Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture

Journal of Southern History, August, 2009 by Randall M. Miller

Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture. Edited by Walter H. Conser Jr. and Rodger M. Payne. Religion in the South. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2008. Pp. [viii], 382. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8131-2494-0.)

Had William Faulkner's Quentin Compson had this book to read, he would never have stopped telling about the South. The essays in Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture literally crisscross the whole terrain of southern religious history and identity and carry the story from the archaeology of African American slave religion to Elvis Presley and gospel music, to Buddhist temples, to Jewish home cooking, to the writing of Flannery O'Connor, to preaching Baptist women, to the comfortable Christianity of "prime minister" Joel Osteen and his "gigachurch" in Houston, Texas, and so much more. This remarkable collection's wide array of topics and approaches to understanding religious ideas, sensibilities, experience, and institutions in the southern context should excite any student of American religious, social, and cultural history and invoke hosannas thanking the editors for assembling such a stellar cast of established and up-and-coming scholars.

Ten of the fifteen essays in this collection have been previously published, some in the Journal of Southern Religion, but none show any wear in terms of argument or the new directions they point toward. Editors Walter H. Conser Jr. and Rodger M. Payne have arranged the essays in three groups--"Religious Aspects of Southern Culture" (for example, on folkways, art, and literature), "Encounters in Southern Religion and Culture" (on the interplay of particular peoples, such as immigrants, with other groups), and "Religion and Markers of Identity" (on gender, ritual, and politics)--but the essays might easily be reshuffled into other categories of analysis, for they interact with one another in multiple ways and make the book as much a conversation as a collection. The essays together demonstrate that by using material culture and art--such as the stained-glass windows of Catholic churches, the yard shrines in Miami's "Little Havana," and the slave-made objects found on former plantations--it is possible to discover the many ways particular people held on to their faith and constructed religious communities apart from the dominant Protestant religious culture (even as they might adapt to and also inform the dominant culture). So, too, by listening to music, these authors catch the rhythms of belief as much as the social bonds that music made and makes. And by reading texts, these authors discover the varieties of witness spreading across the southern landscape in print and spoken word. This collective canvas of southern religion at the crossroads is large and crowded but always filled with original and telling arguments drawn from often nontraditional sources.

It is not always a pretty picture, as Donald G. Mathews shows in an essay on the ways lynching fulfilled needs for blood sacrifice and atonement. It is also often an unfinished one, as Samuel S. Hill suggests in his charting of the arrival and nesting of fundamentalism in the South and the recent hatching of political consciousness that came with it. Many of the essays use a case study of a group, ritual, or experience to relate the dynamic process of religious imprinting by different groups in the modern South. Today immigrants from Asia, the Americas, and Africa compete for social and cultural space in the newest "New South," where social and cultural boundaries are at once permeable by way of occupation and education and guarded, in varying degrees and circumstances, by way of race, cultural background, and religious orientation. As such, southern religion at the crossroads is sometimes a confusing picture, especially at first impression, for no master narrative emerges from the many and varied topics, methodologies, sources, and interests.

In assembling the collection, Conser and Payne promised a book that would invite scholars to consider expanding the scope of inquiry as much as it would inform them about any settled matters in interpreting southern religious history. The editors succeed in doing that and more. As a volume in the University Press of Kentucky's Religion in the South series, Southern Crossroads puts the new religious history squarely at the center of the question of what religion meant and did in making many Souths over the past two centuries. It is the story of people expressing their religious selves on their own terms more than a history of churches. That is the South to tell about, as these authors know so well.

RANDALL M. MILLER

Saint Joseph's University