Southern White Protestantism at the Turn of the Century

Abstract

DURING the last dreary days of the Confederacy, a Mississippi Methodist preacher defiantly exhorted his people: If we cannot gain our political, let us establish at least our independence.' The preacher's, plea was portentous, for the future would demonstrate that military conquest had exacted no spiritual surrender. A proud and undaunted mental independence survived and flourished among southerners-a fountain both of weakness and strength, of cohesion and of strife.2 It was in the ranks of southern Protestantism, however, that separatism thrived most conspicuously. Forty years after Appomattox, 3,5oo,ooo of 6,200,000 white church members in the South still belonged to three explicitly southern denominations: Southern Baptist, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the (Southern) Presbyterian Church in the United States.3 Most others held membership in locally independent congregations unaffiliated with episcopate, presbytery, conference, or convention. Indeed, except in. a few urban districts and in the Catholic areas of Louisiana, Texas, and Kentucky, extraregional ecclesiastical ties were almost absent.4 The numerically weak Episcopal and Lutheran churches were exceptions. Nor was, the cleavage less apparent in content and emphasis. A New England clergyman marveled in 190o that one could not sit in the assembly hall of a Southern [Baptist] Convention fifteen minutes without being thoroughly convinced that he was! not north of the Mason and Dixon Line;5 another northerner was, simply forced to the