Carolyn Renée Dupont. Mississippi Praying

In the assiduously researched and engagingly written Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1975, Carolyn Renée Dupont presents a state study of white evangelicalism during the civil rights era and its aftermath. She challenges John Lee Eighmy's contention in Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of the Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (1972) that Southern Baptists simply capitulated to the racial discrimination of southern society and David L. Chappell's more recent argument in A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (2004) that southern white religion failed to provide segregationists with effective support and justification when the civil rights movement challenged Jim Crow. By contrast, Dupont claims that Mississippi's white Southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians overwhelmingly held firm “religious commitments to segregation and white supremacy,” which they not only helped sustain but also helped forge (p. 4). Although religious white Mississippians sometimes advocated a biblical defense of segregation, more often, they legitimized racial inequalities by emphasizing individual sin, morality, and responsibility that denied whites' collective participation in and responsibility for racial discrimination. They also blamed African Americans for their supposedly benighted, inferior condition. White evangelicals in Mississippi frequently argued that segregation was a political issue beyond the proper concern of religion, yet they advocated a conservative political philosophy, practiced segregation, opposed the civil rights movement, and deflected issues of racial inequality. Society, they argued, would be regenerated once each individual had undergone personal salvation through conversion, and they maintained that only the Second Coming of Jesus Christ could save mankind, rendering social reform both futile and a distraction from the urgent and vital task of winning the unconverted to Christ. Despite the claims that society could only be renewed through salvation, “[l]egal, economic, and legislative coercion forced” the limited racial changes that came to the Magnolia State (p. 231). Mississippi's white evangelicals eventually repudiated overt racism but, like most of the nation's white evangelicals, they failed to acknowledge their continued acceptance of and participation in corporate structures that embedded racial inequality in society, and they attributed African Americans' disproportionate poverty and suffering to individual failings. Furthermore, many white Mississippi evangelicals withdrew from the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church in the United States after those denominations began to advocate racial equality and endorse desegregation.

Civil rights · Morality · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · White (mutation) · White supremacy · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies