Description:
Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century by renowned historian Wayne Flynt offers a compelling exploration of the rich and often overlooked diversity within southern Christianity. Through engaging essays and vivid historical case studies, Flynt reveals how faith shaped the South's responses to labor reform, civil rights, poverty, politics, race relations, and social change. Challenging the notion of a monolithic and uniformly conservative southern religious culture, this insightful volume uncovers the individuals, congregations, and movements that transformed the region's spiritual landscape. Essential reading for scholars, students, clergy, and anyone interested in the intersection of religion and Southern history.
Review Quotes:
"Overall, scholars of the South in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly, will find detailed narratives that add depth to the scholarship of this period. Readers of this journal interested in Alabama history and the intersection of Progressive reform and religion would benefit from many of these essays, as would historians of evangelical religion and its increasing politicization since the rights movements of the late 1950s and 1960s."--Journal of Southern History
"Who better to write a book on southern evangelical religion than Dr. J. Wayne Flynt? This award-winning Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Auburn University, Baptist minister, and Sunday school teacher extraordinaire has devoted most of his professional life to this study. Now, readers have the opportunity to see wisdom, wit, and a wealth of information bundled together in a collection of some fifteen essays, written over the span of nearly fifty years."--The Alabama Review
"Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century is a splendid retrospective of a great scholar's career. Flynt dismantles generalizations, shows individual complexity, and, as the title suggests, reveals 'diversity, ' as well as any scholar I know."--Paul Harvey, coauthor of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America and the author of Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925