White Protestants Research Articles

White Protestants and the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky

White Protestants and the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky Carolyn Dupont (bio) A mere two weeks after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional, Southern Baptists flocked to St. Louis for their annual convention. Attendees at that June 1954 meeting heard a stirring report that lauded the High Court’s action as “in harmony with the constitutional guarantee of equal freedom to all citizens and the Christian principles of equal justice and love to all men.” Although the ten thousand Baptists who gathered in St. Louis represented every state in the nation, two Kentuckians dominated the debate that followed. W. M. Nevins of Lexington warned that the Brown decision put the nation on a dangerous path toward racial amalgamation: “If we are going to eat with [blacks], and go to school with them, and go to church with them, the time is going to come … when some of you that sit in this audience today will have grandchildren with Negro blood.” Another Kentuckian, J. B. Weatherspoon, sprang to the report’s defense. The Southern Seminary professor urged that rejecting the progressive statement would send the message that America could “count Baptists out in the matter of equal justice.” “I don’t think we want to do that,” he concluded, to enthusiastic applause. The report sailed to victory on the wings of Weatherspoon’s oratory, his hearers approving it by an overwhelming voice vote. As if to acknowledge this commitment to a perilous but worthy path, [End Page 543] the convention then burst into a chorus of “He Leadeth Me,” the traditional Baptist hymn of surrender.1 Yet the dispute between Nevins and Weatherspoon more accurately prophesied Southern Baptists’ response to the civil rights movement than the resounding convention affirmation. Back home in their churches, parishioners objected strenuously to the progressive report. In the ensuing years, heated altercations erupted over other convention measures that seemed to challenge the racial hierarchy or to endorse black activism. Indeed, the quest for black equality ignited an argument about the meaning and merits of racial justice in America’s white Protestant communities. The two Kentuckians’ leadership in an opening salvo of this debate strongly suggests that faith communities in the Bluegrass State may offer keys to understanding the relationship of American religion to the civil rights struggle. Writing Religion in Kentucky The subfield of American religious history has mushroomed in recent years. Important scholars have turned to religious history to explain the thorniest issues in the national past, and a new generation of younger historians has launched their careers with groundbreaking treatments that place Americans’ faiths at the center of their story. A variety of new conferences, journals, and blogs devoted to the history of religion attests to the vitality of this field and its ability to deepen our understanding of politics, economics, and race relations.2 Kentucky has benefitted unevenly from this attention. For periods before Reconstruction, scholars seem to have long regarded the Blue-grass State as a place where the religious story illuminates significant issues in American history. From John Boles, in his 1976 classic Religion in Antebellum Kentucky, to Luke Harlow, in the recently published [End Page 544] Religion, Race, and the Making of Confederate Kentucky, 1830–1880, historians maintain that Kentucky’s religious life registered the national pulse on key concerns such as slavery and race. Indeed, Harlow argues that the religious debates over slavery unfolded in Kentucky with both wider range and sharper distinctions than anywhere in the nation. A border state such as Kentucky could easily appear a mushy middle, where converging streams dilute one another to the point of bland meaninglessness. Yet, in these treatments, the collision of ideas casts each in brighter and more distinct light.3 The landscape changes dramatically for the period after Reconstruction, when religious histories of Kentucky nearly evaporate. A pitifully short list of narrowly focused articles and a few monographs focused on Appalachia—Richard Callahan’s Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields and Deborah Vansau McCauley’s Appalachian Mountain Religion, for example—comprise the scholarly attention to religion in Kentucky after about 1880. If we gauge by the attention of historians...

Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South. By Andrew H. M. Stern. Religion and American Culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. x + 268 pp. $39.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Southern Crucifix, Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old . By Andrew H. M. Stern . Religion and American Culture. Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press , 2012. x + 268 pp. $39.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesAndrew Stern has done a great service in exploring relations between elite white Protestants and Catholics in Charleston, Louisville, and Mobile. Catholicism in the has been at issue at least since the poet Allen Tate observed that the region was a feudal society without a feudal religion, yet historians have reflected relatively little about how Catholic practice and institutions fit into the questions we ask about the region.This brief book adds nuance to the literature on elite Catholics first explored by Jon Wakelyn in 1983, and it should encourage future work. As late as 1840, Catholics in the southern states made up the majority of all American Catholics. They held positions of prominence throughout the region and Catholic institutions served people of all kinds. Jefferson Davis, to cite one example, was educated in Catholic schools in Kentucky.Stern boldly argues that and cooperation, more than violence and animosity, marked Catholic-Protestant relations in the antebellum South (2). This was rooted in Catholics' accommodation to slavery. Catholic Church, like the Protestant churches of the South, mirrored the racial values of its adherents. This gave the church a cultural home in southern society, Stern writes. Southern Protestants supported the institutions--charities, schools, and churches--central to Catholicism, and Catholics supported the institution central to the South (146).The strongest evidence of tolerance came in the cooperation between Catholics and Protestants in building charitable institutions, schools, and churches. Catholic nuns nursed residents of Augusta during a yellow fever epidemic in 1839. In 1836, the Sisters of Nazareth opened St. Vincent Infirmary in Louisville. Catholics opened orphanages in Mobile. Kentucky boasted a large system of Catholic schools that educated many Protestants. Catholics worshipped in buildings owned by Protestants, and raised monies for their own churches from wealthy patrons, who often praised the beauty of Catholic liturgy. The point of cooperation that mattered most, Stern argues, was Catholic support for slavery. In this, he affirms earlier work on the subject, but the focus on cities outside of Maryland and Louisiana, home to the largest numbers of black Catholics in the region, mean that the book does not engage in their experiences.Case studies can be suggestive, and Stern is right to claim that scholars have often focused on the notorious incidents of violence and prejudice against Catholics (two of the most notorious anti-Catholic riots in the period occurred in Louisville and Charleston) at the expense of the more ordinary ways that Protestants and Catholics lived together. …

The Right of the Protestant Left: God's Totalitarianism. By Mark Thomas Edwards. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. x + 298 pp. $90.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Right of the Protestant Left: God's Totalitarianism . By Mark Thomas Edwards . New York : Palgrave Macmillan , 2012. x + 298 pp. $90.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThe story is by now familiar: after dominating the American religious landscape, the hegemony of the mainline Protestant churches began to wane in the 1960s and then deteriorated rapidly in the decades that followed. Replacing them were conservative churches of what came to be called either the Christian Right or the Religious Right. The split in Protestantism that first surfaced between modernists and fundamentalists a century ago has now more or less played itself out. The modernists did not fare well.But reports of the death of the mainline are clearly exaggerated. At least, that seems to be the case in the historiography of American religion, which is witnessing a surge on works on white, liberal, modernist, ecumenical Protestants in the twentieth century. Even if the major liberal churches have never recovered their influence, the mainline has never been more interesting to historians.With The Right of the Protestant Left , Mark Thomas Edwards joins a growing list of scholarship on how liberal white Protestants helped shaped American politics and foreign relations in the first half of the twentieth century. His focus is on Christian realists, a diverse and disputatious group usually overshadowed by, and often even conflated with, the towering figure of Reinhold Niebuhr. Edwards does not want to add to the growing field of Niebuhr studies, though as he admits the great man is impossible to ignore. Instead, Edwards seeks to recapture the political ideology of those establishment clergy who led the Christian realist movement, and mainline Protestantism more broadly, from the 1930s to the 1950s. In doing so, he provides a highly original interpretation of twentieth-century religious history. Authoritative in tone and persuasive in its conclusions, The Right of the Protestant Left will be an important and influential book.Edwards's argument is nuanced and complex, but it can be essentially boiled down to three propositions: first, members of the old Protestant left marked a continuation of the Social Gospel movement into the 1930s and beyond, long past the point (c.1920) when most historians have declared its death; second, they sought world order, particularly after 1945, through a global ecumenism that would be led by American Protestants working with their government; and third, and most innovatively, they had much more in common with traditionalist conservatives than has been previously recognized. Motivating all three concerns was the emergence of industrial authoritarianism. Industrialization everywhere undermined the moral bases of society and, through its dehumanizing power structures and reliance on machines and bureaucracies, threatened to destroy the dignity of the individual. The subsequent rise of communism, fascism, and National Socialism imperiled not only democracy but Christianity itself by elevating the state above all else as an object of human veneration. …

Book Review: Jason E. Shelton and Michael O. Emerson, Blacks and Whites in Christian America: How Racial Discrimination Shapes Religious Convictions

In the United States, the subject of long-standing racial disparities between blacks and whites has received much attention from scholars in various disciplines. However, there has been much less attention paid to how these racial disparities shape religious beliefs and how religious beliefs shape understandings of racial disparities. In Blacks and Whites in Christian America, sociologists Jason Shelton and Michael Emerson examine the intersection of race and religion among black and white Protestants. Relying on findings from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, the 2006 General Social Survey, 14 in-depth interviews with high-ranking clergy, and focus groups with 30 Christians from the three largest African American Protestant denominations, Shelton and Emerson argue that racial group membership has a profound influence on how black and white Protestants think about and practice Christianity. While black and white Protestants are nearly identical in their belief of core Christian tenets (i.e., belief in God, Jesus Christ, Heaven and Hell), Shelton and Emerson argue that is where the similarity ends. According to Shelton and Emerson, the explanation for these differences lies in the thesis of their study, the ‘‘five building blocks of black Protestant faith.’’ These building blocks are: experiential, survival, mystery, miraculous, and justice. The five building blocks of black Protestant faith provide support for C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya’s black sacred cosmos thesis which argues that black Protestants have developed a racially specific approach to Christianity that can be found in most black churches regardless of denomination. According to Shelton and Emerson, black Protestant faith is more experiential than academic, meaning they are more concerned with action than strict doctrine. The authors argue that this is a result of the legacy of slavery and segregation where the words and deeds of white Protestants often did not match, as well as the structural barriers black Protestants faced when they tried to achieve an

Farewell to Faith? The Changing Role of Religion in Presidential Politics

The 2012 Presidential election was the first in United States history in which neither party nominated a white Protestant for president, or for vice-president. The distinctiveness of the candidates’ religious identities, combined with the central role of religion in the last half century of presidential campaigns, suggested that religion would likewise be central in 2012. But religion did not appear to play a central role, at least on the surface. The candidates’ religious identities barely surfaced as an issue, and religious issues and leaders likewise remained on the sideline. The reasons were twofold. First, the candidates themselves neutralized the issue of faith, since neither stood to gain from making his own or his opponent’s faith an issue. Second, the nation’s changing religious demographics limited the effectiveness of appeals to religion. The result was a changed relationship between religion and presidential politics that will characterize elections for many decades to come. In light of such changes, Christians would do well to consider the ways that they invoke religion and history in the political sphere.

Factors Influencing Support for Immigration Reform: Analysis from the 2013 Religion, Values, and Immigration Reform Survey

In this paper, we explore the influence of four factors that previous literature suggests influence support for immigration reform: perceptions of economic threat, perceptions of cultural threat, social contact with immigrants, and attendance at religious services. We also explore the power of these factors among two religious groups that have been active in the immigration reform debates over the last decade, Catholics and white evangelical Protestants. Among these groups, we also investigate the power of one of the key theological messages used by Catholic and evangelical leaders in their advocacy for immigration reform, the message of “welcoming the stranger.”

Blacks and whites in Christian America: how racial discrimination shapes religious convictions

Preface: Religion and Race 1 Why Do African Americans Pray So Often? 2 So Rooted a Past: Slavery and African American Protestant Religious Tradition 3 The Apostles' Creed: Racial Similarities in Commitments to Core Christian Tenets 4 Learning and Burning: Racial Diff erences in Academic versus Experiential Models of Christianity 5 Religious Convictions: Everyday Faith-Based Actions and Beliefs 6 Shaded Morality: Not So Black and White 7 Far-Reaching Faith: Evidence of an Inclusive Religious Doctrine 8 Reconciling the Race Problem: Identity Politics and the Gulf between Black and White Protestants Epilogue: Th e Race Problem and Beloved Community Appendix A: Sampling Procedures / Sample Characteristics Appendix B: Descriptive TablesAppendix C: Interview Guides Notes ReferencesIndexAbout the Authors

Red Schoolhouse, Burning Cross: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and Educational Reform

On a hot afternoon in July 1923, former Dallas dentist and national Ku Klux Klan leader Hiram Evans took the podium at the first annual national meeting of the revived organization. By the time of this meeting, the Klan had again become infamous for its reputation of intolerance and vigilante violence. It had also become enormously popular among native-born white Protestants. In states such as Indiana and Colorado, the Klan briefly seized control of state and local politics. In spite of vigorous and scathing attacks from liberals and minority groups, between three and six million native-born Protestant white men rushed to join the secret order. At least another half-million women joined the Women of the Ku Klux Klan. Some even claimed that President Warren Harding took the membership oath in a secret White House ceremony. The appeal of the organization has been explained by historians as evidence of a variety of cultural trends, including worries over lax Prohibition enforcement, desires to enforce white racial dominance, fears caused by increasing immigration rates and labor unrest, and anxiety about changing cultural mores. While each of these issues was part of the revived Klan's allure, the shrewd “Imperial Wizard” chose another topic to electrify his audience. “The greatest duty of America today,” Evans thundered, “is to build up our educational system.”

The Politics of Descriptive Representation: Revisiting Winning and Losing Groups in American Elections

According to scholars, certain groups are disproportionately likely to be on the losing side of American elections and to face serious consequences in terms of representation as a result. Using ANES and a new, merged ANES/United States Historical Election Returns datasets, this paper revisits this question with a longitudinal analysis of presidential, senate, and congressional vote returns for key political groups. Unlike previous studies, this analysis links actual election returns to voters’ electoral choices with the multi-faceted characteristics that ANES requests.Using linear probability models in a longitudinal framework, I find that blacks are more likely than non-blacks to be on the winning side of American congressional and senate elections, but more likely to be on the losing side of presidential elections. While the finding related to presidential voting fits with previous literature, the senate and congressional finding sheds new light on the story of minority voting in American politics. Additionally, many of the key constituent groups that make up American political parties do not fare as well as expected. Northern white Protestants, for example, are more likely than the rest of the sample to be on the losing end of American senate and congressional elections, while Catholics are more likely than the rest of the sample to be on the losing end of congressional elections. This result suggests that Catholics may not have benefitted electorally from a movement toward the Republican Party.Last, political interest plays a profound role in determining whether blacks are going to be on the winning side of American elections. High political interest blacks are much more likely than all others in the ANES/USHER sample to be on the winning side of American senate and congressional elections. This finding suggests that political campaigns should specifically target minority voters, in order to facilitate turnout, political information, and voting among minority populations. Additionally, political campaigns should target high political interest blacks, since they are the vote win leaders in the black population and the sample at large.

Freemasonry and the Second Ku Klux Klan in California, 1921-1925

There is a profound misunderstanding regarding the relationship between freemasonry and the second Ku Klux Klan that rose to prominence in 1915 and carried on until the late 1920s. Within the long, dark shadow of American ethnic and cultural conflicts, fraternal and patriotic organizations, with their own idealized mythological identities combined with the entrenched and accepted nativist sentiment of that era, became embroiled in an American struggle for identity. America is a nation of joiners and has been proud of this distinction, for a large part of its social infrastructure has been built through the efforts of communal organizations and associations. Furthermore, these volunteer associations have been influenced by freemasonry through a natural cross-pollination of members, which, in turn, has influenced the American character of that auspicious fraternity. This is especially true during the golden age of American fraternalism into the early twentieth century. Consequently, confusion has arisen over the determination of what point certain fraternities’ true purposes begin, end, and overlap. Analyzing primary documents and correspondence found in the archives of the Grand Lodge of F & AM of California, this paper will give a first person overview of the problems that arose when the Ku Klux Klan attempted to gain prominence in California freemasonry in the 1920s. Pandering to the societal fears of white Protestants while mimicking the benevolent fraternal societies, the Klan gained sympathy amongst enough California freemasons to cause their Grand Lodge to take controversial action by forbidding its members from being associated with it. The paper will address the ideologies of the Klan and American freemasonry, and how its dual members attempted to reconcile and justify their need for both organizations to compliment one another. Because of their incongruous core philosophies and purpose, the research demonstrates the success California masons had in ousting the Klan from freemasonry in California. This success came from the Klan’s own insistence that it was a ‘fraternal society’ while it did little to eschew its subversive activities, or its hateful and notorious past. Therefore, the Klan’s subterfuge stood in contrast to every mason’s promise to submit to the rule of the law of his country.

WHITE PROTESTANTS AND BLACK CHRISTIANS: The Absence and Presence of Whiteness in the Face of the Black Manifesto

ABSTRACTThis essay brings Critical Whiteness Studies into liberationist Christian ethics in order to analyze white Protestant responses to the 1969 Black Manifesto, which demanded reparations from white churches. The essay's primary argument is that the absence of a sense of white moral agency among white Protestants manifested itself in behaviors and rhetoric that ensured whiteness went unacknowledged, which caused Protestant responses to the Manifesto to fail. A related argument is that white behavior and rhetoric were particularly dramatic because of the call for reparations. Reparations assume that race is a material relationship in which there has been a perpetrator and a victim, rendering the acknowledgment of white agency unavoidable. This essay thus analyzes several ways in which whites can be seen turning away from white selves, turning a scrutinizing gaze instead to Black selves and, in the process, absenting white agency from the work of racial justice.

Protesting While Black?

How does the race of protesters affect how police respond to protest events? Drawing on the protest policing literature and on theories of race and ethnic relations, we explore the idea that police view African American protesters as especially threatening and that this threat leads to a greater probability of policing. We examine more than 15,000 protest events that took place in the United States between 1960 and 1990 and find that in many years, African American protest events are more likely than white protest events to draw police presence and that once at events, police are more likely to take action at African American protest events. Additional analyses complicate these findings by showing that they vary over time. In many years, for example, African American protest events are no more likely than white protest events to be policed. While there is support for a “Protesting While Black” phenomenon, it is not invariant across the entire period of inquiry.

From Forced Tolerance to Forced Busing: Wartime Intercultural Education and the Rise of Black Educational Activism in Boston

In this article, Zoë Burkholder explores the historical interplay of the emergence of tolerance education in the United States and the rise of black educational activism in Boston. By uncovering a pointed lack of tolerance education in Boston and a widespread promotion of tolerance education in other cities in the early half of the twentieth century, the author reveals how racial, historical, and political factors complicated tolerance education's local implementation in Boston. Informed by local racialized politics in the 1940s, the predominantly Irish Catholic teaching force in Boston declined to teach lessons on racial tolerance that were popular nationwide during World War II. Burkholder argues that this site of active teacher resistance against tolerance education provided fertile ground for black educational activism in Boston during the civil rights movement. These findings presage the well-documented virulence of white protest to school integration in Boston and complicate our understanding of integration in today's educational context.

“More Conscience Than Force”: U.S. Indian Inspector William Vandever, Grant's Peace Policy, and Protestant Whiteness

William Vandever (1817–1893) served as a U.S. Indian inspector from 1873 until early 1878. A lawyer by profession, Vandever had been a Republican congressman from Iowa and a Civil War officer. (Later, he would return to Congress, representing California.). While serving with the Indian Office, he became a critic of the militarization of federal Indian policy, so much so as to be reprimanded and not reappointed. His experience enables a reconsideration of President U.S. Grant's peace policy in at least two areas. First, as one of a new group of Office of Indian Affairs officials, Vandever provides a view of federal Indian policy from the middle level of the federal bureaucracy during the 1870s. His case especially illustrates his bureau's attempts to centralize civilian management of Indian reservations. Second, Vandever's policy criticisms, though they assumed white American “civilization” as normative, more immediately arose from his religious perspective. Although he lost his post, Vandever serves to highlight the privileged role of white Protestantism during Grant's peace policy. He exemplified a set of racialized religious sensibilities that were important at the time and that could be termed Protestant whiteness.

Developing a retro brand community: Re‐releasing and marketing anti‐apartheid protest music in post‐apartheid South Africa

1980s South Africa was a constrained context within which to produce protest music. Apartheid censorship prevented protest music from reaching a mass market. This was an especially dire situation for white protest musicians who (unlike black musicians) were restricted by a small potential audience and also limited by the cultural boycott, precluding the possibility of an international audience. In the post‐apartheid era some of these earlier protest recordings have been re‐released by independent labels hoping to profit from the recordings but also in search of broader audiences for this important aspect of South Africa’s musical heritage. Yet it has been difficult to do more than market to “retro brand communities” of former fans. This paper considers marketing strategies used to promote re‐releases of anti‐apartheid protest songs, given the peculiarities of the convergence of retro time and space with present spatial dynamics, in a society willing to forget its musical heritage.

The Handwriting on the Wall: The Klan, Language Issues, and Prohibition in the German Settlements of Eastern Texas

Photograph of the proclamation posted on the door of the Lutheran Church in Berlin in the early 19,20s. Courtesy ofBillNeinasL The Handwriting on the Wall: The Klan, Language Issues, and Prohibition in the German Settlements ofEastern Texas Walter D. Kamphoefner* FOR HISTORIANS IT IS NO NEWS THAT THE Ku KlUX KLAN OF THE 1920s did not restrict its hostilities to blacks. Among its targets were also white Catholics and Jews, foreigners, and anyone who failed to conform to the Klan's definition of "morality." But it has largely escaped notice that even native-born white Protestants could be targets of Klan violence and intimidation merely because they spoke a language other than English. For the German Americans of Washington County, Texas, in the early ig20S, the handwriting was literally on the wall. The following proclamation was photographed from the door of the Lutheran church at Berlin,just a few miles west of Brenham.1 Be It Known and Hereby Proclaimed: That this organization composed of native-born Americans who accept the tenets of the Christian religion, proposes to uphold die dignity and authority of the law. No innocent person of any color, creed or lineage, has any cause to fear or condemn this body of men. . . . We . . . shall ever be devoted to the sublime principles of a pure Americanism and valiant in the defense ofits ideals and institutions. * Walter D. Kamphoefner, professor of history at Texas A&M University, has published widely in die field of German American immigration and ethnicity. His latest book, Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home, edited wiüi Wolfgang Helbich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006) , includes a cross-section ofTexas Germans ofvarious political leanings. 1 Charles C. Alexander, Crusadefor Conformity: The Ku Klux Klan in Texas, ig2o-ig30 (Texas Gulf Coast Historical Association, [n.p.], ig62), 6. The Brenham Banner-Pressori December 24, 1921, carried the bizarre headline, "K.K.K. Sends Gift to Old Negroes on J.E. Routt Place." It was subsequently revealed that Routt was a Klan leader; one suspects that he simply processed his usual Christmas bonus (fifteen dollars) dirough the Klan. On May 17, 1921, a German from Fort Bend County gave a secondhand reported ofa recent Klan procession in Rosenburg. Not yet realizing for whom the bell tolled, the German remarked: "Not a Negro was to be seen. Can't hurt widi the Negroes, since their impudence went a bit too far." Wochenblatt (Austin), May 26, 1921, p. 5 (trans, by the author, as are all German sources cited in these notes); Alexander, Crusade, 15-26. Vol. CXII, no. 1 Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly 2008 54Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly Havingpledged our allegiance to the Hag which protects our Nation, we maintain and insist upon a ?oo per cent Americanism, which includes speaking theEnglish Language. The eyes of the unknown hath seen and doth constantly observe those whose hearts are not right. To each and everyone ofsuch we say: Do not disregard the warning. Be ioo per cent American. Speak the English language or move out of this city and county. Without regard to official, social or financial position, this warning applies to all persons alike living within diisjurisdiction of this Klan. . . . This warning will not be repeated. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsen. KNIGHTS OF THE KUKLUX KLAN2 This sign wasjust the tip of the iceberg in a series of interlocking cultural and political conflicts that extended beyond Washington County to adjacent areas and to some extent to wherever there were significant concentrations of Germans in Texas. Austin County, a few miles southeast of Washington County, was home of the two oldest German settlements in the state, Industry and Cat Spring, both ofwhich predated the Texas Revolution. Austin County was demographically similar to the adjoining counties of Washington and Fayette (with its seat in La Grange). In all three counties, Germans made up a slight majority, ranging from 50 to 54 percent of the white population according to the 1887 agricultural census (which although notoriously vague about its methodology, provides marvelously detailed data regarding ethnicity, which it seems to have assigned based on language and country of origin). The black proportion of the population ranged from 44...

The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past (review)

Reviewed by: The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past Rosemary Radford Ruether The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past. Edited by Catherine A. Brekus. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2007. Pp. x, 340. $59.95 clothbound; $19.95 paperback.) Forty years ago there was little writing on the history of women in religion. But in recent decades there has been an enormous outpouring of research that has demonstrated how central women are in the actual practice of religions, especially in Christian congregations. In spite of the ample availability of excellent studies on women and religion, Catherine Brekus, professor of the history of Christianity at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, finds that women still continue to be ignored in mainstream histories of America. History is seen as primarily about elite men in public life. Women, non-elites, and people other than white Protestants are still marginalized. Religion also is marginalized. Women historians share this bias, often ignoring religion and women of color. Catherine Brekus has edited this collection of twelve essays on women in American religion in an effort to demonstrate the importance of greater inclusiveness. She argues that one cannot understand American history without seeing the importance of religion, or American religion without seeing the importance of women. These twelve essays by leading women historians cover four centuries from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. They include four that focus on white Protestants, one on Black Protestants, four on Catholics, which include blacks, whites, and Mexican Americans, one on Mormons, and one on Jewish women. A twelfth essay challenges the presumed split between religion and the development of feminism in the late 1960s, showing how religiously committed women predominated in its development. [End Page 173] The four essays on American Catholic women are striking for their diversity. One, by Emily Clark of Tulane University, focuses on the centrality of white and black religious women in the evangelization of blacks in the city. Another essay, by Kathleen Cummings of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, details the struggles of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur to found Trinity College in 1897–1900. This was the first Catholic women's college to be founded as a college rather than evolving from an academy. The Sisters' proposal to found such a college raised fears of Catholic conservatives in the United States and in the Vatican that this was a capitulation to Americanism, feminism, and co-education, all anathema in some circles. Cummings shows how Sister Julia McGroarty steered a difficult course between conflicting forces to found the college. A third essay, by Amy Koehlinger of Florida State University, lifts up the racial apostolate of American nuns in the 1960s that not only pioneered new work with African Americans in the rural South and the inner cities, but was able to use the gender and racial ambiguity of habited nuns to cross racial and gender boundaries. A concluding essay, by Kristy Nabhan-Warren of Augustana College, focuses on a Mexican American lay woman of South Phoenix who successfully translated her personal experiences of apparitions of the Virgin Mary into an international movement of Mary's Ministries that founded a K–12 charter school and created a powerful practice of empowerment of women that combines feminist and conservative values, Catholic and evangelical styles of piety. These twelve essays make fascinating reading. Together they make clear how much we miss of American religious history if we ignore the role of women of many ethnic and religious backgrounds. Rosemary Radford Ruether Claremont Graduate University Copyright © 2008 The Catholic University of America Press

Parades and Processions: Protestant and Catholic Ritual Performances in a Nuevo New South Town

AbstractSince the early 1990s, the American South has changed drastically and Siler City, North Carolina reflects those changes. Like larger southern cities, Siler City has received a significant number of migrants from Latin America in a short amount of time. New migrants, many but not all of them Roman Catholic, bring diverse sets of ethnic, cultural, and religious practices to a town traditionally dominated by Baptists and Methodists. One of the most visible examples of local religious disruption in Siler City has been the public display of Good Friday processions by Latino Catholics. That performance signified the presence of new migrants in downtown space. White Protestants, in turn, drew on the long standing ritual tradition of downtown Fourth of July parades to reassert their presence in that same space. Annually performed since 1901, the parades revealed a moral order based on the logic of southern Christian sacrifice. And the vitality of downtown parades indicated the political strength of white Protestants to maintain established order. That strength diminished with the local economic decline of downtown businesses in the 1980s and was challenged by the arrival of Latino migrants in the 1990s. The parades ended in 1988 but were renewed in 1997, the year following the first Good Friday procession in city streets. In the revitalized parade, white Protestants expressed nostalgia for a southern way of life and publicly remembered a time and place — downtown Siler City — before economic decline and Latino arrival.

History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie: Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt in the Modern South (review)

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 8 65 History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie: Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt in the Modern South. Edited by Gordon E. Harvey, Richard D. Starnes, and Glenn Feldman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. xii, 224 pp. $50.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8173-1507-1. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-81735320 -8. Edited by three of his former graduate students, History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie is, as the subtitle makes clear, a tribute to the scholarship and activism of Wayne Flynt. Flynt, as surely all readers of The Alabama Review know, taught at Auburn University for many years and is still an extremely productive and important historian of Alabama and the South. He has coauthored a history of Alabama and published three books of his own on the state—Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (Tuscaloosa, 1989), Alabama Baptists (Tuscaloosa, 1998), and most recently, Alabama in the Twentieth Century (Tuscaloosa, 2004). His studies of poor whites and seminal articles establishing the existence of a social gospel tradition within white southern Protestantism constitute his most important contributions to the historiography of the South. They add needed complexity to historians’ understanding of its past. Although the editors’ introduction discusses and a few of the other essays mention Flynt’s scholarship, the book devotes far more attention to Flynt’sactivism.FlynthasspokentocountlesscivicgroupsacrossAlabama, written editorials for many of the state’s local newspapers, and organized or joined a host of reform organizations and efforts in Alabama. He served as a court-appointed mediator in the battle for equity in school funding and later campaigned to have his and other churches voluntarily pay property taxes to support public education, reasoning that supporting quality public education will not radically restructure power, but it can make a tremendous difference in the lives of many people. Flynt’s efforts in behalf of education and for reform of Alabama’s outdated constitution , another cause he has championed, illustrate his commitment to social justice and to a pragmatic approach to concrete social reform. Essays by fellow scholars John Shelton Reed and Dan T. Carter and by fellow activists Dewayne Key and Bailey Thomson discuss Flynt’s reform efforts; they are justly celebratory but brief. Readers seeking to understand Flynt’s values and motives, rooted in his deep Baptist faith, should also read Flynt’s own admirably matter-of-fact but extremely interesting discussion of his career in John B. Boles’s Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History (Athens, Ga., 2001). T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 66 In addition to the essays praising Flynt’s activism, History and Hope includes essays on various aspects of southern history by seven of his former graduate students, who make clear their respect and affection for their former teacher. The editors and essayists try to relate these essays to Flynt’s scholarship, but his students’ approach seems to differ in subtle ways. Flynt the social activist has fought the historical ills of Alabama and the South; Flynt the scholar, though, has tended to focus more on signs of hope—the strength of the poor whites’ culture and the existence of a reformist impulse within southern white Protestantism, for examples. Some of the essays in History and Hope find similar signs of hope; others, though, analyze the region’s shortcomings. And although Flynt has been a consistent and courageous voice for racial equality, his books and articles have not focused on race; five of the seven essays by his students do. Perhaps the essay that most closely follows Flynt’s own work as a scholar is Richard D. Starnes’s discussion of a limited but nonetheless vibrant and important social consciousness among North Carolina Baptists in the early twentieth century. Jeff Frederick’s analysis of the influence of interest groups on Alabama politics from 1929 to 1971, which has an interesting discussion of the efforts of the Farm Bureau but surprisingly little to say about those of industrialists, seems to build more on Flynt’s activism than his scholarship. The other essays address disparate topics, but all acknowledge...

Faith in Their Own Color: Black Episcopalians in Antebellum New York City

One of the most widely accepted truths about antebellum America is that Afro-Christian churches were the core of free black communities. African American disenchantment with white Protestantism spurred a nationalist movement toward the creation of black churches and an educated clerical elite. Scholarly focus is nearly always on such evangelical denominations as Methodists or Baptists. Craig D. Townsend's history of St. Philip's Episcopal Church, an African American offshoot of the reorganized Episcopalians, themselves direct descendants of the Church of England, presents an alternative to that evangelical model. In his nuanced account of St. Philip's hard-won origins, Townsend greatly enlarges our comprehension of early black theology and leadership and the intertwined racial dilemmas of African American and white American clerics. The author divides the book between doctrinal discussions and applied religious history. Townsend first offers a familiar tale of the founding of St. Philip's in 1809 along with a fine evocation of the career of Peter Williams Jr., its first cleric. The author then provides full explication of the postrevolutionary theological splits within the Episcopal Church between High Church theological beliefs about universal grace and Low Church or evangelical perceptions that salvation could be meritorious. Creatively applying W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness, Townsend demonstrates that in both sacred and secular disputes white and black Episcopalians were caught in a racial discourse. Townsend's careful exposition of this American dilemma sets the stage for explaining, in succeeding chapters, the investment the black nationalists James McCune Smith and Alexander Crummell made in the Episcopal Church.