"Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt" by Christine Heyrman

The Bancroft Prize, commonly regarded as the most prestigious award for scholarship on American history, took the unusual step last April of honoring a book focusing on America's religious past. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, by University of Delaware historian Christine Heyrman, explores how Evangelicalism emerged as the dominant religious faith in the American South. Heyrman focuses her research on churches and ministers in the Baptist, Methodist, and, to a lesser extent, Presbyterian denominations, from the years following the American revolution until the mid-nineteenth century. Her basic thesis might be summarized as "the South changed Evangelicalism more than Evangelicalism changed the South."

Heyrman argues that evangelical "missionaries" sent from northern churches to the South in the middle of the eighteenth century encountered significant resistance from the Anglican hierarchy and the entrenched southern culture. The evangelicals, she believes, initially had rather progressive attitudes toward race and gender roles. They vociferously opposed slavery and encouraged integrated worship. They permitted expanded roles for women in church and in society. They employed an emotional worship style and appeared to show little concern for social refinement or deference to authority hierarchies. All of this, Heyrman argues, was virtually anathema to the entrenched southern culture of slavery, patriarchy, and rigid social mores. Not surprisingly, while the evangelical message initially enjoyed some success among southern women and rural lower classes, southern white men came to massively resist the influence and even the presence of these evangelical carpetbaggers.

Rather than abandoning their mission entirely, Heyrman concludes, the evangelical ministers merely adapted their message. In the face of southern remonstrance toward such radical social values, evangelical preachers eventually accommodated themselves to the southern culture. While retaining the evangelical substance of their message, they adopted more restrictive roles for women in the church and the home, and began to defend the peculiar institution of chattel slavery. Southerners, finding their basic cultural values no longer under assault from these religious interlopers, embraced evangelical Christianity and planted the roots of today's Bible Belt.

Heyrman received widespread accolades in addition to the Bancroft Prize. The reviewer for the Boston Globe, apparently unconcerned about sacrilege, gushed that "the book has much of the beauty of the Psalms and the wisdom of the prophets." The New York Times applauded her diligent research and described Southern Cross as a "wonderfully told and beautifully written story." (1)

Perhaps not surprisingly, Heyrman is concerned with the contemporary applications of her research. She first became interested in Evangelicalism in 1976, the "year of the evangelical," when Jimmy Carter's public discussion of his faith corresponded with a resurgence in "born again" Christianity. (2) Even more currently she finds the Promise Keepers Movement intriguing, having written an op-ed piece on it in the New York Times and, more problematically, offering her observations on Promise Keepers in the epilogue of Southern Cross.

Heyrman leaves no doubt where she stands on the debate over the "Southern Man" contested in song between Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd: the "Southern Man," or more precisely southern men and the culture they created, are the villains. Heyrman argues that evangelical Christianity only received widespread acceptance and adherents in the South when it adapted itself to the stifling social mores of the prevailing power structure wholly controlled by white southern men. Like so many other of today's "new social historians," Heyrman is obsessed with power relations in history-which groups had power, which groups were powerless, how the powerful sought to control and/or exploit the powerless. As with many methodologies and interpretive themes, this one has merit. Yet, the focus on power relations eventually serves to obscure rather than illuminate the full story.

The acclaim of the Bancroft Prize committee, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times notwithstanding, this reviewer found Southern Cross significantly flawed. The considerable insights of Heyrman's research and argument are obscured by her imprecise definitions, questionable conclusions, and sometimes unsettling animus toward the subjects of her book.

To begin with, Heyrman fails to offer a specific definition of just who were the "evangelicals" that her book focuses on. Admittedly, the theological/historical definition of "evangelical" continues to inspire fervent debate in many quarters today, but Heyrman's inability to even broadly define her subjects severely undermines any generalizations or insights she may later offer. At the beginning of the book, she attempts to distinguish "evangelicals" in the early American South as "those who spoke the language of Canaan," which she describes as a metaphor for a certain type of "new awareness" following a conversion experience-also only vaguely defined. (3) Throughout the rest of the book, however, she uses the term "evangelical" interchangeably with "Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians," or other times just "Methodists and Baptists." This only begs the question-were all Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians also "evangelicals," even if they did not have such a conversion experience? What about Anglicans in the South who did have a conversion experience-were they "evangelicals"? Such questions should not be dismissed as mere academic quibbling, for the very thrust of Heyrman's argument rests on the dramatic accommodations that "evangelicals" made in order to dominate the South, and yet she does not seem sure just who these evangelicals were-and were not.

Nor does Heyrman's evidence itself fully satisfy. In order to demonstrate the purportedly profound changes that evangelical clergy made to ingratiate themselves to the southern culture, she focuses on the roles of women and African Americans. Concerning the former, Heyrman describes evangelicals in the late eighteenth century as encouraging expansive roles for women in church life and governance, whereas by the early nineteenth century evangelicals in the South had regressed and severely restricted women's church participation. However, while she relates some anecdotal accounts of women sharing testimonies or exhortations in eighteenth-century church meetings, she concedes that she finds virtually no evidence that evangelicals in any denomination adopted policies of ordaining women, permitting women to preach, or even allowing women to actively participate in church governance. In the later years of the eighteenth-century and early years of the nineteenth-century, Heyrman continues to find occasional anecdotal evidence of women testifying or exhorting in church or prayer meetings, although on a somewhat lesser scale than earlier years. It goes without saying that evangelical churches still generally refrained from ordaining women or permitting them significant roles in church government. In short, Heyrman hardly demonstrates the paradigmatic shift in women's roles on which her argument supposedly rests.

She encounters similar difficulties in supporting her contention that evangelicals dramatically altered their views on slavery. Some eighteenth-century evangelical preachers had courageously denounced slavery, and integrated worship was not uncommon in many eighteenth-century churches. Heyrman finds some evidence that as Methodists and Baptists began to proliferate in the South, churches became more segregated and pastors more muted in their criticism of slavery. However, she presents no evidence that these early nineteenth-century evangelical preachers actively endorsed slavery. Yet one would have expected evangelical clergy to vocally support the South's distinctive institution of chattel slavery if indeed evangelicals sought so desperately to ingratiate themselves to southern culture. (To be fair, by the mid-nineteenth century it appears that some clergy were endorsing slavery, but Heyrman's thesis only addresses alleged changes in the early nineteenth century.) Once again, her evidence, while not nonexistent, is underwhelming.

This overdeterminism-offering strong claims backed by scanty evidence-points in turn to one of the most disturbing aspects of Southern Cross, and that is Heyrman's sometimes thinly veiled contempt for the subjects of her book. She declares that the South "had long been a culture steeped in misogyny," (4) describes preachers who "crowed over their success" in subduing boisterous women parishioners, (5) brazenly refers to serious doctrinal debates among Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists as "the sober fanaticism of hair-splitting religious controversy," (6) accuses preachers of "exploiting the filial anxieties of younger white men," (7) and summarily concludes that the most important goal for ministers was "vindicating their mastery within the public sphere" (8) (emphasis added). Heyrman simply does not like these people, seeing them as hateful, manipulative, deeply irrational, and power-hungry. She concludes Southern Cross with an awkward epilogue describing (and lamenting) what she perceives as the present-day patriarchal authoritarianism of the Promise Keeper's movement and conservative evangelical churches.

At its worst, then, Southern Cross lapses from academic history into an ideological polemic, obscuring what could otherwise have been an innovative interpretation of religion and culture in the American South. Of course, readers of Modern Reformation may have little affinity for a southern Evangelicalism characterized by emotionalism, pietism, and revivalistic fervor rather than a confessional understanding of the doctrines of grace and the centrality of the Church. But readers of Modern Reformation, and all thoughtful Christians, ought to have an interest in accurate, judicious, and insightful works of history. On these counts, Southern Cross disappoints.