Jones attacks what he sees as the historical dismissal of mountain religious life, as supported by nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionary movements bent on changing mountain life through better religion. He explores the creation and perpetuation of negative stereotypes as mainline Christians contended that "Upland Christians" had to be saved from themselves.

Jones attacks what he sees as the historical dismissal of mountain religious life, as supported by nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionary movements bent on changing mountain life through better religion. He explores the creation and perpetuation of negative stereotypes as mainline Christians contended that "Upland Christians" had to be saved from themselves.

The publication of the Encyclopedia of Religion in the South in 1984 signaled the rise in the scholarly interest in the study of Religion in the South. Religion has always been part of the cultural heritage of that region, but scholarly investigation had been sporadic. Since the original publication of the ERS, however, the South has changed significantly in that Christianity is no longer the primary religion observed. Other religions like Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism have begun to have very important voices in Southern life. This one-volume reference, the only one of its kind, takes this expansion into consideration by updating older relevant articles and by adding new ones. After more than 20 years, the only reference book in the field of the Religion in the South has been totally revised and updated. Each article has been updated and bibliography has been expanded. The ERS has also been expanded to include more than sixty new articles on Religion in the South. New articles have been added on such topics as Elvis Presley, Appalachian Music, Buddhism, Bill Clinton, Jerry Falwell, Fannie Lou Hamer, Zora Neale Hurston, Stonewall Jackson, Popular Religion, Pat Robertson, the PTL, Sports and Religion in the South, theme parks, and much more. This is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the South, religion, or cultural history.

Exploring themes of work and labor in everyday life, Richard J. Callahan, Jr., offers a history of how coal miners and their families lived their religion in eastern Kentucky's coal fields during the early 20th century. Callahan follows coal miners and their families from subsistence farming to industrial coal mining as they draw upon religious idioms to negotiate changing patterns of life and work. He traces innovation and continuity in religious expression that emerged from the specific experiences of coal mining, including the spaces and social structures of coal towns, the working bodies of miners, the anxieties of their families, and the struggle toward organized labor. Building on oral histories, folklore, folksongs, and vernacular forms of spirituality, this rich and engaging narrative recovers a social history of ordinary working people through religion.

Religion has always been crucial to the cultural identity of the South. Religion in the Contemporary South is the first book to fully address the emerging religious pluralism in the South today.

In his captivating study of faith and class, John Hayes examines the ways folk religion in the early twentieth century allowed the South's poor--both white and black--to listen, borrow, and learn from each other about what it meant to live as Christians in a world of severe struggle. Beneath the well-documented religious forms of the New South, people caught in the region's poverty crafted a distinct folk Christianity that spoke from the margins of capitalist development, giving voice to modern phenomena like alienation and disenchantment. Through haunting songs of death, mystical tales of conversion, grassroots sacramental displays, and an ethic of neighborliness, impoverished folk Christians looked for the sacred in their midst and affirmed the value of this life in this world. From Tom Watson and W. E. B. Du Bois over a century ago to political commentators today, many have ruminated on how, despite material commonalities, the poor of the South have been perennially divided by racism. Through his excavation of a folk Christianity of the poor, which fused strands of African and European tradition into a new synthesis, John Hayes recovers a historically contingent moment of interracial exchange generated in hardship.

In July 2002 chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court had a two-ton monument of the Ten Commandments placed into the rotunda of the Montgomery state judicial building. But this action is only a recent case in the long history of religiously inspired public movements in the American South. From the Civil War to the Scopes Trial to the Moral Majority, white Southern evangelicals have taken ideas they see as drawn from the Christian Scriptures and tried to make them into public law. But blacks, women, subregions, and other religious groups too vie for power within and outside this Southern Religious Establishment. Religion and Public Life in the South gives voice to both the establishment and its dissenters and shows why more than any other region of the country, religion drives public debate in the South.