The South's Tolerable Alien

The South's Tolerable Alien PDF

Author: Andrew S. Moore

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0807135739

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In The South's Tolerable Alien, Andrew S. Moore probes the role of Catholics in the post--World War II South and argues persuasively that, until the 1960s, religion rivaled race as a boundary separating residents of the Bible Belt. Delving deep into underutilized diocesan archives, he explores the ways in which southern Catholics worked to be both good Catholics and good southerners in a region largely defined by Protestant denominations, and explains how the burgeoning civil rights movement ultimately breached these religious barriers. With religious intolerance integral to southern Protestant identity, anti-Catholicism persisted longer in the South than in any other part of the country. Yet despite the prejudices against them, southern Catholics refused to shrink from public view, creating a separate subculture to sustain their religious identity as they marked out public sacred space from which they could engage their critics. Moore describes in detail the Catholics' civic displays and public rituals -- including the diocese of Mobile-Birmingham's annual Christ the King celebrations, which featured downtown parades of over 25,000 people. More than mere assertions of their presence, these pageants provided Catholics with opportunities to craft a secular identity within the American mainstream. As Moore maintains, the rise of the civil rights movement slowly diminished religious tension among white southerners as violent confrontations in Selma and Birmingham forced Catholics, as well as others, to take a stand. Once the civil rights movement was in full swing, either support for or opposition to racial desegregation became paramount and contributed to social and political realignments along racial lines instead of religious ones. Comparing the responses to the struggle to end Jim Crow among dioceses, Moore finds that, among Catholics, there was no simple liberal/conservative dichotomy. Instead, he argues that, in the South, the civil rights movement was more important than the Second Vatican Council in reshaping the social and political stances of the Catholic Church. By describing the relationship between Catholics and Protestants in the South from a Catholic perspective, Moore demonstrates that, despite the persistence of anti-Catholicism throughout this period, white Protestants were gradually coming to terms with the modern South's religious pluralism. With The South's Tolerable Alien, Moore offers the first serious analysis of southern Catholicism outside of Louisiana and makes an enormous contribution to the study of southern religion.

The South's Tolerable Alien

The South's Tolerable Alien PDF

Author: Andrew S. Moore

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2007-03-01

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0807148628

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In The South's Tolerable Alien, Andrew S. Moore probes the role of Catholics in the post--World War II South and argues persuasively that, until the 1960s, religion rivaled race as a boundary separating residents of the Bible Belt. Delving deep into underutilized diocesan archives, he explores the ways in which southern Catholics worked to be both good Catholics and good southerners in a region largely defined by Protestant denominations, and explains how the burgeoning civil rights movement ultimately breached these religious barriers. With religious intolerance integral to southern Protestant identity, anti-Catholicism persisted longer in the South than in any other part of the country. Yet despite the prejudices against them, southern Catholics refused to shrink from public view, creating a separate subculture to sustain their religious identity as they marked out public sacred space from which they could engage their critics. Moore describes in detail the Catholics' civic displays and public rituals -- including the diocese of Mobile-Birmingham's annual Christ the King celebrations, which featured downtown parades of over 25,000 people. More than mere assertions of their presence, these pageants provided Catholics with opportunities to craft a secular identity within the American mainstream. As Moore maintains, the rise of the civil rights movement slowly diminished religious tension among white southerners as violent confrontations in Selma and Birmingham forced Catholics, as well as others, to take a stand. Once the civil rights movement was in full swing, either support for or opposition to racial desegregation became paramount and contributed to social and political realignments along racial lines instead of religious ones. Comparing the responses to the struggle to end Jim Crow among dioceses, Moore finds that, among Catholics, there was no simple liberal/conservative dichotomy. Instead, he argues that, in the South, the civil rights movement was more important than the Second Vatican Council in reshaping the social and political stances of the Catholic Church. By describing the relationship between Catholics and Protestants in the South from a Catholic perspective, Moore demonstrates that, despite the persistence of anti-Catholicism throughout this period, white Protestants were gradually coming to terms with the modern South's religious pluralism. With The South's Tolerable Alien, Moore offers the first serious analysis of southern Catholicism outside of Louisiana and makes an enormous contribution to the study of southern religion.

Christianity and Race in the American South

Christianity and Race in the American South PDF

Author: Paul Harvey

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 022641549X

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The history of race and religion in the American South is infused with tragedy, survival, and water—from St. Augustine on the shores of Florida’s Atlantic Coast to the swampy mire of Jamestown to the floodwaters that nearly destroyed New Orleans. Determination, resistance, survival, even transcendence, shape the story of race and southern Christianities. In Christianity and Race in the American South, Paul Harvey gives us a narrative history of the South as it integrates into the story of religious history, fundamentally transforming our understanding of the importance of American Christianity and religious identity. Harvey chronicles the diversity and complexity in the intertwined histories of race and religion in the South, dating back to the first days of European settlement. He presents a history rife with strange alliances, unlikely parallels, and far too many tragedies, along the way illustrating that ideas about the role of churches in the South were critically shaped by conflicts over slavery and race that defined southern life more broadly. Race, violence, religion, and southern identity remain a volatile brew, and this book is the persuasive historical examination that is essential to making sense of it.

Southern Civil Religions

Southern Civil Religions PDF

Author: Arthur Remillard

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0820341339

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In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Lost Cause gave white southerners a new collective identity anchored in the stories, symbols, and rituals of the defeated Confederacy. Historians have used the idea of civil religion to explain how this powerful memory gave the white South a unique sense of national meaning, purpose, and destiny. The civil religious perspectives of everyone else, meanwhile, have gone unnoticed. Arthur Remillard fills this void by investigating the civil religious discourses of a wide array of people and groups--blacks and whites, men and women, northerners and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, as well as Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Focusing on the Wiregrass Gulf South region--an area covering north Florida, southwest Georgia, and southeast Alabama--Remillard argues that the Lost Cause was but one civil religious topic among many. Even within the white majority, civil religious language influenced a range of issues, such as progress, race, gender, and religious tolerance. Moreover, minority groups developed sacred values and beliefs that competed for space in the civil religious landscape.

In the Shadow of Ebenezer

In the Shadow of Ebenezer PDF

Author: Leah Mickens

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2022-12-13

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1479816507

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Uncovers how the Civil Rights Movement and Vatican II affected African American Catholics in Atlanta The history and practices of African American Catholics has been vastly understudied, and Black Catholics are often written off as a fringe sector of the religious population. Yet, Catholics of African descent have been a part of Catholicism since the early days of European exploration into the New World. In the Shadow of Ebenezer examines how the Civil Rights Movement and the Second Vatican Council affected African American Catholics in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on the historic Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church in the Old Fourth Ward. Our Lady of Lourdes is a neighbor of major historic Black Protestant churches in the city, including Ebenezer Baptist Church, a block away, which during the Civil Rights era was the pulpit of Martin Luther King Jr. Featuring archival and oral history sources, the book examines the religious and cultural life of the parishioners of Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, showing how this Black Catholic congregation fit into the overall religious ecology of the neighborhood. Examining Our Lady of Lourdes in relation to these larger Black Protestant congregations helps to illuminate whether and how they were shaped by their place at a center of the civil rights struggle, and how religious change and social change intersect.

Minorities and Reconstructive Coalitions

Minorities and Reconstructive Coalitions PDF

Author: Willie Gin

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-06

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 1351981854

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Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Series editor's foreword -- Acknowledgments -- 1 The multiplicity of the Catholic past -- 2 Transubstantiating the body politic: a theory of reconstructive coalitions -- 3 Catholic incorporation from 1890 to the mid-twentieth century -- 4 Working with Catholicism in Australia -- 5 Catholicism at arm's length in the United States -- 6 Provincializing Catholicism in Canada -- 7 Catholic standing in the latter half of the twentieth century -- 8 Realigning Catholicism and Protestantism at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States -- 9 The limits of pan-Christian coalitions in Australia and Canada -- 10 The Catholic past as prologue? The future of ethnic, racial, and religious minority incorporation -- Appendices -- Selected bibliography -- Index

Desegregating Dixie

Desegregating Dixie PDF

Author: Mark Newman

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2018-09-17

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 1496818873

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Mark Newman draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining African Americans to the back of white churches and to black-only schools and churches. However, in the twentieth century, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, pressure from some black and white Catholics, and secular change brought by the civil rights movement increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination both inside and outside its walls. Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South split between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s onward tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began desegregation before or in anticipation of secular change while elsewhere, especially in the Deep South, they often tied changes in the Catholic churches to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than has often been assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing valued black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation shook congregations but seldom brought about genuine integration.

Go and Be Reconciled

Go and Be Reconciled PDF

Author: William Nicholas

Publisher: NewSouth Books

Published: 2018-06-01

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 160306415X

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During the climactic years of the civil rights movement in the Deep South, a closely related struggle was going on within the United Methodist Church. That denomination, second only in membership in the region to the Southern Baptists, was slowly moving toward integration under mandate from its national governing body, the Methodist General conference. But in Alabama, external institutional pressures and even internal constituencies were not strong enough to break down the segregated church structure: doing that would require a significant shift in the leadership of the church. The story is one in which an institution based on the moral teachings of Christianity confronted the immorality of racism and legal segregation within its own ranks while it continued to operate within a racially divided larger society. Against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of the civil rights struggle (the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the King demonstration in Birmingham in 1963, and the Sixteenth Street Baptist church bombing), the North Alabama Conference and its counterpart in South Alabama carried on a spirited and often bitter debate over the existence of a completely separate conference for their black membership. This book tells the inside story of the struggle within the North Alabama Conference for the first time by utilizing the publications and official archives of the church. But its most important sources are interviews with a wide spectrum of Methodists, including those who served in roles of leadership and those who were simply faithful members of their respective churches. Their accounts are compelling and go far beyond the sometimes vague and uninformative official conference documents. Many of the persons interviewed are no longer living, but in transferring their spoken words onto the printed page, there is a sense that their long-suppressed stories are being told for the first time. They described in detail how a hierarchical institution moved from a position of absolute commitment to segregation to one in which the uniting of the races under one organizational structure was achieved. In the end, the integration of the church was finally realized as a result of the daring leadership of a single bishop who challenged the prevailing white segregationist laity, Kenneth Goodson. But along the way there were many other persons who risked their careers and even their personal safety on behalf of racial justice. This is their story as well.

Making Catholic America

Making Catholic America PDF

Author: William S. Cossen

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-08-15

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1501771019

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In Making Catholic America, William S. Cossen shows how Catholic men and women worked to prove themselves to be model American citizens in the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Far from being outsiders in American history, Catholics took command of public life in the early twentieth century, claiming leadership in the growing American nation. They produced their own version of American history and claimed the power to remake the nation in their own image, arguing that they were the country's most faithful supporters of freedom and liberty and that their church had birthed American independence. Making Catholic America offers a new interpretation of American life in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, demonstrating the surprising success of an often-embattled religious group in securing for itself a place in the national community and in profoundly altering what it meant to be an American in the modern world.

Evangelicals and Presidential Politics

Evangelicals and Presidential Politics PDF

Author: Andrew S. Moore

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-04-07

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 0807174866

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Using as their starting point a 1976 Newsweek cover story on the emerging politicization of evangelical Christians, contributors to Evangelicals and Presidential Politics engage the scholarly literature on evangelicalism from a variety of angles to offer new answers to persisting questions about the movement. The standard historical narrative describes the period between the 1925 Scopes Trial and the early 1970s as a silent one for evangelicals, and when they did re-engage in the political arena, it was over abortion. Randall J. Stephens and Randall Balmer challenge that narrative. Stephens moves the starting point earlier in the twentieth century, and Balmer concludes that race, not abortion, initially motivated activists. In his examination of the relationship between African Americans and evangelicalism, Dan Wells uses the Newsweek story’s sidebar on Black activist and born-again Christian Eldridge Cleaver to illuminate the former Black Panther’s uneasy association with white evangelicals. Daniel K. Williams, Allison Vander Broek, and J. Brooks Flippen explore the tie between evangelicals and the anti-abortion movement as well as the political ramifications of their anti-abortion stance. The election of 1976 helped to politicize abortion, which both encouraged a realignment of alliances and altered evangelicals’ expectations for candidates, developments that continue into the twenty-first century. Also in 1976, Foy Valentine, leader of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission, endeavored to distinguish the South’s brand of Protestant Christianity from the evangelicalism described by Newsweek. Nevertheless, Southern Baptists quickly became associated with the evangelicalism of the Religious Right and the South’s shift to the Republican Party. Jeff Frederick discusses evangelicals’ politicization from the 1970s into the twenty-first century, suggesting that southern religiosity has suffered as southern evangelicals surrendered their authenticity and adopted a moral relativism that they criticized in others. R. Ward Holder and Hannah Dick examine political evangelicalism in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. Holder lays bare the compromises that many Southern Baptists had to make to justify their support for Trump, who did not share their religious or moral values. Hannah Dick focuses on media coverage of Trump’s 2016 campaign and contends that major news outlets misunderstood the relationship between Trump and evangelicals, and between evangelicals and politics in general. The result, she suggests, was that the media severely miscalculated Trump’s chances of winning the election.