The Unraveling of the Folk Christian World

This concluding chapter sketches the various forces that, beginning around 1940, began to unmake the milieu in which folk Christianity had been crafted: sweeping economic transformation, huge population shifts, changing class dynamics, and the spread of a national pop culture. The chapter then reflects on the complicated intersections of religion, class, and race in Southern history. It reiterates the book’s thesis, that in a distinct moment of regional life—the New South—poor blacks and poor whites listened, learned, and borrowed from each other to craft a distinct folk Christianity.

The Ethics of Neighborliness

Beginning with a close analysis of the life and musical oeuvre of “Blind” Willie Johnson, this chapter explores the ethical vision of folk Christianity. It argues that folk Christians confronted the potential downward spiral they faced (a “culture of poverty”) with an ethic of non-retaliatory, self-giving “neighborliness.” This ethic was expressed in indirect ways, in song and proverb, and a crucial part of the ethic was to name tangible destructive forces as personified evil. Middle-class observers either did not see this ethic, or looked with condescension at what they regarded as primitive superstition. Regardless, the folk ethic not only transformed the lives of the poor, but also articulated its own critique of the dominant Mammonism of the New South.

Singing of Death—and Life

This chapter explores New South folk songs of personified Death, with special focus on the Lloyd Chandler composition “Conversation with Death”—its geographic scope, probable spread over time, and broad community of appropriators. The roots of “Conversation with Death” are traced to the late medieval Dance of Death, and the song is interpreted as articulating a medieval/modernist vision. Folk songs of Death are shown to be strikingly different from the songs of death in the dominant religious culture, where death is a release and the focus is on life after death as one’s true home. In contrast, folk songs of death evoke the terror of death to affirm the value of this life in this world—an affirmation that had special meaning for the poor, who faced denigration and devaluation from the dominant culture.

Sacramental Expressions

This chapter looks closely at a related group of practices and beliefs: grave decoration, Christmas lore, folk sermons, baptism, and praying spots. It traces the New South practice of decorating graves with household objects to African cultural practices, and New South Christmas lore (and related lore) to legends circulating in modernizing England. Connecting these with other practices and oral forms common among folk Christians, it shows that they all display a strong sacramental impulse—the longing to manifest the sacred in tangible, material ways. While the dominant religious culture wrought a “disenchantment” of the world, the cultural work of folk Christians envisioned an enchanted world where seemingly ordinary, mundane things were transformed and infused with sacred meaning.

Tales of Conversion and Call

This chapter explores two interrelated oral forms: conversion and call narratives. It establishes that they were cultural productions of the New South era, and that they wove elements of African and European religious tradition together to craft a distinct understanding of Christianity’s place in the world—either as an initiate enters into it, or as a religious authority proclaims it. The speakers, dates, and geographic scope of these narratives are traced, and then a close analysis of the oral forms highlights their characteristic features. The vision articulated in the narratives is shown to be very different from the dominant religious culture, where religious authority was professionalized and Christianity was associated with the safe stability of the home. In sharp contrast, the narratives imagine the wildness and liminality of Christianity.

Beneath the Bible Belt

This chapter sets the stage by suggesting the presence of a hidden regional religious culture beneath the familiar “Bible Belt”. It explains why Southern historians and religious studies scholars haven’t seen this culture, then introduces it with two ripe anecdotes, from Lloyd Chandler and Vera Hall. The chapter also explains why the category of “folk religion” is appropriate for analyzing this culture.

The Making of the Poor South

This chapter establishes the economic and cultural context in which folk Christianity was forged. Despite the optimism of its proponents, the New South emerged as a society with severe and widespread poverty, and the dominant religious culture fortified an emergent middle class but gave little consolation to those trapped beneath it. In this circumscribed world, in spaces of their own that often did not look like churches, with impoverished preachers who had no formal training, through oral and imitative networks of wide scope, the poor crafted a distinct Christianity of their own. In this “hard, hard religion” they developed an alternative vision of the world that infused their everyday lives with transcendent meaning—vital cultural space in which they became more than mere victims of their socioeconomic circumstances.