forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press

Introduction

Freedom and Its Coming

I, myself, being a Deep South white, reared in a religious home and the Methodist church realize the deep ties of common songs, common prayer, common symbols that bind our two races together on a religio-mystical level, even as another brutally mythic idea, the concept of White Supremacy, tears our two people apart.” (Lillian Smith to Martin Luther King, Jr., 1956)  

We discussed that crap and it never did really soak in. Not as much as they thought it was soaking in. (Money Alan Kirby, black Arkansasan)
          
 In the early 1960s, freedom riders seeking to desegregate public transportation took up this playful riff from a popular 1950s tune:

                        Freedom, freedom, freedom’s coming and it won’t be long
                        Freedom, freedom, freedom’s coming, and it won’t be long.

But freedom would come only through constant struggle and suffering, as expressed in this song from some of the most difficult days in the civil rights movement in Mississippi:                  

                        They say that freedom is a constant struggle,

                        They say that freedom is a constant struggle,

                        Oh Lord, we’ve struggled so long,

                        We must be free, we must be free.

Ultimately, freedom would come in what activists envisioned as the beloved community—a utopian religious vision that inspired devotion and sacrifice and, inevitably, created disappointment and disillusion.

From Reconstruction through the civil rights movement, white and black evangelical Protestants in the South understood the history of their times as part of sacred (albeit sometimes competing and contradictory) narratives about God’s intent and purposes in history. What did freedom mean, and what would it look like when it came? Was it coming in the sense of “having already come”? Was it coming in the immediate present, as portrayed in the freedom songs of the 1950s and 1960s? Or was it coming in a future, millennial sense? Generations of southern believers vividly expressed their struggles for spiritual freedom in song, sermon, tale, and dance. Meanwhile, many black and a few white Christians fought for freedom through social justice, another constant struggle from the Civil War through the civil rights movement.

The relationship and interaction of three key terms––theological racism, racial interchange, and Christian interracialism—best synthesizes the fundamental argument of this book. Freedom’s Coming traces how the theologically grounded Christian racism pervasive among white southerners eventually faltered, giving way to the more inclusive visions espoused in the black freedom struggle. Racial interchange in cultural expressions helped to undermine the oppressive hierarchies of the Jim Crow South. So did the constant struggle of black and white prophets who formed a southern evangelical counterculture of Christian interracialism. Ultimately, freedom’s coming was based upon the joint and parallel efforts of generations of black and white southerners who envisioned and enacted the beloved community.

Theological racism refers here to the conscious use of religious doctrine and practice to create and enforce social hierarchies that privileged southerners of European descent, legally classified and socially privileged as white, while degrading southerners of African descent, legally categorized and socially stigmatized as black. White supremacy was a deep-rooted, interlocking system of power that enveloped white southerners in an imagined community, encompassing and stretching beyond the social conflicts that divided them. In everyday speech, folklore, self–published tracts and pamphlets, Sunday school lessons, sermons, and high-toned theological exegeses, white southern theologians preached that God ordained the division of the races and the sexes and, therefore, that God sanctioned the inequality between white and black and between men and women. This Christian mythic grounding for ideas of whiteness and blackness was powerful. But it was also unstable, subject to constant argument and revision. The biblical passages about God’s Providence in slavery and segregation were subject to multiple readings, even among biblical literalists. In the twentieth century, this theology of race was radically overturned in part through a reimagination of the same Christian thought that was part of its creation. By the 1960s, segregationists defended Jim Crow more on emotional (“our way of life”), practical (“tradition”) and constitutional (“states rights”) than theological grounds. In doing so, they lost the battle to spiritually inspired activists who deconstructed Jim Crow.

White and black Christians organized into racially defined denominations, baptized their converted in separate pools, and buried their dead in segregated cemeteries. Yet within southern culture existed strata of white and black religious experience seen rarely in the institutional churches––the reigning triumvirate of Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian––but evident in the interstices of community life. In religious life the racial interchange to be explored in this work threatened to undermine the hierarchies under which people were obligated to live. Racial interchange refers to the exchange of southern religious cultures between white and black believers in expressive culture, seen especially in music, the formation of new religious traditions, and in lived experience. In those liminal moments, the bars of race sometimes lowered, if only temporarily. When they did come down, they opened up possibilities for cultural interchange that fed into the "shared traditions" outlined by historian and anthropologist Charles Joyner. Like Huck and Jim on the raft, black and white southerners, Joyner argues, "continued to swap recipes and cultural styles, songs and stories, accents and attitudes. Folk culture simply refused to abide any color line, however rigidly it may have been drawn."[i] White and black believers drew from common evangelical beliefs and attitudes, formed interracial congregations, and swapped oratorical and musical styles and forms. On occasion, they shared moments of religious transcendence, before moving back into the world where color delimited everything.

This common evangelical tradition eventually, if unintentionally, created openings for Christian interracialism, or self–consciously political efforts to undermine the system of southern racial hierarchy. In the years leading up to the civil rights movement, a few white and many more black believers struggled towards mutual respect, desegregation, and a politics (if not altogether a culture) of interracialism. Courageous black believers who formed the rank–and–file of the civil rights movement exposed the frail social and political underpinnings for segregation,  and buried some of the folklore of blackness as inferiority that had enslaved so many Americans for so many centuries. While religious institutions were resistant to change, many religious folk, black and white, devoted themselves to a southern social revolution precisely because they perceived God as its author.

Freedom’s Coming focuses on the theology, the lived experience, the expressive cultures, and the political/civil struggles of white and black Christians in the South. The first portion of the book analyzes the connection between religious and political organizing among both black and white evangelicals from the 1860s to the 1950s. Chapter One traces the manner in which black and white Christians repositioned themselves through Reconstruction and into the era of southern apartheid. Chapter two follows the fortunes of southern Populists, progressives, liberals, and social radicals to the mid–twentieth century—those who carried on the constant struggle for freedom in the public and political world through difficult and treacherous times. The middle section of Freedom’s Coming, chapter three, addresses the overarching theme of racial interchange by focusing on moments of cultural exchange in the religious and sacred sphere: worship styles, religious beliefs, folk practices, and the creation of new religious and musical traditions. The final section, chapters four and five, considers the relationship among evangelical Protestantism, the black freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, and the growth of the southern religious right through the twentieth century.

Religion in the post–Civil War and twentieth–century American South was both priestly and prophetic. If southern formal theology generally sanctified the regnant hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice also subtly undermined the dominant tradition. In one sense, the seeds of subversion were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Freedom’s Coming depicts southern Protestant religious expressive cultures in their complexity, tragic pain, obstinate literalism, creative explosiveness, and reconciling possibilities. If the Freedom Summer of 1964 was “God’s long summer,” as memorably described by theologian and historian Charles Marsh, the era from the Civil War through the civil rights movement might be described as God’s long century, for it was in the South during this time that American Christianity may be seen at its most tragic and its most triumphant.