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Spiritual Bulimia. By Terry Matthews Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to speak of the South as a distinctive entity within American culture. As C. Vann Woodward has pointed out, many of the things that once served to distinguish the region from the rest of the nation--"the one horse farmer, one crop agriculture, one party politics, the share cropper, the poll tax, the white primary, the Jim Crow Car, the lynching bee"--are long gone. And the influence of television, movies, and other forms of mass communication is slowly homogenizing the culture, making the region virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the nation.
Still there are things that remain distinctive about the South. For instance, the pattern of speech in the region is often unique, and "the Southern accent" can pose problems for non-Southerners. The weather is hot and humid. Much of the country-side is rural and agrarian, and traditions tend to be preserved and have more of a role to play in present day life. In a land of plenty and abundance, the South has been a region where living standards, per capita wealth and income, and the good things money can buy like education and health care have lagged behind the rest of the nation. As C. Vann Woodward notes, "generations of scarcity and want constitute one of the distinctive historical experiences of the Southern people...That they should have been for so long a time a "People of Poverty" in a land of plenty is one mark of cultural distinctiveness. In a nation known around the world for the hedonistic ethic of the American Standard of Living, the Southern heritage of scarcity remains distinctive."
Yet another way Southerners are distinct is rooted in the experience of the War Between the States. Until recently, Southerners were the only Americans to experience the taste of defeat on a battlefield, and even today, the region remains unique in that it alone has seen first hand the destructive effects of war fought on its soil.
And last but certainly not least, the issue of race still looms large in the region. While many today would argue the region is no longer motivated by "a common resolve indominately maintained" that the South "shall remain a white man's country," Professor Ulrich B. Phillips assertion that race is the central theme in Southern history can not be easily dismissed.
From the use of black indentured servants in the settlement at Jamestown--to the rise of slavery in the antebellum South to the modern battle over integration and affirmative action, the South has struggled defend a series of peculiar institutions--slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation--each designed to keep African-Americans in a sub-servient position. Indeed, as Woodward notes, "Much of the South's intellectual energy has gone into a desperate effort to convince the world that its peculiar evil was actually a positive good."
Certainly, the history and role of religion in the South was forever made different when Christianity was co-opted into this struggle to turn vice into virtue. Southern religious leaders like Richard Furman (for whom Furman University is named) were among the first to violate what had been a national consensus that slavery was a "necessary evil," and to assert that it was--in fact--a positive good.
There was just one problem with the spiritual alchemy that Furman and others such as James Henley Thornwell tried to effect: it didn't work. Despite hearing many sermons on the virtues of slavery, antebellum Southerners knew in their hearts that they lived in and profited from an evil social system. As James Oakes makes clear from his ground breaking study of private diaries and correspondence during the antebellum period, Southerners were very aware of the incongruity between their public statements about slavery being a positive thing, and the brutal and demeaning institution they experienced on a daily basis, and displayed deeply troubled consciences.
Like human beings everywhere, antebellum Southerners were by definition complex beings, capable of holding to contradictory values, motivated by principles at odds with their behavior. And so it was that many Southern Christians paid a high price in terms of their psychological security. Overwhelmingly evangelical, Southerners had vivid portraits painted for them by their religious dogma of the eternal consequences of sin. And so it was that many lived in great fear that they would spend eternity in hell for the role they played in maintaining the institution of slavery. one former slave, Martha Harrison, remembered her master as a man so frightened by his imminent death that he offered her thousands of dollars to secure his salvation. "But he couldn'ta got out of hell," she declared, "the way he beat my mammy."
And yet few were willing to surrender what one Southerner termed his "convenient sin." The large profits that resulted from holding human beings in bondage proved a better motivator than the fear of eternal damnation that haunted them. As another Southerner put it, "a gentleman has a right to make the most of his life when he can't calculate on anything better than roasting in the next."
Southerners, however, found this tension difficult to live with. The contradiction between their faith's anti-materialism and the slave-holders' secular ethos was no more resolvable than the conflict between their dehumanization of slaves and their claim that slavery was a positive good. Slaveholding parents who taught their children by word and deed to accumulate land and slaves with voracious zeal also imparted to their children a religious dogma that promised damnation in return for the sin of greed. So fundamental were the psychological conflicts bequeathed to the children of slaveholders, so great was the rift between their religious convictions and their behavior that for many the resolution seemed dim.
These psychological conflicts helped to produce a condition in Southern Christianity that I choose to call "Spiritual Bulimia." Faced with a seemingly irreconcilable problem, Southerners opted for what we might characterize as a binge-purge spirituality. Unable to bring themselves to give up the sin of slavery, they found solace in purging themselves of their sin and guilt through intense, emotional, cathartic, religious experiences. A cyclic pattern developed in which Southerners would feast on sin during the week, and go to church on Sunday for an emotional and psychological release. These experiences served to offer the sinner release from the things of this world, and the promise of spiritual rebirth and eternal salvation.
But this emotional and psychological release was purchased at a high price. Religion had to be largely divorced from life, the sacred had to be separated from the secular. The best example of this process was the development of the doctrine of the Spirituality of the Church by James Henley Thornwell. This variant of the old heresy of Gnosticism sought to justify the bifurcation of Southern life by asserting that such social institutions as slavery were the province of the state, and beyond the purview of the church. The church, Thornwell argued, could only deal with such matters of personal morality as playing cards, dancing, or drinking. The weightier issues of racial justice were left unaddressed.
Today, the South continues to struggle with the affliction of Spiritual Bulimia. It manifests itself in the twice yearly revivals found in many churches, as well as in camp meetings, and other "evangelistic" services. Whether a person is "saved" is still far more important than how he lives in his week-day world. Many Southerners still believe it is possible to be a good church member and a racist, to worship a God whose passion is for the poor on Sunday, and to be a slum-lord on Monday. Even today, many Southern congregations draw the line at getting involved in social issues, preferring to instead focus on personal moral issues like a referendum on Liquor by the Drink, or opposition to a state lottery. The weightier issues of justice and mercy continue to be ignored.
While I would not be so bold as to suggest that Spiritual Bulimia represents the central theme of religion in the South, it is an idea that we will re-examine from time to time over the course of this semester. That is because the experience of evil and the region's compromise with it, is difficult to reconcile with the vision of "city upon a hill...a light to the nations" that motivated the first Puritan settlers, and which remains a dominate theme in American life. It will be my contention that not only does Southern religion serve to set apart the region from the rest of the nation, the debilitating effects of its illness remain with us, helping to create a culture that is as dehumanizing to whites as it is to blacks.
Date is an approximation made for administrative purposes. Ed. Shnet
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