Today the American South is defined by evangelical Christianity - not just in terms of religion, but also politics, culture, and history. Many may be surprised, though, that there was a time when evangelical Christianity didn't dominate the South. In fact, evangelicals were treated more like a weird cult that wasn't really trusted.

In Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, Christine Leigh Heyrman writes:

[A]lmost a century elapsed between the 1740s, when evangelicals started actively proselytizing in the South, and the middle of the nineteenth century, when they may have won the attention, if not the allegiance, of a majority of southern whites. [...] The surprise, of course, is that evangelicals struggled for many decades prosper among whites in the South.

So long has this region been the cultural hearth of evangelicalism in the present-day United States that it takes some doing to imagine a past that was radically different, a time when a diverse, contentious spiritual culture seemed unlikely ever to become the “Bible Belt,” let alone its proudly proclaimed “buckle.”

During the first half of America’s existence — and through the colonial era — the American South was dominated by Anglican churches. Anglican Christianity was much more tolerant and laid back than evangelicalism. Some saw this as a drawback because it didn’t inspire much in the way of excitement.

Anglicans had little taste for dogmatism and tolerated differences of opinion on many points of theology. Instead, their clergy encouraged a temperate, practical piety among the laity through liturgical observance and moral admonition. Many southern whites found spiritual satisfaction in hearing intoned the familiar, stately cadences of the Book of Common Prayer, the basis of Anglican worship, and, in some larger churches, savoring the sublime music of choirs and organs. [...]

It became the goal of evangelicals, then, to persuade both the Anglican faithful and the unchurched that resting content in this kind of Christianity entailed a dangerous complacency. They derided the Anglican emphasis on ceremonialism as an empty outward show and condemned that church’s elaborate rituals, holy day observances ... as “popish” relics.

Imagine how much different America might be if Anglican Christianity had remained dominant in the South and evangelicalism had never grown beyond a very minor movement. Evangelicals weren’t always the dominant force in the South, they didn’t have to become the dominant force, and they certainly don’t have to remain dominant.

 

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