYearofData.cfm?NoVariables=Y&CFID=14377749&CFTO KEN=20439125. For infant mortality rates by state, see http://www.state healthfacts.org/comparemaptable.jsp?ind=47&cat=2. For obesity, where Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Tennessee lead the nation, see the obesity rates/maps provided by the Centers for Disease Control at http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html. For literacy rates, see the tables by state at http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates /StateEstimates.aspx. Notes 160 Notes to Chapter One 5. Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Central Theme of Southern History,” American Historical Review 34 (1928): 30–43; Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941), 51. 6. C. J. Ryder, “The Theology of the Plantation Songs,” American Missionary, January 1892, 15–16; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Negro Spirituals,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1867, 685–94. 7. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 50, 36. 8. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 137; Norman Yetman, ed., Life under the Peculiar Institution: Selections from the Slave Narrative Collection (Huntington, N.Y.: R. E. Krieger, 1976), 164; Benjamin A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1973), 16. 9. American Missionary, vol. 6 (February 1862), 33, as quoted in Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 320. 10. “Slavery and the Bible,” De Bow’s Review 9 (September 1850): 281–86, reprinted in Paul Finkelman, ed., Defending Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Old South, A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 2003); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 510–11. 11. For more on how southern divines invoked both the Bible and their sense of History in defense of slaveholding as part of a godly social order that fought against the revolutionary tides of the era from the French Revolution forward, see Genovese and Genovese, Mind of the Master Class. 12. Kurt Berends, “‘Wholesome Reading Purifies and Elevates the Man,’: The Religious Military Press in the Confederacy,” in Religion and the American Civil War, ed. Randall Miller et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 148–49. 13. Daniel W. Stowell, “Stonewall Jackson and the Providence of God,” in Religion and the American Civil War, 196; John Randolph Tucker, The Southern Church Justified in the Support of the South in the Present War: A Lecture Delivered Before the Young Men’s Christian Association of Richmond (Richmond...