Southern Cross

Southern Cross
[[]]
Author(s)	Christine Leigh Heyrman
Publisher	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date	1997
Pages	336
ISBN	9780807847169

    Evangelical Christianity plays a significant, if tenuous, role in modern American society.  Both the force and prevalence of evangelicalism make it difficult to understand that it did not always possess the power it does currently.   But if evangelicalism is associated with specific forms of power, whether moral or political, it is likewise typically associated geographically with the southeastern region of the country, commonly known as the Bible Belt.   Just as surprising perhaps is that this fact has neither always been the case.  Instead, the colonial South was largely dismissive of evangelicalism, rejecting its tenants, which were for them as radical as they were strict.  This initial rejection begs the question as to how a region of the country that was so opposed to evangelical teaching became the bedrock of evangelical culture later in the 19th and 20th centuries.  It is this question that Christine Leigh Heyrman’s book, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt attempts to answer. 

Heyrman’s central thesis is that southern culture was far too different from early evangelicalism for evangelicalism to make any significant headway in the South. For evangelicalism to make any progress in converting the region, it would have to evolve into something that looked a bit more like the southerners it wished to envelope. Heyrman argues that this is exactly what happened to evangelical Christianity during the turn of the century. This process, she argues began in the years preceding the Revolution, climaxing in decades directly after America won its independence. This was a process that occurred over roughly a century. However by its end, the symbiotic nature between evangelicalism and southern culture caused the former to endure a metamorphosis that would ensure its place within southern culture for decades to come. Or as Heyrman writes, “ Southern whites came to speak the language of Canaan as evangelicals learned to speak with a southern accent.” (27).

	Early evangelicalism was a tough road.  Heryrman sifts through the journals and memoirs of a number of early believers to convey the emotional distress that its claims brought on initiates.  Ideas of a literal eternal hell and a corporeal devil drove many to the point of madness, the intensity of self-reflection and the stakes of eternity being almost too much for most to handle.   Heyrman argues that even these elementary characteristics already put evangelicalism at odds with southern culture.  Most southerners were too poor to have the luxury of such ongoing self-analysis.  They did not take well to things that brought such emotional distress to their loved ones.  For many such spiritual anxieties were cues to stay from a form of spirituality that appeared to be detrimental not only to mental stability, but to family relationships.   But even at this point, Heyrman notes the beginning of an evolution.  She points out that early leaders such as the Methodist Francis Asbury understood such concerns, and began to censure preachers spoke to openly about supernatural experiences.  As she looks at the differences between early and later editions of memoirs, she notes that some the recounting of such things begins to become more heavily edited.        


	While southerners showed a clear disdain for overly introspective religion, this was not the only hurtle evangelicalism had to overcome.   Heyrman argues that southern culture was wrought with elements hostile to early evangelicalism.  It was hierarchical and patriarchal.  It would suffer little critique regarding institutions such as slavery, or socially cohesive practices such as drinking and dancing.  She notes that while there were the more heady opponents, such as Thomas Jefferson, the real enemy was apathy rather than freethinking.  In short, southerners were just fine with the colonial Anglicanism that required so little of them.  But early evangelicalism was much more rigid.  Its message implied a spiritual equality that undermined the hierarchical and patriarchal elements of southern society.  Many early preachers attacked slavery, and suffered little for drunken revelers.  All of these things set southern culture and early evangelicalism against one another as inherently conflicting worldviews. 

	One of the strengths of Heyrman’s work is her ability to reconstruct the culture of early evangelicalism from diaries and memoirs of those early believers.  In doing this, Heyrman elucidates the depth of the conflict between regional culture and old time religion.  One of the best examples of this is her second chapter where she recounts the controversies brought on by evangelical ecclesiastical structures.  Early on Heyrman argues that evangelicals began to laud the committed among their youth.   In doing so they unwittingly created a cult of youth.  This became especially problematic for Methodists, who set up a system of itinerant preachers who, young and underpaid, traveled through merciless conditions to speak to numerous congregations every year.  Following the inner struggles of these itinerants, Heyrman traces drastic shifts between self-doubt and self-righteousness.  Oppressed by a culture of celibacy, coupled with unearned ecclesiastical authority over local congregations, they were set up for failure.   Their celibacy automatically made them suspect to local males who in addition to doubting their sexual intentions with wives and daughters were also put off by the authority they wielded.  Such authority undermined the hierarchical world of white southern men, alienating them from evangelicalism.  Understanding that such tension was unsustainable, later measures were taken to lessen the authority of traveling ministers as well as pay them enough to encourage married men to take up their task. 

	Beyond the problems raised by youthful itinerants, evangelicalism raised other challenges for those living in a familial focused environment.  Itinerants definitely had to shirk family responsibilities, but there was also the problem that evangelical churches made it their business to get intimately involved in family life.  They would discourage marriage with unbelievers, often undermining the wills of fathers who hoped to gain wealth through the marriage of their daughters.  They promoted touching across class and racial lines.  And their implied, if not explicit position of many of them on the immorality of slavery called into question the economic responsibility of the religion in the eyes of slaveholders.   All of these things made evangelicalism appear to be inherently anti-family and thus unpalatable to most southern white males.  But Heyrman notes that as evangelicalism progressed, it would later adopt the cult of domesticity from the North, and in doing so would begin to leave the homes to the mothers, which in effect left them to the fathers.  This coupled with a softening stance on slavery made evangelicalism increasingly appetizing to southern white men. 

	The question of gender is central to Heyrman’s argument.  She traces a complicated and ambivalent relationship between women and evangelicalism.  On the one hand women were celebrated and were often able to network structures of power due to their place within the movement.  On the other hand, women existing in a place where they may prove to best their spouses spiritually, turned society upside down in the minds of many men.  Some played this off, dismissing their wives commitment as laughable, while others were more adamant, even violent, in their rejection of such reversals.  Nonetheless, later evangelicalism corrected these offenses in the eyes of southern white men by limiting the powers of women to preach, while male preachers began to show their dominance over questioning women in the local congregations. 

	It should be clear at this point that most of the conflicts that arose between early evangelicalism and southern culture arise from challenges to white patriarchy.  Evangelicalism imbued women and slaves with a spiritual power that white men where simply not comfortable.   But while these things could be mitigated, it also asked men to give up final control of their homes and submit themselves to the judgment of others.  This, exacerbated by evangelicalism’s pacifist tendencies made it difficult to accept up even until the eve of the Revolution.  But for Heyrman, the Revolution was a significant event in the struggle for evangelical hegemony.  Not only did it remove the Anglican competition, leaving a spiritual void for the Baptists and Methodist to fill, it gave the Baptists the chance to prove their manliness on the battlefield.  Most significantly, however, Heyrman argues, the war gave evangelicalism the new vocabulary of patriotic military rhetoric.  Once appropriated, this rhetoric allowed evangelicalism to present itself in a form that was acceptable to white masculinity.  This shift, coupled with evangelicalism’s move away from being concerned with the way men conducted their household in favor of how they conducted themselves in public were just the concessions the movement had to make to white masculinity.  This post revolutionary shift represented a capitulation to southern culture that made evangelicalism finally acceptable southern white men.  Or as Heyrman writes, “Primed by decades of proving themselves men of honor in recognizably southern ways, Baptist and Methodists rose steadily to defend slavery in the 1830’s, secession in the 1850’s, and the holy cause of upholding both with force of arms in 1861” (249).  It was true that the evangelicalism of the 1830s differed greatly that that of the 1790s, and even more than that of the 1760s (27).

	Heyrman’s argumentation is thoughtful and thorough.  Her use of primary documents is skillful and captivating.  While there may be one or two points, where the reader may feel as though she his pushing her point a bit too forcefully, her overall tone is charitable.  It is no surprise that her monograph was the winner of the 1998 Bancroft Prize.