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Religion and regionalism have been intertwined in America since John Winthrop baptized New England and declared its purposes of God. The Latter-day Saints have dominated Utah and its environs since the nineteenth century. Even Garrison Keillor's splintered Brethren seem to embody a region. But no regional identity has been more bound up with religion than that of the American South. It has become a sine qua non—or a clichae, depending on your perspective—for those discussing southern identity to quote Flannery O'Connor's description of the region as "Christ-haunted." And with good reason.
For decades, however, scholars ignored southern religion. If, as Catherine Clinton has claimed, women are the half-sisters of southern history, then religion has long stood as the poor cousin. Ten years ago, John B. Boles could only modestly report that "the issuance since 1980 of at least a dozen books on southern religious history demonstrates the current interest in a topic sadly neglected in the scholarship until recently." Today, it is fair to say that southern religion is a cottage industry.
Seven recently published books on southern religion share two elements. One element seems obvious, the other less so. With the exception of two essays in Religion in the Contemporary South, these books are entirely devoted to Christianity, six of the seven to evangelical Protestantism. This perhaps cames as no surprise, since poeple usually mean Christianity when they speak of "religion in the South." As Samuel S. Hill put it, "Any real acquaintance with southern religious history equips a person with the knowledge that the evangelical family of Protestant Christianity has long been the region's largest and most influential heritage." Which is what renders the second shared component of these books so remarkable: commentators on southern religion have, without quitting their devotion to Protestantism, caught up with the rest of the world and turned their attention to diversity.
Charles Reagan Wilson's latest book offers an elegant and evocative portrait of the "cultural implications of evangelical Protestantism's long hegemony over southern life." In essays covering such varying topics as Bear Bryant's funeral, church fans, Calvinism's influence on William Faulkner, and beauty pageants, Wilson illuminates "how the dominant strain of southern religion seeped into many features of regional life." Like most of the authors discussed in this review, Wilson is concerned with the relationship between southern religion and southern culture more broadly construed. John Eighmy posed the problem in his 1972 Churches in Cultural Captivity, suggesting that southern churches were complicit in the evils of southern society, captives to, rather than shapers of, their own culture. Scholars of southern religion, turning Niebuhr's church/culture model on its head and inside out, have been debating the question ever since. For Wilson, religion does not stand "in isolation from other aspects of southern culture but" interacts with them.
Wilson is concerned with popular religion—"the religion of the people, rather than of leaders or institutions"—and, following up on a theme from his 1980 Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920, civil religion. I am charmed and fascinated by Wilson's forays into the former, but unconvinced by the latter, possessing, as I do, an old-fashioned and unsophisticated inability to entertain the concept of civil religion. Despite the efforts of Wilson, Robert Bellah, Edwin Gaustad, and others, it seems to me no coincidence that Rousseau coined the term when he did. I do not share Wilson's perception of beauty pageants as somehow religious, civil or otherwise. Defining "religion" is, of course, a tricky endeavor (and more interesting than defining it, I suppose, is understanding who has the power to do so), but "civil religion" has always struck me as encompassing all the characteristics we might associate with religion—sacred texts, pilgrimage, iconography, for example—and leaving out God. It is a bigger leap than I am willing to take to suggest that, mutatis mutandis, Miss Mississippi contests function as religious ritual. In Wilson's scheme, Miss America and Elvis Presley stand in for God; that smacks more of idolatry than religion.
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