Students of religious history have long been methodologically inventive, bringing analytical tools from sociology, ethnography, anthropology, geography, and elsewhere to bear in their research. Walter H. Conser, Jr., and Rodger M. Payne fully embrace this trend toward interdisciplinary scholarship in Southern Crossroads, an anthology of new and previously published work on religion in the American South. Indeed, the editors deliberately drew from different approaches within their subfield, and the fifteen essays selected include “explorations into such domains as food, music, art, vernacular folkways, and literature” (4). The volume's center of gravity, however, is still in the contributions of historians, and works by Charles Reagan Wilson, Paul Harvey, and others mentioned below reflect long and thoughtful engagement with the documentary record. The works by non-historians are uniformly provocative, but only Marcie Cohen Ferris in her study of Jewish foodways and Charles E. Orser, Jr., in his survey of the historical archaeology of slave religion offer pieces substantial enough to serve as counterweights to the more traditional histories.

In the spare introduction to the volume, Conser and Payne frame the contributions around the trope of “crossroads” and stress the interaction of religion with other forces both within the American South and outside of it. The essays appear in three overlapping sections, each of which lends itself well to the overall themes of intersection and exchange suggested by the crossroads motif. In “Religious Aspects of Southern Culture,” contributors discuss how southerners' religious commitments shaped the meaning of some of the region's most distinctive cultural markers. In “Encounters in Southern Religion and Culture,” attention shifts to “interactions of local, immigrant, and folk religions with other groups.” The final section, “Religion and Markers of Identity,” is the least focused and deals with “religion and markers of identity such as gender, violence, ritual, and politics” (5). The most important works in the collection fit the crossroads theme most snugly and show the instability of both regional and religious identities—the constant traffic that has long constituted southern religion.

In a lavishly illustrated essay on McKendree Robbins Long, William D. Moore and Walter H. Conser, Jr., present the North Carolina-born pastor and painter as “a touchstone for comprehending how cultural critics have treated southern evangelical Protestantism” (90). North Carolinians celebrated both Long's early work as a portraitist in the 1910s and early 1920s and his later, overtly religious work in the 1950s and 1960s. Art critics from outside the region, however, were slower to appreciate Long's work; and when they did, in the 1980s and 1990s, it was for very different reasons. Willfully ignoring the fact that Long had trained at New York's Art Students' League and in Europe, critics praised Long's work as “outsider art” and calculated his value based on his authenticity as an untutored “folk” artist. In Moore and Conser's analysis, Long's southern and religious identity mattered more to art critics than the actual content of his work; as a religious Southerner, he stood in for the “supposed omnipresence of charismatic Christianity in the South” that served in the eyes of northern culture brokers “to define the region as a land apart from mainstream, secular, pluralistic, modern America” (96). The example of Long's rise to artistic fame shows how labels of “southern” and “religious” can be mutually reinforcing in ways that distort reality.

Several contributors to Southern Crossroads concentrate on southerners, unlike McKendree Long, who actually stood outside of the evangelical Protestant mainstream, and probe how non-evangelical southerners worked to develop or retain their own religious identities. Marcie Cohen Ferris, for example, emphasizes the centrality of foodways in her densely textured examination of Jewish life in the Mississippi River delta. “We ate between these two worlds” of Protestant and Jewish cultures, she writes, “in a complicated culinary negotiation of regional, ethnic, and religious identity” (165). Catholics in nineteenth-century South Carolina faced many of the same obstacles as did Jews in the twentieth-century delta—the difficulty of attracting clergy, geographic dispersal, and hostility from the surrounding culture—but met the challenge, according to Diana Pasulka, through the performance of exterior rituals that “promoted a radical sense of community and exteriority that transcended physical and temporal boundaries” (300). Beyond latkes and ritual connections to the communion of the saints, the book is replete with other examples of religious outsiders trying to hold on to their identities within an evangelical South: Randall Stephens's pentecostals used print culture to build their movement; Barbara Lau's Buddhist monks earned community favor by distributing firewood and produce; Orser's enslaved men and women may have used Colono Ware to replicate African-based rituals; and James Curtis's Catholic and Santerian immigrants from Cuba crafted yard shrines in downtown Miami. That different groups confronted evangelical ascendency in so many different ways is both an indicator of the sophistication of the works in this volume and a theme that merits further research.

Southern Crossroads is dedicated to Donald Mathews and Samuel S. Hill, two elder statesmen of southern religious history who are also contributors to the volume. Hill's hypothesis in the concluding essay, that the fundamentalist entry into politics in the 1970s transformed the South more radically than did the civil rights movement, is ambitious and deliberately provocative. Like some of the best work in the volume, unfortunately, it is already published elsewhere (though unlike some of the entries, it has not been expanded into a monograph). Mathews's contribution is a heavily revised version of earlier work, in which he attempts to explain “Why the Old Man Shouted ‘Glory!’” at a spectacle lynching in 1899. In this disturbing piece, Mathews presents lynching as a religious act, both intrinsically in its “power to transform the moral universe” (322) and indirectly as a function of an individualistic evangelical faith impotent to achieve social justice. He pulls back from the argument “that evangelical religion and segregation, linked as they were in the emotional life of white southerners, caused lynching” but does suggest that “they together did create ways of thinking that could justify it” (345). Like the other contributors, Mathews searches the connections between southern religion and southern culture, though his exploration leads to darker places.