Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975

by Carolyn Renaee DuPont

Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians' intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality. During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renee Dupont richly details, white southerners' evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy. Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi's religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi's evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South. Carolyn Renee Dupont is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, KY.

Genres: History, Religion, Race, American History, Social Issues, Nonfiction

303 pages, Hardcover

First published August 23, 2013

Reviews

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Were Christians in Mississippi opposed to integration in the 1950s and 1960s merely due to their cultural influences? No, argues Carolynn Renee Dupont in this fantastic piece of history. Against the common assumption that religious beliefs were incidental and mostly unrelated to their racism, Dupont shows that it was the religious beliefs of these people that fueled their fight for segregation. They believed God blessed segregation and opposition to the institution was something only liberal types would pursue.

This is a tremendously important book, on the level of Mark Noll's The Civil War as a Theological Crisis. These historical debates inform the debates we are having today, because though the issues have changed the hermeneutics of the two sides have not. As Noll showed in his book, it was conservative religious people who wanted just a plain reading, a literal reading, of scripture who supported slavery. Abolitionists, for the most part, were seen as on a slippery slope away from orthodoxy.

One hundred years later and the echoes are obvious. Those who supported segregation read the Bible in the same way as those who supported slavery. Orthodox conservative Christians had a tradition and felt it was liberals who were straying from orthodox belief who opposed God's desire for races to be separate.

Perhaps most disturbing is how Dupont points to the roots of contemporary conservative religious politics. Those who supported segregation continued reading the Bible in the same way, even after segregation was off the table. They found new battles to fight, though their weapons were the same. Which leads me to wonder, if this way of reading the Bible has been on the wrong side twice in the last 150 years, in two of the most major moral debates in our nations history, perhaps that ought to be a bigger strike against it today then it often is.

I suspect we simply don't know our history. Saying we believe the Bible is literal and the truth is plainly there in the proof-texts is much easier. It is important to know this past, to know that how we interpret the Bible is not neutral or new but has hurt people and simply been wrong in the past. Which then leads to the question, how do we read and interpret the Bible today?

[Joel Wentz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm pretty torn on this book. There's some very excellent research and historical documentation throughout, but it gets bogged down by some really dry writing and some pretty major glosses over serious accusations.

First, Dupont seriously did her homework. These chapters are replete with primary source quotations and detailed accounts of events in Mississippi that chronicle a pretty recalcitrant resistance to integration in the largest white denominations at the time. She especially zeroes in on the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists, and one can learn quite a bit about the historical goings-on in those denominations when it came to the cultural changes around Civil Rights, and especially the Brown v. Board decision in 1954. Some of these chapters are pretty enlightening (like, for example, the ways in which the beginnings of the PCA are entangled with resistance to desegregation).

But, if I'm honest, the reading experience as whole is not great. If anything, there are too many details. Much of the material could have been moved to endnotes, and the central argument would have remained intact. I also wish Dupont would have "zoomed out" from Mississippi more and connected what was going on to broader national events in the Civil Rights Era - the only two such events that are really dealt with this way are the Brown decision and the death of MLK.

Also, she alleges things like the church's "commitment to white supremacy" and that the theological structure of evangelicalism cooperated with segregation, but she does not offer a rigorous definition of evangelical theology. In fact, only one chapter is in any way devoted to theology, which ended up being my favorite section in the midst of a bunch of pretty dry history.

So, I guess it's complicated! I have much sympathy for Dupont's conclusions, and agree that she has her finger on something important. While she did a seriously impressive amount of research, I am not quite convinced she built it into a fully compelling argument. Books like "Color of Compromise" by Tisby are a much more engaging read. I'll be keeping this on my shelf for some of the historical work that's contained within, but would only recommend this to seriously academically-oriented history readers.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although this revised dissertation outlines a helpful history of religious responses to the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, it argues that the “folk theology” of white religion in Mississippi most helped bolster segregation by embracing an individualistic ethos that allowed whites to interpret black poverty, poor education, and high crime rates in such a way as to deem African Americans unworthy of equality. Dupont seems almost constrained to make such an argument because segregationist attempts to construct truly religious defenses of segregation from the Bible were absurdly lame, met with limited acceptance, and were mostly contrived by religious nonentities—none of which was the case for pro-slavery arguments made from the Bible before the Civil War.

There are a number of problems with this book. First, Dupont uses the term “evangelicals” loosely to mean Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian, whether or not the particular members of the denominations she is discussing were truly evangelical or were “moderates” (the term Dupont uses for theological liberals). Second, Dupont seems unaware of the major split in evangelicalism that occurred from 1945 to 1975 and which divided “fundamentalists” from “neo-evangelicals”—roughly, those who opposed and supported the ecumenical evangelism of Billy Graham—and who by the late 1960s disagreed substantially with one another on matters of race. Third, Dupont does not adequately explain how virtually all Mississippi evangelicals (regardless of how that term is defined) could support racial segregation in 1945, whereas one would practically have to look under rocks to find segregationists thirty years later.

[Jason S · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book. Very dense in spots with the inter-religious information. Persuasively argues that backlash to civil rights in Mississippi denominations helped to shape the current Religious Right.

[Israel Macario · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book after taking a couple of trips to the south.. The area is so religious yet they can't see their actions are and have been against the teachings of the bible. The book gives a good history of why the south holds racist beliefs. Of course not as extreme as when there were lynching people of color but there is still prejudice propagated by the church. It is an academic book so it provides details and good historic references. I would recommend the book to have a good overview of the religious history of the south.

[Andy Kirk · Rating 2 out of 5]

At times truly helpful and fascinating. Overall, repetitive, cloudy, and long-winded.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was alright. Dupont really showed her hand in how she felt about evangelicals in general, and I think that biased her work.