Buckling the Bible Belt
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing BUCKLING THE BIBLE BELT By Roger Draper The kind of ascetic Evangelical Christianity that impinges so forcefully on our politics today is strongly associated with the...
...The sexes sat apart at services, an arrangement suggesting to many that the church and not the family was the basic unit of society...
...On the margins of colonial society, the core Evangelical denominations—the Baptists and the Methodists—were for a long time scarcely more prominent than extreme Protestant sects like the Quakers...
...Until independence, the Church of England, with its profound understanding of the worldly pleasures, was established by law throughout the Southern colonies...
...As this enumeration suggests, the Evangelicals, far from being old-fashioned about this type of conduct, actually anticipated our modern squeamishness about it...
...The latter were generally not paid, lest they become a separate caste, like the Episcopal (and, as the Baptists saw it, the Methodist) clergy...
...Southern Baptist churches are today found throughout the country...
...Originally, members of both communions were almost as prominent as the Quakers in opposing slavery...
...Such practices attracted adherents...
...Much of this activity involved what would now be called adolescent rebellion on the part of both the preachers and the preached-to...
...Mainly because it had no effective opposition...
...furthermore, they—and to a greater extent, the celibate Shakers—were still less compatible with regional traditions than the Evangelicals were...
...They were modem also in their democratic commitment to saving anyone and everyone...
...there were even cases of black preachers serving predominantly white chapels...
...The Methodists were neutral during the war...
...Though active in the South, the Quakers were rarely zealous to win converts...
...The Methodists and the Baptists were thus objects of harassment by Anglican and, subsequently...
...In this huge area, where more than half of the white populace was under the age of 16, the Evangelicals let loose hundreds of young, essentially self-licensed itinerant preachers who directed their efforts chiefly at teenagers...
...By the 1820s, Heyrman notes, the Evangelical clergy was a significantly older, more experienced body than it had been in the previous century...
...The established church in the South never recovered from American independence...
...As John Wesley, the English founder of Methodism, put it, the soul of a dancing master was no less precious to God than the soul of a duke...
...they alone had the right to license ministers...
...It was not only murderers and thieves who were to burn in hell forever, they were convinced, but also quite everyday people who indulged in venerable pastimes like dancing, dueling, drinking, fornicating, smoking, gambling, playing cards, racing, boasting, and brawling...
...In fact, many Evangelical ministers now had social aspirations not unlike those of Episcopal vicars...
...As late as the 181 Os, the author estimates, the Baptists, the Methodists and the Presbyterians (whom she regards as semi-Evangelicals) together claimed as communicants less than 20 per cent of adult Southern whites...
...Not the Quakers and the Shakers...
...It could therefore never have propagated the gospel effectively through the newly populated regions of the South's western country, in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee...
...Still, observes Heyrman, most Southerners, "both the humble and the great," believed that Evangelicalism "undermined the stability and unity of Southern communities by challenging the hierarchies of class and slavery that properly kept people apart, while preaching against the customary pleasures that occasionally brought people together...
...Baptist and Methodist congregations made concessions to family solidarity by relaxing their original practice of separating men and women at worship...
...Americans remaining loyal to the old ways did not regroup till 1789, when they formed the Protestant Episcopal Church...
...In the years between 1776 and the Episcopal rebirth in 1789, many Southerners joined Evangelical churches "as their only option...
...They had begun their long journey along the road from the Left to the Right...
...After 1776, almost all Anglican priests and many laymen fled the country...
...In 1792 the Wesleyans changed their original warning "Do not affect the gentleman," to the rather less specific "Avoid all affectation...
...from their standpoint this would be an anti-Semitic thing to do...
...As the original, trans-Appalachian West was settled, it became more capable of supporting Anglican-style churches with resident Methodist or Baptist ministers...
...that it takes some doing to imagine a past that was radically different," when it "seemed unlikely ever to become the 'Bible Belt,' let alone its proudly proclaimed 'buckle.'" The C of E, the largest single persuasion in those early days, claimed only a small minority of the South's total population...
...Writers & Writing BUCKLING THE BIBLE BELT By Roger Draper The kind of ascetic Evangelical Christianity that impinges so forcefully on our politics today is strongly associated with the South...
...The services of those black men who did manage to get ordained were more and more confined to fellow blacks...
...Most Baptist clergymen had to earn their livings in secular pursuits, but (unlike their Methodist counterparts) they were free to preach wherever they wanted...
...The change in the nature of these congregations went deep...
...Why then did Evangelicalism, with its unsuitable origins, triumph in the end...
...The Methodists soon abandoned their attempts to exclude slaveholders, for example, although many ministers continued to speak out against them and insisted on retaining the denomination's ban against the purchase or sale of human beings...
...Closer to the wellsprings of modern liberalism than of modern conservatism, they differed from rival Puritans in their absolute opposition to state establishment and to infant baptism, an act implying that a child's religious destiny is determined by birth and not personal choice...
...But the established religion would have run aground even if there had been no break with the mother country, since it could flourish only in settled areas capable of supporting a resident, educated clergyman...
...Yet the Evangelical sects had their own problems...
...White Baptist men showed "increasing severity" in rating "the skills of African-American men as preachers," and the Methodists "quietly deleted from the editions of their discipline that circulated in the South any mention of rules allowing African-American men to receive ordination as preachers or deacons...
...Like that of the Episcopalians, it was governed by bishops presiding over an organization that ordained preachers and assigned them to specific territories...
...Yet it is actually quite antithetical to the religious culture that prevailed there before the Revolution...
...Each of their meeting houses was under the independent control of its own members...
...rather than flourishing, however, the cause "struggled for many decades," as Christine Leigh Heyrman notes in Southern Cross (Knopf, 352 pp., $27.50...
...Opposition to slavery persisted among Baptists in the North, and in the 1840s the Southern Baptists prefigured the Civil War by seceding from their Yankee brethren...
...Aggressive proselytization alone might have converted the South...
...In the beginning they embodied traditions utterly foreign to the South...
...it had "embraced a more modern conception of the ministry as a profession, entry into which required formal training"—and, it might be added, offered better remuneration...
...Both occasionally permitted black men, slave and free alike, to preach and to act as deacons...
...Baptists rejected the idea of a church in this sense...
...Revolutionary magistrates...
...Organized Evangelicalism appeared in Virginia and North Carolina during the 1740s and 1750s...
...Wesley, by contrast, had started out as an ordained Anglican priest and took pedobaptism for granted...
...There, and everywhere else in British America, large numbers of completely "unchurched" men and women created their own personal religions, in which Protestantism mingled freely with personal eccentricities and local superstitions...
...Another peculiarity of traditional Evangelicalism had been the relatively large religious role allotted to women...
...That percentage would be considerably lower if we excluded the Presbyterians, the single largest group, who chiefly addressed their missionary work to persons of Scottish and Scots-Irish descent...
...Women too were granted unusual latitude in teaching and preaching...
...The Methodists set up their own church bureaucracy...
...What the Baptists and the Methodists had in common was a belief in the sinfulness of ordinary human nature—the essence of Evangelicalism...
...They shared this extreme individualism with the Quakers and the Shakers...
...The Baptists were akin to the other inheritors of the Puritan tradition, the Congregationalists and the Presbyterians, in their mostly Calvinist theology and their rejection of what passed for conviviality 200 years ago...
...This is why today Evangelicals refuse to abandon their efforts to convert the Jews...
...After independence "civil persecution ceased, but well into the 19th century both outraged individuals and angry mobs occasionally beset preachers or disrupted worship...
...The pristine simplicity of contemporary design owes a lot to their influence as well...
...Yet by the beginning of the 19th century, writes Heyrman, most Southern Evangelicals had concluded that "nearly any concession to the South's ruling race could be j ustif ied" in the name of converting it...
...Aiming to win over men who disliked this, the Evangelicals stressed male "control over charismatic [female] dependents by the sheer force of their authority as heads of their households and rulers of the churches...
...Then, too, it was the Methodists and the Baptists who developed the organizational form suited to winning over the trans-Appalachian regions...
...the ministry in turn admitted new members to the denomination and ruled on matters of doctrine...
...Although there was no overarching Baptist governing structure, congregations created common institutions to undertake special tasks like evangelism in foreign parts...
...So long has this region been regarded as the cultural hearth of Evangelicalism...
...However, Heyrman prefers to emphasize the effort by the Baptists and the Methodists to adapt their beliefs and organization to Southern culture—an evolution that can be observed "in every significant revision of earlier Evangelical teaching and practice after 1800...
...Not the Episcopalians, who were lucky to hold on to their core areas...
...In 1784, the Methodists "capped more than a decade of fiery antislavery preaching in America" by briefly expelling all slave owners...
Vol. 80 • April 1997 • No. 6
