An eloquent piece of narrative history that seeks to clarify one of
American religion's most enduring puzzles: How did the South, once
a culture highly resistant to evangelical revivalism, become the
"buckle" of the Bible Belt? Historian Heyrman (Univ. of Delaware)
has crafted a meticulous portrait of the early South in the era of
the Second Great Awakening, roughly around the turn of the 19th
century. She demonstrates that evangelical religion and southern
culture were at first rigidly incompatible - young itinerant
Methodist and Baptist preachers threatened the authority of
middle-aged southern planters, while women and slaves who found
outlets as evangelical exhorters challenged white male power.
Evangelicalism could only triumph in the South when its evangelists
were willing to make themselves over in the image of the southern
male gentry. This meant that preachers had to become older, more
settled, and more aggressively masculine, while women ceased to
exercise public spiritual authority, retreating instead to the
domestic realm. Evangelical religion, which had once demanded that
its adherents sever all ties with unbelieving family members,
reinvented itself as the force which held the southern family
together. The South's "family religion" continues to this day; in
the epilogue, Heyrman briefly explores the contemporary legacy of
this evangelical male transformation in groups like the Promise
Keepers. This is an outstanding book, impressively saturated with
primary sources, beautifully written, and spiced with pervasive
wit. Heyrman offers a novelist's sensitivity to the many colorful
characters of her tale, with each anecdote illuminating the overall
evolution of southern evangelicalism. One might wish only for more
attention to slave religion, and the interplay between white and
black evangelicalism. But in all, this is a remarkable book that
will set a high standard for future studies of religion in the
antebellum South. (Kirkus Reviews)
Revealing a surprising paradox at the heart of America's ""Bible
Belt,"" Christine Leigh Heyrman examines how the conservative
religious traditions so strongly associated with the South evolved
out of an evangelical Protestantism that began with very different
social and political attitudes. Although the American Revolution
swept away the institutional structures of the Anglican Church in
the South, the itinerant evangelical preachers who subsequently
flooded the region at first encountered resistance from southern
whites, who were affronted by their opposition to slaveholding and
traditional ideals of masculinity, their lack of respect for
generational hierarchy, their encouragement of women's public
involvement in church affairs, and their allowance for spiritual
intimacy with blacks. As Heyrman shows, these evangelicals achieved
dominance in the region over the course of a century by
deliberately changing their own ""traditional values"" and
assimilating the conventional southern understandings of family
relationships, masculine prerogatives, classic patriotism, and
martial honor. In so doing, religious groups earlier associated
with nonviolence and antislavery activity came to the defense of
slavery and secession and the holy cause of upholding both by force
of arms--and adopted the values we now associate with the ""Bible
Belt."" |Examines the evolution of the conservative religious
tradition of the South's Bible Belt. Heyrman shows that preachers
from the Anglican Church achieved dominance in the South by
assimilating the values already held there.
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