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“We have left undone those things which we ought to have done”: Southern Religious History in Retrospect and Prospect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Donald G. Mathews
Donald G. Mathews
Affiliation:
professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Extract

One of the most distinguishing marks of the American South is that religion is more important for the people who live there than for their fellow citizens in the restof the country. When this trait began to identify the region is surprisingly unclear, but it has begun to attract attention from scholars of religion and society who have hitherto been esteemed as students primarily of areas outside the South. The study of religion in Dixie cannot but benefit from this change. After centuries of obsession with thickly settled, college-proud, and printexpressive New England—an area not noted for excessive modesty in thinking about its place in the New World—students of American religion are turning to a region whose history has sustained a selfconsciousness that makes its place in American religious history unique. For studying the American South begins with a dilemma born of ambiguity: whether to treat it as a place or an idea. Sometimes, to be sure, the South appears to be both; but sometimes it is “place” presented as an idea; and sometimes it is a place whose historical experience should have, according to reflective writers, taught Americans historical and moral lessons they have failed to learn. Confusion results in part from the South's contested history not only between the region and the rest of the United States but also among various competing groups within its permeable and frequently indistinct borders. Differences between region and nation will, however, continue to dominate conversation even though the myth of southern distinctiveness may mislead students as much as the myth of its evangelical homogeneity. If inquiry about religion in the South should be sensitive to the many faith communities there, the history of the South will still by contrast provide insight into the broader “American” society.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 305 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1998

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67. This line of thinking was first developed in conjunction with a project published in Mathews, “Christianizing the South,” 93–97. Further development of the idea was published in “Religion and the South: Authenticity and Purity—Pulling Us Together, Tearing Us Apart,” in Religious Diversity and American Religious History: Case Studies in Traditions and Culture, ed. Conser, Walter H. Jr and Twiss, Sumner B. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). Since that time the hypothesis has been further developed through reading scholars on violence, atonement, and punishment, especially those cited here. Now that the hypothesis is near completion, it needs to be tested.Google Scholar

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