Southern Protestantism

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Southern Protestantism

Southern Custom. The South, like the North, was deeply affected by the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Until the late eighteenth century, Southerners as a group were not particularly pious. Southern culture was dominated by a wealthy male aristocracy often more interested in personal honor than in salvation. Although nominally members of the Anglican Church (Church of England), many Southern aristocrats viewed church services as little more than social occasions and were given to cursing, gambling, and dueling the other six days of the week. The wave of religious revivals that swept the South in the 1790s and early 1800s, when zealous preachers began a fullfledged missionary effort there, dramatically altered this traditional culture. Many members of the Anglican aristocracy were converted and convinced to alter their values and behavior and to respect the Christian values of love and kindness. More significantly, the revivals brought large numbers of previously unchurched middle- and lower-class Southerners into the evangelical churches and gave them a new sense of self-worth and stature in Southern society.

Revivals and Cultural Change. The Southern revivals, held primarily by Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians, were characterized by a high degree of emotionalism similar to that of the camp meetings of the Western frontier. Preachers stressed the importance of a dramatic conversion experience and sought to bring their listeners to a state of acute awareness of their sins using a variety of techniques, including the recounting of dreams, visions, and personal struggles with sin. Many were unlettered men who spoke colloquially and appealed to poor and uneducated people who had been passed over by the staid and unwelcoming services of the Anglican Church. Influenced by the rhetoric of the American Revolution, preachers emphasized the equality of all men before God and the ability of all to think for themselves and guide their own lives. By valuing the achievement of salvation and personal piety above all, they offered an appealing alternative to old ways of determining stature in Southern society. Money and personal valor became less important as formerly disconnected individuals united in a solid community of the converted that used public preaching and disciplinary action to reinforce the sense of distance between Christians and non-Christians. Women gained respect as naturally pious teachers and nurturers, and the newly converted poor were able to feel a dignity that had formerly been denied them.

Decline of Antislavery. The emphasis on social reform that accompanied Northern revivalism was largely absent in the South. Rather than engaging directly with the nation’s political and social institutions, Southern evangelicals preferred to influence the world by personal example. They placed a high value on the outward life of the individual and

argued that it was the duty of each saved person to be a holy example to the unrepentant. Conspicuously absent from nineteenth-century Southern evangelical culture was the antislavery sentiment so common among Northern evangelicals. The Methodist and Baptist preachers who had come to the South in the eighteenth century had spoken of the spiritual equality of both races, offered the same sense of dignity and self-respect to all races, licensed African Americans as preachers, and had spoken out directly against the evils of slavery. In 1784 the Methodists pledged to excommunicate all members who did not free their slaves within two years. By 1815, however, pressure from converted slaveholders and other proslavery whites had led both denominations to abandon their stance against the institution. White Southerners had become increasingly uncomfortable with integrated worship and began to oppose the authority of African Americans in the church. By the 1830s most white Southern evangelicals had completely rejected the heritage of an earlier generation that had valued people of color as church members and had been deeply influenced by African forms of spirituality and worship. In 1843 Methodists in the South owned more than two hundred thousand slaves.

Christian Arguments for Slavery. The alteration of the evangelical position on slavery resulted from several factors, including the increasing economic dependence of the South on slave labor, the rising volume of abolitionist sentiment in the North, and the fear caused by several slave insurrections that had been rooted in Christian sentiment. Although some slaveholders believed religion made slaves unruly and thus refused to allow missionaries or revival preachers to address their slaves at all, most continued to favor the religious instruction of slaves. They hoped that a carefully controlled plan of religious education would engender respect and obedience and would convince slaves to accept their lot in life with Christian humility. Equally important, the evangelization of their slaves provided masters with a powerful justification for slavery that could be used in the struggle against abolitionist sentiment. They had long used a scriptural justification for slavery based on the idea that God had sanctioned slavery both among the Old Testament patriarchs and in the time of Jesus, but now they could also argue that they were ensuring the salvation of the souls of savages who would otherwise be damned. Slavery, they asserted, was a good, Christian institution in which masters did a service for their slaves that could not be matched in the North, where free blacks were left to wander alone without the much-needed nurturing and guidance of whites. While few Northerners could accept this argument, prominent missionaries such as Presbyterian Charles Colcock Jones and Methodist William Capers, concerned about the lack of regular church attendance among most slaves and eager to promote the Christianization of the institution of slavery, were willing to accommodate their message to the wishes of slaveholders.

Schisms. By the mid 1830s both Northerners and Southerners held deeply entrenched attitudes toward slavery that they believed were rooted in Christian morality. The disparity in these attitudes ultimately led to divisions within the evangelical denominations along the lines that would soon divide the nation. In 1837 the Presbyterian Church split into two factions known as the Old School and the New School. Most of the Presbyterians who were leading the abolitionist fight in the North belonged to the New School, which officially repudiated the scriptural argument for slavery, while proslavery Southerners made up much of the Old School. The Methodist Church experienced a schism in 1844 as opposing sides at the denomination’s General Conference came to a deadlock over whether slaveholders should be subject to discipline by the church. And in 1845 the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention marked the formal division of the Baptist Church along sectional lines. Although most other churches remained formally united, none could escape the disruptive effect of the slavery question. The conflict provoked within the churches led to increasingly elaborate scriptural and moral arguments on both sides of the issue and became a powerful force in the hardening of opinions that resulted in civil war.