Southern Churches Research Articles

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham (review)

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham (review)

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham (review)

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham (review)

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church. By Christopher Alan Graham

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church. <i>By Christopher Alan Graham</i>

Staying in Place: Southern Methodists, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, and Postwar Battles for Control of Church Property

Abstract: Late in the Civil War, northern missionaries from African Methodist denominations flooded into Kentucky and across the upper South, where they sought new members, especially among Black Methodist congregations. But they encountered resistance from an unexpected foe—the law of church property. White Southern Methodists had prided themselves on their "Mission to the Negroes," and white churchmen used litigation to ensure that Black churches remained in the hands of the proslavery church, even after emancipation. This article recovers an otherwise unknown series of Kentucky court decisions on questions of race and church property. Other jurisdictions followed Kentucky's lead, frustrating shifts in allegiance to Black northern denominations. These cases give new context to the formation of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME) in 1870, which tied Black congregations firmly to the southern church. By taking law into account, the role of sacred space, church property and financial wealth, and the use of state power all emerge as key elements of the story. The legal history of CME's founding and its early growth highlight a reconstituted white supremacy, which imposed a strict requirement that the new denomination avoid all politics and yet could not prevent the emergence of a vibrant and longstanding spiritual community.

A Death in the Reverend's House: The Three-part Allegory in William Faulkner's Light in August

A Death in the Reverend's House:The Three-part Allegory in William Faulkner's Light in August Brian K. Reed The exuberance of youth can become the sorrow of age. William Faulkner expressed this thought to undergraduate students at the University of Virginia when he said, there comes a time when you've got to live with [the cruelty one has done in one's youth], when you're too old and the fire which enables you to get a certain amount of hysterical adrenalic pleasure out of things like that is gone, and all you have left is to remember what you did and you probably wonder why in God's name you did things like that, and you have to live with it, and I think that quite often unexplained suicides go back to some man who has done something like that and he gets old, and he's got to live with it, and decides it's not worth living with it. (Faulkner, University 41) Though Faulkner was talking about Percy Grimm, a character in his novel Light in August, he expressed a truth that applies to more than any one character. In Light in August, living with his past is a torment the reverend Gail Hightower hopes never to endure. Alfred Kazin describes the past in Light in August as "a god-like force that confronts man at every turn with everything he has been" (262). Hightower's dread of this god-like force becomes a dread of his inevitable meeting with Joe Christmas, a character whose mysterious connection with that past will make it impossible for Hightower to forget. Though both characters have considerable development outside of the allegorical framework, the story of Gail Hightower and Joe Christmas is an allegory of the history of turn-of-the-century southern church leaders as they struggle to adjust to the South's slaveholding past. The past Hightower struggles to forget begins in his childhood, with troubled thoughts of his father. Because both he and his mother are ill [End Page 79] through most of his youth, Hightower develops an unconscious animosity towards his father, the only healthy member of the family. His father's good health makes him "a stranger to them both, a foreigner, almost a threat. … he was an enemy" (475). Searching for a reason to consciously justify his resentment, Hightower believes he finds one in the blue patch sewn into the frock coat he finds in a trunk in the attic. This coat, which his father wore as a chaplain to Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, captures the child's imagination so that he surmises with "a kind of hushed and triumphant terror" (469) that his father probably killed the man whose uniform supplied the patch. Hightower now regards his father with the horror he would have for a murderer. In his grandfather, killed in the Civil War years before the boy is born, Hightower finds the object of admiration he does not find in his father. The fantastic stories told by Cinthy, his family's Black cook and housekeeper, bring his grandfather to life for him. Unlike his father's frock coat, these stories, in which his grandfather kills Yankees "by the hundreds," bring no terror because the people in them "were just ghosts, never seen in the flesh, heroic, simple, warm; while the father which he knew and feared was a phantom which would never die" (477). Tales of his grandfather dominate Hightower's life so intensely that they become his personal mythology, or "a kind of revealed truth," as Olga W. Vickery calls it, "compounded of an old Negress' storytelling and his own boyish imagination" (Novels 77). As his grandfather gains actuality through these stories his father loses it, so Hightower decides he must have emerged directly from his grandfather, without his father's involvement. In fact, it seems to Hightower that his real life is the one he lives through his grandfather rather than through his own physical being. Hightower believes he "skipped a generation" and that he must go where his grandfather died, "where my life had already ceased before it began," and die...

An Exploration of U.S. Southern Faith Leaders' Perspectives of HIV Prevention, Sexuality, and Sexual Health Teachings.

Reducing human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) racial/ethnic disparities in the Deep South has been a critical objective of the U.S. National HIV/AIDS Strategy. This finding, originally published in 2010 by the Office of National AIDS Policy, serves as a complement to the Health and Human Resources and Services Administration’s Ending the HIV Epidemic (EtHE): A Plan for America. The EtHE plan, released in 2019, emphasizes community stakeholder involvement to achieve the planning goals of decreasing new HIV infections in key U.S. geographic areas. According to the plan, an important stakeholder is faith leaders, especially around stigma reduction. This paper focuses on a community–academic research partnership’s exploration of southern Black faith leaders’ teaching perspectives regarding HIV prevention, sexuality, and sexual health in predominantly Black congregations in Memphis, Tennessee. The partnership conducted four focus groups using a semi-structured discussion interview. Any adult faith leader involved in ministry work in a predominantly Black church was eligible to participate in the discussion. A total of 26 faith leaders with a mean age of 54, representing four Christian denominations, consented to participate in the study. Emerging themes included: (1) restriction of scripture to teach prevention and address sexuality, (2) role of secrecy and silence in living with HIV, and (3) impact of the stigma of HIV and sexuality. Findings may inform nationwide jurisdictional implementation plans, particularly for faith-based interventions in southern churches working toward ending the HIV epidemic.

Desegregating Dixie: The Catholic Church in the South and Desegregation, 1945–1992

Mark Newman is the leading authority on southern churches during the civil rights movement. His first book, Getting Right with God (2001), is a prize-winning study of Southern Baptists and race relations between 1945 and 1995. His Divine Agitators (2004) covers the Delta Ministry project of the National Council of Churches. Newman's latest work, Desegregating Dixie, is a study of the Catholic Church in the South during the civil rights movement that combines prodigious research with carefully nuanced insights. Historians of the civil rights movement, American Catholicism, and African American history will use this monograph for decades. Newman convincingly rejects the sociological view that the hierarchical polity of the Catholic Church made it more progressive than southern Protestant churches on the issue of race relations in the South. In theory, Catholic bishops had great authority over priests and communicants, but, in reality, many southern white Catholics shared segregationist views with their Protestant neighbors. Prior to 1945, southern Catholic bishops felt little pressure to make civil rights an issue. Even when race relations became a growing societal concern, southern Catholic bishops did not want to move too quickly ahead of their flocks or incite anti-Catholic sentiment in the overwhelmingly Protestant and conservative South.

Disorderly Communion: Julia Chinn, Richard Mentor Johnson, and Life in an Interracial, Antebellum, Southern Church

AbstractGreat Crossing Baptist Church was founded in 1785 by white Baptists who migrated to Kentucky from Virginia. The founders included the parents of Richard Mentor Johnson, the nation’s ninth v...

To Count Our Days: A History of Columbia Theological Seminary by Erskine Clarke

Reviewed by: To Count Our Days: A History of Columbia Theological Seminary by Erskine Clarke Lee Ann Caldwell To Count Our Days: A History of Columbia Theological Seminary. By Erskine Clarke. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 369. $49.99, ISBN 978-1-61117-996-5.) In To Count Our Days: A History of Columbia Theological Seminary, Erskine Clarke displays the same meticulous research and captivating narrative style that won him the Bancroft Prize for Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (New Haven, 2005). This study of Columbia Theological Seminary is more than a chronicle of the economic, curricular, faculty, and service components seen in institutional histories. While those topics receive adequate attention, Clarke also examines the larger story of Southern Presbyterianism in the context of southern history, from the contradictions of slavery and Jim Crowism to the growing challenges to both the institution and traditional religion in the face of cultural modernity and consumer capitalism. As Clarke states in the preface, he hopes that even those without "personal connections" to the seminary "will find in the history of Columbia a story that intrigues and that helps to inform their understanding of southern history with all its ironies and of the religious life of the American people with all its complex intermingling of peoples and traditions, of light and deep shadows" (p. ix). In its beginnings in an antebellum mansion in Columbia, South Carolina, the seminary trained "gentlemen theologians" to be knowledgeable in Greek and Latin, science, history, and moral philosophy (p. x). By the 2010s the seminary, on an expansive campus in Decatur, Georgia, since 1927, served a much more diverse constituency as it sought to provide education appropriate for the twenty-first century while navigating cultural fault lines in both the church and society. In the almost two hundred years in between, the seminary faced the trauma of Civil War, the emergence of Lost Cause mythology, the controversies provoked by evolution, periods of great poverty and great growth, and the growing secularism and materialism of the modern world. [End Page 914] A particularly strong theme throughout the book is racism and its impact on the church, the seminary, and the people of the South. Chapter 2, entitled "Slaves: In the Shadows of Columbia," begins, "Hidden in the shadows of the seminary's history, waiting to tell their stories, were black men and women whose labors, sorrows, and dark bodies provided the financial foundations for Columbia Seminary and its development" (p. 15). Clarke gives voice to those enslaved servants who cooked, cleaned, and kept the seminary functioning day-to-day. He also tackles how erudite, religious men explained their hierarchical society and, recognizing "slavery as that which 'so radically and fundamentally distinguishes' the North and South," were willing to leave the Presbyterian church to form their own southern version and to secede from their country to maintain the racial status quo (p. 73). It was not the last time race led to disunion. The civil rights movement in the 1960s pressured white Christians to reexamine racial assumptions and southern norms. Clarke points out that, as in the antebellum era, most nonwhites on the seminary campus were those who worked there, and, "like those who had gone before them, they kept their own world and their own perspectives largely hidden from the whites who thought they knew them so well" (p. 221). Ultimately, the controversy over desegregation in the southern church helped lead to another breakaway in 1973. Columbia Theological remained in the fold and in 1983 was part of the reunion of Northern and Southern Presbyterians in the Presbyterian Church (USA). In the last chapters Clarke examines the seminary's efforts to find its place in a rapidly changing, diverse, individualistic, and secular society. The dilemmas are those facing our era. Clarke finishes with many questions, including about the very place of the institution's history in its present and future. This thought-provoking, engaging study by an insightful scholar and talented wordsmith is well worth a read. Lee Ann Caldwell Augusta University Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association

The African Initiated Churches as an embodiment of the moratorium debate: Lessons for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa Central Diocese

The African Initiated Churches pose a challenge to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa/Central Diocese, regarding living up to the challenges of moratorium debate in missions in the 1970s. Among other things, the moratorium debate was advocating for values of autonomy such as; self-governing, self-support, self-propagating and self-theologising (Bigambo, 2001; Kendall, 1978 & Wagner, 1975). In its original sense, a full moratorium meant the cessation of all activity on the part of missionary personnel as well as financial assistance brought to the African churches from Europe and North America. It also means that the missionaries were to return to home from Africa for a period of five years Uka (1989:193). In this article, I do not align myself fully with this definition per se, however, I firmly believe that certain aspects of the moratorium debate illustrated by the African Initiated Churches in this article warrant attention in relation to Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa/Central Diocese.

An Ode to Belonging: Southern Black Women’s Politics of Belonging Through Storytelling

The laughs of black women dancing around the room as they stir large pots of food created from moments of nothing. Their bodies meshing into each other, small children melting into their hugs, and a scholar-researcher taking it all in, carrying their words and lives with her everywhere she goes. This is an Ode to Belonging, a love song to knowledges constructed in hair salons, on porches, and in small Southern churches. Their songs, jokes, arguments, and stories demand the attention of everyone around them. This article is an excerpt of a project that explores the politics of belonging employed by Southern black women. This scholar-researcher’s own memories and experiences work alongside the stories shared to create a stage play that highlights the work storytelling does for black women. This project expands on conversations on knowledge production had by black feminist scholars and feminist geographers.

A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era by April E. Holm

Reviewed by: A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era by April E. Holm Nathaniel Wiewora (bio) A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era. By April E. Holm. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Cloth, $47.50.) How does a religious group remain in the world, but not of the world? This question drives April Holm's study of the ways that evangelicals in the Border States negotiated the crises of the Civil War era. Examining the three largest evangelical denominations—Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians—she traces how these groups worked out the relationship between religion, morality, and politics in a contested region. Holm's main historical contribution is uncovering the way these Border evangelicals made it their business to avoid conflict by separating religion and politics. They fashioned a theology of spirituality and political neutrality that argued that politics had no place in the pulpit. This politics of spirituality, she argues, influenced actions before and during the war, and this desire to avoid conflict decisively shaped the evangelical landscape after the war. Evangelical Protestantism had exponential growth in the western part of the United States during the Second Great Awakening. Holm writes in a nuanced fashion about how the importance of the West in the evangelical imagination led to an intense period of institution building that left these three evangelical denominations strong but resulted in unexpected consequences. Border evangelicals began to conceive of themselves as [End Page 599] distinctive from eastern evangelicals, with different needs and separate institutions. The quick growth of evangelicalism in the west was also brittle, leaving evangelical churches vulnerable to fracture. As northern and southern churches increasingly associated with their region during the Secession Crisis, regional identification with the West broke down amongst Border evangelicals. These churches faced internal conflict over church property and ministerial selection. The discord in the years leading up to the Civil War primed evangelicals in the border region to create a theology of conflict avoidance in response to the ways that local disputes damaged congregations and disrupted worship. Holm finds that Border evangelicals blamed outsiders for these disputes. Border evangelicals believed the problem was that both of these groups tried to answer the question of what to do about slavery in theological terms, while they believed it was a fundamentally political question. Border evangelicals thus concluded debates over slavery were incompatible with preserving unity in the church. Border evangelicals conceived of their theology of spirituality and political neutrality as a morally superior choice, according to Holm. In one of the most fascinating parts of the book, she traces how Border evangelicals took this theology into the Civil War. Holm finds that many Border evangelicals rejected northern admonitions and requirements to show loyalty through patriotic sermons, displays of the U.S. flag in church buildings, and prayers for the victory of the Union Army. She sees their attempts to separate church from state as impossible. The choice to remain neutral was itself a political action that chose ecclesiastical unity over racial equality. Political neutrality also became untenable because of Union military victories and the pressure of these loyalty tests. Union officials transferred property from disloyal to loyal ministers, making it difficult to be a neutral worshipper. This theology of spirituality and political neutrality drove Border evangelicals away from the North in the postwar period as efforts to secure their loyalty broke down outside of the explicitly political realm. Northern evangelical churches sent missionaries to the South and to the Border States during and after the war to establish churches for both African Americans and white Americans. These missionaries preached that the Union victory was providential as they rebuilt churches, demanding a kind of spiritual loyalty. Holm underscores how Border [End Page 600] evangelicals found these efforts more infuriating than those imposed by secular authorities. Holm's final contribution is tracing the ways this theology of spirituality and political neutrality affected reunion and memory during the post-war period. Border evangelicals joined southern churches because they accused northern churches of mixing religion and politics through the promotion of abolition. Southern evangelical churches embraced Border evangelicals because they offered monetary and...

A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era by April E. Holm

Reviewed by: A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era by April E. Holm Christopher M. Bishop A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era. By April E. Holm. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017. Pp. 276.) April E. Holm has produced a work of lasting significance to scholars of the nineteenth century. Holm “uses religion as a critical lens through which to analyze sectionalism, war, and reunion” (1). She considers shifting sectional identity in what became the border region, the ways in which evangelicals there understood the sectional crisis and Civil War, and explains how border ideology became significant later in the century. Far from being peripheral players, Holm demonstrates that evangelical border moderates played a major role in their denominations and helped define a distinctive regional identity that was neither southern nor northern. Before the Ohio Valley was thought of as the border, it was the West. During the Second Great Awakening, evangelicals believed it was their divine errand to bring Christianity to the region, where they built strong institutions and competed fiercely for converts. Once established, “Evangelicals in the West . . . argued that the people of their region had spiritual needs that differed from those of the East and these needs warranted separate regional institutions” (36–37). These new institutions helped forge regional identity. But as slavery became increasingly divisive, the West found itself trapped in the middle. The slavery debate spilled into the religious realm, dividing Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists into sectional branches. For their part, border evangelicals “viewed themselves as intermediaries between irrational actors in the North and the South” (40). Moderates prized denominational unity and felt that abolitionism posed a far greater danger than slavery. This religious tension helped transform the West into a new border region. Denominational schisms marked the beginning—not end—of intense factionalism in the border region. Throughout the 1850s, churches urged border Christians to take sides and worked to secure their loyalty. Moderates, on the other hand, demanded religious leaders leave politics out of religion and asserted that slavery was political in nature. As southern [End Page 95] denominations embraced the Confederacy and their northern brethren took up the banner of the Union, border preachers articulated the philosophy known as the spirituality of the church, meaning that religious organizations served a spiritual purpose and political discussion was off-limits. In the end, neutrality alienated both sides. Holm compellingly describes how state actors insinuated themselves into this religious struggle. Army officers maintained that neutrality was treason and coerced Christians along the border to actively pray for the Union, frequently requiring ministers to take loyalty oaths and display flags or face imprisonment and banishment. Edwin M. Stanton even ordered northern officers to place southern Methodist pulpits into the hands of loyal ministers from the northern Methodist church. Confederate defeat escalated religious conflict. In places like Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia, neutral moderates who remained loyal to northern denominations now seemed suspect. The middle ground they hoped to occupy vanished when northern churches openly embraced abolitionism and the Republican Party at the end of the war. Under pressure to take a political stand, many defected to southern churches, seen as less radical by comparison. Southerners enthusiastically welcomed them and co-opted their culture of political neutrality. The doctrine of the spirituality of the church became an article of faith for southern evangelicals, which made them feel superior to northern evangelicals, while they still supported the racial status quo. Later in the century, polemicists produced histories of schisms and war which aired old grievances and declared their rivals to be apostates. In an era of reconciliation, denominations kept sectionalism strong. A Kingdom Divided is based on excellent primary sources, including newspapers, letters, diaries, contemporary accounts, government documents, and denominational records. Holm provides an illuminating history of the doctrine of the spirituality of the church, a key idea in southern religious history. The perspective of the border further shows that sectional religious conflict played out across the nineteenth century and did not subside even when conciliation was in full swing. Scholars of particular denominations will quibble over minor points and the author’s treatment of the...

Ideo in honore dupucatus est locus

As early as 1846. a significant inscription of the Bishop and confessor Maurus has been found in the altar of the Euphrasius' cathedral in Poreč (Parentium). In spite of many papers and studies dedicated to this epigraph all problems have not yet been solved. Especially wrong is the explanation of the last sentence which is the theme of this paper. But, in order to achieve the aim, it is necessary to take into consideration complete inscription and its context.The epigraph consists of four sentences of two lines each. The last sentence is incomplete, since its second line was chiselled out, except for zhe word actus. It is very important to bear in mind that the inscription is of sepulchral character.The word cubile in the first line was not very well understood. The author emphasizes that, bearing in mind the poetic way of the style, this word must be the substitution for the word sarcophagus. It is more probable since it is a fragment of a late antique sarcophagus. The second sentence is quite clear. The third speaks about the solemn translation of the Maurus' corpse on the place where he was elected bishop and where he suffered for the faith and became confessor. Most scholars thaught that the meaning of confessor and martyr must have been the same even in the 4th century. The author assumes that only the original meaning of the word could come in question, since the same word was twice mentioned. Confessors in contrast to martyrs survived persecutions and therefore were less honoured. Obviously the citizens of Parentium would not do such a confusion for their bishop, if he was really a martyr.The last sentence was usually thought to reffer to a new church which was attached to the older one (basilicae geminatae) in honour of the translation of Maurus' body from the cemetery to the cathedral. The word locus was thought to be the sinonym for the ecclesia. Only D. Rendić-Miočević had slightly different opinion. He emphasized the position and significance of the syntagma in honore, and supposed that honour of Maurus was duplicated, but not locus, i. e. ecclesia. Also for him locus is ecclesia.The author of this paper, starting from the sepulchral context of the inscription, points out that word locus in this regard means burial or burial with the belonging area. Locus signifies, especially in Christian terminology, holy burial (locus sanctus). So the meaning of the sentence must be that the Maurus' burial was doubled. How could a burial be doubled? But it is very simple. With translation Maurus got two burials: the original in the cemetery, the second one in the cathedral. It was quite normal for saints to have two or even more loca sancta. Such a situation should be noticed for example in Salona, where Anastasius burial was moved from his mausoleum in the southern church on the same site, but both functioned simultaneously. Maurus even nowdays has two burials. One in Rome, in the Lateran oratory near the Lateran baptistery and the other in the Poreč cathedral. The same is with Salonitan martyrs who have burials in the Split cathedral and in the same chapel in Lateran.So the word locus is not sinonym for ecclesia (church), but it means, as usual, the saints' burial. The author dated the epitaph in the 5th century and correlated it with the second phase of the Poreč cathedral.

Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801 by William Harrison Taylor

Reviewed by: Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801by William Harrison Taylor Tammy K. Byron Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801. By William Harrison Taylor. Religion and American Culture. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 186. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-1945-8.) By 1758, American Christians were seeking a spiritual rationale for the French and Indian War that had been plaguing the colonies since 1756. American Presbyterians concluded that the war was a sign of God's displeasure with the church's recent schism; subsequently, the Presbyterians sought not only the reunification of their church but also the fostering of inter-denominational unity for the good of Christendom and the nation. In Unity in Christ and Country: American Presbyterians in the Revolutionary Era, 1758–1801, William Harrison Taylor examines their efforts, concluding that rather than achieving long-term church and national unity, the Presbyterians' late-eighteenth-century efforts actually increased religious division and national sectionalism by the turn of the century. Taylor begins by examining the Presbyterian reunion in 1758 and the Presbyterians' ensuing efforts to cultivate Christendom by encouraging cooperation among Christian denominations. However, in addition to facing continuous internal conflict, Presbyterians found that interdenominational and political enmities complicated Christian cooperation between the mid-1750s and mid-1760s. Despite this struggle, Christians increasingly came together to face Great Britain's threat to American political liberties by the Revolutionary period. As they did so, their focus naturally became more political than religious, and by the end of the war, Presbyterians struggled to shift inter-denominational cooperation back to the goal of uniting Christendom. Taylor shows that the success of these interdenominational efforts varied by region and were more successful in the North than in the South. In the North, Presbyterian churches found similarly minded denominations, such as the Congregationalists, who shared their desire to create the Plan of Union of 1801 for the good of Christendom and the nation. However, southern churches, Taylor argues, suffered from a deficiency of regular leadership and an emphasis on local concerns that weakened southern churches' connections not only to other churches but also to the Presbyterian Church's national body. As a result, more Presbyterians came to believe that their needs could be better met by separating from the national church. Thus, Taylor shows, while Presbyterians succeeded in achieving their goal of community with other Christian denominations, they also inadvertently fostered division and sectionalism, leading southern members to draw away from a church that they believed could not meet their needs. While much literature exists on the history of late-eighteenth-century Christianity, Taylor's work adds to this scholarship by specifically examining the Presbyterian effort to foster Christian unity during this era and demonstrates how that effort resulted in fracturing both the church and American national unity. Much of the research on American sectionalism focuses on political clashes and the slavery debate as exacerbating sectionalism; Taylor, however, adds a new dimension to this historiography by illustrating the implications of the Presbyterians' religious divisions on Presbyterians in the southern states. [End Page 424] A significant part of the author's success is rooted in his use of a multitude of relevant sources, including lectures, sermons, and personal correspondence of leading Presbyterians. Taylor also references hymnals, books of poetry, and official Presbyterian Church records, such as the minutes of the Presbyterian Church's General Assembly and those of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia. Moreover, his book includes a strong survey of the secondary literature relating to late-eighteenth-century Presbyterian and political history. Taylor's work is also highly readable and understandable, due in large part to its clear and logical organization. Its five chapters are ordered chronologically, with the last two chapters organized by both period and region. The work is also peppered with interesting, relevant quotations from primary sources, which draw the reader into the period while supporting the thesis. Thus, both the layperson and the scholar will find Taylor's argument convincing and easy to follow. Tammy K. Byron Dalton State College Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Authors’ Response

Authors’ Response

Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret

Reviewed by: Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South by Jeff Forret Dea H. Boster (bio) Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South. By Jeff Forret. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 530. $65.00. cloth) In his second monograph, Jeff Forret analyzes instances of violence between slaves, primarily on plantations, in the American South from the 1790s to the 1860s, making a compelling case that violence—in a variety of forms and encounters—was both destructive and constructive within southern slave neighborhoods. Slave against Slave presents an amazing collection of qualitative and quantitative data on conflicts between bondspeople and argues that violence “afforded slaves an avenue through which to uphold cultural expectations, police themselves internally without interference from whites, and impose a moral and ethical code of their own creation” (p. 25). More [End Page 94] important, Forret’s research problematizes prevalent assumptions about slave community cohesion and the “celebratory tone” of slave agency that has dominated scholarship since John Blassingame’s The Slave Community was published in 1972. While Forret acknowledges that interracial violence was likely more common in the antebellum South (with slaves as both perpetrators and victims) than between the enslaved, he nonetheless points out that violent encounters between slaves have received scant scholarly attention. He believes this inattention “is not only misleading historically but also wrongly elevates all slaves to virtual sainthood” (p. 7). His research places the context of slave violence within a “violent” southern slaveholding culture, which provides a fascinating lens on the complexities of slave agency as well as nineteenth-century society more generally. Such a project would be a daunting task for any scholar, and the author readily admits the limitations inherent in the primary record; cases of aggression between slaves were likely to go unrecorded, particularly when masters did not face a loss of property or liability. The book also relies heavily on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narratives in certain instances, which, as the author notes, can lead to contradictions and distortions. However, Forret makes up for these limitations by presenting an amazing array of documents and demonstrating a meticulous reading of his sources. County and state court transcripts, state auditors’ records, plantation journals and correspondence, ex-slave testimonies, and even church records contain many examples of violent encounters between slaves. The early chapters of the book quantify cases of slave violence considering a number of variables—including physical size, age, region, occupation and skills, choice of weapons, and even the time of the week or year that incidents occurred—to present some fascinating correlations and trends. The role of southern evangelical churches, particularly Baptist congregations, in monitoring and policing slave violence (especially when it was associated with drinking or gambling) is particularly intriguing. Some southern churches had a significant number of enslaved [End Page 95] congregants and even “colored committees” to lead disciplinary proceedings against black members; for slave women who were sexually assaulted, the church might have been the only institution that could offer any kind of protection or recourse. The author’s major focus is not on the circumstances of slave violence but on the motivations for such encounters, which often involved dishonesty, disputes over property, threats to family or romantic ties, and, most important, “gendered performances of honor” (p. 36). Men and women fought and abused one another in a variety of ways, for a variety of reasons, and the author makes a compelling case that violence was important for the construction of both masculine and feminine identities. The author concludes with an epilogue about the modern discourses of “black” violence and the historical fallacies or “metaphorical ghosts” that have shaped those discourses (p. 385). Overall, the book is a fascinating read, and Forret’s exhaustive attention to detail is truly staggering, but he writes in an eloquent and effective style that maintains a very clear focus on his key narrative arguments. Moreover, he emphasizes aspects of slave life and culture that are often overlooked, including examples of property ownership and the slave “internal economy,” continuities between work and leisure activities, competition, disloyalty, sexual double standards, and domestic violence. For its complex, “deromanticized” depiction of lives and...

Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America ed. by Andrew Preston, Bruce J. Schulman, and Julian E. Zelizer

Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America. Edited by Andrew Preston, Bruce J. Schulman, and Julian E. Zelizer. Politics and Culture in Modern America. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Pp. viii, 213. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4702-2.) The relationship between religion and politics in America is tremendously broad and extraordinarily complex. It is a sharply contested, hotly debated subject and in perpetual need of pondering and clarification. Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America does exactly that. With nine essays that cover the Civil War to the present, the collection presents reflections on the historical fact of religion's endurance throughout the last 150 years. The essays invite critical analysis of the various ways that Christianity and other religions have been part of U.S. political and cultural life. Historiographically, the editors situate this volume of political history in conversation with what they call the turn in American history, by which they mean approaches to religious history that account for its entanglements with the nation's political and cultural life, and the mutual impact this relationship has had on both the practice of religion and the execution of politics (p. 7). The first two essays deal broadly with how turn-of-the-twentieth-century political and cultural change as trends, such as urbanization, affected religious ideas, religious groups, and social practices. David Mislin's essay documents Protestant-Catholic convergence on the politics of family and higher rates of divorce, while Lila Corwin Berman's insightful analysis of modern Jewish life and practice shows how urban contexts shaped religious and cultural identity. Chapters by Darren Dochuk, Alison Collis Greene, and Edward J. Blum that encompass the 1920s through the 1960s address, respectively, questions of race and class in relation to fundamentalist and mainline religious networks, internationalism, and U.S. petroleum culture; the ways that black and white southern churches responded to shifts in the relationship between church and state during the New Deal; and how a preacher politician, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., traversed the categories and navigated the contours of religion and politics during his career in ministry and government. Focusing on midcentury trends in religion and public life, Matthew S. Hedstrom's chapter uses the life of Christian missionary and literacy advocate Frank Laubach to illustrate the vibrancy of liberal Christianity outside the institutional church. Liberal religion, Hedstrom contends, thrived in social and cultural work inspired by a broad spiritual cosmopolitanism and prefigured the rise of today's so-called nones, people who claim no religion, that Pew Research Center studies on religion and public life have recently documented (p. 72). Traversing the same historical period, Molly Worthen presents the theological backstory of the Christian Right. …

The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation. By Stephen R. Haynes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 324 pp. $29.95 cloth.

The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation. By Stephen R. Haynes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 324 pp. $29.95 cloth. - Volume 83 Issue 2

The Role of Christian Women in the Global South

This study discusses the growing role of women from the Church of the global South. With the shift of the centre of global Christianity towards the South, today, two-thirds of the world’s Christians live in the southern hemisphere, namely Africa, Asia and Latin America. This implies growing and significant roles for southern churches to play. The role of women from the South is the focus of this study. It attempts to answer the following question: In what areas can the women from the South contribute both in local and global settings? The study explores specific areas of potential contribution by the women from the global South, particularly reflecting on the author’s own mission engagements in diverse areas of academic circumstance. The study is to challenge and encourage them to actively pursue academic careers in international platforms to provide active leadership in the shaping of future global Christianity.