I’m grateful for Advance the Church and the efforts to understand the culture of the South in order to see the gospel faithfully contextualized. I hope that the upcoming conference in Durham, Contextualizing the Gospel in the New South, will serve to equip pastors for the long haul of faithful gospel ministry in the South.

Everyone gets that the South is this weird monster of cultural Christianity. The deeper question is how this happened? Why the South? What caused the Church to affect the culture in such a way that today most people there would consider themselves to be Christians although they are not? I think that we would be better equipped to confront the culture of the American South if we knew more about the influences that make it what it is.

I propose that the church’s present decline in the American South is not a sudden phenomenon, but that it is the concluding chapter in a series of effects that find their source in the Civil War, especially the era of Reconstruction (1863-1877).

In the book, Religion and the American Civil War, Paul Harvey has a fascinating essay entitled, “Yankee Faith” and Southern Redemption: White Southern Baptist Ministers, 1850-1890. Harvey discusses the challenges and moves in remaking the Southern cultural identity after suffering defeat in the Civil War. The weight of this burden fell on the Church. Southern clergy were faced with the struggle of defining the future of their society. The loss of the war remained a theological mystery for many and they looked to the Church for an explanation. The Church did not shy away from providing one. Harvey writes, “Baptist ministers provided their parishioners with a compelling narrative of their recent history” (167). Baptist minsters suggested that the Confederate soldiers had served the society by cleansing the South of its sin and paved the way for the “return of a righteous order.” (168). This narrative turned into orthodoxy and dominated southern evangelical historical interpretation for a century to come.

In short, the consolation for losing the war was that the South had been purged for the remaking of a better Christian society. It goes like this:  “We may have lost the war, but we’re more Christian than you are!” There is no doubt that Southern evangelicals considered the Christianity of the North to be an altogether different religion. John Broadus said, “Under Yankee rule, we may not expect to worship God but according to Yankee faith.” (176).

The Southern strategy to hold back the Northern takeover of the South during Reconstruction was to start and fill institutions and customs in southern religious life. For too many, the Baptist view of preserving “pure religion” in the region ultimately hinged on preserving racial hierarchy. White supremacy and evangelical Protestantism became the bulwarks of a stable social order

In older southeastern states such as VA and NC, leaders of state conventions took the lead in welcoming the “benevolent empire” to the South. They erected colleges for ministerial education, edited religious newspapers, organized missions societies, and built impressive churches in southern towns and cities.” (169)

This way of thinking was succeeded in the pulpit well into the mid 1900s. The normative narrative of Reconstruction was the “story of the oppressed but heroic white South” (168). This way of thinking had a shaping power well into the Civil Rights movement. And even today residue of this is seen by the segregation within Southern churches (but that is another subject).

In sum, the South needed to be rebuilt in postbellum America. Southern clergy emerged as the leaders of this enterprise, shunning Northern influence by instilling and preserving Southern society. The concrete was being poured and you could write whatever you wanted. It seemed to be a very good idea to scribble “Christian” on that concrete. That is what the makers of that new Southern society did. What is being called the “New South” in 2010 is actually the ultimate failure of the new South in 1877.

Scribble in concrete doesn’t show up after being trampled by 100+ years of reality. The Church influenced the culture in such a way that it blurred their distinctions. The Church’s best attempt in making the culture “Christian” was to cloak it with a shell of fabricated morality. Over time this would not work. We see that now. The gospel doesn’t add up with that attempt and the culture would only put up with it for so long. It was unsustainable. And 133 years later you have hundreds of church-buildings scattered about like stagnant puddles.  The people of the South are craving something more, something deeper.

This is a pivotal moment in the history of the America South. It is the dawning of a new day. The work ahead is not a remaking of society, but a revitalization of the Church.  What is needed is revival.  A revival of the Church that can only come by a Spirit-dependent recovery of the gospel of Jesus Christ.