To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865-1915.

By Sally G. McMillen (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. xviii plus 297 pp. $54.00/cloth $24.95/paper).

Sally McMillen's latest book offers a detailed exploration of the institutional development of Sunday schools after the Civil War. She identifies Sunday schools as embodiments of modern, rationalized social uplift, seen as a way to shape behavior and recruit church members. Although McMillen never makes the connection explicit, her analysis suggests that Sunday school organizers' efforts became the spiritual analog of New South boosters' business aspirations.

Northern and southern Protestants viewed Sunday Schools as a way both to reclaim order out of social chaos and to heal sectional wounds. Southern Protestants of both races initially welcomed northern missionary and Sunday school societies' efforts to begin Sunday schools throughout the South. These groups not only provided expertise and personnel, but also much needed materials. Indeed, for many southerners, Sunday schools supplemented inadequate public education. Eventually, however, white southerners came to resent the intrusion of northern groups, and saw church instruction less as a vehicle for sectional reunification and more as a way to build loyalty to regionally-based denominations. In response, many church groups began their own in-house publishing companies, and encouraged their teachers, with limited success, to use only the materials of their own denominations. Programs increasingly competed over pupils, seeing them both as consumers of church literature and as lifelong congregants. Although officials feared that youngsters might be tempted by rival Sunday schools, debates about doctrine rarely entered the Sunday school room itself. Sunday schools, perhaps to the chagrin of denominational adherents, were remarkably similar across both regional and denominational lines.

McMillen's provocative analysis presents Sunday schools and church officials as both in thrall with and suspicious of modern secular trends. Officials determined through statistical analysis that Sunday school instruction provided the most efficient means of winning converts, thereby ensuring local churches' continued viability. Sunday school superintendents used standardized lessons to rationalize Sunday school instruction and to encourage effective teaching. Sunday schools developed into a well-coordinated and proven method of recruiting a steady stream of new church members, shepherding their religious development from childhood to adulthood. Students became the consumers of the pamphlets, lessons, and newsletters published by church presses, which in turn generated the income denominations needed to expand their reach. Sunday schools in this period, as McMillen argues, were indeed modern, using progressive methods to achieve their ends. Ironically, even as church groups sought to mitigate the secular effects of modern culture by co-opting railroads and amusement parks for religious purposes through Sunday school outings, they mimicked secular business practices. Not surprisingly, Sunday schools created controversy, denounced by some as being without Biblical foundation, by others as being too focused on profit or too social in character. Nevertheless, by 1915, Sunday schools were a fixture of the southern religious landscape.

Advocates viewed Sunday school instruction as an essential tool of social uplift, designed to ameliorate social problems by creating a more moral and better behaved populace. Sunday school teachers taught the fundamentals of Christian belief, but they also inculcated middle-class standards of dress, cleanliness, deportment, and punctuality. Although McMillen does not argue this directly, they implicitly sought to spread a progressive, white, middle-class vision of civilization with its attendant beliefs about racial hierarchy, patriarchy, and class structure. It is not surprising, then, that some white southerners began African-American Sunday schools, believing blacks could not direct their own religious education. African Americans, in turn, voted with their feet and flocked to schools of their own making. African-American Sunday school education also encouraged uplift through "respectable" behavior, but, as other historians have shown, blacks often adopted white norms for more subversive purposes--to undermine white superiority rather than to emulate it. White Sunday school missionaries were hardly more enlightened when it came to class, despairing of their ability to transform poor, rural whites. McMillen, however, though she describes these attitudes, does not place them in the context of the development of the new southern social order. She notes that white Sunday schools ignored the seeming contradictions between Christian behavior and segregation, and that Sunday schools taught middle-class values, but it seems clear that Sunday schools were wholehearted participants in entrenching ideas of racial difference, women's subordination to male authority, and class hierarchy. Civilized respectability, the core of much of Sunday school teaching, taught white standards of appropriate gender roles, and simultaneously enshrined a social order that kept the "shiftless, ignorant, worthless, class of anti-social whites of South" (1) on the margins.

McMillen's work raises similar questions regarding gender. She points out that most Sunday school teachers were women. Sunday school teaching was a logical extension of women's traditional role as moral caregivers and nurturers of children. At the same time, however, Sunday school advocates regarded their programs as necessary because they believed children were receiving inadequate religious education at home, suggesting that women were abdicating their role as mothers. Some southerners, including clergymen, opposed Sunday schools because they might "lead mothers to forsake their duties" at home by shifting responsibility for moral education from the home to the church (80). The apparent paradox between a willingness to expand women's role to include Sunday school teaching and a simultaneous concern that Sunday schools encouraged women to allow institutions to perform their traditional functions receives little sustained attention. One wonders whether the controversies about women's role in Sunday schools might illuminate broader debates about women's role in the developing New South social order.

McMillen depicts Sunday schools in isolation, as though they were the only institutions seeking to bring about a New South. This approach raises obvious questions about Sunday schools' interactions with other organizations and ideologies engaged in southern uplift. McMillen's sources suggest interesting lines of analysis about the creation and inculcation of a social order premised on white women's subordination to white men, racial hierarchy, and efforts to make all whites behave as a supposedly superior race should in the face of persistent, albeit subtle black resistance. To Raise Up the South is a fine examination of Sunday schools, but one wishes McMillen had used what she uncovered to examine broader questions about the post-war South.

ENDNOTE 

(1.) Ham/Hamilton Laughlin's famous characterization of poor southern whites, though stated in the 1925 case that eventually gave constitutional imprimatur to the compulsory sterilization of the "unfit," reflected the attitudes of many southern Sunday school advocates. Quoted in "Three Generations, No Imbeciles: New Light on Buck v. Bell," New York University Law Review, LX (April 1985), 51.

Lisa Lindquist Dorr

University of Alabama