Mississippi praying : southern White evangelicals and the civil rights movement, 1945-1975 / Carolyn Renée Dupont.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dupont, Carolyn Renée.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Evangelicalism.

History.

Church history.

Mississippi--Church history--20th century.

Mississippi.

Evangelicalism--Mississippi--History--20th century.

Civil rights movements--Mississippi--History--20th century.

Civil rights movements.

Physical Description:

xiii, 290 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2013]

Summary:

Mississippi Praying examines the white faith communities at ground zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era demonstrates that their intense religious commitments played critical, not incidental, roles as they confronted black Americans' quest for freedom rights. During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could so unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renée Dupont richly details, white evangelicals' religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as morally evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy. Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religion as captive to the culture and weak in its support for segregation, Dupont shows how white Mississippians created a faith divinely suited for a segregated society. Thus, most of them rejected the religious argument for racial equality and worked actively to thwart black civil rights. Only a few white Mississippi Christians embraced the demise of segregation as a demand of their faith, though some moderates did challenge the methods and tactics of hard-line segregationists. During the struggle, racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi's religious communities and transformed them into battlegrounds over the meanings and implications of the Christian faith. Though Mississippi's evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction : history, white religion, and the civil rights movement

Segregation and the religious worlds of white Mississippians

Conversations about race in the post-war world

Responding to Brown : the recalcitrant parish

"A strange and serious Christian heresy" : massive resistance and the religious defense of segregation

"Ask for the old paths" : Mississippi's Southern Baptists and segregation

"Born of conviction" : the travail of Mississippi Methodism

The Jackson church visits : "a good quarter-time church with a bird dog and shot gun"

"Warped and distorted reflections" : Mississippi and the North

Race and restructuring of American religion

Conclusion : a theology on the wrong side of history.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780814708415

0814708412

OCLC:

841516063