Reviewed by: Southern Religion in the World: Three Stories by Paul Harvey Hilde Løvdal Stephens Southern Religion in the World: Three Stories. By Paul Harvey. George H. Shriver Lecture Series in Religion in American History. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 104. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5592-4; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5572-6.) Southern Religion in the World: Three Stories is based on a three-part lecture series Paul Harvey delivered at Stetson University in 2018. Harvey’s book follows others in the George H. Shriver Lecture Series in Religion in American History by scholars Eddie S. Glaude Jr. and Deborah Dash Moore. Southern religion is often thought of as existing in a peculiarly regional, perhaps isolated, culture. But as Harvey points out, southern religion is interconnected with global trends. And it is not just one thing. Harvey chooses to highlight the diversity of southern religion: the mysticism and cosmopolitanism of Howard W. Thurman; the mainstream Protestantism of missionary Frank W. Price; and the Pentecostalism of musicians Rosetta Tharpe and Johnny Cash. Harvey tells the story of how these three different versions of southern religion have engaged with, been shaped by, and influenced the world in different ways. Harvey starts off with Frank Price, a liberal Protestant missionary to China. To Harvey, Price is an example of missionaries who have been more successful “in transforming America than in converting souls abroad” (p. 6). Harvey follows Price’s close relationship with Chiang Kai-shek. The two, Harvey notes, spoke the same language linguistically and politically. They grew up in the same region of China, and they shared a political language of “Wilsonian idealism and religious progressivism, the very direction that American missions moved in during the first third of the twentieth century” (p. 7). But theirs was not a straightforward relationship, Harvey writes, and he takes the reader on a fascinating journey throughout the 1940s and 1950s, as Chiang grew closer to the staunchly anticommunist evangelical movement after the 1949 revolution. The chapter on Howard Thurman is set outside the United States as well, but it focuses on how Thurman translated Mahatma Gandhi’s view of nonviolence [End Page 140] to the American civil rights struggle. On a trip to India in the mid-1930s, Harvey writes, Thurman continually had to answer questions about his Christian faith while living in a racist society. But he gained a vision of interracial Christianity and a mysticism that would nurture the soul of civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. The last chapter is less about the impact the world had on the American South and more about how southern music became the soundtrack of the world. Harvey chronicles how Tharpe and Cash, and to a lesser extent Levon Helm, brought regional and religious styles of music to an international audience. The musicians gained a large following and turned the music of the Sanctified churches of the American South into a global phenomenon, bringing southern biblical literalism and the theme of sin and redemption to new audiences. Southern Religion in the World is a short book, at ninety-one pages of main text. But it successfully offers up vignettes to explore broader themes in American religious history. Each chapter is a great starting point to discuss the relationship between personal choices and wider connections; local, national, and global developments; and ideas of where religion starts and ends. Hilde Løvdal Stephens University of South-Eastern Norway Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association