Donald G. Mathews wrote one of the great books in American religious history, Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), co-wrote (with Jane Sherron DeHart) an important volume on gender and politics, Sex, Gender, and the Politics of the ERA (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), and continues to write challenging essays on southern religious history and violence, and religious history and its relationship to scholarship on southern history. When he retired after decades of teaching in the History Department at the University of North Carolina, a number of his former Ph.D. students put together this impressive collection of essays to honor his work as a teacher, scholar, and example.
Varieties of Southern Religious History is not the sort of essay collection that anyone is likely to read from beginning to end. As a group, the fifteen essays are not attempting to support, or prove, or overturn any scholarly argument or approach to history. A few themes emerge that relate immediately to themes in the work of Donald Mathews. How did people, mostly in the South, use Christianity to oppose slavery, and to support it? Which parts of the Bible did people use to understand community, power, ethics, gender, and in one case, the end of the world? How did people understand death, and how did they understand how to live and to treat other people? How did definitions of gender relate to religious life and respectability? How can scholars study institutions like colleges and newspapers—institutions that often generate their own sub-fields of scholarship—in ways that connect to questions of power, freedom, and inclusiveness? How did women change what had been all-male features of religious life and leadership?
What unifies these essays is their attention to using evidence to tell meaningful stories, and their potential for surprise. On the latter point, it seems important that the first words of the first essay are “few would guess” (9). Some of the surprises come from the approaches of the authors: taking seriously, for example, the theology of Nat Turner; or studying the earliest versions of Japanese Christianity not through missionaries, but from the perspective of an educated Japanese convert; or in detailing the story of a Kentucky-born lesbian adventuring among London's Bloomsbury writers. Some of the surprises come from the arguments: such as studying religion founder William Miller as someone who, despite what scholarly models might suggest, had neither charisma nor organizing skill; or in telling stories about a briefly bi-racial church before whites turned toward a pro-slavery Christianity, opposition to Quaker efforts to free their slaves in the 1700s, and a Nashville preacher who faced controversy because of his spiritualist beliefs about contacting the dead. Essays consider how different groups of southerners denied death, how popular works on the Underground Railroad have done a poor job using historical evidence, and religion editors faced recurring controversies over issues of gender and activism.
Life, death, power, organizing, writing, educating, freedom, slavery—the scholars in this collection consistently address big questions in short essays. Above all, these essays are unified by the quality, professionalism, and ambition of their scholarship, and that seems the best tribute to Donald Mathews and his influence.
