Status, Residence, and Fundamentalist Religious Beliefs in the Southern Appalachians

Abstract

Data obtained from a sample of 1,466 Southern Appalachian households show that different components of religious fundamentalism vary in their relationships to urbanism, educational level, and socioeconomic status. Current functional theory does not adequately account for the observed patterns of religious beliefs, particularly those of the middle social classes. T HE PURPOSE of this paper is threefold: (1) to present some data pertaining to major aspects of religious belief in the Southern Appalachian region; (2) to discuss some of the implications of the data for current theory in the sociology of religion; and (3) to point out some specific inadequacies in this theory for explaining certain observed relationships between religious beliefs and social characteristics of those who profess them. The data presented here were obtained through a sample survey conducted for Southern Appalachians Studies by the Survey Operations Unit of the University of North Carolina. Southern Appalachian Studies is an organization established in 1957 for the purpose of surveying changes in social, cultural, and economic conditions of the Southern Appalachian region.' The attitude survey, from which the data reported here are drawn, was part of the more comprehensive research project. The Southern Appalachian region, as delineated for purposes of the project, consists of 190 mountainarea counties in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Because of the great influence that religion exercises on almost all aspects of life in the region, a considerable portion of the research effort was devoted to the study of religious beliefs and practices and changes which have occurred in them. It was hoped that by means of an attitude survey a clearer understanding could be gained of the relationships between religious beliefs and such factors as degree of urbanization, income, occupation, education, age, and other characteristics of the survey respondents. This paper presents an analysis of a few of these relationships. Specifically considered are the associations between religious fundamentalism and place of residence, sociocconomic status, and schooling level of respondents, all of which will be defined later. SECTARIAN BACKGROUND OF SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN PROTESTANTISM An adequate discussion of the nature of religion in the Southern Highlands would require much greater knowledge of its historical origins than can be presented here, but some of the highlights of its development may be sketched.2 In the middle of the eighteenth century, when the movement into the region was just getting under way, the Presbyterian church was the most important religious body, measured both by number of members and influence, on what was then the western frontier. The great Baptist movement did not gain strength until the latter part of that century, when the sectarian appeal of the Separate Baptists began to win numerous converts in the Piedmont region. It was also in the latter part of this same century that American Methodism began its expansion under the dynamic leadership of Bishop Asbury. So, although some of the settlers who moved into the Appalachians prior to the turn of the nineteenth century were already Baptists or Methodists, the greater majority of them were not. The basic religious tone or temperament of the * Read before the twenty-third annual meeting of the Southern Sociological Society, Atlanta, Georgia, April 9, 1960. 1 Headquarters of Southern Appalachian Studies is located at Berea College, Kentucky. Research operations of the organization were financed by a grant from the Ford Foundation supplemented by donations from various religious bodies. 2The interested reader is referred to the various volumes of William Warren Sweet in his on the American Frontier series and to his article Religion and the American Frontier, Twentiethv Century Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1955). The historical materials presented here have been largely abstracted from Sweet's publications. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.85 on Sat, 28 May 2016 05:32:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms