Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era.

Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era. By Paul Harvey. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2005. Pp. xviii, 338. $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2901-3.)

Paul Harvey's title reveals an overarching theme in his analysis of southern evangelicalism in the century from the Civil War to the civil rights movement. Freedom was both a reality that was never fully achieved and a hope that stirred both passion and action. Freedom had different meanings, though, for African American and Euro-American southern evangelicals.

For blacks, freedom was intertwined with the experience of slavery and the legally sanctioned segregation and racism that followed on slavery's demise. Freedom embraced not only fundamental human and political rights; it also included affirmation of a religious style that linked African tribal expression with Christian experience.

For whites, primarily Baptists and Methodists, freedom captured the conviction that white humanity could live freely only when races were separated and white superiority was ensconced in law and tradition. It represented an exercise in power and affirmation of a mythic past when religious and social ideals coincided.

Between the close of the Civil War and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), southern evangelical culture struggled with theological racism, racial interchange, and efforts at genuine Christian interracialism. Harvey's strength lies in tracking these three currents running through both black and white southern Protestantism, a strength evidenced in his Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (Chapel Hill, 1997), which examined racial identity and the distinct but interrelated religious cultures among southern black and white Baptists.

Harvey's other gift is sensitivity to gender. Among white and black southern evangelicals, women were far more likely to call for the dismantling of racist structures, to work across racial lines, and in time to provide the human power to propel the profound changes that came to both churches and society with civil rights activity. Indeed, southern women are the real champions of the evangelical gospel; in retrospect, as Harvey sees it, men such as Willis D. Weatherford and Howard "Buck" Kester, who are often portrayed as visionaries calling for the transformation of southern life, became more cautious and less willing to risk momentary turmoil as a new order emerged.

In tracking the hegemonic culture in the century after Reconstruction, Harvey fills a significant void in the literature appraising southern religious life. In recent years, many scholars have probed how an evangelical style displaced established Anglicanism in shaping southern life. Donald G. Mathews, Christine Leigh Heyrman, Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, and others have unpacked the dynamics of antebellum southern religion. At the other chronological pole, spurred by Samuel S. Hill's Southern Churches in Crisis (New York, 1967), countless studies have examined how religious forces spawned and sustained the civil rights challenge to cultural racism even as they worked to bolster the status quo. Relatively few have looked at the period between the two, apart from Charles Reagan Wilson's appraisal of the religion of the Lost Cause (Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 [Athens, Ga., 1980]) and Ted Ownby's study of masculinity and evangelicalism in the rural South (Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South [Chapel Hill, 1990]); both ended their story around 1920. So Harvey's work is a welcome addition to the literature on southern religion.

It is also welcome because of its conclusion. If legislation spurred by the civil rights movement destroyed racism's legal structures and evangelical groups gradually and grudgingly repented of theological racism, racial inclusion remains elusive. Also, as Harvey demonstrates, the energy consumed by racism among white evangelicals--especially those in the Southern Baptist Convention--became redirected to issues of gender and class. The call for wives to submit to godly husbands replaced the cry for African Americans to acquiesce to white supremacy. Now gender equality threatens biblical authority.

There is yet more to be told. Evangelical Protestantism remains the dominant religious element buttressing southern life, but the life and thoughts of others enrich the story. For example, alongside the racism determining the course of white and black life, there existed a steady current of anti-Semitism and an occasionally virulent anti-Catholicism. The Ku Klux Klan, composed mostly of white evangelicals, did not limit its assaults only to African Americans in any of its manifestations. From the Leo Frank case early in the twentieth century to the synagogue bombings in the civil rights era, white evangelicals frequently displayed an aggressive hostility to Jews and other religious minorities. But those minorities have endured.

So, too, have other Protestant clusters. Harvey wisely brings Pentecostals into his purview, but much of the religious dynamic of Appalachian culture remains on the periphery, as does an account of how Restorationist groups such as the Churches of Christ figure into the picture. A full account of southern religious life from 1865 to 1965 remains to be told. Meantime, those drawn to this most religious region owe much to Paul Harvey's diligent telling of freedom's coming.

CHARLES H. LIPPY

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga