Paul Harvey Redeeming The South Summary

The educational book I chose to review on was Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, which talked about the development and culture shifts among the Baptist in the Reconstruction Era. This book speaks about the race problems of the South; but the real value of this book provides an interesting look at the shifts in values and reality that was in areas such as business, liberalism, and self-restraint. Paul Harvey notes how society in the South began to change in worship, their ministry, and denominational status. I read that African Americans and whites Baptist, brought up at National Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist Convention; in the eighteenth-century that they stressed the conversion

“Black and white Baptists profoundly influenced each other. Together, and separately, they created different but intertwined southern cultures that shaped Baptists in deep and lasting ways. Southerners of widely varying social groups, from plantation owners to farmers to enslaved blacks accepted the evangelical Protestant mythology of mankind’s unearned ability to achieve salvation” (12). Harvey’s traditional scheme that uses a familiar subjects; for example, the gender culture and Victorian class of modernization people. “In the 1940s, when white southern Baptists might be worshiping in a small church, or black Baptist in scattered congregations in south Chicago, religious styles with rural roots endured and were adapted to new settings. Today, while still seeing themselves as outsiders, their styles have become part of the dominant national culture, and they have claimed a political inheritance denied their forebears”(13). Both black and white Southern Baptist were two sets of people that were divided by their religious cultures and the differences in their historical

Worth, Texas. From its inception, Southwestern remained decidedly more conservative and sectarian than its brother seminary in Louisville. Its curriculum deemphasized the traditional subjects of nineteenth century education ancient languages, exegesis, and moral philosophy and replaced them with practical courses in church management” (151). What Harvey has done is uncovers a very difficult and diverse picture of religion in the south. The bible as the source of truth, defines morality as an individual acts determines their morality rather than their state of society, and that all people have or had direct access to God. It has been long recognized that the model had immeasurable exclusions and difficulties. The notion that whites were better than African Americans, and according to sources at that time coherence in the late nineteen hundreds. Many wondered if that model applied to white Baptists more than anyone else even African