Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt examines the rise of Evangelical Christianity in the American South beginning just prior to the American Revolution and proceeding through the early republic period. Heyrman’s work speaks to social history, political history, cultural history, as well as race and gender history. In Heyrman’s own words, she uses this monograph as a means of “recovering a world marooned from living memory in which evangelicals, far from dominating the South, were viewed by most whites as odd at best and subversive at worst.” She reconstructs this world and traces Evangelical Christianity from its origins as a fringe religion to the dominant belief system in the American South.
Heyrman argues that Evangelical Christianity was not a powerful force within the South from its beginning and spends most of her monograph examining the ways in which evangelicals challenged and strained Southern society. The same young ministers and young gifts who spread the message of evangelicals threatened the established order of Southern life due to their itinerant ministering and forsaking of marriage. Even within the Methodist Church, Heyrman writes, “As salaries, full-time professional preachers, itinerants ranked as the princelings of the church; they alone admitted and expelled members, and they alone were eligible to attend, deliberate, and vote at the General Conference, which the bishops convened every fours years to decide church policy.” Beyond the threat of youth superseding their elders, evangelicals challenged notions of gender and the family. According to Heyrman, while evangelicalism could unite families, “evangelical loyalties were at least as likely to divide as to unite white families living in the early South.” She demonstrates this through the examples of Stith Mead and others who rejected relatives or were rejected by relatives that did not share their conversion. Finally, Heyrman describes the unique opportunities for women to exercise spiritual power, writing, “When the clergy identified bona fide seers, they were more likely to be women than men. While preachers believed that both sexes might have portents of the future revealed in their dreams, they tended to be skeptical of laymen claiming special knowledge from any other source.” In this way, “the clergy endorsed the view that acceptable forms of female spiritual expression went beyond fulfilling their private roles as dutiful wives, mothers, and sisters.” This challenged the South’s gendered hierarchy.
Heyrman writes in the context of Rhys Isaac, Nathan Hatch, Rachel Klein, Stephanie McCurry, and Paul Johnson. Heyrman uses the journals of ministers, converts, and others around them as her primary sources. Several of these were published while their subjects still lived though others, containing the innermost spiritual struggles of their authors, remained private during the authors’ lifetimes. Heyrman classifies these sources into two categories. She writes, “The first was the lore of wonders, accounts abounding in marvels and miracles, prodigies and portents, which were published on both sides of the Atlantic during the early modern era.” In this way, evangelicalism fit into a larger continuity of religious thought. Heyrman writes, “The second source influencing the southern clergy were narratives of earlier religious awakenings in Britain and its American colonies published in the middle of the eighteenth century.” These link evangelicalism to the First Great Awakening. ( )

Prologue: Canaan's Language

In evangelizing the early American south, evangelical religious sects such as Methodists and Baptists sought to teach the populace the language of Canaan - a biblical language of damnation and hell's horrible punishments intended to awaken them from their earthly slumber and focus them on the demands of God for the salvation of their eternal souls. Having begun the evangelical effort n the First great Awakening during the 1740s, it was not until the second great awakening almost a hundred years later that they actually made a real impact on the southern religious landscape.

And a struggle it was, not just against the deists like Jefferson but more importantly against "worldlings" who failed to see the need to forsake the pleasures of this word. Either unchurched or happy in their "lax" Episcopalian faith, they were more interested in the hunt, the tavern or the allure of the fiddle. But the evangelicals were indeed equal to the task. As Anglicans were sending their least capable ministers to the frontiers in mid 18thC south, the Baptists and Methodists were training a cadre of young shock troops ready to endure the rigorous life of evangelization. Hardly the lax negligent parents of legend, Anglicans and later Episcopalians were stern when it came to such offenses as "swearing, gossiping and lying" even if they encouraged dancing and musical instruments. And it was in their simple joyless ways that the Baptists and Methodists were a standing rebuke to the better established adherents of the COE. Many of them stood up as champions of the faith against the unregenerate elite of the southern aristocratic planter class.

But class antagonisms don't quite explain it all. Indeed, the evangelicals alienated the plain republican folk as well who sought to retain harmony in their relations with the gentry. The evangelicals were a threat to the southern culture of "conviviality and competition". They struck at the heart of the culture and offered instead the alien rituals of full-emersion baptism and public confessions of faith called "love feasts". At "class meetings" they broke out in groups segregated by groups bereft of the markings of social status and hierarchy.

With the departure of the Anglican Church after the revolution, the Episcopal Church was but a shadow of the former institution (which had its problems as well). The question we have to ask is why didn't the evangelicals rush right in to fill the gap? Just as they were trying to get the "worldlings" to speak the "language of Canaan," they needed to assimilate to the local culture as well -- to learn to speak with a southern accent. It was not just their opposition to the slavery which supported the grandees, but also their upsetting of traditional relations between parents and children, men and women, etc. Teaching the people of the south to speak the language of Canaan

would require winning humbler folk as well, by altering, often drastically, many earlier evangelical teachings and practices concerning the proper roles of men and women, old and young, white and black, as well as their position on the relationship between the church and the family and between Christianity and other forms of supernaturalism. (p. 27)

Chapter 3: Family Values

Drawing on personal letters and journals of evangelists, Heyrman is a able to reconstruct the family saga that was at the heart of much of southern evangelicals' early trials and tribulations. Recounting the conversion of the Mead family of Georgia to the Methodist faith, she relates the conversion experience in 1789 of Stith Mead in Virginia and the history of his subsequent struggles to evangelize his family -- including William Mead, the family's patriarch. After his conversion Stith was tireless in his efforts to convert his family. When one backsliding brother's attendance at a dance seemed linked to his death shortly thereafter, Stith blamed William for sending this brother to hell.

Heyrman puts this individual narrative within the broader perspective of the social change happening at the time. Migration to the frontier often broke up families and disrupted larger kinship networks, leaving people unsettled and anxious about family ties. The evangelicals succeeded in part by constructing "little families" where pastors were called father or "daddy" and the itinerate preachers called each other brothers in Christ. They even likened heaven to an eternal family reunion in the hereafter. But it was hard to make the case that itinerate young men who shunned kith and kin to live the celibate life were exemplars of the value of family. Constantly warring against the flesh and the temptations of the road, young itinerates were often suspected of licentious behavior. Even when they started to "locate" Methodist ministers provided poorly for their wives and offspring, evoking doubts about their masculinity in the population at large. They also unsettled the privacy of the home by their public sharing of inner religious conflicts as well as the details of their private sins. Their inveighing against slavery endangered the prosperity of future generations. Their encouragement of godly women to damn unregenerate spouses upset familial relations in the most immediate way, along with their encouragement of daughters to marry for reasons of spiritual and romantic compatibility. In all of this they were seen by the majority of white southerners as far too close to indian tribes, Shakers and Quakers.

In order for them to cast of this image of being associated with the lunatic fringe, they needed to abandon their anti-slavery agitation, moderate their views on mixed-faith marriages. They did this by increasingly supporting the patriarchy of the "traditional" Southern family. As they shifted to a more professionalized clergy, they also began to require married ministers with families. Yielding oversight of families to male heads of households, they rendered themselves respectable. The cult of domesticity began to overtake the godly women of the south as various justifications for slavery were proffered and accepted. Women and blacks were sacrificed on the alter of respectability ...

Epilogue

In her epilogue, she turns to the ways in which family values have entered the political debate in the late 20th C. Historiographically, there are basically two options -- evangelical religion either advanced democratization through the promotion of individualistic faith or it substituted patriarchy for the empowerment of all of God's children. Evangelical religion, then and now, holds the mutually contradictory possibilities within it for progressive and traditionalistic outcomes. Curiously, she sees the rise of the Promise Keepers as a return to the earlier days of Stith Mead. One would have thought that she would cast them as an example of the triumph of patriarchy in the late 20th C ... That is, at least how they appear to me...