Bible Belt Politics: The Confluence of Christianity and Politics in the American South Since the Civil War and Today

Throughout my semester of research and exploration of the topic of Christianity in the south, politics emerged at every turn. As I examined various aspects of the intermingling of southern life and Christianity and as I delved into how Christianity shapes southern culture, I found that there was an unspoken political discourse richly entwined with the Christian faith in the minds of many southerners. Paul Harvey has noted that academic scholarship in the field of post-Civil War religion in the south is “still in its adolescence” (Harvey 387). This study is an attempt to add to this growing field and to answer the questions of how Christianity and politics became so inextricably linked in the south and how this political undercurrent manifests itself in southern Christianity today.

In order to understand how it is that Christianity became inextricably linked with politics in the southern mind, we must trace back to the earliest European settlements, where Protestantism already “exercised dominant political power in the south” (Lienesch 111). Initially, this Protestantism was vehemently in support of the separation of church and state as is evident by protestant separatist James Madison’s Bill of Rights provision that prevented the establishment of a state church in the new America (Lienesch 111). With the antebellum south, however, came a pervasive politico-religious agenda. Mid-nineteenth century southerners saw their richly religious culture as “the last bastion of Christian civilization in America,” and took threats to this culture as threats against Christianity (Wilson, “Lost Cause” 207). Lienesch notes, “By 1861 any separation between church and state had all but disappeared, as southern clergymen in large numbers supported the Confederacy, describing the impending war as a crusade for righteousness” (Lienesch 112). Southerners thus saw the Civil War as a righteous Christian war and after their loss reacted to progressive pressure from the north with much resistance.

The history of the south is a history of conflict between tradition and progress that largely results from this progressive pressure following the Civil War (Robinson). The result of southerners’ resistance of progress was the religion of the lost cause, which Lienesch describes as “the combination of Christian and Confederate imagery to reiterate the righteousness of the war” (Lienesch 112). Southerners believed that God was on their side during the Civil War, and they reconciled their loss by turning to the religion of the lost cause and a strong emphasis on personal morality (Robinson). These allowed southerners to view the war as righteous and themselves as God’s chosen people, who had lost the war due to their own personal moral failings. The result was a culture that arduously valued personal morality and re-invented their history and their traditions in order to keep them alive; history and traditions anchored in the evangelical-leaning protestant churches of the south (Robinson). As Applebome notes in Dixie Rising, “it wasn’t until after the Civil War that the true myth of the south was born” (Applebome 126). It wasn’t until southern culture had to be preserved that it really came alive (Robinson). Glenn Feldman notes that “religion in the south has, far more often than not, been a force for convention, tradition, continuity, the status quo: in a word, conservatism” (Feldman 288). The status quo society to which Feldman refers was, if not invented by the church, then certainly upheld by the church in the post Civil War south. Feldman equates the status quo society of the south with hard right politics, and says that “the white south has never really changed politically, and in the way that politics is a reflection of society, it has not changed fundamentally either” (Feldman 293). Whether or not Feldman’s statement holds true today, it certainly holds truth for the early years following the Civil War in the south and through the early nineteenth century.
The politically hard right status quo society did not just encompass evangelical Protestants in the post-war south; all of society was wrapped up in the church. Paul Harvey, referencing Ted Ownby’s Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920, notes that “although evangelicalism was never as all-pervasive as the believers hoped, ‘people who rarely attended church and who lived far outside the evangelicals’ moral code nevertheless found ways to express their belief in the virtues of the dominant religion’… Evangelicals (in the late nineteenth century), Ownby contends, moved from church discipline to disciplining society as a whole” (qtd. Harvey 395). As Harvey points out, the religion of the lost cause and strict personal morality reached its arms out from the church doors and wrapped them around southern communities, embracing them with a fervor that would not soon let go. The religion of the lost cause became the southern civil religion, and established a distinctively southern set of values and way of life that was based in moralistic Puritanism and traditional Protestant Christianity. Southern civil religion provided southerners with an identity in the nation and a basis for a public moral code during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, but southern identity was about to change (Wilson, “Lost Cause” 209). The advent of the late twentieth century brought drastic political and religious change to the region.

The second half of the twentieth century were tumultuous years, and the dust had to settle before religious historians and sociologists could really figure out what had happened. Prior to the dramatic shift that accompanied the second half of the twentieth century, the increasingly evangelical and pro-segregation Democratic Party provided the political wherewithal for wealthy southern whites to pursue their political agendas through the mid-twentieth century, during which time the south remained solid blue (Hallen, Flynt 495). However, a dramatic shift in southern politics occurred in the late twentieth century, following the turbulent years of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of moderate anti-segregation leaders in the Democratic Party in the 1970s (Bullock 216). White Southern Democrats or “Dixiecrats,” Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Bill, were alienated from the Democratic Party as southern Blacks solidified their allegiance to the new Democrats (Bullock 216). This shift of party allegiance across the southern electorate during the second half of the twentieth century had much to do with race and the 1954 Brown v Board of Education desegregation Supreme Court ruling (Flynt 496). It also had to do with suburbanization, economic and class changes, and new leadership in both parties (Flynt 495). Many southern political leaders shifted their allegiances away from the Democratic Party. One such leader was South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, whose 1964 political shift to the Republican Party estranged white southerners further from the Democratic Party and helped to cement the dividing lines of the southern electorate (Hallen, Bullock 216). Thus, into the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first century, the GOP was seen as the greatest political ally to southern civil religion and the southern way of life, not to mention southern evangelicals.

While southern states were changing color politically, turning from blue to red, southern evangelical Christianity became more and more conservative. Southern evangelicals started the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s with the goal of returning to traditional southern family values, the values of the southern civil religion. Often during this period, conservative southerners and protestant evangelicals would unite to support political agendas including Prohibition, Sunday closing campaigns, Jim Crow laws, economic reform, school prayer, and outlawing the teaching of evolution in public schools, and to oppose other political issues such as the public financing of private schools, abortion and sex education, homosexuality, and women’s liberation (Lienesch 112, Flynt 499). The shift of southern politicians combined with the personal morality issues of the culture wars led southern Christians to feel that the GOP best represented their political interests in the late twentieth century. Republican politicians embraced the political agenda of southern Christians and the south became solid red (Hallen). Southern evangelical churches were a large part of why the south became reliably Republican. “Evangelical Christians… virtually turned their churches into Republican precinct headquarters, registering new voters, distributing voter guides, and warning delinquent members who neglected to vote that they were partly responsible for murdering fetuses and destroying the moral fiber of this country” (Flynt 499). There was a convenience to this relationship that both the southern churches and the GOP benefitted from. In the reconstruction south, the church had provided communities with social networks and places of political organization; in the late twentieth century south, the GOP now provided the church with means to political ends and the church provided the GOP with a core voter base (Hallen, Robinson). This has many modern-day ramifications, which will be explored later. The social gospel, as southern civil religion has been called, defined the post-war south socially, religiously, and politically. However, the social gospel was not the only gospel that took root in the post-Civil War south; evangelical fundamentalism took a stronghold that must be explored if we are to understand how Christian and political roads have converged in the south since the Civil War.

Fundamentalism has been a harbinger of political conservatism in the south since the early twentieth century. Fundamentalism grew out of southern Protestant evangelicalism, which Charles Reagan Wilson said “came to dominate the religious life of southerners… and served as an unofficially established religious tradition, powerful in worldly resources, institutional reach, moral authority, and cultural hegemony” (Wilson, “Overview” 2). This deep and wide influence of protestant evangelicalism combined with the pervasive southern civil religion led to a climate in which some Christians felt that the gospel was being distorted and misrepresented, and that they needed to branch off from and resist these mainstream patterns of Christianity (Mathewson). A return to the fundamentals of the faith was desired, and a theology that was obsessed with “doctrinal exactitude and correct belief” in the supreme authority of the Bible emerged (Hill 2). Thus southern evangelical fundamentalists were born. George Marsden has defined a fundamentalist as “an evangelical who is angry about something… who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values or mores, such as those associated with secular humanism” (Marsden 1). Marsden provides a clear articulation of how southern evangelical fundamentalism developed in opposition to liberal theology and to cultural secularism.

Initially and for most of its history, the fundamentalist movement remained apolitical. Early leaders such as Jerry Falwell “insisted that the church separate itself from politics and concentrate instead on the winning of souls” (Lienesch 113). In early fundamentalist churches in the south, politics took a back seat to evangelism. Hill articulates this well: “Organizing politically was simply not an item in the divine calling. Thus for half a century or more, the movement was separatist and contrarian. To most, there was no use, nor any faithfulness, in working to improve things; the Lord’s second advent would take care of that” (Hill 2). Hill outlines well the fundamentalist theology that led adherents of the movement to retract from society from the time of the rise of the movement in the 1920s until the 1970s, when fundamentalism gained national attention and became politically active. Hill describes this shift as a shift from a theology of retreat to a theology of conquest (Hill 2). Hill suggests that the catalyst for this shift was “the vacuum in public moral life that has resulted from radical polarization and the cultural conquest by relativist and secularist mentalities” (Hill 3). Fundamentalism is always reactive (Mathewson). The protestant evangelical fundamentalism that emerged on the national stage in the late twentieth century was reacting to the growing prominence of secularism in America and had switched their mode of reaction from a reaction of defense to a reaction of offense. Their offense was and is based upon one of the primary tenets of fundamentalism, that of presuppositionalism.
One of the clearest and most consistent tenets of evangelical fundamentalism in the American south is that of presuppositionalism, which maintains that the Bible is both authoritative and self-evidently true (Mathewson). The implication of presuppositionalism is that every sphere of life is guided by the authoritative word of the Bible, including social morality and politics (Mathewson). For much of the twentieth century, mainline Protestants aligned with the secular political consensus, which in the south was guided primarily by southern civil religion, thereby squeezing out conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who resisted the secular consensus because it did not adhere to Biblical teaching (Marsden 94). The late twentieth century saw personal morality come into the political spotlight, giving evangelical fundamentalists issues to rally around; they had plenty to say about personal morality. Leaders like Falwell, who had initially called for the separation of believers from society and politics, began ‘exhorting’ their followers to take political action regarding issues such as abortion, gay marriage, gun ownership, and the roles of women (Lienesch 113). The religious-political coalition that organized around these and other issues became known as the Religious Right, and manifested itself in organizations such as the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority. For the Religious Right, the separation of church and state was secondary to the agenda of “setting evangelical moral standards for the nation,” (Marsden 97). Hill poignantly notes that this new agenda took precedence over southern identity; for evangelical fundamentalists, being Christian was far more important than being southern, and thus organizations such as the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority took on a national, rather than a southern, scope of influence (Hill 3). Thus, with the rise of southern evangelical fundamentalists, religion and politics became more entwined in the south (and in the nation) than they had ever been. As a result, tensions arose in the south regarding the separation of church and state.

In the south, history and tradition are valued, so it follows that debate over the separation of church and state would look to history for answers. When it comes to the issue of the separation of church and state, in the south there are essentially two sides: fundamentalists and evangelicals who maintain that the founding era and the Constitution were based on evangelical principles, and the secularists or adherents of southern civil religion who do not. Historically speaking, the latter are correct; “an evangelical discourse about the sacred character of the founding” did not emerge until the 1830s (Noll 185.) However, when dealing with religion and politics, history is sometimes silenced, and in this case, the ramifications of southern evangelicals holding onto a view of the founding of the nation as an evangelical one are important despite the history. It is true that the founding occurred in an overwhelmingly protestant atmosphere. However, this Protestantism was not of the same theology as modern evangelicalism and in fact “differed substantially from modern evangelical conservative Protestantism” (Noll 185, 191). Thus, a conflict emerges that cannot be easily reconciled. Noll articulately outlines this conflict: “The founders’ guidelines for religion and society came out of a situation that was much more theistic than some modern liberals admit, but also out of a situation that was much less explicitly Christian than modern evangelicals wish it had been. The founders wanted much less specific religious influence on politics than contemporary evangelical conservative Protestants seek, but they looked to religion for much more support for republican morality than opponents of contemporary evangelicals can tolerate” (Noll 200). Regardless of the religious environment in which the nation was founded, the majority of the tension surrounding separation of church and state throughout most of post-Civil War southern history has been rooted in evangelical agendas based on presuppositionalist views of the Bible.

The issue of the separation of church and state split the southern protestant church into two main branches: one expressing social liberalism and wanting to remain a part of the larger American culture and the other a more conservative one that resisted the chaos and confusion that came with the changing of the times. The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 became a symbolic battle between these two schools of thought. The trial surrounded John Scopes, a Tennessee high school science teacher, who agreed to be arrested and prosecuted for breaking Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, which prohibited the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools. Scopes was a pawn in the great battle of theologies that was raged between the conservative fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan and the ACLU lawyer Clarence Darrow. Though the state of Tennessee upheld the law, Darrow won the culture battle, and the world ridiculed the fundamentalists who defended the law based upon the Bible. In Marsden’s words, the Scopes Monkey Trial “thrust fundamentalism into worldwide attention and brought about its decline as an effective national force” (Marsden 60). The Scopes Monkey Trial is a prime example of evangelical fundamentalists prioritizing presuppositionalism above the separation of church and state. As a result of the trial and the cultural ridicule that followed, fundamentalists shut themselves away from the secular world. The Scopes Trial was the beginning of the south recognizing and responding to evangelical fundamentalism, and southern Protestantism has been split between fundamentalists and mainstream protestants ever since.

We have established that there is a rich political history of Christianity in the south that has led to the linkage of politics and religion in the southerner’s mind. From the rise of personal morality and the religion of the lost cause, the southern civil religion and the hard right status quo society, from the branching off of evangelical fundamentalists and the tension surrounding the separation of church and state, political discourse pervades the history of Christianity in the south. But what are the ramifications of this for today’s society? What are the consequences for today’s southerners and for today’s Christians? The political undercurrent of Christianity in the south manifests itself today in ways that are even more compelling than the manifestations of the past.

There are many interesting things happening in southern Christianity today. Protestant evangelical theology is leaning more and more toward fundamentalism and fundamentalist denominations such as the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) are stronger than ever. Meanwhile, mainline protestant churches are losing members as their congregations age. The south is not as homogenously dominated by political conservatism today as it once was, but the modern south is a product of its history and we have seen that in southern history, Christianity and politics go hand-in-hand. In order to understand the new political movements happening among southern Christians today, we must first observe how Christianity is changing.

Southern protestant evangelicals have become fundamentalists in that they have adopted theologies that are exclusivist, value “doctrinal exactitude and correct belief,” are presuppositionalist and value particular teachings above others (Hill 2). These characteristics do not differentiate the new southern fundamentalists from any other Christian fundamentalists; what does differentiate them is that the new southern fundamentalist is politically active and very much a part of society, rather than being withdrawn from society. Hill states, “What makes the new phenomenon of southern fundamentalism distinctive is that its people have always been at home in the world. They are old-style southern evangelicals who have on certain issues shifted to align themselves with the recently-emergent more conservative movements” (Hill 3). The shift from traditional mainline Protestantism to modern fundamentalism has also been a result of southerners’ disillusionment with traditional southern civil religion. Martin notes, “fundamentalism…provided a new basis for community for people who had lost faith in the Lost Cause and could no longer treat its icons as the basis for solidarity” (Martin 3). Fundamentalist evangelicalism has taken on the role of the traditional Protestant church in the south.

Politics have played a large role in this shift from southern evangelicalism to a more conservative fundamentalism. The political whirlwind surrounding the issues of the mid-twentieth century culture wars has been resurrected, with harder-right conservative Christians demanding the restoration of ‘family values.’ Issues including abortion, homosexuality and marriage, and sexual education have motivated activism among conservative southern Christians. Secular America has responded to this deepened political conservatism among southern Christians in the late twentieth century by “eradicating evangelicalism from academia and public life altogether,” thereby freeing society of the “repressive features of evangelical ideology” (Marsden 99). As a result, fundamentalist evangelicals in the south have either closed themselves off from secular society completely or become even more politically active, seeking legislative reform of social morality.

Today, the Religious Right inspires visions of cultural domination in those who fear it. People are aware of the evangelical-fundamentalist leanings of the modern leaders of the Religious Right, and some are uncomfortable with the idea of the Religious Right Christianizing America, especially when it comes to issues of personal morality such as abortion and gay marriage (Smith 92-93). The political agenda of contemporary evangelical conservatives inspires negative reactions in many Americans, ranging from distaste to outright fear. In Christian America: What Evangelicals Really Want, Christian Smith refers to Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman’s 1984 Holy Terror, in which they claim that evangelicals are waging a “guerilla war on our private thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, on our nation’s timeless values and historic freedoms… with an arsenal of advanced hardware aimed at the most fragile part of our humanity” (qtd. Smith 92). Smith also references an ACLU article; “the new evangelicals are a radical anti-Bill-of-Rights movement that seeks not to conserve traditional American values, but to overthrow them” (qtd. Smith, 92). Smith asserts that these fears of domination are largely unfounded as he evaluates the role of evangelicals in politics today. He asserts, “The vast majority of ordinary evangelicals, even those animated by Christian Right issues, clearly disavow aspirations to (cultural) domination” (Smith 99). Rather than operating as a homogenous conglomerate with the goal of complete cultural domination, a “disciplined, charging army,” as it has been called, Smith says that today’s Religious Right functions “like a divided and hesitant extended family” (Smith 128). Over the course of over 200 interviews, Smith found that “for every one evangelical interviewed who expressed support for a Christian Right leader or organization, there was another evangelical who expressed outright opposition” (Smith 122). In essence, there is debate among evangelical Christians as to what the role of Christians in politics should be. Smith asserts that most evangelical Christians feel an ambivalence between the idea that the political realm is an effective means of creating positive social change and exerting Christian influence on society and the contrary idea that the world’s social problems can only be solved through personal evangelism and the spiritual transformation of individuals and that therefore Christians should focus on evangelism rather than political activism (Smith 115). Smith’s findings illuminate why it is that among southern evangelicals and fundamentalists there can be much dispute regarding the role of Christians in politics. However, the loudest voices are often the only ones heard, and the loudest voices in the Religious Right today are those who passionately feel that they have the responsibility to initiate Christian social change through political action.

The leaders of the Religious Right who are dedicated to a vision of a Christian America are for the most part adherents of Christian Dominion theology and Christian Reconstructionism. Mark Juergensmeyer defines Dominion Theology as “the position that Christianity must reassert the dominion of God over all things, including secular politics and society” (Juergensmeyer 27). Christian Reconstructionists take aggressive political action to further the Dominionist idea of asserting God’s law over all aspects of life. They support the formation of a theonomy, a political state where God’s Biblical law rules (Mathewson). Politically active Reconstructionists in the United States claim that they do not want to legislate morality; that rather they desire to maintain public standards for conduct. However, they desire that these public standards for conduct would be Biblically based (Juergensmeyer 28).

The political goals of Christian Reconstructionists and Dominionists, i.e. modern Christian fundamentalists, are pursued by organizations such as the Christian Coalition, which originally grew out of southern evangelicalism. The organizations of the Religious Right in general, and the Christian Coalition in particular, anchor themselves politically in the Republican Party (Bullock 217-218). Charles Bullock and Mark Smith note this in their essay “The Religious Right and Electoral Politics in the South.” They observe, “Republicans seek to encourage voting among Christian conservatives through use of targeted mail and telephone calls… The Christian Coalition, although purporting to be nonpartisan, has distributed voting guides designed to make Republican candidates attractive to Religious Right fundamentalists at churches attended by Christian conservatives. The activities of figures such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James A. Dobson of Focus on the Family often parallel those of the Christian Coalition in this respect” (Bullock 218). Bullock and Smith, upon a close study of the political climate and electoral results in eleven southern states between 1994 and 2000, offer a “core constituency theory,” stating “the power of core constituencies, such as the Religious Right for the GOP, is real. Yet these constituencies and the candidates that appeal to them must maintain a delicate balancing act so as not to alienate general election voters with primary contests that indulge too overtly in the issues that move core constituents” (Bullock 215). They find, in essence, that there is a real core constituency of conservative Christian voters in the south that support Republican candidates, but they also find that if candidates appeal overtly and exclusively to this conservative Christian core, they are not likely to win in general elections. Thus, like Christian Smith, Bullock and Smith do not find that the political power of the Religious Right is “absolute or unfettered,” but that it is “undeniably strong” (Bullock 215). Bullock and Smith also assert that this conservative Christian Republican voting core is more prominent in the south than elsewhere in the United States: “Our expectation is that the presence of Religious Right candidates in the GOP is higher in the south than elsewhere…(but) the evidence does not support contentions that Christian conservatives have taken over candidate recruitment in the GOP across the south” (Bullock 227-228). Bullock and Smith also note that the voting Religious Right may even impede a candidate from success in general elections because the general public may view their political stances as extreme (Bullock 228). Bullock and Smith contribute important findings: that there is in fact a core constituency of conservative Christian voters that consistently support Republican candidates, that the prominence of this core constituency is concentrated in southern states, and that the conservative Christian voter core of the GOP does not make the GOP politically invincible, especially if candidates overtly support hard-right Christian social policies in primary elections. However, it is very important to note that while there is a core constituency of conservative Christian voters in the south, many southern evangelical fundamentalists do not value political activism because their theological principles steer them away from being involved in secular society; Bullock and Smith are talking about voters, not full-time activists. The prominence of this Christian conservative core in the south begs the question: Are these modern voters conservative because they are southern, or because they are evangelical?

Sam Hill would answer that it is because they are evangelical, and in fact has little to nothing to do with their cultural southern identity. Hill, in an essay entitled “Fundamentalism in Recent Southern Culture: Has it Done What the Civil Rights Movement Couldn’t Do?” suggests that the rise of fundamental evangelicalism as an extension of traditional Protestantism in the modern south has sparked a “radical revolution” in southern culture, and is eroding the distinctive southern culture by propounding social exclusivity, while the Civil Rights Movement was a “conservative revolution” of southern culture that propounded social inclusion (Hill 6). Hill uses the Civil Rights Movement as a point of comparison for the modern Christian fundamentalist movement, observing “The Civil Rights Movement reconfigured all the existing parts of southern society and culture by insisting that all be considered equal partners, by law and, desirably, in informal practice. Fundamentalism insists on establishing public policy for the entire public whether most, many, or only a few subscribe… It is perhaps too simplistic to label these competing views of public life as a contrast between democracy and theocracy, but their conflict is apparent” (Hill 7). The inclusive nature of the Civil Rights Movement and the exclusivist nature of the fundamentalist movement both completely reconfigured southern society in their own generations. Hill’s point is that the Christian fundamentalist movement that is taking place in the modern south is reconfiguring society more dramatically than did the Civil Rights Movement, and that it is reconfiguring southern culture in such a way that the traditional southern identity is eroded as fundamentalist theology takes root. The dissolution of a distinctly southern culture results from fundamentalist theology because rather than viewing the south as Zion, as traditional southern Protestantism did, modern evangelical fundamentalism views the south as a part of the evil, secular fallen world, and thus southern Christian theology has become far more exclusivist than it ever has been in southern history (Martin 3).

The political ramifications of this exclusivist fundamentalism and its dissolution of traditional southern culture are based on the fact that, as Hill points out, “southern fundamentalists… hold more in common with their coreligionists in other parts of the country than they do with many coregionalists within their own denominations” (Hill 7, emphasis mine). In essence, faith has become more important than regional culture for southern evangelicals. A fundamentalists’ identity as a Christian takes precedence over their identity as a southerner. Whereas the traditional mainline Protestant denominations that dominated the south for most of its history were inextricably linked to and proud of their southern heritage, the new Christian fundamentalism of the modern south is not bound to southern identity, but rather bound to “ideological correctness” (Hill 7). As a result, the evangelical fundamentalist movement has taken on a national scope and the political issues that matter to today’s evangelicals have consequently also taken on a national rather than southern scope. Furthermore, despite the persistence of the conservative Christian voting core of the GOP in the south, many new fundamentalists are prioritizing faith over politics as well, reverting back to the early fundamentalist teachings of the 1970s that encouraged the avoidance of secular society and politics altogether.

In a New York Times article entitled “Putting Faith Before Politics,” David Kuo outlines a few reasons that many evangelicals are becoming hesitant to take political action and associate themselves with the Religious Right. Kuo observes that the GOP has failed the Religious Right in certain areas over the past few years, particularly in abortion legislation. This has caused some evangelicals to reevaluate their role on the political stage and their spiritual priorities (Kuo 1). David Kirkpatrick found similar rustlings in the evangelical community in 2007. In his New York Times article, “The Evangelical Crackup,” Kirkpatrick interviewed Southern Baptists who desire a “crackdown on unorthodox doctrine and a corresponding expulsion of political moderates” (Kirkpatrick 7). Kirkpatrick’s findings deepen the evidence that evangelicals in the American south are becoming more conservative and more fundamentalist. He also found that cynicism is taking root in the southern evangelical community regarding their political potential. The fundamentalist Rev. Carlson whom Kirkpatrick interviewed said, “When you mix politics and religion, you get politics” (qtd. Kirkpatrick 11). Carlson also felt that “the Religious Right peaked a long time ago… as a historical, sociological phenomenon, it has seen its heyday. Something new is coming” (Kirkpatrick 12). The something new that Carlson envisions for the evangelical movement is centered theologically around the tenets of fundamentalism, and while he is looking forward to an evangelical future without the Religious Right, others, such as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, assert that the Religious Right is far from dead and is growing in strength (Kirkpatrick 14). Perkins is in the minority, however. Most Conservative Christian leaders do not feel that the Religious Right is furthering the Christian gospel (Kirkpatrick 14). Kuo quotes John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute: “Modern Christianity, having lost sight of Christ’s teachings, has been co-opted by legalism, materialism and politics. Simply put, it has lost its spirituality…Whereas Christianity was once synonymous with charity, compassion and love for one’s neighbor, today it is more often equated with partisan politics, anti-homosexual rhetoric and affluent mega-churches” (qtd. Kuo 1). Evangelicals have taken note of the secular reaction to evangelical involvement in politics and the activities of the Religious Right. Kuo notes that a Beliefnet poll demonstrated that “60 percent of non-evangelicals have a more negative view of Jesus as a result of Christian political involvement” (Kuo 1). Just as evangelicals are placing their Christian identity before their southern identity, so now some are calling for Christians to place their Christian identity before their political identity. There is fear in the evangelical community that the Religious Right is actually harming the movement. Some are “worried that the (evangelical) movement might ‘fragment because it is more identified by a political agenda that seems to be failing and less identified by a commitment to Jesus and his kingdom’” (Kuo 1). Priorities are being shuffled in the evangelical community, and personal evangelism is coming out on top of political action.
The Christian evangelical community in the south is at a crossroads. Hill points out that “fundamentalism’s great achievement thus far has been to make southern religion less southern, that is, less culturally influenced or even less culturally captive” (Hill 7). Modern evangelicalism is, in Hill’s words, “prying (Christians) loose from their comfortable link with traditional southern culture” (Hill 8). The national GOP continues to seek a core constituency among conservative Christian voters at the same time that many evangelicals are calling for a reorganization of spiritual priorities and a stronger emphasis on personal evangelism with less effort given to political activism. The south used to be the Bible Belt of southern civil religion and mainline Protestantism; today it is becoming the Bible Belt of fundamentalist evangelicals with presuppositionalist views of the world and ambivalent attitudes toward politics. An outcry for political and religious definition is rising in the south today; conservative evangelicals are disillusioned with GOP candidates who claim conservative social stances in primaries and wade toward moderate waters in general elections while much of the secular and newly religiously diverse south is uncomfortable with evangelical rhetoric in the political sphere. The relationship between religion and politics in the south is changing, and this is nowhere more clearly evidenced than in the 2008 elections.

A survey conducted from 18 June-1 November 2008 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released by the Pew Forum on 3 November 2008 revealed that Republican candidate McCain had a two-thirds or better lead over Democratic candidate Obama among white evangelical protestant registered voters for the duration of the campaign. Among white mainline protestant registered voters, however, McCain led by approximately ten percent until September, when mainlines protestants began shifting to support Obama. Ultimately, mainline protestants were evenly split on election day. Obama maintained a nearly two-thirds lead over McCain among registered voters unaffiliated with any religion throughout the campaign (“Trends in Candidate Preferences Among Religious Groups”). Confirming what the Pew Research Center’s survey predicted, exit polls released by the Pew Forum on 10 November 2008 demonstrated that evangelicals voted 73% Republican, down 5% from 2004 and that non-evangelical protestants voted 55% Republican, with no significant change from 2004 (“How the Faithful Voted”). While this data is based on national exit polls and does not necessarily reflect the regional voting of the southern states, it can still provide insight into how the changes that are occurring in southern Christianity today are affecting politics.

It is clear from the results of the 2008 elections that there is, as Bullock and Smith found, a core constituency of evangelical voters for the Republican Party. What is interesting about these results is that mainline Protestants are shifting to the middle of the political spectrum; the churches that historically supported GOP candidates most avidly are now politically split. This illustrates that Christianity in the south is experiencing a polarization, in which evangelical fundamentalists are distinctly separate from mainline Protestant Christians. The 2008 elections also demonstrate that traditional secular conservatism persists in the deep south; CNN exit polls demonstrated that in all the states of the deep south (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee), McCain gained every electoral vote (“Election Center 2008”). Importantly, the evangelical Republican vote was a national phenomenon in 2008, rather than a strictly southern one. The national nature of GOP support within the fundamentalist evangelical movement supports Hill's hypothesis that modern evangelicalism is causing the dissolution of a distinctive southern culture as evangelicals prioritize their Christian faith over their culturally southern identity. However, the southern civil religion of the twentieth century is preserved in the south in mainline Protestant denominations and in southern conservative secularists who also contribute to the faithful voting base of the GOP. The 2008 elections demonstrate that political and religious polarization is on the horizon in the south. The Republican Party cannot simultaneously become more socially conservative to appease Christian fundamentalists and maintain political moderation in order to appeal to the general population. The modern GOP in the south is split between Christian fundamentalists and conservative secularists and the modern Christian church in the south is split between evangelical fundamentalists and mainline Protestants. A deepening of exclusivist fundamentalist theology in the evangelical community is likely to weaken their links both to the GOP and to the mainline protestant population of the south.

This study has been an attempt to demonstrate that Christianity and politics became linked in the southern mentality as a result of an historically pervasive politico-religious agenda surrounding the Lost Cause of the Civil War, the subsequent development of a hard-right status quo society rooted in southern civil religion, a dramatic shift of southern political allegiance to the GOP in the late twentieth century as a result of the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of evangelicalism, and the role of the Religious Right in ushering in Reconstructionist and presuppositionalist theology in the political sphere. The modern day ramifications of this Christian Right mentality in the south are somewhat unexpected. As it turns out, the fundamentalist evangelical community is contributing to the dissolution of an identifiable southern culture as they denounce secular society as a whole and take on national faith-based political agendas. Many evangelicals are calling for a return to emphasis on personal evangelism as they become disappointed with the political foundering of the Religious Right. The traditionally hard-right protestant mainline denominations of the south are shifting to the moderate zone of the political spectrum as conservative Christian southerners become wary of fundamentalism. The confluence of Christianity and politics in southern life in the future is likely to determine the future of southern culture; will it be retained as a distinct culture within the United States, or will it blend theologically and ideologically in with the rest of the country? Charles Reagan Wilson asserts, “Religion continues to define the U.S. South as a distinctive part of the United States. It contributes to defining debates on public policy issues and provides on-going organizational bases for political campaigns across the ideological spectrum…It offers a still compelling worldview to the majority of the South’s Christians, giving meaning in troubled times and empowering the poor and marginalized” (Wilson, “Overview” 15). Christianity is indeed an ineluctable aspect of southern culture and history has shown that it has the potential to politically define the region. Joel Martin suggests that if “Southern white Christians (can) reimagine their southernness and their faith in non-exclusivistic ways appropriate for and supportive of a pluralistic democracy… they could give southern distinctiveness a vibrant future” (Martin 4). The south has always been a region defined by the struggle between tradition and progress, and my guess is that as tradition has always found root in southern society, so it will continue to bear a blending of Christian ideology and political ideas in a region where both religion and politics matter a great deal apart, but perhaps matter even more combined.



Works Cited

Applebome, Peter. “Southern Partisans, Then and Now.” Dixie Rising. New York: Harvest
Books, 1997. 116-147.

Bullock III, Charles S. and Mark C. Smith. “The Religious Right and Electoral Politics in the
South.” Politics and Religion in the White South. The University of Kentucky Press, 2005. 215-230.
“Election Center 2008.” CNN. 4 November 2008. Accessed at
http://edition.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results 13 November 2008.

Feldman, Glenn. “The Status Quo Society, the Rope of Religion, and the New Racism.”
Politics and Religion in the White South. The University of Kentucky Press, 2005. 287-337.

Flynt, Wayne. “The Transformation of Southern Politics, 1954 to the Present.” A
Companion to the American South. Ed. John B. Boles. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 494-505.

Hallen, Paige. Personal Interview. 14 October 2008.

Harvey, Paul. “Religion in the American South Since the Civil War.” A Companion to the
American South. Ed. John B. Boles. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 387-406.

Hill, Samuel S. “Fundamentalism in Recent Southern Culture: Has it Done What the Civil
Rights Movement Couldn’t Do?” The Journal of Southern Religion. Vol. 1 No. 1. 1998. Accessed at http://jsr.fsu.edu/essay.htm 28 March 2009.

“How the Faithful Voted.” The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. 10 November 2008.
Accessed at http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=367 13 November 2008.

Juergensmeyer, Mark. Terror in the Mind of God. Los Angeles, CA: University of
California Press, 2001.

Kirkpatrick, David D. “The Evangelical Crackup.” The New York Times 28 October 2007.

Kuo, David. “Putting Faith Before Politics.” The New York Times 16 November 2006.

Lienesch, Michael. “Politics and Religion.” The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,
Volume 1: Religion. Ed. Samuel S. Hill and Charles Reagan Wilson. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 111-114.

Marsden, George M. Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1991.

Martin, Joel W. “All that is Solid (and Southern) Melts into Air: A Response to Sam Hill’s
Fundamental Argument Regarding Fundamentalism.” The Journal of Southern Religion. Vol. 1 No. 1. 1998. Accessed at http://jsr.fsu.edu/martin.htm 28 March 2009.

Mathewson, Dan B. Personal Conversations and Class Lectures. September 2008- March
2009.

Noll, Mark A. American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2001.

Rev. Dr. Robinson, Ronald Ray. Personal Interviews and Class Lectures. September-
November 2008.

Smith, Christian. Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want. Los Angeles, CA:
University of California Press, 2002.

“Trends in Candidate Preferences Among Religious Groups.” The Pew Forum on Religion
and Public Life. 3 November 2008. Accessed at http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=349 13 November 2008.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. “The Religion of the Lost Cause: Ritual and Organization of the
Southern Civil Religion, 1865-1920.” Religion and American Culture: A Reader. Ed. David Hackett. New York: Routledge, 2003. 207-219.

Wilson, Charles Reagan. “Overview: Religion and the U.S. South.” Southern Spaces. 16
March 2004. Accessed at http://www.southernspaces.org/contents/2004/wilson/1a.v2.htm September 2008.

Southern Politics and Christianity

Upon examination of American political discourse, it is apparent that religion plays a vital role in this sector of our society, particularly in South Carolina. What is the place of religion, and more specifically, Christianity, in southern politics? In South Carolina state politics? On a quest to answer these questions, I interviewed volunteers at both the Democratic and the Republican Headquarters of Spartanburg County. What I found were deep-rooted beliefs, opinions, and defenses of the role of Christianity in both the Democratic and the Republican landscapes of South Carolina.

Liz Patterson has been a volunteer at the Democratic Party Headquarters of Spartanburg County for many years. She answered my questions thoughtfully; making sure that she was fairly representing both her own views and those proponed by her party. The most poignant statement she made regarding Christianity and the Democratic Party pointed to the social stigma of a Democrat as being anti-Christian. “I regret that it has become that if you’re a Democrat you can’t be a Christian,” she said. Liz has a bumper sticker on her car that reads, “I am a Christian and a Democrat.” She feels the need to assert the confluence of her political views and her faith because many in her community seem to think that the two are mutually exclusive and that one can only be one or the other. Glenn Smith points out the Democratic Party’s recent efforts to repudiate this view that Democrats are without religious or moral views in his October 14, 2008 article entitled “How the Values Voter Myth Strengthened the Democrats.” In this article, Smith addresses the cultural assumption prevalent in 2004 that “red states have values, blue states don’t.” He observes that the Democratic Party “played into this label (of being amoral) by steering clear of talk about the values that underlie their policy proposals” in the past, but that recently the party has “reawakened progressive consciousness to the importance of wearing its moral worldview on its public sleeve.” Liz Patterson’s assertion of her Christian faith strengthening her Democratic political views is evidence of Smith’s argument playing out in Spartanburg: She is wearing her moral worldview on her public sleeve, or rather, the bumper of her car.

Mrs. Patterson also feels that “Religion has become too involved in the political process… People question whether or not you are born again” with the assumption that your answer significantly affects your political views. She seems frustrated that a religious label, such as that of a Born-Again Christian, has immediate political contexts for many in her community. However, she also feels that her experience growing up in the Christian church has significantly impacted her political views. “So much of what I learned in the church leads me in my political thoughts,” she states. She is eager to define the ways that her own Christian experience have shaped her political life, but quite hesitant to associate herself with Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christian groups. I assume this is largely due to the political views often associated with these groups. Liz Patterson’s position is not uncommon in South Carolina. It seems that there are many people who actively engage in a Christian faith, and feel that their faith is questioned because they do not hold conservative political views. I was quite eager to hear what my Republican interviewee might have to say about these topics.

To put it gently, my interview with Alice Armantrout was an enlightening experience. To foreword this analysis with a disclaimer, I do not feel that many of Mrs. Armantrout’s views reflect those of the Republican Party of South Carolina nor the National GOP. Nevertheless, her positions are valid and of consequence because she holds them firmly, and there are many others who share them. Alice agrees with Kansas Southern Baptist Pastor Terry Fox’s binding of Christianity and politics together. He states “One, we are religious. Two, we are right.” The conservative Christian Political movement is very much based on the idea that Evangelical Christian views are synonymous with conservative republican political views. Throughout the course of my interview, Mrs. Armantrout made statements reflecting this tight association of her Christian views with her conservative political views. She even went so far as to say that liberals are not Christians, validating Liz Patterson’s assertion that there are those who see the party split as a religious split as well. She asserted (incorrectly) that Barack Obama was inaugurated into congress with his hand on the Qur’an and implied that if he were Muslim, this would make him an incapable and untrustworthy senator. She further claimed that the moral convictions of Muslims “are based on killing and beheading anyone who is an infidel,” insinuated that Muslims lack a belief in a higher power, and that “Barack Obama is definitely a Muslim.” (He has repeatedly made public statements about his Christian faith.) Mrs. Armantrout’s primary reason for believing that Obama is not a Christian is his view on abortion. For her, his view on this one issue was important enough to define his entire religious identity. Let me say that I do not intend to imply that those who believe that the issue of abortion is of vital importance are also misinformed about the religious identity of Obama and the reality of what Islam and the Qur’an are about; I do however think it relevant that Mrs. Armantrout is so misinformed and does hold so firmly to her views. When I asked Mrs. Armantrout to articulate how her religious views informed the opinions she had just shared with me, she expressed a hesitancy to associate herself with the people who are traditionally pinned with the kind of misguided ideas about Islam and Democratic Politicians that she exemplified, those people being Evangelical Christians. She said, “I don’t consider myself Evangelical. I am not Born-Again.” She felt that the label ‘Evangelical’ implied someone whose views lay further to the right than hers, and though frankly I find it hard to imagine political ground further to the right than hers, her view of what it means politically to be Evangelical is certainly note-worthy. For Mrs. Armantrout, to be a Born-Again Evangelical Christian necessitates ultra-conservative political views.

What’s important here is that first, Mrs. Armantrout firmly believes that public policy and religion are synonymous entities and that Christian ideals should govern American public life; second, she embraces the platform of social morality that the Republican Party has so successfully used in South Carolina, and third, she associates Evangelicals with radically conservative political views. Her misinformation regarding Obama and Islam, while shocking and certainly cause for pause, are not the most relevant things she had to say. Far more relevant to my study are the aforementioned views that inextricably link Evangelical Christian ideals and the governing of American public life based on a social morality platform. Though it was very difficult for me to force myself to have perspective on Mrs. Armantrout’s views, once I did so I became enthralled by figuring out what led her to believe the things she believes, and why she holds to them so vehemently.

My interview with Mrs. Armantrout so engrossed me in the social and political roots and ramifications of her views that I sought a second interview with someone familiar with the Republican Party of South Carolina. I did not need to look far. A close friend of mine, Paige Hallen is a senior at Wofford College. Paige is a government major who will graduate with every concentration the Wofford government department offers. She has interned in Washington with the Family Research Council, interned in Columbia and Washington with Joe Wilson, Republican South Carolina congressman, and in 2008 Paige served as the second-youngest delegate at the South Carolina state Republican Convention. The role of the GOP in South Carolina is her life’s passion, and her views starkly contrast those of Mrs. Armantrout.

Paige explained South Carolina politics in political, rather than religious, terms. She explained the history of political conservatism in the South and helped me to understand why it is that the Republican Party is associated with Christianity in the south. It all began, she said, when the mid twentieth century saw the Civil Rights Bill of 1957 and Strom Thurmond’s political conversion in 1964. Previous to the 1950’s, the American South had been ‘solid blue.’ Southerners had held to the Democratic Party vehemently for as long as they could remember. The Civil Rights Bill threatened what many saw as ‘the southern way of life.’ Suddenly, there was a status quo to protect. Southerners sought to do this by converting to ‘Dixiecrats’ or ‘Southern Democrats.’ Strom Thurmond, South Carolina’s senator, spoke against the Civil Rights Bill for more than twenty-four hours on the Senate floor. Largely due to issues surrounding the Civil Rights Bill, Thurmond switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican party in 1964, and was instrumental in Richard Nixon’s White House victory of 1968. With Nixon as an ally, Thurmond passed much legislation that was very beneficial to the state of SC during Nixon’s presidency. This made South Carolinians far more amiable to the Republican Party. Thus we have the conversion of South Carolina from blue to red in the 1960’s. Now to account for the association of the GOP in SC with Christianity…

What Paige helped me to see here is that politics are political. This may sound like a given, but it is easy to see religion in politics, and as a result, it is easy to assume that politics can be religious. This is not the case, she said, for elected officials. Their agenda is for the most part political rather than religious. Thus the marketed and widely accepted association of the Republican Party with particular social justice issues that are involved in the Christian faith, i.e. abortion and gay marriage, is also political rather than religious. These issues brought voters to the polls on a larger scale than did issues of fiscal conservatism or small business. Once the GOP of SC recognized that these ‘buzz word’ issues caused Evangelical Christian voters to flock to the polls and support the GOP while believing, extremely in some cases, that they were the ‘party of God,’ the political landscape in SC changed dramatically. Those who held conservative Christian views were expected by society to vote Republican because the Republican Party spread propaganda along the lines of “a vote for a Democrat is a vote against God.” It is true that not all Republicans feel this way, especially outside of South Carolina, but the fact remains that the propaganda was issued and absorbed by most of the rural public of the state. However, many policy makers do not stand by these “buzz word” issues as vehemently as their voting public. This begs the question, are the Alice Armantrouts of the state of South Carolina having their votes bought by their religious convictions while the officials they elect see them as the means to an end?

It will certainly be interesting to watch the South Carolina results come in on November 7.

Bob Jones University: Southern Fundamentalism at its Finest

Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina is an anomaly of today’s culture. It is more of a self-sustaining evangelical community than it is a university. In order to illustrate this, allow me to share with you a few excerpts from the university website. These statements may be found at www.bju.edu/about/mission.html as of today, October 2, 2008.

“Bob Jones University exists as a training center for Christians from around the world. The goal of the administration, faculty, and staff is to equip its students for a lifetime of service to Christ… The founder’s philosophy that BJU is not here just to teach men and women how to make a living, but more importantly, how to live, remains our focus.”

The University Creed, which is recited by every student and staff member every day in Chapel:
“I believe in the inspiration of the Bible; the creation of man by the direct act of God; the incarnation and virgin birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ; His identification as the Son of God; His vicarious atonement for the sins of makind by the shedding of His blood on the cross; the resurrection of His body from the tomb; His power to save men from sin; the new birth through the regeneration by the Holy Spirit; and the gift of eternal life by the grace of God.”

The Core Values as identified by the University are “Love for and faithfulness to God and His Word; Unashamed testimony for Jesus Christ, the only Savior; and Edifying love for God’s people.”

Of the nine institutional goals listed on the BJU website, two are related to academic education. All others are explicitly related to sharing the Gospel of Christ.

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Knowing all of this before I visited campus, I must admit I was a little bit nervous. Though I myself am a Christian and have worked in conservative Christian environments before, I wasn’t really sure what the people at Bob Jones would be like. Would they be normal? Would they stare at me?

My fears dissipated almost as soon as my visit to BJU campus began because my tour guide was so friendly. Jeff, a junior from New Hampshire, showed me around the campus with familiarity and fondness. He answered my many questions with a curiosity as to why a senior at Wofford College would be studying Bob Jones. (I later discovered how impressive it was that Jeff had heard of Wofford at all!) After my tour, I viewed the multi-image presentation that Bob Jones presents to prospective students when they visit the campus, which concisely and precisely illustrates Bob Jones University as an institution. I was able to speak with another student during and after this presentation, a senior named Martha from Greenville. I learned much more about Bob Jones from talking with these students than I ever could have from the outside looking in.

When I asked Jeff how he would define the mission of BJU, he told me about Bob Jones Senior. Bob Jones, who was not an educator, realized that young Christians were being presented with a slanted, liberal, secularist world-view when they went to college. He wanted for young Christians to be able to get an education in a biblical environment, and thus BJU was born. Jeff felt that the local community was receptive to BJU’s mission and supportive of its efforts. Though the college was founded in Tennessee and moved to Florida before finally settling in South Carolina, Martha felt that the location of BJU “probably helps with people being receptive to our mission because we’re in the Bible Belt.” Martha also pointed out that many BJU students settle locally after graduation, thus reinforcing the Bob Jones world-view in the community culture.

Neither Jeff nor Martha feel that Bob Jones attempts to explicitly create a parallel culture for students, but they both feel passionately that the biblical environment created within the Bob Jones community is beneficial to them. Some parameters that help to create this biblically-based environment include mandatory daily chapel attendance, strictly separate male and female dorms, strict conservative dress codes, restrictions pertaining to what music students listen to, strict prohibition of alcohol, exclusively intramural athletics, chaperoned group dates for male and female students who wish to leave campus together, single-sex social societies, and a demerit system based on compliance with all of these. Martha said that “it’s easy to forget what it’s like outside. When I go home, I’m always shocked to see girls wearing sleeveless shirts.” Jeff said that he hardly ever leaves campus, because he feels no need to leave the community. In many senses, being a student at Bob Jones removes a young person from the surrounding world and creates an explicitly Christian environment for them in which to live and learn. Both Jeff and Martha felt that being expected to live by a biblical standard has created a safe and nurturing environment for them, which they cherish.

Perhaps the most interesting thing that I found talking to Jeff was the attitude with which he approaches his religion classes. Every student at Bob Jones takes a Bible course each semester, and I asked Jeff if they studied the text from a purely theological point of view or if they also studied it from an academic, critical perspective. He avidly told me that they study history along with the bible and that they observe how the Bible lines up correctly with history in every instance. I then asked him if they studied the Bible in a historical context for the purpose of validating the text instead of critically engaging the text, and he stumbled over his response. He seemed uncomfortable with the fact that I wanted to know if they studied the Bible for any reason other than gleaning truth from it. He told me about an apologetics class he took in which they read the text critically and assured me that the professor always presents the information and then encourages the students to make up their own minds. It seems to me, however, that at a school where every professor refers to the Bible as a source of truth on a daily basis during class, a student might not feel inclined to think of the Bible as anything other than absolute truth. Marsden points out that “although fundamentalist preaching sometimes stresses making up one’s own mind, in fact the movement displays some remarkable uniformities in details of doctrine and practice that suggest anything but real individualism in thought (115).” It seems to me that this is exactly what happens with BJU students. They are verbally encouraged to make up their own minds about the authority of the Bible, but they are encouraged in every other fashion to accept it as absolute truth.

Bob Jones University is a fundamentalist Christian community that has taken every measure possible to create a parallel culture; an alternate environment in which young men and women can live life as they believe it should be lived. They are more than happy to invite visitors into their community, with the intention that the visitor should hear the gospel and be saved. They also actively send members of their community out into the world around them to spread the gospel they believe. Bob Jones University is not just a college where the school newspaper features articles on prayer and professors consult the Bible in the classroom; it is an institution with an explicit mission to cultivate young men and women with a Christian education who will go out into the world and live Christian lives, teaching others to do so along the way.

The Birth of American Fundamentalism: A Good Place to Start

Today, the word ‘fundamentalism’ evokes a particular fear for most Americans, the fear of radical fundamentalist Islamic terrorists. For most of our nation’s history, however, fundamentalism has almost exclusively been understood in a Christian sense. Christian fundamentalism has, historically, played a very large role in our country. George Marsden examines fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the United States in his 1991 volume, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. It is poignant to note that Marsden was writing from a pre-9/11 perspective, and thus does not provide for an audience as affected by the term as the general American public is today.

Marsden discusses the beginnings of Christian fundamentalism in America with the onset of World War I. During the war, Protestants began to associate patriotism with Christian ideals. Billy Sunday even said, “Christianity and Patriotism are synonymous terms (51).” After the war, the church was initially more united than ever, gaining victories such as the passing of Prohibition (53). However, along with the Red Scare, social unrest, and secularization of American culture that came in the 1920s came divisions in the American Protestant church. The church split into two main branches, one expressing social liberalism and wanting to remain a part of the larger American culture, and a more conservative one that resisted the chaos and confusion that came with the changing of the times. The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 became a symbolic battle between these two schools of thought.

John Scopes was a public high school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who agreed to be arrested and prosecuted for breaking Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, which prohibited the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in public schools, in order that he might challenge the constitutionality of the law. The trial was immediately thrust into the national spotlight, a first for the American legal system at that time. John Scopes was no more than a pawn in a trial that turned into a battle between two quintessential American public figures, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. Bryan, whom at this point in his career had run for President (and lost) three times, was a champion of the Democratic Party of the day and a staunch Prohibitionist and socially conservative Presbyterian. Of the Scopes trial, Bryan said that he was “trying to save the Christian Church from those who are trying to destroy our faith.” Darrow, on the other hand, was a leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and was widely respected throughout America as an unbeatable lawyer with very liberal views. Darrow called the south “an intellectual desert.” Throughout the trial, Darrow attempted to illustrate that the anti-evolution law was unconstitutional, stating that if that kind of law were upheld then eventually the country would turn into a battle of “man against man… creed against creed… until we are back to the times when bigots burned the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.” Bryan opposed, declaring that evolution was synonymous with atheism. The trial was really won when Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand and gleaned from him that he believed the book of Genesis was subject to interpretation, saying that “the creation could have gone on for millions of years.” The legal outcome of the trial was that the Tennessee Supreme Court eventually upheld the anti-evolution law and determined Scopes guilty of violating it. However, it was also stated by the Supreme Court of Tennessee that no prosecutor could again bring an indictment against a teacher for violating the law. The social outcome of the trial, though, was that the country ridiculed the Southern Christians fighting behind Bryan, and they lost the cultural battle of Bible versus Darwin. In Marsden’s words, the Scopes Monkey Trial “thrust fundamentalism into worldwide attention and brought about its decline as an effective national force (60).”

*Information about Scopes Monkey Trial from PBS Documentary.

The Scopes Monkey Trial was the catalyst that separated Christian fundamentalists from the American Evangelical Protestants. Marsden states, “What chiefly distinguished fundamentalism from earlier evangelicalism was its militancy toward modernist theology and cultural change (66).” The Scopes Monkey Trial made it very clear that American culture was changing and embracing modernist theories of science and religion. Fundamentalists built walls for themselves, both literally and figuratively, so that they could separate themselves from the rest of American culture. Jerry Falwell, a famous American Evangelical Christian Pastor, has defined fundamentalism in a catchy way: “A fundamentalist is an evangelical who is angry about something (Marsden 1991).” The early twentieth century certainly made a large number of Evangelical Protestants angry, and they reacted by becoming fundamentalists, separate from the rest of the church and the rest of the nation.

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.

Why Study Southern Christianity?

Nelson Mandela, a hero of cross-cultural understanding, once said, “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” I cannot be certain what these words meant to Mandela, but they hold truth for me. From February through June 2008, I lived and studied in Melbourne, Victoria, in the beautiful country of Australia. This weekend I will have been back in the United States for three months, and back at Wofford in South Carolina for one month. The reverse culture shock that I experienced upon returning home was in many ways more difficult to deal with and understand than the culture shock I experienced during my life on foreign soil. You can imagine my surprise and disbelief when this reverse culture shock was actually magnified by coming back to school. Students at Wofford and people in South Carolina in general were saying and doing things that baffled me, but why? I have spent three years at Wofford, and truthfully it has felt like just as much of a “home” as my hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There was something about the people here, the culture here, that was drastically different from what I experienced in Melbourne and even what I readjusted to at home during the summer. I feel that being from the American South has shaped much of my study abroad experience, and framed my cultural perceptions. I think that Southern culture, especially in South Carolina, is drastically different from other cultures that I have experienced. The things people believe, what guides their actions, and why they live the way they live in South Carolina are based in entirely different conceptions of the world and one’s role in it than those characteristics of other peoples. I hope to illustrate how Christianity in the South is a large part of what makes southern culture different, what makes southern people and southern life different from the rest of the world.

“So, is everyone in Southern America a Christian?” Giselle, my Australian roommate, asked when I had tried to explain why being “southern” was different than just being “American.” I had told her that southerners were typically more socially and politically conservative than most Americans, that southern people in general hold a special sense of place and value being ‘southern’ as a part of their identity, and that within the United States being ‘southern’ connoted a differentiation from the larger American society. She was curious, I believe, because Australia is a very secular country. It intrigued her that for me, part of being from the south was being Christian. I stumbled over my words in an effort to present to her the truth as it was without being biased or giving her any negative impressions. Her question, however, was a valid one. Most earnest attempts to define what it means to be southern include some exploration of the ways in which Christianity has defined southern life over the years. This conversation with Giselle, as well as many others I had with Australians as well as Americans from other regions have led me to seek a definition of what it means to be southern, what it means to be Christian in the south, and whether or not any line can be drawn between the two.

Over the course of the semester, I will be exploring what it means to be southern and how Christianity has shaped South Carolina's culture and people, especially in the Spartanburg area. I will attempt to discover how Christianity in the south is changing by observing where it has been and currently is, as well as where it is headed. I will be looking for Christianity in southern culture; in politics, education, social life and public morality. I feel that these things are pertinent to the lives of not only those who live in the south, not only Christians, but all Americans and even all people.