Judgement and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis.

Southern folkways draw deeply from the wellsprings of religious imagination. The region is overwhelmingly Protestant and permeated by evangelical beliefs in experience-as-destiny, of life as a search for conversion, and of redemption from depravity and sin. Ironically (or perhaps providentially), it was a Catholic novelist, Flannery O'Connor, who made the memorable observation that the South is "Christ-haunted."

Judgment and Grace in Dixie, by Charles Reagan Wilson, a historian at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, is a brilliant excavation of religious strains in the Southern psyche. Wilson was coeditor, with William Ferris, of the much-praised 1,600-page Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. The Center for the Study of Southern Culture, where Wilson teaches, has brought prestige to a campus that has come light years since the 1962 race riot that left two men dead. The center's projects include a blues archive to which B.B. King donated thousands of recordings; a film-video catalogue that markets a range of documentaries on religion, politics, culture, and folk life; and annual conferences on William Faulkner and Elvis Presley.

Wilson's core theme is the emergence of a "civil religion" after the 1920s, a time when the collective memory of defeat in the Civil War still held a heightened sense of myth. Historian George Tindall's notion of "myths as mental pictures summing up a people's experiences" is Wilson's touchstone. The Lost Cause myth made secular saints of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders.

Even now, a generation after the civil fights movement collided with that myth (and largely toppled it), the Rebel flag is the militant symbol of a past that, in Faulkner's words, "is never really past." In a 1984 campaign swing through the South, Ronald Reagan regaled crowds with the demagogic line, "The South will rise again." Just last winter, Patrick Buchanan, in a cynical pitch to whites, argued that "Dixie" was a song with a meaning just as valid to one group as the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" for another. David Duke preached a similar brand of relativism in the 1991 Louisiana governor's race.

The Lost Cause, writes Wilson, folded into a theological idea that "Southerners were a Chosen People, but they were also a Tragic People." To many northern intellectuals, the idea drips with sentimentality. But the Agrarian School of the 1920s, which formed at Vanderbilt and was led by Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom, extolled an ethos of land and family as a bulwark against industrialization. The religious sensibility was deep; the vision was blurred, however, by a failure to recognize the violent racial domination behind the Lost Cause myth. Warren eventually reversed himself and in the 1960s became a critic of segregation.

By then, the civil rights movement was advancing a counter-myth. The impassioned oratory of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., identified Southern blacks with the children of Israel, searching for a promised land of freedom. King stirred the African-American spiritual imagination, and it surged alongside the white evangelical current. "The myth of a biracial South finally recognizes that the Southern tragedy is symbolic of the human condition," writes Wilson. "Southern white narcissism - and American pride - must be repudiated, says this myth, in favor of the awareness of its common lot with the rest of humanity."

A new white myth came from sports. "The god of Southern football is a tribal god, a god of the Chosen people," notes Wilson. He's serious. When Jefferson Davies died in New Orleans in 1889, a four-and-a-half-mile procession followed the funeral cortege. Tens of thousands followed King's horse-drawn hearse through the streets of Atlanta in 1968. A few years later large crowds turned out for the funeral of Elvis Presley in Memphis. But the most massive funeral came in Birmingham, a half a million people for the Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant.

Elvis's fusion of rockabilly, white gospel, and rhythm-and-blues galvanized teen-agers with the body language of Southern bluesmen. Elvis embodied a biracial myth; yet the homeboy who said "yes, sir" to reporters when he returned from the army was still a sexual outlaw to social critics of early rock 'n' roll.

Byrant, by contrast, made winning "the ultimate morality." His spectacular coaching record straddled the transition from segregated to biracial football teams. In the end, he was a Southern man for all seasons - and human to a fault. "He cursed and yelled and was generally gruff," writes Wilson.

He had smoked too much, drunk too much, and liked to party . . . . This fit Southern expectations perfectly. A people raised on hard religion based on sin and guilt knew that everyone falls short in the glory of God. Byrant's very vices evoked images of the Southern past. For a people mired through much of their history in miserable poverty, the only way out indeed seemed to be to fight and claw and scrape and escape it. The Southern Protestant religion leaves room for the possibility of redemption, and the worse the sin the better the feelings of salvation.

The photographs by Tom Rankin and Susan B. Lee interspersed through the text capture the grace and timelessness of small churches, baptisms in rural ponds, and art works of unlettered folk.

Jason Berry is the author of Lead Us Not into Temptation (Doubleday).