What Does it Mean to be Southern?

As Peter Applebome begins his book entitled Dixie Rising: How the South is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture, he describes a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, calling this organization the “most southern of institutions.” Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are clearly a big deal in this part of America. Applebome states that “the confederation of Southern Baptists always summed up the feverish religiosity, righteous probity, and confining insularity of the South (5, 1996).” It is not so much the Southern Baptists themselves that interest me so much here, but rather the way that their religion seems to define their way of life as well as the way of life of the people who live around or near them. To be southern, it seems, is to be Christian, and furthermore to be Protestant Christian. The probity and insularity of which Applebome speak are surely effects of the inundation of the south with Protestant Christianity. I do not wish to limit any valid definition of southern culture as a whole to an analysis of its religious atmosphere alone, but I believe it to be true that the religious atmosphere in the south has always been a part of what defines the south as different from the rest of the nation. Applebome goes on to illustrate various ways that one might define what it means to be southern, but there is a context of Protestant Christianity in which all of the social and political definitions of ‘southern-ness’ Applebome provides must be viewed. In the first chapter alone, he discusses the political ramifications of the growing religious right, the juxtaposition of past alongside present that is so common in the south, the racial history of the south and its impact on society, and various other truths about why the south is southern. However, in order to understand these truths, the people behind them, and the culture they come from, one must understand the Christian lens through which most southerners view the world.