Like many other American small towns in the 1930s, Hazelhurst, Mississippi, presented its self-image to the world through a post office mural commissioned as one of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal cultural programs. The scene the community chose captures our attention because it presents an image intended to evoke the Old South. The mural features a steamboat cruising the river country nearby. The only problem is that Hazelhurst is landlocked; no river nearby is large enough to support a steamboat. Partly the mural reflects nonsouthern attitudes–a federal government agency’s judgment on an appropriate image for the community. But Hazelhurst selected...

The South Carolina legislature voted in May 2000 to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state’s capitol, an event of enormous symbolic significance in the redefinition of southern culture. The flag had once flown over several state capitols in the South. One of the last states to remove it, Alabama, did so in 1993, after a lawsuit from African Americans, but the battle was fully fought in the state that had been secession’s birthplace. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) initiated a boycott in 1999 that had a dramatic economic effect on South Carolina, forging...

James Agee spent much of the summer of 1936 in rural Alabama, observing the hard life of white sharecroppers. “These children,” he wrote, after visiting pupils at a local school, “both of town and country, are saturated southerners, speaking dialects not very different from the negroes. Brother Rabbit! Old Southern Tale!” The families that Agee and photographer Walker Evans documented–named Ricketts, Woods, and Gudger–seemed the poorest, most isolated of southerners, and yet they were indeed saturated with southern culture. People like them became national symbols during the Great Depression, when southern poor folk took on a new ideological...

In his essay “On Privacy (The American Dream: What Happened to It?)” William Faulkner complained of the invasion of his privacy by a writer who penned a story on him despite his wishes. He blamed corporate America: the magazine company, not the writer, was really at fault. This experience led Faulkner to speculate on the decline of individual liberty in a world increasingly dominated by “powerful federations and organizations and amalgamations like publishing corporations and religious sects and political parties and legislative committees” that use “such catch-phrases as ‘Freedom’ and ‘Salvation’ and ‘Security’ and ‘Democracy’” to delude the public. The...

Charles L. Black, a born-and-bred white southerner, was teaching at the Yale Law School in 1957 when he wrote an article for The New Republic in which he outlined the legal and moral appeals that might be made to sympathetic whites to promote desegregation of the South. At the end of the essay, he revealed a dream he had long had, formed from pondering “[his] relations with the many Negroes of Southern origin that [he had] known, both in the North and at home.” He continued: “Again and again how often we laugh at the same things, how often we...

In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty gives a superb portrait of the creativity nurtured in her by her family and community in Mississippi. Her parents embodied a creative dialogue. The inspiration from her father came in the form of technology–the telescopes around the house to look at the moon and stars, the clocks that taught her the importance of time, the Kodak camera that gave her a visceral sense of imagery. His creativity with such things looked toward the future, toward the progress to which creative inventions could lead. Welty’s mother’s creative gifts were different ones. She loved books,...

Long ago, while driving through rural North Carolina, I came across a hand-lettered sign on rough wood, fastened to a tree. A primitive drawing portrayed a hand with a nail through it and drops of blood, painted in bright red, flowing out of the hand. Beneath this drawing were the words HE LOVED YOU SO MUCH IT HURT. This graphic icon seemed to jump off the tree and confront the viewer, whether believer or skeptic, with a raw, religious sentiment, evoking the crucified Jesus on the cross and all that image suggests about death and resurrection. More recently, while driving...

Flannery O’Connor, the Georgia-born, Roman Catholic writer whose most acclaimed works appeared in the 1950s, saw the South through a lens of faith that would have enabled her to appreciate the region’s self-taught artists. She was a storyteller and so too have been these creative visionaries. The storyteller, for O’Connor, “is concerned with what is,” and for a storyteller of faith, “what [she] sees on the surface will be of interest to [her] only as [she] can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.” The mystery she speaks of is “the mystery of [humankind’s] position on earth,” and...

In a “Sermon on St. Peter,” recorded around 1950, the Reverend McKendree Robbins Long preached on the need for revival during a wicked time. “A great Southern preacher once said, ‘There are plenty more Pentecosts in the sky,’” Long noted. He added, however, that while that might be true for “mere revivals,” the times required a new kind of awakening, “the foundation of faith in terms of infinite power.” He feared that “not a handful really believe we can have one,” and yet he insisted on the need to look beyond “the apostasy about us” and to rely on the...

In December 1956, Elvis Presley dropped in at Sun Studios in Memphis, just as a Carl Perkins recording session was ending. Presley was now a national star, having transcended during that year his previous status as a regional rockabilly performer. But that December afternoon turned into a special day, one that came to be known as the “Million Dollar Session,” because of the supposed “million dollars” worth of talent that included Presley, Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and briefly, Johnny Cash. An open microphone recorded a lively jam session. For the student of southern religious music, it was an especially revealing...

When Richard Wright arrived in Seville in the spring of 1955 to observe Holy Week in the Spanish city, the first thing he commented on were shop windows filled with “tiny robed figures with tall, pointed hoods that gave [him] a creepy feeling, for these objects reminded [him] of the Ku Klux Klan of the Old American South.” He surmised that “it must have been from here that the Ku Klux Klan regalia had been copied.” Wright may or may not have been correct that the Seville Catholic symbolism was the source for the Klan’s ceremonial dress, much of which...

My journey to the study of southern religion began as a child in Nashville, Tennessee, took me to Texas, and brought me to Mississippi. It began in the Church of Christ, led to years outside any church orbit, and has brought me now to Episcopalianism. I am a historian but easily see ways to use the theories and methods of other disciplines to illuminate the study of southern religion in context. I have had many mentors, both actual teachers and intellectual figures whose works have shaped me. Looking back on my life, I see how spiritual issues have been enduring...