Religion in the Contemporary South: Changes, Continuities, and Contexts.

Religion in the Contemporary South: Changes, Continuities, and Contexts. Edited by Corrie E. Norman and Don S. Armentrout. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. Pp. xxiv, 332. $21.95, ISBN 1-57233-361-8.)

In Religion in the Contemporary South: Changes, Continuities, and Contexts, editors Corrie E. Norman and Don S. Armentrout have brought together a set of essays as diverse as the southern religious experience itself and authored by a truly impressive cadre of scholars. The volume ultimately will interest serious students and scholars because it raises numerous points for further research.

All of the essays share two basic assumptions: that the religious experience in the South is both distinct from and more intense than religious experiences elsewhere, and that the once hegemonic influence of the main denominations--Baptists and Methodists--has broken down, resulting in an increasingly diverse religious experience in the South. Indeed, Bill Leonard's essay on the fracturing of the Southern Baptist Convention demonstrates that diversity has undermined coherence even within one denomination. Still, according to Wayne Flynt, historians need to be mindful of denominationalism, which he argues is stronger in the South than elsewhere. Flynt notes that several excellent books have examined social issues across denominational lines but suggests that denominationally focused studies--as opposed to strictly traditional denominational histories of formal religious institutions and their leaders--can offer considerable insight into the religious and social history of the South. Indeed, even within the present volume, most of the essays examine one or another religion's experience in the South; only the first essay on women's experiences is a truly interdenominational study.

Among the most intriguing essays in the volume are those on non-Christian religions. While scholars have recognized the Jewish and Islamic presence in the South, far less work has been done on these religions--much less on Hinduism and Buddhism--than on the dominant Protestant denominations. Several essays in Religion in the Contemporary South address relations between non-Christian denominations and the wider, clearly Christian, southern society. Still, more could have been done to investigate the relationship between convert and immigrant adherents. Indeed, Steven Ramey notes tantalizingly that "[t]he majority of the initiates of New Goloka [Hindu Temple] are European American" but offers little follow-up on the relationship between these members and South Asian Hindus in North Carolina (p. 215).

The last three essays focus on the Episcopal experience in the South. Though Episcopalians have not had the numerical presence in the South that Baptists and Methodists have had, Gardiner Shattuck shows that their experience mirrors the shift from community churches to mega-churches in surprising ways, and that the southern Episcopal experience is in many ways out of step with the national Episcopal Church. The section ends with Donald Mathews's examination of Episcopalians and segregation, in which he shows that the Episcopal Church in the South has followed southern trends more than national trends at least since the great revivals of the early nineteenth century.

The volume offers two multi-author essays on women's religious experiences in the South--one focused exclusively on female priests in the Episcopal Church and the other ranging broadly across a variety of denominations. Both raise numerous points for further investigation, though it is unclear if the experience of female Episcopal priests in the South is demonstrably different from that of their colleagues elsewhere. On the other hand, the volume offers little about the African American religious experience in the South, a gap the editors themselves lament in their preface. This is particularly problematic because, as Donald Mathews points out, the African American narrative and the "approved" southern narrative diverge at several points (p. 304). Nevertheless, issues regarding race clearly permeate the essays on Latino Catholics, South Asian Buddhists and Hindus, and Muslims, as well as Mathews's own essay. These serve as a reminder that race relations in the South are more complicated than the black/white dichotomy might suggest.

In the end, it is clear that what Sam Hill calls the normative experience of southern evangelical Protestantism has collapsed in the face of religious diversity. Religion in the Contemporary South offers a glimpse of this new diversity and will help scholars frame questions for future research.

ALAN SCOT WILLIS

Northern Michigan University