‘These Untutored Masses’: The Campaign for Respectability Among White and Black Evangelicals in the American South, 1870–1930

Abstract

In the post‐Civil War American South, leaders of both white and black denominations sought to root out southern ‘folk’ religious practices from their churches. Denominational modernizers preached the middle‐class virtues necessary to the building of a new southern social order: piety, sobriety and the systematic accumulation of wealth. They built bureaucracies of benevolence and conceived of ‘intelligent worship’ as a means of schooling their ‘untutored masses’ in the ways of bourgeois religiosity. In response, white and black believers, predominantly small farmers and sharecroppers with limited educations, adopted certain forms suggested by the advocates of respectable religion while also maintaining publicly emotive and physically tactile expressions of southern religiosity derived both from the camp‐meeting past as well as African‐derived rituals of worship. By focusing on worship practices and musical styles, this article illuminates an episode in the dialectic of traditional spirituality and bourgeois decorum in a region in, but not fully of, America.