This topic immediately raises two interrelated questions: What do we mean by "religion"? and What do we mean by the "South"? The answer to each is by no means obvious or straightforward, and in many ways the answers are intertwined. In each case we have to confront stereotypes and conventional wisdom that may not accurately describe the phenomena we are treating. For many, if not most Americans, the term 'religion' usually brings to mind two things: an institution--the church--and a set of ideas and behavior associated with that institution. For most of us religion means a particular denomination such as Southern Baptist or United Methodist along with the things that Baptists or Methodists believe and do (or in some cases don't do.) Insofar as the several denominations in America have had vigorous histories and have managed to secure a powerful hold in public life and in the enlistment of millions of members, it is not surprising that this should be the case. Denominations are a massive feature of religious life in America. This fact, however, makes it difficult for us to see religion in broader terms as a general aspect of culture or as an element in the totality of the life of a particular community, society, or ethnic group. Americans are also strongly disposed to see religious behavior in ethical-pietistic terms rather than in the assent to a set of assumptions about the structure of the cosmos or our place within it. In general for us religion means going to church, doing what the members of that church do, and being "good".
Many professional interpreters of religion in the Twentieth Century have urged a different view of religion. Theologians, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and others have recognized that religion often has an effect upon society and individuals that is different from the requirements of the denominations. Scholars such as Peter Berger, Paul Tillich, Robert Bellah, and Clifford Geertz argue that along with the denominational forms of religion there are elements of religion that are associated with the world-view endorsed by a people and that these elements may be found in a symbolic structure that only partially coinheres in the apparatus of the denominations. Religion in the sense we are developing here is sustained in a culture rather than in a church, and it is manifest in a set of symbols that:
function to synthesize a people's ethos--the tone character and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood--their world view--the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order. (Geertz, "Religion as a symbolic system")
In other words, religion tells people who they are, where they stand, and what they have to do in life--but it does all these things using not only the specific symbols of the denominations but also using the ideas mediated to them through day-to-day experiences of the culture to which they belong. Geertz observes:
Religious concepts spread beyond their specifically metaphysical contexts/ to provide a framework of general ideas in terms of which a wide range of experience--intellectual, emotional, moral--can be given meaningful form. (Ibid.)
In our study of Southern religion, it would be a serious methodological error to locate religion in the south solely within the recognized structures of institutional religion. To do so would be to fail to recognize the more general nature of religion described here. Moreover, it would distort the significance of the institutional religion by giving it an exclusive importance, and it would set aside the supposedly "secular" areas of Southern life as having no direct connection with institutional/denominational religion and as having no religious dimension in themselves. But we cannnot study Southern religion just by studying churches and the documents they produce. In the first place, there is a Southern religious sensibility that cuts across denominational lines and is expressed in common styles of church architecture, hymnody, preaching, and in the nearly universal acceptance of the King James Version of the bible.
There is also a Southern religious sensibility that exists apart from the beliefs and piety of the churches. A significant part of Southern religion appears in the popular culture of the region, especially in its distinctive music, and there is often a reinforcing relation found between denominational beliefs and the informal beliefs of the popular culture. To the extent that religion is inherently cultural as well as denominational, we must consider Southern religion along with Southern culture, and the character of that religion will depend in significant ways on the character of that culture. The documents of Southern religion necessarily include the important documents of the Southern denominations, but they must also include secular sources that though each of these supplies a context of usage that is important in approaching the full meaning of the term.
In raw geographic terms, the South is a region of the United States below the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. But in this region people settled, built towns, cleared land, raised churches and barns, sang songs, married and buried, and fought wars. Out of all these things and more, a way and style of life emerged that gave those who lived there a special way of seeing themselves. It became an area where the people who lived there thought of themselves as Southerners. Certainly this way of life did not appear all at once; it did not remain unchanged; and not everyone participated in it on equal terms. Part of it included the daily round of activities people must do to survive and prosper; part of it included the accumulated memory or tradition associated with generation after generation of families living in the same place; and part of it included the effects of large historical events felt by everyone in the region whether they were participants in those events or not.
Taken together, life, tradition, and history in this region have produced a culture--not a people only for there are many ethnic groups in the South; not a nation for the political independence of the South was far too costly a dream for America to fulfill; not a civilization although popular thought and some serious interpreters have called it that--but a culture: a complex vision with roots, a place of belonging where life and value, tradition and history, belief and vision mesh and generate an array of symbols that tell people who they are and show them how to live. The South is a culture--at once grand and flawed, heroic and fragile, persistent and decaying--but a culture nonetheless that brought together a way of life with a sometimes varying vision of reality. In this place, the doctrines of the denominations, the larger religious sensibility, and the life forms of the culture were woven together. Although the South never attained the artistic level nor systematic integration of Medieval Christendom, it echoed briefly that coherence of life and world that existed for many earlier peoples before the relation of religion to culture was severed in the rationalistic impulses of modernity.
Though some scholars have disputed the integrity of the South's regional identity and while many others have tried to find in Southern history a single theme or controlling idea, the South as a culture is not reducible to a single idea nor can it be explained or understood by considering its politics in isolation from its religion or its history apart from its economics. As a culture, like every culture, the South is a complex, comprehensive social entity. It is more than the parts that make it up. To understand it we must look beyond the constituent parts--whether these be denominational doctrines or tariff laws or social codes or political alliances--and see the South whole, as an emblem of the unity of life and belief, religion and culture, secular and spiritual fashioned over the years in this region.
This concept of the religious culture of the South determines in large measure our approach to the tens of thousands of potential documents that could be considered for the anthology. The editor has taken the position that a document should expose for the reader an important aspect of the values, beliefs, attitudes or practices of this religious culture. By reading the document, the reader should be able to enter into and take up--however tentatively--the vision of the author of that document. The reader should be able to say, "O yes, now I see. I can follow that. I understand why they thought back then." To the extent that the documents are well chosen, the reader's response should reasonably accord with historical actuality--remembering however that both in the writing of a document by the original author and in the selection of it by a contemporary anthologist there are acts of interpretation that may not be fully symmetric. This potential disparity should lead us to exercise caution in proclaiming the meaning of any artifact whether material or literary; at the same time, the disparity may give access to alternative or additional layers of meaning embedded in the document of which the original producer and original recipients of it were only tacitly aware. It is true, as the scientist Michael Polanyi once said, that we know more than we can say. In good documents something of this "more" survives as a surplus of meaning which the careful interpreter can elucidate by attention to the exegetical particulars of the text and to the historical context and subsequent tradition which is the medium both of the document's preservation and of its received meaning.
The editor has used the following criteria and guiding questions in selecting each of the documents in this volume: First, we have selected documents that are known to exist and that we have access to. For the most part this means we have selected published documents rather than manuscripts. If a document has been collected before, we have asked whether it is a good representative of its type or whether a less widely known selection would be better. We have also asked whether the document were widely known in its own time. Is the document about the South? This is more important than authorship by a Southerner. Would a contemporary of the writer have been able to understand the document or see himself or his situation described in it? Does the document display typical or widely held views rather than the exceptional or the obscure?
Does the document convey its message concisely or is it susceptible of being edited without distortion of theme or meaning? Can the document, allowing for modernization of language and punctuation, be understood by a present-day reader? Is the document a well-crafted piece of writing worth reading in its own right? By reason of the subject treated or compelling historical interest, does the document deserve to be read in any case? Does the document represent a type of material not otherwise included in this volume? Can the document be understood by the college student who does not have the training or knowledge of the graduate student or professor?
Does the document concern Southern religion or a Southern religious denomination? Preference is given to documents which expose the general religious sensibility of the region in a particular period rather than texts/ which remain denominational, parochial, or narrowly sectarian. Also, the primary interest of the collection is in those general religious ideas that are determinative of the forms of life in the South rather than in theological or doctrinal debates within denominations.
For the collection as a whole, the editors used several guiding questions: Does the collection display a broad perspective that is historically accurate for Southern religion? Are the major groups, issues, periods, personalities, and regions of the South represented? Are significant status minorities treated: sects, women, blacks, Jews, Catholics, Indians? Are the major forms of religious material represented: sermons, tracts, speeches, diaries, letters, poems, hymns, manuals, minutes, psalters, narratives, histories, autobiographies, official records? Are the types of material familiar to the Southern people of each period represented? Are the typical (i.e., accustomed and widely distributed) materials represented? Are the selections balanced with reference to region, period, type of religious document, popular vs. elitist forms? Is the collection reasonably comprehensive? Does the collection effectively represent the diversity of theology and doctrine, values, practices, attitudes and visions found in Southern religion?
No single criterion nor all of them together have determined the selection of any particular text. Some texts/ were selected for a single reason; others for a variety of reasons. The sustaining test is hermeneutic utility: does the text allow the reader to understand what is described by it? Obviously not every available text could be included and some that were excluded might better have met one criterion than another.
This collection was assembled for students in college and its purpose is to help them understand religion in the South. Such understanding involves a general awareness of historical developments, of some of the variety of religious expression, and of the society that served as context and background for these religious expressions. Taken together the texts/ in this volume should enable the student to attain a sense of:
The position taken here about the religious culture of the South also affects our groupings of the documents in temporal sequences. In locating the document in relation to other documents, we have paid more attention to its theme than to its place in an absolute linear chronology. Historical "periods" are highly artificial groupings of events often demarcated by a prominent reference point such as the reign of a monarch, a war, or a great discovery. American history is often periodized with reference to wars and as part of this larger pattern the history of the South has been segmented in a similar fashion. Despite the convenience of this method of organizing the past, wars usually have long spans of antecedents and consequences that precede and follow them; in fact, wars are often prominent surface features of deeper social or cultural movements which do not coincide with the duration of the war. The periods reflected in the chapters of this volume deliberately avoid the war-to-war periodization for Southern history. Historical events seldom fit neatly into the limits of wars but instead overlap and shade into each other. For example, when we speak of the "Old South" we do not mean an exact span of time but rather a cultural phase that overlaps the preceeding Colonial or Early South but which also extend into the time of the Militant South. And the Militant South does not begin in 1861 nor end in 1865 nor even in 1877. We find the attitudes which eventually lead to the War Between the States festering as early as 1820 and in some areas lasting beyond 1900. For this reason the temporal limits of each chapter intentionally overlap.
We have sought to give coherence to each period by emphasizing a major theme, tone, mood, ethos that prevailed in that time. When we look at the historical materials we find clusters of ideas, recurring images, persistent motifs, but not, perhaps, archetypal patterns. The chapters organize the documents under broad headings meant to suggest a pervasive character or sense of world order that was subscribed to in that time. There is, we believe, a coherence in Southern history, but this coherence does not present itself as a single, dominant theme; it is rather to be found in an emergent, but not formal, tradition of life forms that are given expression in a variety of documents as well as in day-to-day living but which does not attain a static embodiment at any point in Southern history. Quite simply, the culture of the South is not controlled by a single idea, nor does it attain a single form in the beginning that is carried through to the present. It is hoped that the avoidance of strict periodizations will itself suggest an important lesson for the study of religion in the South: Southern religion like Southern culture has been persistently dynamic, shifting, and cannot be rendered under a single motif.