Al Benson, Jr.

The Christian Basis of Southern Culture

Often when one mentions the Christian basis for Southern culture it provokes a virulent protest in certain quarters. There are some in the Southern Movement today that want no part of Christianity, nor do they want Southern culture of history to have had anything to do with Christianity. Some even go so far as to claim that Christianity is a "white supremacy" religion and feel that such a foolish argument gives them an excuse for having nothing to do with it - and some of these people are white, too. I suspect that, in many cases, their real problem is Jesus Christ, not race. In fact one thing that has convinced me of the truth of Christianity is the continued invective hurled at it. People don't say that much against Judaism, or the Muslim faith or against the Bhuddists, but they sure do hate Jesus Christ with a passion - as the Scriptures said they would.

Some of these Enlightenment mentalities point to the fact that Thomas Jefferson, a Virginian, was a deist, and therefore not Christian. I will agree with them in regard to Jefferson. Though I love his views on government, I think he was way off base when it came to religion, and his views on government, whether he realized it or not, were influenced by biblical thinking and the culture around him. So, if Jefferson was a deist, so what? He was hardly the only Founding Father. There were George Washington, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and a score of others that seemed to have no problem with the Christian faith. Patrick Henry, another Virginian, is reported to have stated, rather emphaticlly that: "It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great Nation was founded not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For that reason alone, people of other faiths have been afforded freedom of worship here." In my humble opinion, Patrick Henry was one of the greatest Christian statesmen this country ever produced.

In The Southern Essays Of Richard M. Weaver Mr. Weaver wrote of the faith of the Old South. He noted: "For although the faith of the South was heavily Protestant, its attitude toward religion was essentially the attitude of orthodoxy: it was a simple acceptance of a body of belief, an innocence of protest and schism by which religion was left one of the unquestioned and unquestionable supports of the general settlement under which men live...In short, there was a religious as well as a political Solid South." Weaver noted that travelers in the South in the early 1800s were amazed at the number of denominations and sects in the South, and yet these travelers ."..expressed a double amazement at the multiplicity of sects and at the lack of friction or ill will between them."

Weaver observed that: "The religious Solid South expressed itself in a determination to preserve for religion the character of divine revelation. Superficially the difference between a backwoods convert, with his extraordinary camp-meeting exhibitionism, and the restrained and mannered Episcopalian of a seaboard congregation, seems very great. Yet it must be borne in mind that despite the different ways they chose to assert religious feeling, both were inimical to the spirit of rationalism. And if the spirit of rationalism is looked on as the foe of religion, then it must be admitted that ortodox Christianity was as safe in the hands of one as the other." Weaven mentioned how Christianity in the Northeast had slipped into the apostasy that gave rise to the Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and other such groups. Such apostasy never occurred in the South - although it has to be admitted that the Unitarians tried, they just didn't get very far.

Mr. Weaver made a telling point when he said "So the Southern people reached the eve of the Civil War one of the few religious peoples left in the Western World. Into the stange personnel of the Confederate Army, out of 'regions that sat in darkness' poured fighting bishops and prayer-holding generals, and through it swept waves of intense religious enthusiasm long lost to history. It is on record that there were more than fifteen thousand conversions in the Army of Northern Virginia alone. And when that army went down in defeat, the last barrier to the secular spirit of science, materialism, and pragmatism was swept away." Weaver has, indeed, made a good case for the Christian basis for the culture of the Old South.

Those in the Southern Movement today that can look at the history and culture of the Old South and not see the Christian faith as an integral part of the warp and woof of that history and culture are either willfully blind, or they have yet to grasp what that culture was really all about.

Copyright ©, 2003 Al Benson Jr.

Al Benson, Jr. is also the Editor of the Copperhead Chronicle, and may be reached at albenson@patriotist.com