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One of the most important cultural developments between the 1930s and the 1970s was the rise of the South from being a self-consciously separate region to becoming more of an integral part of the national culture. That transformation was not possible until the turmoil of the civil rights movement receded and the South formally joined the rest of the nation in accepting racial integration, at least in principle. During the era of the triumph of civil rights legislation and enforcement of school desegregation in the 1960s, opposition to these causes served as a major force in separating many white southerners from the Democratic Party, as was most evident in George Wallace's 1968 campaign. Despite religious dimensions in that opposition, piety was probably no more conspicuous there than it was in most other aspects of southern public life, whether conservative or progressive, white or black. In any case, only after white southerners were no longer automatically voting Democratic was it possible to organize a truly national movement of political conservatives. Furthermore, once civil rights receded as the defining political issue so that not everything that southern conservatives did was dismissed by their critics as motivated by veiled racism, the door was open to marshal southern conservative political energies and resentments elsewhere. So it is no accident that almost as soon as the divisive issue of civil rights formally receded, the Religious Right emerged as a national movement with conspicuous southern leadership, best exemplified by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Robison.1

It may seem odd that the American Protestant fundamentalism that, as I and others have argued, appears to be primarily northern in its origins, should now seem to have its most solid base in the South. Yet it is not new that many fundamentalists should speak with a southern accent. A number of the most influential leaders of the movement in the 1920s, including William B. Riley. A. C. Dixon, Curtis Lee Laws, John Roach Straton, J. C. Massee, J. Gresham Machen, and J. Frank Norris, were from the South. Fundamentalist militancy typically arises when proponents of a once-dominant religious culture feel threatened by trends in the larger surrounding culture. In other words, to use a non-fundamentalist analogy, it takes two to tango. If organized fundamentalism is to arise not only does there have to be a conservative religious community but also the more liberal-secular culture has to be strong enough to be impinging on the once-dominant religious culture and seem to be threatening to replace it. Accordingly, although transplanted southerners were prominent in northern fundamentalism, for a long time there was very little organized fundamentalism in the Deep South. Special fundamentalist organization there would have been redundant. Though people might be aroused against an alien teaching such as evolution, on the whole southern evangelical culture seemed secure. When evangelical white southerners were directly confronted with seemingly inexorable national secularizing trends, some of them, such as the early fundamentalist leaders who had been transplanted to the north, were ready to fight.

During the first half of the 20th century in much of the South, white evangelical Protestants typically exercised, as Grant Wacker has so nicely put it, "custodial" control over the local culture. So long as their cultural dominance was secure, they could afford to be champions of separation of church and state and of "the spirituality of the church," a popular code phrase for the doctrine, sacred since the days of slavery, that churches should not meddle in political causes. Even though "the spirituality of the church" was transparently a way of protecting the segregated social order and churches did exercise their influence when it came to approved political causes such as prohibition, Sabbath observance, or anti-evolution, most of that influence was informal or taken for granted and did not require special political organization. Jerry Falwell's famous 1965 sermon "Ministers and Marchers," in which he proclaimed that the duty of the church was simply to "preach the Word" and not to "reform the externals" was an expression of this classic southern and fundamentalist stance.

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