When prophets are honored, it is time to be wary. Placing prophets on pedestals can be a way not only of disarming them but also of evading all the lessons they can teach. American Catholic radicals, for instance, occupy several revered niches in the history of American Catholicism. Here, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin break bread on Mott Street and milk cows on Maryfarm; there, Daniel Berrigan destroys draft records and leads G-men on a merry chase through New England. Though vilified in their times, this communion of saints now commands respect in most quarters of American Catholic intellectual life and could even constitute a Catholic wing in the pantheon of American radicalism.

Forty-eight hours after they landed in New York City in 1880, a small contingent of the Salvation Army held their first public meeting at the infamous Harry Hill's Variety Theater. The enterprising Hill, alerted to the group's arrival from Britain by newspaper reports, contacted their leader, Commissioner George Scott Railton, and offered to pay the group to “do a turn” for “an hour or two on … Sunday evening.” In nineteenth-century New York City, Harry Hill's was one of the best known concert saloons, and reformers considered him “among the disreputable classes” of that city. His saloon, they said, was “nothing more than one of the many gates to hell.”

Shortly before the turn of the nineteenth Century, an amateur collector of Negro Spirituals and folklore recounted a conversation that she had had with an unidentified African American clergyman. According to the collector, the clergyman, “one of the most scholarly and noted ministers of the colored race,” admitted that, even as a professed Christian, he found himself “under the influences of voodooism” and other African occult practices. He explained that, as a young pastor, he had grown “completely discouraged” after numerous unsuccessful attempts to attract new worshipers into his congregation until one day an unexpected visitor happened his way:

The accompanying engraving [see fig. 1] appeared in a mid-nineteenth-century issue of The Ladies' Repository. Its caption, “Missionary Cemetry [sic], Fuh-Chau, China,” gives an accurate enough description of the scene. The artist even included a legend identifying the missionary wives and children whose remains the graves held. It is difficult to know exactly in what spirit The Repository presented this engraving to its subscribers. But the shady silence of the scene, like a pictorial obituary, invites reflection on both the lives and the deaths of the entombed. Significantly, like an obituary, the embrace of the trees also draws one in to reflect on one's own life and eventual death.

At times in history, groups of people with very different ideologies have allied with one another because of a common threat. The most striking example of this was the World War II alliance of the United States and the Soviet Union. In a religious matter, Baptists and other free-church evangelicals in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries joined with deists like Thomas Jefferson to combat the threat to religious liberty posed by the establishment of religion. At other times, groups with similar ideas have been unable to come together because they did not share similar attitudes toward or positions within their cultures. This essay is concerned with the latter phenomenon and uses Southern Baptists and northern evangelicals as a case study. The historical relationship of these two groups illustrates something profound about the very nature of religious alliances; specifically, it illustrates how cultural factors and intuitive notions of uneasiness about theological security determine whether or not religious groups with great theological similarities can find common ground.