Politics and Religion in the White South.

Politics and Religion in the White South. Edited by Glenn Feldman. Religion in the South. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 386. $55.00, ISBN 0-8131-2363-1.)

Religion and Public Life in the South: In the Evangelical Mode. Edited by Charles Reagan Wilson and Mark Silk. Religion by Region Series. (Walnut Creek, Calif., and other cities: AltaMira Press, c. 2005. Pp. 224. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-7591-0635-5: cloth, $69.00, ISBN 0-7591-0634-7.)

By all measures, the South is (and has been) the most religious region in the United States. In recent years, southern states have provided an almost insurmountable block of electoral votes for Republican presidential candidates. Moreover, with a southern evangelical winning the White House in five of the last eight elections, these two books are a most welcome exploration of the nexus between religion and politics in the South. Both volumes are collections of essays and take a rather broad view of politics, with the editors not limiting their authors to a narrow focus on elections and partisan campaign activity by religious interest groups. Religion and Public Life in the South: In the Evangelical Mode is part of a series with an intriguing premise: to explore how the role of religion in public life varies from region to region. If the other volumes are as good as this one, then they deserve to be in libraries large and small. Politics and Religion in the White South is a bit narrower with its essays focusing on whites, so one will have to look elsewhere for an analysis of the religious political activities of African Americans and other ethnic minorities. However, this book has an interesting mix of perspectives and methods from historians and political scientists. Unfortunately, both volumes concentrate on the contemporary South of the last two or three decades, providing only in broad strokes the historical background of how current trends developed. But reading the volumes together reveals just how rich is the topic of the public role of religion in southern society and culture.

The essays in Religion and Public Life are more limited in part because of the need to conform to the series format. For example, one may argue against the decision of Mark Silk, the series editor, to put Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas--all traditionally southern states--in the "Southern Crossroads" region (along with Oklahoma and Missouri). Silk offers no clear justification for this decision apart from implicitly suggesting that these states represent transitional areas between the South and other regions. Moreover, the essays tend to be a little formulaic; the authors sometimes strain under the requirement to discuss statistical data and to skim through the historical background before getting to the meat of their topic. The consequence is that some repetition and overlap between essays occurs. For example, Ted Ownby has the thankless task of creating a statistical portrait of the religious South. He does, however, offer an interesting measure for a "typical" southern county: 25 percent of church attenders go to either a white Baptist or a black Protestant church. With that baseline, Ownby finds that Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina are the most "southern," while Florida and Virginia are the least so. But many parts of Ownby's statistical analysis are repeated without much additional insight in other essays. Charles Reagan Wilson's graceful introduction provides a historical survey of religion in southern life, but some of the authors cover much the same territory, adding only a few additional details.

Once past the requirements of the series format, several of the essays offer provocative arguments about religion and southern society that call for additional development. For example, Paul Harvey's insight that the religious right has replaced white supremacy with patriarchy is worthy of more detailed analysis. He offers tantalizing clues in his essay in Religion and Public Life to suggest he may be right, but he does not take the chance to follow up in the freer form permitted in Politics and Religion to lay out the details of the transformation. The essay by Cynthia Lynn Lyerly on women in southern churches in Religion and Public Life offers only indirect evidence to support Harvey, confirming the generally conservative assumptions about gender roles in mainstream southern denominations. But she also shows, through case studies of the Church Mothers of the Church of God in Christ and the Southern Baptist Convention's Women Missionary Union, the way women have worked around traditional assumptions about their roles to make significant contributions to home and foreign missions, education, and charitable work. Nor do the two essays on women in Politics and Religion add much, except that Glenn Feldman's on women in the Alabama Ku Klux Klan suggests that gender and racial hierarchies have a long history, with religion playing a central role in binding them together. Andrew M. Manis's essay on Dorothy Tilly shows how her work on racial reconciliation during the civil rights era served to challenge those hierarchies.

Most of the authors are well known and in some cases cover familiar territory, like Harvey on Southern Baptists in both volumes; Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox on the religious right in Virginia's politics in Politics and Religion; William E. Montgomery on African American religion in Religion and Public Life; and Manis on the South's civil religions in Religion and Public Life--though Manis extends his analysis to cover the culture wars of the 1990s and the war on terror in the new century. Samuel S. Hill has the challenge of discussing Appalachia and Florida for Religion and Public Life, neither of which fit well culturally into the region of which they are geographically a part. Yet Hill skillfully shows how studying the margins illumines the features of the mainstream.

Some of the essays cover familiar topics with fresh insight. For example, Stephen P. Miller's discussion of Billy Graham's southern crusades in Politics and Religion demonstrates not only how they were a force for desegregation but also how Graham can be seen as a case study of a southern racial moderate struggling to reconcile civility with civil rights. Other essays break new ground in discussing areas needing a scholar's analytical eye, like Ownby on Donald Wildmon's American Family Association in Politics and Religion. In some ways, Wildmon's effort to mobilize evangelicals to boycott sponsors of television shows that he labeled immoral is an example of civic gospel in action. James L. Guth, in his Politics and Religion essay, offers an intriguing analysis of how the reinterpretation of the traditional southern doctrine of the "spirituality of the church," which holds that the church's main mission was saving souls (not transforming society), was converted to one in which the church has the duty to redeem society from moral decay by calling citizens to abide by biblical ethics, thus restoring America to its Christian foundations.

While these volumes provide excellent coverage of white evangelicals, religious and racial/ethnic minorities receive scant attention. For example, in Religion and Public Life, Charles H. Lippy offers a rather broad survey of how Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and others (only about 10 percent of southern adherents) developed "tactics for survival" in this overwhelmingly Protestant region (p. 125). But in Politics and Religion, Mark K. Bauman demonstrates how Jews during the Gilded Age and Progressive era were able to influence public life in Atlanta far beyond their proportion in the population.

In sum, these essays show how vibrant and vital is the field of southern religious history and make significant contributions to our understanding of how religion and politics connect in a specific regional context. As such, both collections belong in academic libraries as well as general collections of public libraries.

WILLIAM R. GLASS

American Studies Center, University of Warsaw