How we got the Bible Belt

How We Got the Bible Belt
Jim Hill

The South was not always as religious as it is today. During the Colonial period the strongly religious groups tended to go to Northern colonies like Massachusetts or Pennsylvania. Even as late as the 1820s the overwhelming majority of Southerners still had no religious affiliation. But by the 1850s Southerners could claim with justification that their region was strikingly more religious than was the North.

One major factor which helped keep the South from getting religion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was opposition to slavery on the part of the Protestant churches. The American Revolution had been justified by an ideology of natural rights and human equality such as may be found in the Declaration of Independence, and it was in this period that slavery-which had been legal in all thirteen colonies-was abolished in the North. The three religious groups that would someday dominate the South-the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians-all condemned slavery in the 1780s using the rhetoric of the Revolution.

In 1784 the Methodists announced that they would excommunicate anyone who did not free his slaves within two years. In 1787 the Presbyterians resolved to pray for the "final abolition" of slavery. In 1789 the Baptists declared that slavery was "a violent deprivation of the rights of nature and inconsistent with a republican government."

This wave of activity was a byproduct of the American Revolution and employed the language of the Revolution rather than the categories of Christian theology. And it didn't last. The Methodists were forced to rescind their threat of excommunication within six months of its promulgation; over time they grew more silent on the issue, declaring in 1816 that "little can be done to abolish the practice so contrary to the principles of moral justice." The Presbyterian General Assembly in 1818 characterized emancipationists as socially disruptive, while the Baptists seem to have stopped discussing the issue sometime before 1800.

Slavery could be abolished in the North because there were few slaves and the institution was of limited economic significance. But in the South things were different, and religion found itself powerless in the face of economic interest. The outcome of this ill-fated religious crusade against slavery was to put new emphasis on the Evangelical belief that the struggle against evil involved a personal struggle with one's own sins. This period marks the beginning of the Southern Protestant doctrine-still with us-that the way to make the world a better place lies in working to develop one's own personal holiness rather than trying to change society directly. The emancipationists of the eighteenth century came to be seen as people who lacked humility.

Social justice was no longer on the agenda of the Southern Protestant, but other Southerners continued to be suspicious. Most slaveholders maintained their distrust of Evangelical Protestant religion into the 1830s, when two events led them to change their minds. First there were the slave revolts, particularly Denmark Vesey's 1822 conspiracy but above all the dramatic insurrection led by Nat Turner in 1831. These two movements were led by charismatic religious figures, and they gave the Evangelicals the opportunity to argue that black people would always be a threat to the white power structure as long as they continued to have their own subculture. And the way to destroy black culture, these Evangelicals continued, was to teach them the white man's religion of Jesus and his love.

Around the time of the Nat Turner rebellion another event occurred which helped persuade slaveholders that they should regulate the religious lives of their slaves more closely than in the past. This was the appearance of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper Liberator. Slaveholders now felt that they were definitely under attack.

Beginning in the 1830s, the Southern slaveholders became more willing to let Evangelicals have access to their slaves in order to win them for the white man's Jesus. But the Evangelicals argued successfully that this was not enough. For, they pointed out, as long as the slaveholder was supporting a religion in which he did not believe, his slaves would see through his hypocrisy and not respond. If the slaveholder wished to see his slaves follow the New Testament admonition to obey their master as they would Christ, then he himself would have to show forth his own obedience to God in his daily life. And so the worldly slaveholders began coming forward to give their hearts to Jesus.

Besides his concern that slaves be made more obedient through their being indoctrinated with Christianity, the slaveholder was also looking for an ideological defense of the institution of slavery in the face of attacks coming from Northern abolitionists. The abolitionists were appealing to the Declaration of Independence, which stated that it was self-evident that all men were created equal and that God had endowed everyone with a number of rights, one of which was liberty.

Considering how important the Declaration of Independence was for the founding of our country, the abolitionists were clearly playing their ace when they employed it in their arguments. They made it look as if those who defended slavery were not real Americans, and the Southern slaveholders desperately needed an even more prestigious document with which to trump the abolitionist ace. They found it in the Bible.

Once the Evangelical clergy began pointing out that the Bible-when interpreted literally-supported the institution of slavery, being religious (and therefore supporting slavery) became identified with being moral. The social pressure began building up which transformed the South into a church-going, Bible-believing society.

For the Bible did indeed provide an alternative to the ideals of liberty and equality found in the Declaration of Independence. In place of human equality the Bible emphasized human sinfulness. Government was established by God to restrain sinners. "Be ye subject to the higher powers," said Paul. "For the powers that be are ordained of God"(Rom.13:1). According to Paul, the ruler is "the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer"(v.4). But people are born with unequal intelligence, unequal capacities; therefore some must rule while others must be ruled.

The Southern Evangelicals argued that this was the case with women. Because of the fall, God had decreed to women that "your husband shall rule over you"(Gen.3:16). Here was a clear case where the Declaration of Independence must be wrong in alleging human equality, for according to the Bible half the population was to be subject to the other half.

Keeping women in subjection to men proved useful in legitimating the institution of slavery. The South adopted this explicit principle of subordination even as the North was developing a concept of separate spheres for men and women, which provided women with a limited form of equality.

Southern Evangelicals argued the same case with respect to children. Surely no sane person would claim that children were equal to adults or that they should not be subject to adult discipline. And these religious leaders then went on to claim that black people were really children that had never grown up-a belief that was widely held, even among abolitionists. The conclusion was that blacks needed the same supervision and correction as children.

These same Evangelicals also emphasized those passages in the Bible which advocated corporal punishment of children. Since the Bible said it was right to beat children, then it must also be right to whip slaves, for slaves were believed to be overgrown children. Thus the desire to legitimate slavery also led to treating children as sinful and in need of severe punishment. By contrast, the North was moving in the opposite direction, viewing children as innocent and portraying them as little angels in magazine illustrations.

This dark vision of human nature in which all are sinners leaves room for only two types of people: those who discipline themselves and those who must be disciplined by others. The Southern Evangelical merely had to argue that blacks lacked self-discipline and therefore belonged in the second category along with criminals, the insane, women and children. Given the atmosphere of racial ideology of the time, this wasn't very hard at all. Slavery was a legitimate part of that government which had been ordained by God after the fall and was necessary for the maintenance of civilization.

But these Evangelicals went further than saying that slavery was a necessary evil to restrain morally and intellectually inferior blacks. They claimed that slavery was an act of Christian love, for only as slaves could black people find the conscientious supervision which they so desperately needed in order to cope with life. As the Southern Evangelicals described it, it was the Northern abolitionists who were heartless and uncaring, for they wished to throw blacks out on the street to fend for themselves even though these racial inferiors were obviously incapable of doing so.

From the 1830s to the 1850s the growth of Evangelical Protestantism exploded in the South. By the 1850s Southern whites were arguing that they were more religious (and therefore supposedly more moral) than people up North, and with good reason. As one Baptist minister pointed out, according to the 1850 census, the population of New England was about the same as the free population of the five original slave states. But New England had only 4607 churches with 1,900,000 members, while the corresponding five slave states had 8081 churches with 2,900,000 members. And no fewer than 487 of those New England churches were Unitarian, while those Southern states had only eight Unitarian churches! Clearly the South was more religious.

And if the proslavery South is more religious-continued these Evangelical leaders-then it must also be more moral than the free states of the North. Thus the biblicist religion developed by the Southern Evangelicals and its use to defend slavery put them on a collision course with their Northern brothers in Christ. The conflicts which arose in the three main Evangelical denominations were pushed for by both abolitionists and apologists for slavery, for the members of both camps knew in their hearts that God was on their side.

The Methodist split came over the question of whether bishops should be allowed to own slaves. The test case was Bishop James Osgood Andrew of Georgia. Bishop Andrew had inherited two slaves; one was a young boy whom the bishop intended to free and send out of the state-as was required by Georgia law whenever a slave was freed-as soon as he was old enough to make his own way. The other slave was a young woman who was offered her freedom but turned it down rather than leave the state.

In 1844 abolitionists demanded that Andrew resign his office in the church; the bishop at first decided to do that in order to avoid a conflict, but then Southern delegates to the denomination's General Conference of that year urged him to stay on as bishop and precipitate a confrontation in the church. He did, and the northern Methodists then won the vote on a resolution relieving Andrew of his duties for as long as he continued to own any slaves. Having seen enough, Andrew's supporters met in May, 1845, at Louisville, Kentucky, to found the Methodist Episcopal Church, South; a denomination whose sole reason for existing as an autonomous entity was to defend the institution of slavery.

Southern Baptists were also looking for a fight, but it was harder for them to find one than it had been for the Methodists, because they had little formal organization above the level of the local church. What they did have was a convention every three years to coordinate missionary activity, and it was here that the confrontation was precipitated. In 1844 it was learned that an official of the Home Mission Board was trying to persuade Jesse Busyhead-Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Cherokee Nation-to resign his position as a missionary because he owned slaves. Chief Justice Busyhead died before the issue was settled, but his fellow Alabaman Baptists angrily insisted to the Board of Managers of the Baptist General Convention that there be an explicit policy statement affirming that slaveholders were as qualified to be missionaries as nonslaveholders. Finally in December the Baptist Acting Board of Foreign Missions ruled that it would not appoint anyone as a missionary who intended to continue to hold slaves.

The proslavery Baptists met in Augusta, Georgia, in May of 1845-the same month that the proslavery Methodists met in Louisville-to found the Southern Baptist Convention. Today the Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with some 14 million members. And it was founded for the sole purpose of defending the institution of slavery.

The Southern Presbyterian Church was not founded until 1861, when it was organized to support the Confederate cause and defend slavery. Presbyterians were able to put off the split longer than other Evangelicals because so few of them were abolitionists to begin with. There had been a significant number of abolitionists in the denomination in the early 1830s, but then they were purged during a mass excommunication in 1837.

A conflict had developed in the North between theological conservatives who wished to maintain the traditional Calvinist doctrine of unqualified human depravity and moderates who had a somewhat more optimistic view of human nature. Now throughout the nineteenth-century religious debate over slavery there was, generally speaking, a correlation between beliefs about human nature and attitudes toward race relations. The closer people adhered to the "Christian doctrine of human nature," which emphasized human sinfulness and powerlessness to do good, the more likely they were to support slavery as an institution. And the more optimistic (a traditionalist theologian would say naive) that people were about human nature, the more likely they were to want to abolish slavery.

The Presbyterian Church was no exception to this overall pattern. Presbyterian abolitionists were in the moderate camp which eschewed the Calvinist vision of human sinfulness, while those who defended slavery also defended the traditionalist, pessimistic view of human nature. When the theological conflict between moderates and conservatives first broke out, it was confined to the North. But then Southern Presbyterians noticed that the moderate camp included the abolitionists, and they swung to the support of the conservatives, helping them to excommunicate the supposed heretics. After the purge of moderates of 1837, Southern Presbyterians had no problem with abolitionists within their own denomination. And so they had no need to start their own, exclusively Southern, organization until the rise of the Confederacy.

When the Civil War finally came, it turned out to be the most religious war in U.S. history. Both armies sponsored revivals and prayer meetings. Here is a little sample from the diary of a Southern Methodist chaplain:

There was preaching in Dalton every night but four, for four months; and in the camps all around the city, preaching and prayer meetings occurred every night. The soldiers erected stands, improvised seats, and even built log churches, where they worshipped God in spirit and in truth. The result was that thousands were happily converted and were prepared for the future that awaited them. Officers and enlisted men alike were brought under religious influence.

Estimates of how many soldiers were converted run between 100,000 and 200,000. On both sides men felt their hearts strangely warmed; they experienced the washing away of their sins and were born again. On both sides these men inferred from the impressive conversion experiences which they had undergone that God was with them, that it was his will to defeat the other army. And so on both sides these men rose from their knees and went forth to kill. And kill. And kill.

After the end of the Civil War, the Southern Methodists, Southern Baptists and Southern Presbyterians all continued to denounce emancipation as contrary to the will of God. Religion is basically a conservative force in society, and these three Evangelical denominations were true to form as they taught Southern whites that the North had abused them and that life had been better before the Civil War. They comforted the Southern whites not only by telling them that they were superior to blacks, but also that they were morally superior to Northern whites, who were less religious than they. For after all, you can't be moral if you're not religious; can you?

The three Southern Evangelical churches achieved great success with this message, and by 1890 they accounted for 95 per cent of all Southern church members. And their heritage lives on. Today we are still confronted with Southern Evangelicals who claim that belief in the literal truth of the Bible, the subordination of women, the physical abuse of children and a narrow view of the role of the state as merely a system of criminal justice have all been ordained by God. And none of them will acknowledge-nor do very many even remember-that their religion arose from the theological defense of slavery.
--------------------------
Jim Hill holds Masters degrees in Philosophy and Economics. ©1990 by Jim Hill

http://www.freeinquirynetwork.com/Articles.html