Taking
Religion Seriously in the Deep South:
An Interview with Wayne Flynt
Conducted by
Randall J. Stephens
Wayne
Flynt
is the great contrarian of southern religious history. Whereas
other
scholars describe broad trends that mark the region—a white homogenous
evangelicalism, parochialism, a regressive social outlook, etc—Flynt
finds jack-leg socialist preachers, white liberal professors, and
agrarians that certainly don’t fit the mold. Flynt’s work on the
culture of the South’s poor has influenced a whole generation of
scholars. His Poor
but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites (1989) and Dixie’s
Forgotten People: The South's Poor Whites
(1979; 2004) turned readers’ attention to the countless southerners
who, though marginalized by their “social betters,” stood firm; strong
in their faith, resisting class oppression. Flynt’s long career
and
his work with a flurry of grad students over the years was celebrated
in a 2006 festschrift: History
and Hope in the Heart of Dixie: Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt
in the Modern South. He was also the subject of
an Alabama Public Television documentary, The Gospel According to
Wayne Flynt (1993), from
which we have streamed an excerpt here.
“I do so admire Wayne Flynt,” said Harper Lee, author of the southern
classic To Kill a Mockingbird
(1960). “Here is a man with a gift for making long ago and the recent
past come alive. He writes with an unclouded clarity, and makes writing
history the work of an artist; I savor the delights of Alabama in the
Twentieth Century.” For insight on his life as a historian, a
Baptist,
public activist, and mentor, Randall Stephens spoke to Flynt in late
October 2007 at the Southern Historical Association in Richmond.
Randall
Stephens: I’d like to ask you about the early field of southern
religious history. How did things look in the 1960s and 1970s, when
Kenneth K. Bailey, Rufus B. Spain, and Sam Hill charted out their
scholarly course?
Flynt: It’s
interesting that a
lot of people still associate me with the early days of this field,
which I wasn’t a part of. I’m not the first generation; I’m the second
generation really. I didn’t have any particular interest in religious
history early in my career. Though I had been a ministerial
student as
an undergraduate, I was reacting to segregation in the church, which is
why I subsequently left the ministry.
Stephens: What first
drew you into the field then? What did you make of Sam Hill’s
now-classic study Southern Churches
in Crisis (1966).
Flynt: I read
Sam’s because I was interested in it, and I was certainly
delighted with this sort of early glimmer of something other than an
absolute uniformity in southern religious history. And the work of
Bailey, and John Eighmy was inspirational. In their scholarship one
already began to get the main trajectory of the story. But the
studies
of these historians provoked new questions for me. Though I
agreed
with much of what they had written, I was interested in the lives of
ministers and laypeople, who by no means fit a uniform history of
religion in the South. A hard look at the region revealed anything but
uniformity. Yet religion departments in southern schools forty
years
ago were pretty homogenous. Most professors were orthodox, and so
was
I, and having gone through an undergraduate program at a Baptist
university, where nobody believed you had to choose between creationism
and everything else, I really felt the story had been badly distorted.
Stephens: Did you read
Lillian Smith and Harper Lee in the 1960s?
Flynt: I did.
Harper Lee had a major impact on me. Her book
To Kill a Mocking Bird
made me reconsider Alabama. Before I read that I had a negative
impression of the state. I started grad school at Florida State in 1961
and the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed in 1963. I remember going
home in 1961 and telling my wife that I didn’t know where we’d end up
teaching, but it would never be in Alabama. I’d never go back there.
Stephens: As you’ve
written in a short piece—“A Pilgrim’s Progress through Southern
History,” Autobiographical Reflections on Southern
Religious History (2001)—you attended First Baptist Church
in Tallahassee, Florida in these years.
Flynt: That’s
true. In 1964 that church had a vote on integration. The church
chose to remain segregated.
Stephens: Did
segregationists have a
weaker theological argument than did integrationists? I wonder
what
you make of David Chappell’s argument in A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and
the Death of Jim Crow (2004) about that matter.
Flynt: The
segregationists’
argument was almost wholly cultural, and not religious at all.
Tallahassee’s First Baptist Church made a political case, since it was
the major church for the political establishment in the state’s
capital. A lot of really overt racism in that church was
political.
Older church members who were inactive showed up to cast ballots in the
he 1964 church vote on integration. They showed up that night and
voted, and we didn’t recognize many of them.
Stephens: Did the issue
break down along generational lines?
Flynt: It was
generational,
overwhelmingly so. We had a very young pastor from the West, which
meant he was theologically fairly conservative and socially quite
liberal, as were Texas Baptists and Oklahoma Baptists.
Stephens: Did he attend
seminary in Kentucky?
Flynt: No he was
from the
Southwest, so he didn’t go to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in
Louisville.
Of course, Southwestern
Baptist Theological Seminary, in
Fort Worth had a tradition of being the most liberal in terms of
ethics. A whole generation of ethicists from Southwestern was quite
liberal on the issue of race. That was partly because there were
so
few blacks in Texas. Yet theologically Southwestern was more
conservative than Southern.
Stephens: The
liberal/conservative
lines can get rather blurred when we look at how American Christians
have worshiped. I’m curious about your own theological or
ecclesiastical views.
Flynt: High pulpits
bother me.
I don’t like split chancels either. I like the pulpit in the
middle
and the emphasis on the word. I like the pulpit as low as it can be in
terms of the congregation. I don’t think there should be a great divide
between the clergy and the congregation.
This partly reflects my populist political views. My early work at
Florida State was in political history and labor history. My first two
books were a biography of Senator Duncan Fletcher (1859-1936) and
Governor Sidney Catts (1863-1936) of Florida. A lot of people see
Catts, who was a Baptist preacher from Alabama, as the harbinger of my
scholarly trajectory. That’s not really true. Catts fascinated me
solely because of his politics, and I found his religion to be a very
interesting background for what he became, which was a southern
demagogue, an anti-Catholic hypocrite. His daughters told me, for
instance, that he drank alcoholic eggnog while campaigning against
alcohol. He was involved with organized gambling in the 1920s. That was
all behind the scenes. On the other hand, he was one of the most, if
not the most, progressive governors Florida had in the early 20th
century. He championed prison reform and education reform, and ran
against the power brokers in the Democratic Party. Of course, he was
elected not as a Democrat, because the Democrats stole the election
from him. He was elected as a prohibitionist. He basically tried to
create an independent third party politics that would be closely allied
with Tom Watson and the old Populist anti-catholic tradition. I found
that all extremely intriguing.
At that same time I was working a lot on labor history. I wrote a paper
on the 1908 transit strike in Pensacola. And I actually did research
for a full-scale book on labor in Florida. One of the things I ran
across was the fact that so many of these labor leaders were coming
from Nazarene churches. They were also members of working class Baptist
churches. Labor in the South absorbed this extraordinarily powerful
reform ethos of evangelical religion. Labor leaders in the West
Virginia Coal Mine Strike of 1920, or the Birmingham Strike of
1919-1921 quoted the 25th chapter of Matthew, the Sermon on the Mount,
and referred to the life of Christ. All those strikes were informed by
the ethos of the Gospel. This was not Marxism. If they were socialists,
they were Christian socialists, but their radicalism was a radicalism
born of the church and the very literal teachings of Jesus. You could
argue that they were fundamentalists—in terms of their believing that
every word of the Bible was literally true—but when they quoted Jesus
they picked passages that didn’t make polite society feel good.
Stephens: Do you think
religion has been integrated into the master narrative of southern
history?
Flynt: It
hasn’t been
integrated very well. Take, for example, C. Vann Woodward. There’s no
way Woodward, in the master research he did for his
Origins of the New South, 1877-1913
(1951), could have missed it. It must have been a blind
spot. Perhaps
he wasn’t looking for it, or maybe he didn’t want to find it. Given his
experience with the Methodist Church in Arkansas, he was fleeing from
it like almost all intellectuals were in the 1920s and 1930s. If a
historian really feels like religion produces segregation, or that
religion is a major bulwark for conservatism, or that it produces the
rigid political hierarchies of the church, then it’s easy not to see
it.
In almost all the classes I taught I asked: “What role does religion
play in the lives of the people who take it seriously?” What I like
about the question is that it is an absolutely neutral question. It
doesn’t assume you are religious or irreligious. It just assumes you
start off with a premise that’s fundamental in any historian’s work. If
you bring a judgmental kind of attitude to your research, you do what
every historian is told not to do.
Stephens: When you were
doing your
work in the 1970s, did you encounter historians who thought that
religion was always a mask or a function of something else?
Fynt: Oh
absolutely. And the
thing I was always battling against my whole career was the sort of
political correctness that was present in history departments then.
When I went to Auburn, some colleague said, “We like you a lot, but we
wish you wouldn’t go to the Baptist church.” They liked me, but it was
always as if they liked me in spite of my faith.
Stephens: Your work often
strikes a
dissonant chord. To what extent did the progressive Parker Church, a
Baptist church, influence the groups and individuals you write about?
Flynt: It was
certainly the
most influential congregation I was in. We moved around a lot so
I was
exposed to many churches, but that was the most influential one. When I
was growing up in Aniston, Alabama, we had a World War II naval
chaplain who had come from Texas. Pastor Locke Davis went to the South
Pacific as a traditional conservative Baptist, and suddenly he was
doing last rights for Catholics and ministering to Jews on ships that
were hit by Kamikazes. World War II changed the faith of a whole
generation. They had not been very progressive. They were quite
close-minded, but in that setting they changed. Davis came back, he
never felt comfortable in the SBC, and actually pastored a church out
in Missouri that was aligned with the American Baptist Convention and
the Southern Baptist Convention, and when he decided to leave that
church he had two offers. One was from the American Baptist Church in
Detroit and the other was Park Memorial. For a number of reasons
he
decided to come to Park Memorial instead of Detroit. I don’t know, I
did an oral history with him but I never asked him that question about
his decision.
Stephens: Could you say
something about the pacifism of Davis’s predecessor in the Parker
pulpit, Charlie Bell?
Flynt: He voted for
Norman
Mattoon Thomas, socialist and pacifist presidential candidate, twice.
Bell formed a racial cooperative based on another southern model,
Clarence Jordan’s Koinonia farm near Americus, Georgia. Bell had blacks
come to eat in the living room and dining room of his house. They
entered through the front door rather than the back one. He was just
scandalous, for that era, and the only reason he survived was because
his father owned the largest bank in town, and because of the editor of
the local newspaper, a very high ranking member of the Democratic Party
in the state.
Stephens: When I read your
work about some of these fascinating figures I have wondered how unique
they were.
Flynt: Oh this was
very unique,
and I’m not seeing that growing up, as a kid I’m not seeing that, I am
seeing it as, “this is how Baptists are, this is how all Baptists are.”
I was seventeen and preaching already, but people were supportive of
what I preached, and very supportive of me. Civil rights was not yet on
the agenda.
Stephens: You have written
that you
became more and more aware of the race issue. Was it toward the late
1950’s or maybe after the Montgomery bus boycott?
Flynt: I don’t
remember race being a big thing in the late 1950s. The
Brown v. Board decision was
irrelevant in Alabama in 1958. While I was in school, of course,
the freedom rides occurred.
Stephens: When and how did
you first start thinking seriously about religion and race?
Flynt: The freedom
rides loomed
more large for me. I’m working on a memoir now and the first
public
position I took on anything was against a letter in the
Anniston Star defending
the Adam’s brothers who had attacked the freedom rider’s bus in
Anniston and burned it. They used a passage in the New Testament
about
Jesus scourging the moneychangers in the temple to justify
violence.
It just absolutely infuriated me. So I wrote a letter to the
Anniston Star
and asked what do you do with the Sermon on the Mount. The idea
that
Jesus engaged in violence at the temple is hardly an accurate reading
of the text anyway. He didn’t strike anybody, he didn’t destroy
anything, he upset the tables and he may have given them a
tongue-lashing. But that was about as far as he went. Of course, I got
a lot of angry reactions.
Stephens: How old were you
when you wrote that?
Flynt: I was
twenty. I couldn’t
even vote. I had been president of the student government association.
I had been on the debate team. I don’t know if I could have gone to
college if I hadn’t had a debate scholarship. In those years I
was
disgusted by the Democratic Party, which was represented then by
Governor John Patterson and George Wallace. So I saw Republicans as the
liberal alternative to the racism.
Stephens: Was Lyndon
Johnson the first Democrat you identified with?
Flynt: He was the
first
Democrat I supported. In 1964 I had to form a group at Florida State
called “Republicans for Lyndon Johnson” and I actually did door to door
campaigning for the Democratic ticket. By 1968 I switched parties. The
Barry Goldwater period in ’64 had convinced me all that the white South
was going to switch to the GOP, which was what happened. By then I was
a pretty liberal Democrat. In fact, when I went back to Samford to
teach in ’65 one of the first things I did was form a tutoring program
in Rosedale, a black community. Rosedale High School had no equipment,
and it was in a kind of ghetto. The first black student to enroll at
Samford was a graduate of the tutoring program that I started, which
was sponsored by the Young Democrats and the Baptist Student
Union. I
was proud of those groups. We were able to bring those two groups
together, and there was a lot of overlapping membership too. I
also
started a drive in Rosedale to register black voters in ’65. A lot of
my students went door to door getting people to register.
Stephens: Was there
tension over that?
Flynt: Oh yes
Stephens: From church
people?
Flynt: Not from
church people
so much. I was at Baptist church at the time and there were a lot of
people who didn’t like integration and didn’t like people doing stuff
like that, but they didn’t really know what I was up to. I had a young
family and was a new member of the church. A telephone call from the
pastor in Tallahassee told this Baptist church that I had been trained
in Cuba and smuggled across the Mexican border to integrate the First
Baptist Church in Tallahassee, which the pastor thought was the most
amusing thing he ever heard. With my limited Spanish I would have
starved to death, and never would have made it back.
At any rate, there was that kind of stuff, but the people up there
didn’t really know much of what was going on. After the Voting
Rights
Act, I took some African American to vote who didn’t know how to read
or write. When she asked me to help her in the voting booth there
was
a furious reaction from the registrar. He said “you can’t do
that.” I
said, “we need to get someone from the Justice Department to instruct
you on what I can and cannot do because you obviously haven’t read the
Voting Rights Act.” I do have a temper. I lost it that day, and told
them they might very well haul me off to jail but I was going into that
voting booth and I was going to help her vote whether they liked it or
not. There was that kind of confrontation, and the very first black
student who came to our church was one of my students, he was a
pharmacy student from Nigeria. That made the first round of
integration more acceptable.
Stephens: That was the
same with the Nazarenes.
Flynt: It was the
same at Mercer University, too. Their first black student was a
Nigerian.
Stephens: The first black
faces you see in evangelical college yearbooks in the 1960’s tend to
have African names beside them.
Flynt: It made it
convenient,
because these individuals were the products of our missionary
efforts.
The Nazarene Church, pentecostal churches, the Church of Christ, and
the Independent Baptists had a strong missionary outreach. The
Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the Methodists had already gotten out
of missions. They were too embarrassed by it. So they were the ones who
were reaping the harvest of the missionary movement.
Stephens: Could you
describe how some
within your boyhood community of Anniston, Alabama eventually grappled
with issues of race and social justice?
Flynt: Race
relations were
probably the last bridge to be crossed on the journey for most. Charlie
Bell, at Parker Baptist Church, was quite liberal on race. He and
a
handful of others brought a resolution in the 1930s to the New Orleans
Baptist Convention. Bell did it to counter the Christian Life
Commission, as it was later called, which brought up a resolution about
alcohol. Charlie was furious. He got to his feet and said “Here we are
with a quarter of our population without jobs and poverty and
starvation in our land, and here you are passing resolutions about
alcohol as if that’s the most important issue.” What they did is they
started talking about race. W. O. Carver, one of the most liberal
members of the faculty at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Louisville, was one of Charlie Bell’s teachers. So, all of a sudden you
have this movement that begins to at least run around the issue of
race, and they had already taken a position on an awful lot of
contemporary social problems: poverty notably, share cropping, tenant
farming. Sure, there were a lot of Baptists who did not get interested
in anything because they were too busy saving souls.
Stephens: That reminds me
of why Sam
Hill’s work on the South resonated with me. Growing up in the Nazarene
Church, as I did, it seemed the great commission crowded out all other
concerns. Yet that was an evangelical development that was
certainly
not limited to the South.
Flynt: And it seems
to me that
this is the staying power of Sam’s book. If you’re looking for the
core, the guts of what southern religion is all about, it is
conversion. I never argued the other side of that. I conceded that from
the beginning. John Boles always said that this is boiled down to the
issue between splitters and lumpers.
Stephens: It is
interesting, then,
that you have found so many figures in southern history, many not
attached to institutions, renegade preachers and the like, who do not
figure into the work of other historians. I found some of these people
in my research as I mined denominational papers for pentecostal
voices. How have you found some of these fascinating individuals?
Flynt: Backwards.
What basically took me into reconstructing history backwards was my
first book,
Duncan Upshaw Fletcher:
Dixie’s Reluctant Progressive
(1971), based on my doctoral dissertation. When Fletcher died—after he
had been one of the most influential men in the U.S. Senate during the
first few decades of the 20th century—his secretary, the interim
Senator chosen to take his place, burned all of Fletcher’s papers. He
had no space to store them and nobody wanted them in those days. So
when I was writing my dissertation, I had to go to somebody else’s
papers to find his letters. I went to Carter Glass’s papers, I went to
Woodrow Wilson’s papers, and I went to Roosevelt’s library. And I
reconstructed background.
By the same token, if you can’t find anything about Populist-supporting
preachers in denominational newspapers, you must go to the Populist
papers. Populist newspaper editors invariably took such pride in
ministers who supported Populism. Historians who have written
about
Populism have pointed out that populist rhetoric is straight out of the
gospel. These individuals upheld the idea that there is a world of
justice out there and the world is to be changed by Christians who
apply the gospel to all sorts of unjust situations. The temperance
movement was clearly there because the Democratic Party was a wet
party. The Populists were running dry.
But the most important thing was the vocation of those who supported
Populism They were coal
miners
in Alabama. Alabama is the most
industrial southern state. It is the state with the largest number of
union members outside of Kentucky. In many ways it’s more like
Pennsylvania than it is like Mississippi, and therefore you get people
who are being forged by the same kind of things that were happening in
Pittsburgh.
Stephens: I didn’t know
that about Alabama.
Flynt: Aniston was
the soil
pipes center of the world, which means they made sewer pipes for Cairo,
Egypt. These Aniston pipes were used all over the world. They also had
railroad shops, which made railroad cars. As a result Aniston was
basically divided in two. West Aniston was working class through and
through, while East Anniston contained those who had crossed over, the
wealthier.
Stephens: I recall you
describing East Aniston as having a kind of country club atmosphere.
Flynt: That’s
right. My dad was
very much from West Aniston. He moved to the East side when he
got the
money. He aspired to be a part of that world. The first place we lived
was one fence removed from the black section of Aniston, right on the
boundary of East and West Aniston. When we came back, Dad was a
manager, he managed the branch even though he never went to high
school, and he had made enough money and was successful enough as a
businessman. There were two sides up on the mountain. One was very
rich, with wonderful houses, and the other, the side we lived on, had
very simple abodes. But they were the kind of homes my Dad could afford.
Stephens: Do you think
this is a kind
of a metaphor for your work? You seem to be in between in a way;
you
see things from these two different sides.
Flynt: Absolutely.
That is
absolutely true Randall. A lot of people assume I wrote the sort of
history I wrote because I was so fiercely determined to have the world
I came from represented. Actually the truth is that until I began
to
do research on poor whites in the South I had no idea of the poverty of
my parents. They had very carefully shielded me from it, the same way
first generation immigrants shield their children from the Old Country.
They don’t want their children to be Old Country. They don’t want them
to talk like that, they’re perfectly happy for them to be totally
different. Which is why second generation people usually are running
from that.
When I was interviewing my dad I was teaching a world history class,
and I started interviewing him because I remembered his stories when I
was in my thirties. When I began to talk to him—he was an incredible
storyteller—the pressure of modernity and my mother always saying:
“Homer get to the point . . . Homer they don’t want to hear that story
. . . Homer they’ve heard that story 15 times,” made him truncate his
stories, so it was never as rich as when I had first heard it. Both my
mother and dad had been extremely poor, but by the time I had been born
they were moving into the lower middle class and the middle class. They
never talked about that world they had once been a part of. Dad told
stories, rural stories about farming, but only when I began asking
probing questions about my grandfather especially, a sharecropper. Then
my dad began filling those stories in. So, in a sense, I was almost
like a second-generation immigrant kid who decided he wanted to know
where he came from.