This richly detailed biography examines the colorful life and preaching of evangelist John Lakin Brasher (1868-1971), effectively destroying old stereotypes that portrayed holiness folk as fanatical and uneducated. Relying primarily on Brasher's 25,000 manuscripts and on extensive sound recordings of his preaching and storytelling, J. Lawrence Brasher analyzes the dynamics of holiness religious experience and explores the beliefs, rituals, politics, cultural context, and folklore of the southern holiness movement.

This richly detailed biography examines the colorful life and preaching of John Larkin Brasher (1868-1971), effectively destroying old stereotypes that portrayed holiness folk as fanatical and uneducated. A fresh addition to our knowledge of American evangelical history--full of surprises.--Samuel S. Hill, University of Florida at Gainesville. 36 photos.

The Sanctified Church is a collection of Hurston's ground-breaking essays on Afro-American folklore, legend, popular mythology, and, in particular, the unique spiritual character of the Southern Black Christian Church. Along with preserving the customs, music, speech, and humor of rural Black America, The Sanctified Church introduces us to such extraordinary figures as Mother Catherine, matriarchal founder of a highly personal Voodoo Christian sect; Uncle Monday, healer, conjurer, and powerful herb doctor; and High John de Conquer, the trickster/shaman figure of freedom and laughter still honored in parts of rural Black America today. A pioneering ethnographer and folklore scholar, the great Zora Neale Hurston captured the exuberance, vitality and genius of Black culture with a vividness and authority unmatched by any other writer. (Back cover).

Paul Harvey uses four characters that are important symbols of religious expression in the American South to survey major themes of religion, race, and southern history. The figure of Moses helps us better understand how whites saw themselves as a chosen people in situations of suffering and war and how Africans and African Americans reworked certain stories in the Bible to suit their own purposes. By applying the figure of Jesus to the central concerns of life, Harvey argues, southern evangelicals were instrumental in turning him into an American figure. The ghostly presence of the Trickster, hovering at the edges of the sacred world, sheds light on the Euro-American and African American folk religions that existed alongside Christianity. Finally, Harvey explores twentieth-century renderings of the biblical story of Absalom in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom and in works from Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones. Harvey uses not only biblical and religious sources but also draws on literature, mythology, and art. He ponders the troubling meaning of "religious freedom" for slaves and later for blacks in the segregated South. Through his cast of four central characters, Harvey reveals diverse facets of the southern religious experience, including conceptions of ambiguity, darkness, evil, and death.

In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.

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.

Hill’s landmark work in southern religious history returns to print updated and expanded—and compellingly relevant. In 1966, Samuel S. Hill’s Southern Churches in Crisis argued that southern Protestantism, a cornerstone of white southern society and culture, was shirking its moral duty by refusing to join in the fight for racial justice. Hill predicted that the church was risking its standing in southern society and that it would ultimately decline in influence and power. A groundbreaking study at the time, Hill’s book helped establish southern religious history as a field of scholarly inquiry. Three decades later, Southern Churches in Crisis continues to be widely read, quoted, and cited. In Southern Churches in Crisis Revisited, which reprints the 1966 text in full, Hill reexamines his earlier predictions in an introductory essay that also describes how the study of religion in the South has become a major field of scholarly inquiry. Hill skillfully engages his critics by integrating new perspectives and recent scholarship. He suggests new areas for exploration and provides a selected bibliography of key studies in southern religious history published in the three decades subsequent to the original appearance of this groundbreaking work.