Harvey, Redeeming the South

ISSN: 1094-902X
Volume 2, Number 2 (Spring 1999)

Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925. By Paul Harvey. University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 342 pp. $49.95, cloth; $17.95, paper.

With research from a wide variety of both primary and secondary sources, Paul Harvey has pieced together a narrative of black and white Baptists in the postbellum South. The narrative of Redeeming the South also makes some major shifts in the discussion of "southern religion." Harvey defines "‘southern religion’ as a biracial and bicultural phenomenon," and hopes that by telling this "combined story . . . we may better understand the broadest themes of southern cultural history from the Civil War to the 1920s" (3). Redeeming the South is organized chronologically by familiar historical periods: Reconstruction, the New South, and the Progressive Era. Within this traditional narrative scheme, and using familiar themes such as modernization and the spread of "Victorian" class and gender culture, Harvey argues that "together and separately" black and white southern Baptists "created different but intertwined southern cultures" (12). But this thesis, while corrective and constructive in many ways as it responds to the prevailing interpretations of Protestant Christianity in the southern U.S., is not entirely convincing.

What is convincing is Harvey’s argument that the prevailing historical narratives have improperly focused on evangelicalism as the key to understanding "southern religion." Scholars such as Donald G. Matthews, John Boles, and, most recently, Christine Leigh Heyrman, have argued that individualistic, conversion-moment-focused evangelicalism was held captive by "secular" southern culture, eventually capitulating on matters such as opposition to slavery and the public roles of women. The story, Harvey shows us, is not quite that simple. Evangelicalism is a deeply-rooted aspect of southern Christian life, and it was intimately tied to "secular" southern life, but it is not the most important aspect. Harvey offers two good examples of the diversity of Protestantism in the South that complicate the story: the rise of the Holiness movement, and the prominence of women’s organizations in southern Protestant institutions. Though I think these do not receive enough treatment from Harvey — especially women’s missionary organizing — their emphasis is an important facet of Harvey’s revisionism. Yet, as Harvey shows us, the most significant weakness in using evangelicalism as the central theme in the history of "southern religion" is that it overlooks, or at least obscures, black church life in the South. Harvey is offering a corrective to what he calls a "static" or simplistic use of evangelicalism as an interpretive scheme. By combining both black southern and white southern Baptist institutional narratives, Harvey uncovers a more diverse and complex picture of "southern religion."

But the main claim of the book, that is, that it tells a story of the interaction between and intertwining of black and white Baptist cultures, seems overstated. Harvey has organized the book into three sections revolving around the broad "central themes" of American cultural history. Within the sections the chapters are divided by a racial focus: the first chapter of each section tells the story of white southern (eventually Southern) Baptists, and each following chapter examines black southern Baptists. This polarized organizational scheme allows only broad comparisons; there are a only a few exceptional examples in support of "biculturalism" and "biracialism," especially the sections on worship styles and the debates about worship. There are also several examples of direct interaction between black and white Baptists. The story of Richard Henry Boyd in the last chapter is the most provocative example. But these examples are not enough to carry the weight of the promised picture of "biracialism," and interesting comparisons and parallels do not lead to a biracial "southern religion." What Harvey does show is that both black and white Baptists were engaged in struggles with similar cultural, theological, and historical forces, and that while they shared the same denominational name and history, they moved further apart after the end of slavery, creating different and separate Christian cultures.

The other disappointment in the book is that despite the use in the subtitle of the phrase "racial identities," Harvey does not probe the nature and character of the racial, regional, or religious identities of his subjects. Rather, racial identities function in this study only as fixed boundaries between blacks and whites. Harvey has told a story of black Baptists and a story of white Baptists without asking more precisely what those identities meant in the historical context of the postbellum Baptist world. Nor has he investigated what "southern" meant to different groups or individuals. For example, throughout the book it is apparent that white southern Baptists were self-consciously culturally "Southern;" this is not so clear in the chapters on black southern Baptists. What Harvey misses in his analysis is that it is significant for our understanding of the differences among Baptists in the south that some wanted to be "Southern" — white Baptists eventually named themselves Southern Baptists — and others did not — most black southern Baptists became National Baptists. Region and race, which Harvey uses to define the parameters of this book, are much more dynamic factors in identity formation than Harvey has allowed in this study. A little more investigation into their role in the building of southern Baptist institutions in this narrative could have, for one, taken us completely away from having to struggle with troublesome fixed definitions of black and white "races" and cultures.

Despite these difficulties, Redeeming the South is an important step toward reshaping how historians of American religion talk about Protestant Christianity in the southern U.S.

Morris L. Davis, Jr., Drew University, The Theological School