Mississippi Praying

Winner of the 2013 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize presented by the American Society of Church HistoryMississippi 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 Renée 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.

I am grateful to [the author] for further recovering the central role of religion in the civil rights era., This is an inspired and sparkling religious history of the three major white denominationsSouth Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodistsin the state of Mississippi for the three decades of the Civil Rights movement...This is notsimply a tale about what happened in the struggle for black equality in Mississippi from 1945 to 1975. It is a mirror, reflecting what is still happening in segregated churches all over America, not just in Mississippi, not just in the South, but all over this great republic., Carolyn Renee Duponts examination of Mississippi white evangelicals fervent support of segregation during the 1950s and 1960s offers historians a fresh interpretation of the confounding paradox of God-fearing whites condoning and even participating in massive resistance. [] This book successfully challenges the reader to think beyond a variety of biases inherent in discussion of literatures relationship with ethnic, regional, and national identities., Dupont's book is an essential companion to any study of the civil rights movement, not only for its treatment of how religion impacted the movements history but also for the way it exposes how easily oppression can be wrapped in a cloak of religiosity that blinds its adherents to injustice occurring all around them., Gripping and detailed,Mississippi Prayingtells how the fight to maintain white supremacy was deeply embedded in all the states institutions, particularly its churches. Such a narrative challenges readers to understand how some forms of racism topple, while others yet persist.

Carolyn Renée Dupont is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, KY.