Christianity in Appalachia: Profiles in Regional Pluralism by Bill J. Leonard (review)

Abstract

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS OPINIONS AND REVIEWS Leonard, Bill J. Christianity in Appalachia: Profiles in Regional Pluralism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. 311 pp. Cloth, $28.00. Paper, $14.00. This collection largely represents the papers given at an AMERC conference in 1997, but each one of these papers has been substantially enhanced, and even other papers solicited to make this the most useful guide to religion in Appalachia available. Almost all of the significant published scholars of Appalachia or Appalachian religion are included. Bill Leonard's introduction itself presents a useful overall perspective, which analyzes the wide differences and polarities present in the Christianity of the region. There is, of course, a difference in the quality of the essays included. One of the most useful is Leonard's own "Introductions," which sets the volume's purpose, and is quite different from Deborah McCauley's monumental Appalachian Mountain Religion (1995). McCauley herself has a useful article here entitled, "Mountain Holiness," which touches on her own thesis about mountain religion. Various Appalachian Christian traditions are also separately discussed, as the Old-Time Baptists by Howard Dorgan; the Southern Baptists by Bill Leonard; the Presbyterians by Davis Yeuell and Marsha Clark Myers; the Stone-Campbell tradition by Anthony Dunnavant; the wider Wesleyan-Holiness tradition by Melvin Dieter; the Church of God (Cleveland) by Donald Bowdle; and the Catholic mission to Appalachia by Lou F. McNeil. Also included is a fascinating personal account of the Glenmary Mission at Big Stone Gap by Monica Kelly Appleby. Various larger themes are also treated in most useful essays. Following a well-informed essay evaluating the historiography of Appalachian religion and culture by Barbara Ellen Smith, Ben Poage presents an insightful study on the effects of the deteriorating farm situation upon the rural churches generally. Gary Farley and Bill Leonard treat the mountain preacher in a most sympathetic manner. Charles Lippy contends that religiosity in Appalachia is not truly different from the rest of the United States, except in degree and intensity. Janet B. Welch's essay on cultural and religious values 95 emphasizes the "uneven ground" of Appalachia's broad variety of values. Loyal Jones's essay, covering a variety of religious responses in the region, allows Appalachians themselves to speak about God, Satan, the World, and Salvation. Finally, Samuel Hill presents a useful, broadbased evaluation of the several theologies present in Appalachia. On the whole, perhaps the best essays are those evaluating the region's variety of religious belief, and those describing the region's Pentecostal churches, as well as the Baptist tradition in the mountains. In my view, the major weakness of this collection is the treatment given to Protestant missions. Aside from James Sessions's article on the Commission on Religion in Appalachia (CORA), and Ira Read's essay on "The Church College in Central Appalachia," which sees higher education largely as a missionary enterprise, and the Presbyterian chapter by Yeuell and Myers, which deals with missions briefly, on the whole the vast enterprise of Protestant home missions in Appalachia is missing. In fact, when Protestant missions are mentioned, they tend to be presented as intrusions upon the indigenous Protestantism in a manner reminiscent of the treatment by Deborah McCauley and David Whisnant. It is time, I think, for the scholars of the region to cease viewing missionaries in the cynical and essentially stereotypical way, which sees missionaries as handmaidens of outside imperialism, the usual image adopted by regional scholars since the 1960s. William R. Hutchinson and Martin E. Marty have certainly given us insight enough through their recent studies of foreign missions, for those of us concerned with Appalachia to begin to look at home missionaries to the region as individuals, and to realize that they, like Appalachians themselves, come in many forms. Also, both Southern and Northern Presbyterians had quite separate mission enterprises, and each built significant churches, as did Episcopalians, Lutherans, and Methodists. The fact that the Methodists are left out of the denominational reviews here, is a serious omission. The Methodist Church is important throughout the region, and the largest church in West Virginia, and a particularly important church in the coal camps. Since this volume emphasizes the pluralism...