White Minority Culture in the Southern States of the USA: the Southern Baptist Example

Abstract

Kenneth K. Bailey argues that ‘Sectionalism has perhaps been perpetuated more explicitly in the southern churches than in any other institution.’1 The churches defended the South against Northern abolitionist attack, supported the Confederacy during the Civil War, celebrated its myths in the Lost Cause, abhorred Northern declension from ‘true religion’ and supported the South’s perpetuation of racial inequality. Of all the major denominations in the American South, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) exhibited the most ingrained and longest sense of sectionalism and regional identity. Although Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians in the South split from their Northern co-religionists over the issue of slavery and formed regional denominations, Southern Baptists, alone, refused to reunite with their erstwhile Northern brethren in the twentieth century.2