Publisher’s Website<\/a><\/p>\nJoseph L. Locke\u2019s eye-opening monograph shatters erroneous and too-long-held assumptions regarding the role of religion in Texas political history.\u00a0 Locke argues that H.L. Mencken\u2019s 1920s dismissal of the American South as the \u201cBible Belt,\u201d a region where fundamentalist preachers erased the division between church and state and profoundly shaped, if not dictated, law and custom in the former Confederacy, only approaches the reality in Texas beginning with the World War I era.\u00a0 Mencken\u2019s simplistic depiction of the South as a backward theocracy tucked inside American borders, Locke argues, has exerted a baleful influence on subsequent scholarship and punditry over the last nine decades.<\/p>\n
The South as a whole might be \u201cChrist-haunted,\u201d as Flannery O\u2019Connor once put it, but Locke skillfully demonstrates that for much of its history Texas was not uniformly so.\u00a0 He dates the origin of the Bible Belt to the Prohibition movement\u2019s political victories from 1910 to 1920.\u00a0 Nevertheless, he writes, even as fundamentalists achieved political hegemony, the state remained home to a Babel of religious voices.<\/p>\n
Locke recovers the state\u2019s boisterous theological late-nineteenth-century past, a time when \u201c[t]heological diversity, institutional rivalries, and organizational disunity\u201d diminished the policy influence of major Protestant denominations like the Methodists and Southern Baptists (19).\u00a0 For much of the nineteenth century, atheists, free-thinkers, heterodox preachers, and religious liberals attracted large audiences. Locke depicts nineteenth-century Texas as shaped by what he calls \u201canti-clericalism,\u201d the deeply-held notion that ministers should stay out of politics on the grounds that the involvement of clergy in political matters threatened the kind of theocratic tyranny seen in medieval Europe and in the witch trials of Salem.<\/p>\n
Post-Civil War, many white Texans also associated politically active clergy with an abolitionist movement still reviled for decades after Robert E. Lee\u2019s surrender at Appomattox.\u00a0 Texas anti-clericals positioned themselves as heirs to religious liberty advocates like Thomas Jefferson, and tapped into popular prejudices against the Catholic Church and Islam, which they depicted as imposing doctrines on helpless, captive populations.\u00a0 The anti-clericals dominated the state\u2019s political discourse from the late 1860s until the rise of Progressivism at the dawn of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n
Swimming against these currents, some Texas preachers ventured into politics, campaigning for Prohibition in the 1880s only to suffer a series of humiliating defeats, from a loss in a local option election in McLennan County in 1885 to the resounding rejection of a prohibition amendment to the state constitution in 1887. Most ministers in the state, it seemed, preferred to focus on saving souls instead of exorcising \u201cdemon rum.\u201d<\/p>\n
Utilizing a wide array of archival sources, including the papers of major religious leaders such as Baptist preacher J.B. Cranfill and Methodist minister and educator Edward Mouzon, Locke demonstrates how the Prohibitionist clergy recovered from defeat to emerge as the dominant political force in Texas at the time of World War I.\u00a0 For a time, Protestant churches focused on institution building.\u00a0 Rather than standing in persistent opposition to the modern world, they established a firm foothold in developing Texas cities.\u00a0 Leading preachers took advantage of the era\u2019s most advanced technology to promote their vision of a world redeemed through Christian activism.<\/p>\n
Baptists and Methodists expanded and improved Baylor University, which merged with Waco University in 1887, while also establishing Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth in 1908, and Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1915.\u00a0 These colleges and universities professionalized the state\u2019s clergy.\u00a0 A more sophisticated clergy, in turn, presided over growing bureaucracies that printed denominational newspapers and published books that addressed not just spiritual matters, but political ones as well.\u00a0 Clerical authors wrote popular books that spun historical myths portraying the Texas revolutionary leaders in the 1830s as zealous men of God battling heathen forces.\u00a0 Preacher-authors presented state founders, such as Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston, as role models for Progressive Era preachers fighting to shutter saloons or to ban Darwin from the classroom.<\/p>\n
Anti-clericalism provided churches in the late nineteenth century with a useful nemesis.\u00a0 Preachers like J.B. Cranfill and J. Frank Norris, even as the pews in their churches filled in the late 1800s and early 1900s, created a sense of shared grievance at the sinful world and a common sense of mission to save it not just through prayer, but through the vote as well.\u00a0 All that was needed for the emerging activist clergy to reshape Texas law was a skilled politician, who arrived in the person of Morris Sheppard, who represented the state in the U.S. House from 1903 to 1913 and the United States Senate from 1913 to 1941. In 1917, Sheppard introduced in the Senate a resolution proposing the Eighteenth Amendment, which would ban the manufacture and distribution of alcohol in the United States.<\/p>\n
A gifted storyteller, Locke introduces us to a wide range of colorful figures and reminds readers of the little-known Texas connections of major Prohibitionist leaders like Carrie Nation and Robert \u201cFighting Bob\u201d Shuler, who achieved greater fame as the pastor of Los Angeles mega-churches and as a controversial radio broadcaster. As Locke notes, what happened in Texas didn\u2019t stay in Texas.\u00a0 The Prohibition Movement paved the way for the rise of the Christian Right that would realign parties and transform American politics nationally beginning in the 1970s.\u00a0 This nuanced volume should be read closely not just by historians of American religion, but political scientists and sociologists as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Review: Making the Bible Belt Michael Phillips Professor of History at Collin County Community College JSR Volume 20 Cite this Article Michael Phillips, “Review: Making the Bible Belt,”\u00a0Journal of Southern Religion (20) (2018): jsreligion.org\/vol20\/phillips. Open-access license This work is licensed CC-BY. You are encouraged to make free use of this publication. Joseph L. Locke. Making…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101017,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-675","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101017"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":948,"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/675\/revisions\/948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jsreligion.org\/vol20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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