Varieties of Southern Religious History

Description

Essays from former students of Donald G. Mathews on topics in Southern religion

Comprising essays written by former students of Donald G. Mathews, a distinguished historian of religion in the South, Varieties of Southern Religious History offers rich insight into the social and cultural history of the United States. Fifteen essays, edited by Regina D. Sullivan and Monte Harrell Hampton, offer fresh and insightful interpretations in the fields of U. S. religious history, women's history, and African American history from the colonial era to the twentieth century. Emerging scholars as well as established authors examine a range of topics on the cultural and social history of the South and the religious history of the United States.

Essays on new topics include a consideration of Kentucky Presbyterians and their reaction to the rising pluralism of the early nineteenth century. Gerald Wilson offers an analysis of anti-Catholic bias in North Carolina during the twentieth century, and Mary Frederickson examines the rhetoric of death in contemporary correspondence. There are also reinterpretations of subjects such as late-eighteenth-century Ohio Valley missionaries Lorenzo and Peggy Dow, a recontextualization of Millerism, and new scholarship on the appeal of spiritualism in the South.

Historians of U.S. women examine how individuals struggled with gender conventions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Robert Martin and Cheryl Junk, touching on how women struggled with the gender convictions, discuss Anne Wittenmyer and Frances Bumpass, respectively, demonstrating how religious ideology both provided space for these women to move into new roles and yet limited their activities to specific realms. Emily Bingham offers a study of how her forebear Henrietta Bingham challenged gender roles in the early twentieth century.

Historians of African American history offer provocative revisions of key topics. Larry Tise explores the complex religious, social, and political issues faced by late-eighteenth-century slaveholding Quakers. Monte Hampton traces the transition of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina, from a biracial congregation to an all-black church by 1835. Wayne Durrill and Thomas Mainwaring present reinterpretations of well-studied subjects: the Nat Turner rebellion and the Underground Railroad.

This collection provides fresh insight into a variety of topics in honor of Donald G. Mathews and his legacy as a scholar of southern religion.

Contributors
Emily Bingham
Gavin James Campbell
Ruth Alden Doan
Wayne K. Durrill
Mary E. Frederickson
Monte Harrell Hampton
Cheryl F. Junk
W. Thomas Mainwaring
Robert F. Martin
Daniel R. Miller
Philip N. Mulder
Nancy Gray Schoonmaker
Regina D. Sullivan
Larry E. Tise
David J. Voelker
Gerald Lee Wilson

Sujets

• Comparative Religion
• HISTORY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Conferencia Sur de Liderazgo Cristiano
• New England theology
• Southern Historical Collection
• Baptist beliefs
• Culture of the Southern United States
• American Missionary Association
• Tolbert Fanning
• Christian Order
• Southern Methodist Church
• Revival meeting
• Social Gospel
• Separate Baptists
• Southern Agrarians
• Restoration Movement
• Socinianism
• Liberation theology
• History of the Americas
• History of religions
• Baptists
• Southern Gothic
• Religion
• United States
• Southern Christian Leadership Conference
• Évangile social
• FL
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• VA
• GA

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 22 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611174892
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Varieties of Southern Religious History
Varieties of Southern Religious History
Essays in Honor of Donald G. Mathews
EDITED BY Regina D. Sullivan and Monte Harrell Hampton
2015 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-488-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-489-2 (ebook)
Cover photograph: View from the Slaves Gallery, Midway Congregational Church, Liberty County, Georgia; Brian Brown Photography, vanishingcoastalgeorgia.com
For Elizabeth Farrior Buford
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Historian of Humble Access
The Greatest Curiosity
Race, Religion, and Politics in Henry Evans s Methodist Church, 1785-1858
M ONTE H ARRELL H AMPTON
Strangers in a Wilderness
Lorenzo Dow and John Taylor on the Religious Frontiers of the Early American Republic
P HILIP N. M ULDER
Taking Up Quaker Slaves
The Origins of America s Slavery Imperative
L ARRY E. T ISE
Presbyterian Orthodoxy and the Dilemma of Pluralism
The Battle over Kentucky s Transylvania University, 1800-1830
D AVID J. V OELKER
Nat Turner and Signs of the Apocalypse
W AYNE K. D URRILL
Neither Cult nor Charisma
William Miller and Leadership of New Religious Movements
R UTH A LDEN D OAN
Ladies, Arise! The World Has Need of You
The Widow Bumpass s Newspaper War
C HERYL F. J UNK
Where Do We Go from Here?
Spiritualism and Eternity in 1850s Nashville
N ANCY G RAY S CHOONMAKER
Annie Wittenmyer and the Twilight of Evangelical Reform
R OBERT F. M ARTIN
All Sharers in the Blessed Knowledge
Niijima J s Transpacific Crusade for a Christian Japan, 1871-73
G AVIN J AMES C AMPBELL
Psychological and Historical Perspectives on the Denial of Death
M ARY E. F REDERICKSON
The Underground Railroad
Deus ex Machina
W. T HOMAS M AINWARING
Kentucky in Bloomsbury
Henrietta Bingham, Black Culture, and the Southern Gothic in Jazz Age London
E MILY B INGHAM
Nationalism, Marxism, and the Christian Reformed Church in Cuba
D ANIEL R. M ILLER
Preachers and Politics
The Religious Issue in the North Carolina Presidential Campaign of 1960-A Footnote on Al Smith
G ERALD L EE W ILSON
APPENDIX A : Dissertations Directed by Donald G. Mathews
APPENDIX B : Select Bibliography of Donald G. Mathews s Writings, 1965-2015
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the contributors for their eager participation, hard work, and patience with what has been a lengthy process. We are also indebted to those who made the publication of this festschrift possible. David Moltke-Hansen, Alex Moore, and Linda Fogle of the University of South Carolina Press gave this project a home. We would like to acknowledge the particular support and kindness of Alex Moore throughout the publication process. We also thank the anonymous readers for their critiques, which made this volume stronger. Elizabeth Farrior Buford and the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provided essential administrative help, and we thank them sincerely. Finally we would like to recognize our families, without whose support this project would have been impossible
This book is dedicated to Elizabeth Farrior Buford, not only for her assistance with this volume, but also for her enduring generosity. She graciously and unselfishly shared her husband with us, and all of Mathews s students, during his years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and we remain deeply grateful.
Introduction
A Historian of Humble Access
When the editors shared with their mentor the news that their proposed festschrift had been approved for publication, Donald G. Mathews responded with characteristic humility. After expressing his gratitude, his reply turned quickly to his own sense of deficiency. I have not always been as good a mentor or advisor . . . as I should have been, he lamented. Many times, he disclosed, I have mumbled the words of the confession ( and there is no health in us ) and the prayer of humble access. This was not the only occasion upon which Mathews expressed himself in words taken from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer: We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. 1 As Mathews is a former Methodist minister who converted to Episcopalianism, the basic sentiments conveyed in these hoary liturgical phrases have informed much of his engagement with his academic worlds, whether the world of his historical subjects, which he entered through the craft of interpretive scholarship, or the world of present relationships, which developed through countless hours of advising his students over the years. These sentiments of human inadequacy have manifested themselves in a deep-seated skepticism toward historical claims of human righteousness and beneficence (especially by those on top ), and this has served his scholarship well, enhancing his historical vision with lenses of incisive scrutiny and uncommon sensitivity. When it comes to his contribution as a mentor, however, this sensibility has most certainly distorted his vision.
This wide-ranging collection of essays, all of which were contributed by his former students, should correct this distortion. 2 Examples of his flexibility and consistency as an adviser also abound in the list of dissertations overseen by Mathews, which is included in the appendix of this book. The sheer range, topical as well as temporal, covered by this body of scholarship belies his feelings of inadequacy; clearly, there was not too much that was left undone. And his influence transcends the indelible imprint left upon his own students, extending to countless others who have quietly drawn inspiration from his work. Mathews, it should be mentioned, proved a natural interdisciplinary scholar. Interested in both religion and history, he earned a B.D. from Yale Divinity School before taking a Ph.D. in history from Duke University, where he studied with both the historian of the South Robert Woody and the scholar of religion H. Shelton Smith. Numerous scholars of these and related fields, though not having benefited from Mathews s direct mentorship, have nonetheless expressed admiration for his vast sway over the fields of their own scholarship. It was, for example, an admiring colleague rather than a former student, who, upon the occasion of his retirement, honored him with a paper reflecting on the lasting influence of his Religion in the Old South . No doubt countless others would have lined up for the opportunity to applaud him by acknowledging the impact of his work upon their own. 3 When it comes to assessing the contribution of Mathews as a guide and inspiration to historians, then, it must be observed that a great gulf stretches between the deep appreciation of the many prot g s whom he has directly or indirectly influenced, on the one hand, and his own assessment of inadequacy, on the other.
This same alertness to human inadequacy, this appreciation of the dearth of human sufficiency, has suffused his scholarship, and here its effects have been much more salutary. This awareness has lent to his historical studies a compelling but rare combination of sensitivity and skepticism. The former can be seen in his taking seriously the widely varying forms of human religiosity with which the student of the past must come to terms. That the religion of bygone southerners, for instance, may have lacked resonance with the personal beliefs and priorities of the historians who proposed to study them did not, in Mathews s view, excuse scholarly inattentiveness. In a 1998 essay on the past and future of southern religious history, he noted that synthetic histories of the South, with few exceptions, had given surprisingly scant attention to religion. Admonishing his colleagues, he counseled contrition for this historiographic negligence. Invoking words of Episcopal liturgy, he wrote, Perhaps historians should have knelt at the altar of Clio to confess with the old prayer book, we have left undone those things which we ought to have done. 4 Repeating this counsel three years later, Mathews wrote, Religious life is the portal to an imagined sacred and moral reality that historians distort if they nurture an aloof and na ve incredulity when approaching it. Instead he advocated for openness to the moral dimensions of past lives, which he characterized as an approach to our subjects through the prayer of humble access. 5 This deep awareness of human finitude and fallibility, of his own finitude and fallibility, helped foster in Mathews a refusal to dismiss those dimensions of the past that do not yield readily to the expectations and mental framework of present academic discourse; yet his approach of humble access has ironically multiplied knowledge by bringing into the light countless remote dimensions of the past.
If, fifteen years later, his refrain of insufficient scholarly attention being paid to southern religious history now sounds pass , then this welcome change has resulted in large part from his own prodigious contributions. His pathbreaking and still crucial Religion in the Old South , for example, exhibited this humble openness in its approach to the evangelical faith of both blacks and whites in the antebellum South. Mathews looked beyond the formal thought systems and moral record of the region s