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Mass Culture, Upper-Class Culture, and the Decline of Church Discipline in the Evangelical South: The 1910 Case of the Godbold Mineral Well Hotel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Extract
Two of the primary images most scholars have of the religion of white southerners in the postbellum period seem inconsistent or even contradictory. One image portrays members of the mainstream Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches as becoming increasingly secure in their positions as leaders of southern society. The churches were losing, or had already lost, their sense as agencies for the plain folk to criticize the complacency, the hierarchical pretensions, and perceived decadence of the upper class. In doing so, they had taken on the characteristics John Lee Eighmy best described as Churches in Cultural Captivity. As on so many topics, C. Vann Woodward states this position most clearly.
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- Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1994
References
Notes
1. Eighmy, John Lee, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972).Google Scholar
2. Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 172-73.Google Scholar Other leading works on the apparent complacency of the mainstream churches in the postbellum period include Hill, Samuel S., Southern Churches in Crisis (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1967)Google Scholar; Hill, Samuel S., “A Survey of Southern Religious History,” in Religion in the Southern States: A Historical Study, ed. Hill, Samuel S. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1983), 383–423 Google Scholar; Hill, Samuel S., ed., Religion and the Solid South (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Bode, Frederick A., Protestantism and the New South: North Carolina Baptists and Methodists in Political Crisis, 1894-1903 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975)Google Scholar; Spain, Rufus B., At Ease in Zion: Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865-1900 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and Farish, Hunter Dickinson, The Circuit Rider Dismounts: A Social History of Southern Methodism, 1865-1900 (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1938; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1969).Google Scholar Wilson, Charles Reagan, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980)Google Scholar, does not fall into the same category, but, by stressing the ways that postbellum religion supported the existing class System while mythologizing the old, it Supports the notion that postbellum churches were far from protest institutions. The most important works on Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the antebellum South argue less that the churches were complacent than that they were not yet fully in charge and, therefore, still saw themselves as Outsiders. See Mathews, Donald G., Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Loveland, Anne C., Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Boles, John B., “Evangelical Protestantism in the Old South: From Religious Dissent to Cultural Dominance,” in Religion in the South: Essays, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson 3. 128 Religion and American Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 13–34.Google Scholar Broad interpretations of the nonpolitical bent in white southerners’ religion appear in Kurtz, Ernest, “The Tragedy of Southern Religion,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 217-47Google Scholar; and Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage Books, 1941).Google Scholar
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9. Summit's Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian churches met every other week, and its Catholic church met once a month. Summit Sentinel, March 25, 1909, 3. Only three of the twenty-seven churches in the Bogue Chitto Baptist Association had pastors every week. Bogue Chitto Baptist Association Minutes, 1910-1912.
10. Bogue Chitto Baptist Association Minutes, 1910, 36-37.
11. SBCM, August 28, 1910.
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13. SBCM, September 10, 1910.
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18. See note 2.
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25. Ownby, Subduing Satan, 130-33.
26. SBCM, May 18, 1890; January 1874; emphasis mine.
27. SBCM, March 4, 1880.
28. Walter Edwin Tynes, “Diary of Reverend Walter Edwin Tynes” (unpublished MS, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi), 16.
29. SBCM, September 6, 1874; February 21, 1875; June 6, 1875; August 28, 1897-1910.
30. Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms.
31. (Jackson, Mississippi) Baptist Record, January 16, 1908, 7; June 18, 1908, 10.
32. On the controversies within the church, see SBCM, June 4, 1905; December 3, 1905; April 1, 1906; November 11, 1906; January 10, 1907; October 13, 1907; January 5, 1908; March 15, 1908; April 5, 1908; October 3, 1908.
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35. Tynes, “Diary,” 39.
36. SBCM, April-May 1879.
37. SBCM, 1897-1910. On Anding and Simmons as neighbors, see U.S. Bureau of the Census, 13th Census, Population Schedule for Pike County, Mississippi, 1910.
38. On Ratcliff's career, see Summit Sentinel, June 3, 1909, 3; October 8, 1908, 3; June 17, 1909, 3; C. V. L. Ratcliff file, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Mississippi.
39. Summit Sentinel, June 24, 1909, 3; December 31, 1908, 3.
40. Summit Sentinel, October 7, 1909, 3; November 24, 1909, 3; June 11, 1903, 3; December 31, 1908, 3; September 22, 1910, 4.
41. Summit Sentinel, June 16, 1904, 3; October 8, 1908, 3; June 23, 1904, 3; July 2, 1908, 2; October 8, 1908, 3; July 21, 1909, 4; April 22, 1909, 3.
42. Summit Sentinel, March 17, 1910, 4; March 24, 1910, 4; August 11, 1910, 4; July 21, 1910, 4; August 18, 1910, 4; September 15, 1910, 4; October 20, 1910, 4.
43. Summit Sentinel, May 12, 1910, 4; June 30, 1910, 4; July 7, 1910, 4.
44. Summit Sentinel October 7, 1909, 3; November 24, 1909, 3; June 11, 1903, 3; December 31, 1908, 3; September 22, 1910, 4.
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58. Summit Sentinel, December 31, 1908, 3.
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60. Charles Reagan Wilson makes a similar point in Baptized in Blood, 79-88.
61. Summit Sentinel, November 3, 1910, 4.