Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (review)

Abstract

Freedom's Coming Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era By Paul Harvey University of North Carolina Press, 2005 360 pp. Cloth $34.95 If you think you understand how religion and race work in the South, then obviously no one has explained it to you properly. Lillian Smith tried to explain it in her 1949 Killers of the Dream: We were taught ... to love God, to love our white skin, and to believe in the sanctity of both. But it was more complicated than that, she admitted. No wonder that God and Negroes and Jesus and sin and salvation are baled up together in southern children's minds and in many an old textile magnate's too. I suspect that quotes like these find their way into Paul Harvey's most recent book, Freedom's Coming, because he, too, recognizes the difficulty of making sense of how evangelicalism could mean so much to such different southerners as klansmen, populists, and civil rights activists. Freedom's Coming is a broad, sweeping history of the South from Reconstruction to the 1990s. Harvey begins by noting the parallels between political and religious organizing after the Civil War and by discussing the different religious meanings southerners gave the War. He describes how the mainstream religious cultures of white supremacy and black independence left little room for white Unionists. Following other historians, Harvey presents both Reconstruction and redemption as religious movements, and he pays careful attention to the switch in white supremacist theology from paternalistic control in biracial churches to a justification of apartheid. Freedom's Coming devotes considerable space to thin but tough groups of Christian dissenters who opened the South up for interracialism and undermined, if only in part, theological racism. The middle of the book is peopled by the likes of white liberals, Methodists, black Baptists turned NAACP organizers, the Disciples of Christ and the Southern Farmer's Alliance, Clarence Jordan and Koinonia Farm, Lucy R. Morgan and CIO labor movements, and Charles Jones and the Federation of Southern Churchmen. Harvey also investigates interracial spaces: places where black and white believers shared faith, ideas, and art. This Christian interracialism took place in music halls, Holiness-Pentecostal revivals, and over the radio. And although it was intermittent and often riddled with persistent beliefs in white superiority, it began to make fissures in the solid South. But what ultimately cracked it open was the mass movement of black southerners in the 1950s and 1960s. …