To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865-1915 (review)

Sally McMillen’s latest book offers a detailed exploration of the institutional development of Sunday schools after the Civil War. She identifies Sunday schools as embodiments of modern, rationalized social uplift, seen as a way to shape behavior and recruit church members. Although McMillen never makes the connection explicit, her analysis suggests that Sunday school organizers’ efforts became the spiritual analog of New South boosters’ business aspirations.

Northern and southern Protestants viewed Sunday Schools as a way both to reclaim order out of social chaos and to heal sectional wounds. Southern Protestants of both races initially welcomed northern missionary and Sunday school societies’ efforts to begin Sunday schools throughout the South. These groups not only provided expertise and personnel, but also much needed materials. Indeed, for many southerners, Sunday schools supplemented inadequate public education. Eventually, however, white southerners came to resent the intrusion of northern groups, and saw church instruction less as a vehicle for sectional reunification and more as a way to build loyalty to regionally-based denominations. In response, many church groups began their own in-house publishing companies, and encouraged their teachers, with limited success, to use only the materials of their own denominations. Programs increasingly competed over pupils, seeing them both as consumers of church literature and as lifelong congregants. Although officials feared that youngsters might be tempted by rival Sunday schools, debates about doctrine rarely entered the Sunday school room itself. Sunday schools, perhaps to the chagrin of denominational adherents, were remarkably similar across both regional and denominational lines.

McMillen’s provocative analysis presents Sunday schools and church officials as both in thrall with and suspicious of modern secular trends. Officials determined through statistical analysis that Sunday school instruction provided the most efficient means of winning converts, thereby ensuring local churches’ continued viability. Sunday school superintendents used standardized lessons to rationalize Sunday school instruction and to encourage effective teaching. Sunday schools developed into a well-coordinated and proven method of recruiting a steady stream of new church members, shepherding their religious development from childhood to adulthood. Students became the consumers of the pamphlets, lessons, and newsletters published by church presses, which in turn generated the income denominations needed to expand their reach. Sunday schools in this period, as McMillen argues, were indeed modern, using progressive methods to achieve their ends. Ironically, even as church groups sought to mitigate the secular effects of modern culture by co-opting railroads and amusement parks for religious purposes through Sunday school outings, they mimicked secular business practices. Not surprisingly, Sunday schools created controversy, denounced by some as being without Biblical foundation, by others as being too focused on profit or too social in character. Nevertheless, by 1915, Sunday schools were a fixture of the southern religious landscape.

Advocates viewed Sunday school instruction as an essential tool of social uplift, designed to ameliorate social problems by creating a more moral and better behaved populace. Sunday school teachers taught the fundamentals of Christian belief, but they also inculcated middle-class standards of dress, cleanliness, deportment, and punctuality. Although McMillen does not argue this directly, they implicitly sought to spread a progressive, white, middle-class vision of civilization with its attendant beliefs about racial hierarchy, patriarchy, and class structure. It is not surprising, then, that some white southerners began African-American Sunday schools, believing blacks could not direct their own religious education. African Americans, in turn, voted with their feet and flocked to schools of their own making. African-American Sunday school education also encouraged uplift through “respectable” behavior, but, as other historians have shown, blacks often adopted white norms for more subversive purposes—to undermine white superiority rather than to emulate it. White Sunday school missionaries were hardly more enlightened when it came to class, despairing of their ability to transform poor, rural whites. McMillen, however, though she describes these attitudes, does not place...