Evangelizing the South

ISBN-13: 9780195309003 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 264 str.

Monica Najar

Opis

Although many refer to the American South as the "Bible Belt," the region was not always characterized by a powerful religious culture. In the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century, religion-in terms both of church membership and personal piety-was virtually absent from southern culture. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, however, witnessed the astonishingly rapid rise of evangelical religion in the Upper South. Within just a few years, evangelicals had spread their beliefs and their fervor, gaining converts and building churches throughout Virginia and North Carolina and into the western regions. But what was it that made evangelicalism so attractive to a region previously uninterested in religion?

Monica Najar argues that early evangelicals successfully negotiated the various challenges of the eighteenth-century landscape by creating churches that functioned as civil as well as religious bodies. The evangelical church of the late eighteenth century was the cornerstone of its community, regulating marriages, monitoring prices, arbitrating business, and settling disputes. As the era experienced substantial rifts in the relationship between church and state, the disestablishment of colonial churches paved the way for new formulations of church-state relations. The evangelical churches were well-positioned to provide guidance in uncertain times, and their multiple functions allowed them to reshape many of the central elements of authority in southern society. They assisted in reformulating the lines between the "religious" and "secular" realms, with significant consequences for both religion and the emerging nation-state.

Touching on the creation of a distinctive southern culture, the position of women in the private and public arenas, family life in the Old South, the relationship between religion and slavery, and the political culture of the early republic, Najar reveals the history behind a religious heritage that remains a distinguishing mark of American society.

Recenzje

"Monica Najar's Evangelizing the South provides a persuasive account of how gender and religion intersected in the early southern Baptist movement. Her book carries the story of evangelical Southern culture into the post-revolutionary period, and her treatment of evangelical religion in this era is the most successful I have seen. Unlike other accounts, Najar effectively explains how this religious movement came to dominate and suffuse southern culture. She shows how Baptists worked to separate the church from the state but also to bring the functions of the state into the church. Her insight illuminates a source of the under-development of Southern state infrastructure at the same time that it helps us to understand the origins of a distinctive southern religious style. This is a great book, essential reading for those interested in religion, gender or the south." —Carla Pestana, author of The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661

O autorze

Monica Najar is an Associate Professor of History at Lehigh University. She specializes in the histories of gender, religion, and the South