Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T10:48:46.475Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mass Culture, Upper-Class Culture, and the Decline of Church Discipline in the Evangelical South: The 1910 Case of the Godbold Mineral Well Hotel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Ted Ownby
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Two of the primary images most scholars have of the religion of white southerners in the postbellum period seem inconsistent or even contradictory. One image portrays members of the mainstream Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches as becoming increasingly secure in their positions as leaders of southern society. The churches were losing, or had already lost, their sense as agencies for the plain folk to criticize the complacency, the hierarchical pretensions, and perceived decadence of the upper class. In doing so, they had taken on the characteristics John Lee Eighmy best described as Churches in Cultural Captivity. As on so many topics, C. Vann Woodward states this position most clearly.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , Winter 1994 , pp. 107 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Eighmy, John Lee, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972).Google Scholar

2. Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 172-73.Google Scholar Other leading works on the apparent complacency of the mainstream churches in the postbellum period include Hill, Samuel S., Southern Churches in Crisis (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1967)Google Scholar; Hill, Samuel S., “A Survey of Southern Religious History,” in Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study, ed. Hill, Samuel S. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1983), 383–423 Google Scholar; Hill, Samuel S., ed., Religion and the Solid South (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Bode, Frederick A., Protestantism and the New South: North Carolina Baptists and Methodists in Political Crisis, 1894-1903 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975)Google Scholar; Spain, Rufus B., At Ease in Zion: Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865-1900 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and Farish, Hunter Dickinson, The Circuit Rider Dismounts: A Social History of Southern Methodism, 1865-1900 (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1938; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1969).Google Scholar Wilson, Charles Reagan, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980)Google Scholar, does not fall into the same category, but, by stressing the ways that postbellum religion supported the existing class System while mythologizing the old, it Supports the notion that postbellum churches were far from protest institutions. The most important works on Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the antebellum South argue less that the churches were complacent than that they were not yet fully in charge and, therefore, still saw themselves as Outsiders. See Mathews, Donald G., Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Loveland, Anne C., Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Boles, John B., “Evangelical Protestantism in the Old South: From Religious Dissent to Cultural Dominance,” in Religion in the South: Essays, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson 3. 128 Religion and American Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 13–34.Google Scholar Broad interpretations of the nonpolitical bent in white southerners’ religion appear in Kurtz, Ernest, “The Tragedy of Southern Religion,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 217-47Google Scholar; and Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1941).Google Scholar

3. Cash, Mind of the South, has probably the most lasting argument about the rural, backward-looking side of postbellum religion. See also Thompson, James J. Jr., Tried as by Fire: Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1982).Google Scholar For a discussion of Fundamentalism that Stresses the anti-modern side of that movement, see Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).Google Scholar Stressing the tensions between prosperity and religious humility is Harrell, David Edwin Jr., “The Evolution of Plain Folk Religion in the South,” in Varieties of Southern Religious Experience, ed. Hill, Samuel S. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 24–51.Google Scholar

4. See, for example, Harrell, “Evolution of Plain Folk Religion”; David Edwin Harrell, Jr., “Religious Pluralism: Catholics, Jews, and Sectarians,” in Religion in the South, ed. Wilson, 59-82; Harrell, David Edwin Jr., The Social Sources of Division in the Disciples of Christ (Atlanta: Publishing Systems, Inc., 1973)Google Scholar; Harrell, David Edwin Jr., White Sects and Black Men in the Recent South (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Synan, Vinson, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement in the United States (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971; repr., 1987)Google Scholar; and Crews, Mickey, The Church of God: A Social History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990).Google Scholar See also Ayers, Edward L., The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

5. See especially Flynt, J. Wayne, “Dissent in Zion: Alabama Baptists and Social Issues, 1900-1914,” Journal of Southern History 35 (November 1969): 523-42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flynt, J. Wayne, “Alabama White Protestantism and Labor, 1900-1914,” Alabama Review 25 (July 1972): 192–217 Google Scholar; Rynt, J. Wayne, “Feeding the Hungry and Ministering to the Broken Hearted: The Presbyterian Church in the United States and the Social Gospel, 1900-1920,” in Religion in the South, ed. Wilson, , 83–138 Google Scholar; and McDowell, John P., The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman's Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886-1939 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).Google Scholar Many works on progressive reform movements in the South, especially prohibition, mention the significance of religion.

6. Ownby, Ted Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 205-7.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., 135.

8. Surnmit Baptist Church Minutes (hereafter cited as SBCM), October 1874, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi; Bogue Chitto Baptist Association Minutes, Forty-first Annual Session, 1910. The average size of Baptist congregations in the Bogue Chitto Baptist Association was 174. Bogue Chitto Baptist Association Minutes, 1910, 32.

9. Summit's Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian churches met every other week, and its Catholic church met once a month. Summit Sentinel, March 25, 1909, 3. Only three of the twenty-seven churches in the Bogue Chitto Baptist Association had pastors every week. Bogue Chitto Baptist Association Minutes, 1910-1912.

10. Bogue Chitto Baptist Association Minutes, 1910, 36-37.

11. SBCM, August 28, 1910.

12. SBCM, September 4, 1910; September 10, 1910.

13. SBCM, September 10, 1910.

14. Haines, Stephen M., “Southern Baptist Church Discipline, 1880-1939,” Baptist History and Heritage 20 (April 1985): 26.Google Scholar

15. SBCM, 1910-1912.

16. SBCM, 1911-1973.

17. Mell, Patrick Hues, Corrective Church Discipline: With a Development of the Scriptural Principles upon Which It Is Based (Charleston, S.C.: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1860; repr., Athens, Ga.: E. D. Stone Press, 1912), 22; SBCM, October4, 1874.Google Scholar

18. See note 2.

19. SBCM, March 4, 1880; emphasis mine. Making reference to the perfectionist element in southern church discipline are McCurry, Stephanie, Masters of Small Worlds: Gender, Class, and the Yeomanry in the South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar; and Sparks, Randy, On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelical Religion in Mississippi, 1800-1877 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar

20. See, for example, Lockridge, Kenneth A., A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970; repr., 1985)Google Scholar; Boyer, Paul and Nissenbaum, Stephen, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974)Google Scholar; Zuckerman, Michael, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1970)Google Scholar; and Bushman, Richard L., From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).Google Scholar

21. See, for example, Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977).Google Scholar

22. Issac, Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982)Google Scholar; see also Kroll-Smith, J. Stephen, “Transmitting a Revival Culture: The Organizational Dynamic of the Baptist Movement in Colonial Virginia, 1760-1777,” Journal of Southern History 50 (November 1984): 551-68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Mathews, Religion in the Old South; Friedman, Jean E., The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South, 1830-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).Google Scholar See also McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds.

24. On church membership in general in the evangelical south, see Mathews, , Religion in the Old South, 102-6Google Scholar; and Ownby, Subduing Satan, 129. For Summit Baptist Church membership, see SBCM, January 1874; October 1912. In 1874, women made up 80 of the 114 members. In 1912, women made up 100 of 157 members.

25. Ownby, Subduing Satan, 130-33.

26. SBCM, May 18, 1890; January 1874; emphasis mine.

27. SBCM, March 4, 1880.

28. Walter Edwin Tynes, “Diary of Reverend Walter Edwin Tynes” (unpublished MS, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi), 16.

29. SBCM, September 6, 1874; February 21, 1875; June 6, 1875; August 28, 1897-1910.

30. Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms.

31. (Jackson, Mississippi) Baptist Record, January 16, 1908, 7; June 18, 1908, 10.

32. On the controversies within the church, see SBCM, June 4, 1905; December 3, 1905; April 1, 1906; November 11, 1906; January 10, 1907; October 13, 1907; January 5, 1908; March 15, 1908; April 5, 1908; October 3, 1908.

33. Bogue Chitto Baptist Association Minutes, Thirty-seventh Annual Session, 1906, 20; see also Otken, Charles H., The Ills of the South, or Related Causes Hostile to the General Prosperity of the Southern People (New York: G. R Putnam's Sons, 1894), 198.Google Scholar

34. In 1870, the household of A. A. Cotten's husband, William, owned $10,000 worth of real estate and $6,500 worth of personal property. William Cotten was both a planter and a merchant. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 9th Census, Population Schedule for Pike County, Mississippi, 1870.

35. Tynes, “Diary,” 39.

36. SBCM, April-May 1879.

37. SBCM, 1897-1910. On Anding and Simmons as neighbors, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, 13th Census, Population Schedule for Pike County, Mississippi, 1910.

38. On Ratcliff's career, see Summit Sentinel, June 3, 1909, 3; October 8, 1908, 3; June 17, 1909, 3; C. V. L. Ratcliff file, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi.

39. Summit Sentinel, June 24, 1909, 3; December 31, 1908, 3.

40. Summit Sentinel, October 7, 1909, 3; November 24, 1909, 3; June 11, 1903, 3; December 31, 1908, 3; September 22, 1910, 4.

41. Summit Sentinel, June 16, 1904, 3; October 8, 1908, 3; June 23, 1904, 3; July 2, 1908, 2; October 8, 1908, 3; July 21, 1909, 4; April 22, 1909, 3.

42. Summit Sentinel, March 17, 1910, 4; March 24, 1910, 4; August 11, 1910, 4; July 21, 1910, 4; August 18, 1910, 4; September 15, 1910, 4; October 20, 1910, 4.

43. Summit Sentinel, May 12, 1910, 4; June 30, 1910, 4; July 7, 1910, 4.

44. Summit Sentinel October 7, 1909, 3; November 24, 1909, 3; June 11, 1903, 3; December 31, 1908, 3; September 22, 1910, 4.

45. Kearney, Belle, A Slaveholder's Daughter (New York: Abbey Press, 1900), 67.Google Scholar

46. Johnson, Clifton, Highways and Byways of the South (New York: Macmillan, 1904), 101.Google Scholar On “Christian dancing,” see Craig, Alberta Ratcliffe, “Old Wentworth Sketches,” North Carolina Historical Review 11 (July 1934): 188 Google Scholar; Powell, Arthur G., I Can Go Home Again (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), 93 Google Scholar; and Hope Summereil Chamberlain, “Fifty Years Ago, or ‘Older Years than Fifty’ ” (typescript, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Archives, Chapel Hill, North Carolina). See also B. A. Botkin, “The Play-Party in Oklahoma,” in Follow de Drinkin' Gou'd, ed. J. Frank Dobie (1928; repr., Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1965), 7-24; Spain, At Ease in Zion 198-200; and Ownby, Subduing Satan, 120.

47. Liddell, Viola Goode, With a Southern Accent (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948 Google Scholar; repr., University: University of Alabama Press, 1982), 63; Summit Sentinel, September 30, 1909, 4; August 18, 1910, 4. For descriptions of dances, see Erenberg, Lewis A., Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Franks, A. H., Social Dance: A Short History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963)Google Scholar; and Richardson, Philip J. S., The Social Dances of the Nineteenth Century in England (London: H. Jenkins, 1960).Google Scholar

48. SBCM, May 24, 1879; Baptist Record, August 19, 1920, 3.

49. Martha Wolfenstein coined the term “fun morality” to refer to child- raising literature of the 1940's in “The Emergence of Fun Morality,” Journal of Social Issues 7 (1951): 15-25. Among the historians dealing with the concept, or concepts closely related to it, see Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Higham, John, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” in Higham, John, Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 73–102 Google Scholar; and May, Lary, Screening Out the Past: The Birth ofMass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).Google Scholar

50. Summit Sentinel, November 3, 1910, 4.

51. Kasson, John F., Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill and Wong, 1978), 105.Google Scholar

52. Summit Sentinel, July 7, 1910, 4; SBCM, May 24, 1879.

53. See Higham, “Reorientation,” 73-102; Banner, Lois W., American Beauty (New York: Knopf, 1983; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar, chap. 9; May, Screening Out the Past, 94-146; 200-236.

54. On the resistance of ethnic groups to mass culture, see studies as diverse as Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1951)Google Scholar; Howe, Irving, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976)Google Scholar; and Levine, Lawrence W., Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar On the Opposition of Protestants, especially in the South, to mass culture, see Spain, At Ease in Zion; Marsden, Fundamentalism; and Bailey, Kenneth K., Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).Google Scholar On the ability of mass culture to undercut or overpower many local traditions, see, for example, Kasson, Amusing the Million; the essays in Fox, Richard Wightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983)Google Scholar; and Ewen, Stuart, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).Google Scholar On the ability of local groups to use mass culture in creative ways, many of which resisted corporate domination outside the workplace, see Rosenzweig, Roy, “Eight Hours For What We Will”: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983; repr, 1985)Google Scholar; Heinze, Andrew, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

55. On southern family styles, see Lewis, Jan, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar; and Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).Google Scholar

56. (Little Rock, Arkansas) Baptist Advance, January 20, 1921, 5.

57. McComb City Enterprise, March 11, 1915, 2.

58. Summit Sentinel, December 31, 1908, 3.

59. Faulkner, William, The Town (New York: Random House, 1957), 14.Google Scholar

60. Charles Reagan Wilson makes a similar point in Baptized in Blood, 79-88.

61. Summit Sentinel, November 3, 1910, 4.