Religious Practices

“[T]he South… is most certainly Christ-haunted.” Flannery O’Connor’s famous observation, made in 1960, highlights the fact that religion’s influence on the South is inescapable. Religion is one of the most important themes in southern history. As one of the primary social institutions in a mostly rural society, organized religion played a crucial role in determining values and culture. The South and its people, perhaps more so than any other region of the United States, have felt the effects of religion. William Faulkner, whose novels illustrate the ways that religion has shaped southerners, explained that “the Christian legend is part of any Christian’s background, especially the background of a country boy, a Southern country boy,” admitting that, in the South, religion is “just there.” ¹ Despite novelists’ long-standing recognition of the importance of religion, historians were reluctant to talk about the subject. Until the 1970s and 1980s, the topic was nearly taboo for historians, except for the influence of the Puritans on Yankees. But in the last four decades, interest in religion has exploded, making it one of the most exciting topics for historians of the United States. Historians of the South have not neglected religion. In the 1970s, groundbreaking works by Donald Matthews, Samuel Hill, and Albert Raboteau illustrated the importance of religion in shaping southern history. In the 1980s, historians further explored the role of religion in the South. Rhys Isaac, who demonstrated the ways evangelicalism shaped eighteenth-century Virginia, Orville Vernon Burton, who has shown how important religion is to the making and shaping of community(ies) in the rural South, and Samuel Hill, whose edited collection, Varieties of Southern Religion, emphasized the diversity of southern religious experiences, all revealed the importance of religion in the South.