Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Paul Harvey, Sarah Gardner

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780820345925, 9780820334110
• eBook ISBN: 9780820343747
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione, politica e Stato

Paul Harvey uses four characters that are important symbols of religious expression in the American South to survey major themes of religion, race, and southern history.

The figure of Moses helps us better understand how whites saw themselves as a chosen people in situations of suffering and war and how Africans and African Americans reworked certain stories in the Bible to suit their own purposes. By applying the figure of Jesus to the central concerns of life, Harvey argues, southern evangelicals were instrumental in turning him into an American figure. The ghostly presence of the Trickster, hovering at the edges of the sacred world, sheds light on the Euro-American and African American folk religions that existed alongside Christianity. Finally, Harvey explores twentieth-century renderings of the biblical story of Absalom in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom and in works from Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones.

Harvey uses not only biblical and religious sources but also draws on literature, mythology, and art. He ponders the troubling meaning of "religious freedom" for slaves and later for blacks in the segregated South. Through his cast of four central characters, Harvey reveals diverse facets of the southern religious experience, including conceptions of ambiguity, darkness, evil, and death.

Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

PAUL HARVEY

Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures No. 52

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Illustrations and Endnotes

INTRODUCTION.
What Is the Soul of Man?

CHAPTER ONE.
Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the Trickster:
Narratives of the Evangelical South

CHAPTER TWO.
“‘Because I Was a Master’”:
Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom

CHAPTER THREE.
Suffering Saint:
Jesus in the South

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This book derives from three lectures originally delivered as the Lamar Lectures in Southern History at Mercer University in early November 2008, just as a historical presidential election was taking place. For their warm cordiality and support, I want to thank Sarah Gardner, Douglas Thompson, and the others on the Lamar Lecture Committee who arranged for this series of exploratory talks. Thanks also to Bill Underwood, president of Mercer University, who arranged a postlecture election-watching party at his presidential house at Mercer.

For their ongoing collegiality, advice, and research tips, I owe much to Edward J. Blum, Randall Stephens, Matt Sutton, Kathryn Lofton, Rebecca Goetz, Kelly J. Baker, Philip Goff, Kevin Schultz, Mike Pasquier, Lin Fisher, and David Sehat.

I have dedicated this book to my undergraduate and graduate teachers. As a product of a denominational liberal arts college and a major public university, benefiting since from postdoctoral work at a midsized church-related university and currently blessed with generous and supportive colleagues at a smaller state university campus, I’ve been fortunate enough to experience many sides of the American higher education system. I especially want to thank my college teachers Dale Soden, the late Laura Crouch, the late Gerry Gunnin, James Farthing, and John Mayer; my graduate school teachers Leon Litwack, James Gregory, the late Reginald Zelnick, and the late William Shack; my Lilly Fellow colleagues John Fea, Joe Creech, Mark Schwehn, Arlin Meyer, “Buzz” Berg, Jon Pahl, Darren Dochuk, Stephanie Paulsell, and Pamela Parker; and my colleagues in the History Department at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, especially Rob Sackett, Christina Jiménez, and Christopher Hill.

A Note on Illustrations and Endnotes

This book includes references to maps (in chapter 1) and to paintings and other illustrations (in chapter 3) that are best viewed in color. Because illustrations included in this book had to be reproduced in black and white, I have created an accompanying website at http://paulharvey.org/moses; it includes a full list of web addresses where readers may view the illustrations in color. I encourage readers to use the link especially when reading about the illustrations discussed in chapter 3, as color is central to understanding these paintings, photographs, and drawings.

Throughout the book I will include references to URLs for the maps and paintings. Because web addresses can be transitory, a full updated list of these URLs will be kept at the accompanying website, and when permissions can be obtained, the illustrations also will be available on the website.

Because this book constitutes the published form of a series of lectures meant to be suggestive and informal more than scholarly and definitive, many arguments and assertions that normally would be accompanied by copious endnotes listing relevant sources in the primary and secondary literature are not present. I have chosen instead to supply references mostly when I use direct quotations, and I ask readers to assume that the arguments made in the book come from years of reading and thinking about the subject.

Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

INTRODUCTION

What Is the Soul of Man?

Won’t somebody tell me, answer if you can!
Want somebody tell me, what is the soul of a man
I’m going to ask the question, answer if you can
If anybody here can tell me, what is the soul of a man?
I’ve traveled in different countries, I’ve traveled foreign lands
I’ve found nobody to tell me, what is the soul of a man

When the pioneering gospel blues slide guitarist Blind Willie Johnson recorded “What Is the Soul of Man?” for Columbia records in the late 1920s, he challenged listeners to ponder a question central to the religious experience. The Texan used his growling voice to pose religious queries and challenges, as in “John the Revelator”:

Who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

Who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

Who’s that writing? John the Revelator.

Hey! Book of the Seventh Seal.

Johnson’s evangelical self-examination, “Nobody’s Fault but Mine,” has been covered numerous times since.

The gospel blues originating in the interwar years typically expressed optimistic verities about a Jesus who was real. Johnson’s grittier, sometimes apocalyptic songs rarely provide such assurance. “What Is the Soul of Man?” challenges the idea that man is only the physical material of the brain, for the resurrection of Jesus proves that “man is more than his mind.” Beyond that, the soul of man remains a mystery.

This book tours some of the answers Protestants in the American South historically have given to the philosophical quandary posed by Blind Willie Johnson. How did southern Protestants, black and white, from the eighteenth century to the civil rights era, grapple with the intractable religious and philosophical questions through religious expression and belief? How did they come to terms with questions about the soul of man? Most particularly, how did they do so through religious institutions, thought, and culture? How did they do so through theology, folklore, music, art, drama, and film? And why did their cultural expressions of religious faith characteristically take on an intensity and vivacity that continues to attract our attention today, giving the South its Bible Belt image?

Based on three public lectures given at Mercer University in the fall of 2008, this short book examines Bible stories as they were transmitted in the South alongside historical understandings from Wilbur J. Cash forward, literary evocations of religion in the region (focusing especially on William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Edward P. Jones), musical expressions, film, and art. The aim is for a brief, evocative exploration of key expressions of religious culture in the South, one that engages both historical narrative and literary/ artistic/sonic expression.

Ultimately, Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster explores further whether “southern evangelicalism” is capacious enough to capture the complex religious life of Christians in the region. When southerners have examined the soul of man, they have come up with a variety of answers belying the simple reliance on evangelical archetypes. In other words, when we move beyond formal theological statements, electoral maps, and data collection, we find a capacious religious experience belying simple stereotypes about southern religion. Answers to Blind Willie Johnson’s question may be gleaned by focusing on some of the central symbolic figures of southern religious history.

To understand fully how southern believers have defined the soul of man, we must broaden our field of vision beyond the usual suspects in the study of southern religion. Here we will do so through an examination of four historical literary archetypes: Moses, Jesus, the Trickster, and Absalom. Moses and Jesus are familiar, Absalom and the Trickster less so, yet they too have been formative to creating the southern sacred. Southerners’ answers to questions about the soul of man suggest the power of evangelical Protestantism in southern history, as well as the ways in which that power consistently has been challenged and questioned. Skeptics have nibbled around the edges of the evangelical culture that came to cultural dominance after the Civil War. Literary figures, cultural archetypes, and musical explorations have added layers of cultural complexity to what otherwise might be seen as a solid South of evangelicalism.

The first chapter surveys the major biblical, literary, and folkloric characters of Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the Trickster as they have come down through the history of southern religious culture. If Moses and Jesus represent the conscious engagement of theological ideas in the South, Absalom and the Trickster speak to more subterranean elements. If Moses and Jesus are moral paragons, Absalom and the Trickster are necessary morally gray figures. Southerners required such a complex cast of characters to grapple with a social world riven with intractable conflicts.

The second chapter analyzes the social history of religious ideas of freedom in the South from the eighteenth century to the Civil War. In his recent profound work The Myth of American Religious Freedom, historian David Sehat has uncovered the ways Americans of all political persuasions have misunderstood or misused the history of the First Amendment and the concept of separation of church and state. He identifies a “moral establishment” that survived the wall of separation between church and state, one that was as coercive as the legal establishment it followed. Nowhere was this more true than in the South, where a moral establishment grew up alongside the institution of slavery and, indeed, provided key justifications for human bondage. With such a history, religious ideas of freedom came to have a social, not just a legal, meaning. Exploring their evolution requires understanding the social history of how they came to be developed precisely by those who were denied freedom.

The final chapter focuses more specifically on Jesus. The black birth of Jesus, the white rebirth, and the twentieth-century struggles over the imagery of Jesus suggest how and why Christ came to be especially associated with the South. This chapter continues also the story of the evolution of religious ideas of freedom through the twentieth century into the civil rights era, completing the narrative begun in chapter two. The figure of Jesus became central to those ideas of freedom.

As a preface and apologia, an explanation of what is not here. Perhaps most importantly, there is comparatively little about the Catholic South and, therefore, not as much about Louisiana and New Orleans as one might wish. This book makes no pretense of covering the religion of Native peoples. Further, it deals only tan-gentially with the recent diversification of religion in the South, including the migration of Latinos and Asians to a region historically dominated by people of English/Scots Irish origin and people of African descent. This runs counter to much contemporary scholarship in American religious history. Recent work in this field has pushed toward understanding pluralism, to “decentering the narrative,” to incorporating the stories and religious traditions of those historically...

Table of contents

• Selected Books from the Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures
• Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South