Product Description

In the 1600s Colonial French settlers brought Christianity into the lands that are now the state of Mississippi. Throughout the period of French rule and the period of Spanish dominion that followed, Roman Catholicism remained the principal religion. By the time that statehood was achieved in 1817, Mississippi was attracting Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and other Protestant evangelical faiths at a remarkable pace, and by the twentieth century, religion in Mississippi was dominantly Protestant and evangelical.

In this book Randy J. Sparks traces the roots of evangelical Christianity in the state and shows how the evangelicals became a force of cultural revolution. They embraced the poorer segments of society, welcomed high populations of both women and African Americans, and deeply influenced ritual and belief in the state's vision of Christianity. In the 1830s as the Mississippi economy boomed, so did evangelicalism. As Protestant faiths became wedded to patriarchal standards, slaveholding, and southern political tradition, seeds were sown for the war that would erupt three decades later.

Until Reconstruction many Mississippi churches comprised biracial congregations and featured women in prominent roles, but as the Civil War and the racial split cooled the evangelicals' liberal fervor and drastically changed the democratic character of their religion into archconservatism, a strong but separate black church emerged. As dominance by Protestant conservatives solidified, Jews, Catholics, and Mormons struggled to retain their religious identities while conforming to standards set by white Protestant society.

As Sparks explores the dissonance between the state's powerful evangelical voice and Mississippi's social and cultural mores, he reveals the striking irony of faith and society in conflict. By the time of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, religion, formerly a liberal force, had become one of the leading proponents of segregation, gender inequality, and ethnic animosity among whites in the Magnolia State. Among blacks, however, the churches were bastions of racial pride and resistance to the forces of oppression.

Randy J. Sparks, an associate professor of history at Tulane University, is the author of On Jordan's Stormy Banks: Evangelical Religion in Mississippi, 1773-1876.

Heritage of Mississippi Series, distributed for the Mississippi Historical Society

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2404028 in Books
• Published on: 2001-07-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 374 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As historians of American religion begin to pay long-overdue attention to the American South, more studies emerge that explore the conflicts and triumphs of Southern religion. In Religion in Mississippi, historian Randy Sparks explores the history of that state's predominate evangelical Christian population, both white and black, as well as the presence of "outsider religious groups" such as Jews, Catholics and Mormons. While not as nuanced as other studies on religion in the South (such as Christine Leigh Heyrman's Southern Cross), this is valuable for its ambitious denominational scope and its sweeping saga of change over a 300-year period.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap
From Catholicism to Evangelicalism, from the seventeenth century to the present day, a study of dissonant religious forces in MississippiÂ’s turbulent history

Customer Reviews

progressive evangelists
So often before reading Randy Spark's book I would have as a matter of course dismissed the evangelical tradition with a typical northerner's condescension---that of being a wholly reactionary tradition. Well, as is so often the case to those predisposed to close-mindedness, through the discerning use of primary sources Dr. Sparks clears a muddled historic path revealing a religious movement in keeping with the most progressive of American movements. Little did I realize that so much of the early evangelic movement owed its inspiration from the leveling masses, who saw in the traditionalist churches of the early nineteenth century, albeit protestant in name, as little more than social clubs with which to climb the economic ladder, and, moreover, as rationalizing mouthpieces for the cruelest of Southern institutions: slavery. Indeed in the words of Mississippian themselves, both black and white, we look into the very contemplative souls of the people, admitted less articulate than their wealthier brethren, who, in religiously passionate terms, stood forthrightly against the darkest side the American experience. Unfortunately, as is so often the case of maturing institutions, social status and economic complacency soon takes hold of it constituents, leaving the idealistic, egalitarian notions that served as the catalyst for its birth all but forgotten.