Anyone with even a passing interest in the field of southern history knows Wayne Flynt. From Poor But Proud (University of Alabama Press, 2001), his classic history of Alabama's impoverished whites, to his most recent book, Mockingbird Songs (Harper, 2017), Flynt's work has reshaped how we understand the intersections of class, race, and region. Religion has been a predominant interest in Flynt's career, best illustrated by Alabama Baptists (Fire Ant, 2005), his sweeping treatment of his home state's evangelicals. Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century puts fifteen of Flynt's hand-selected articles into one volume with a framing introduction that makes plain the main thesis: “Southern religion is more complicated than it seems” (7). That it is, but what is most revealing in this collection is how Flynt's articles have conveyed and captured his intellectual development and a field's maturation over time through trial and error, interesting departures, and sustained inquiry.

The volume opens with Flynt's personal recollections of growing up Baptist in Anniston, Alabama, under the influence of Rev. Charles R. Bell, Jr., whose reformist, interracialist, and pacifistic sensibilities nurtured in Flynt an outsider's suspicion of the Jim Crow South's racial arrangements, anti-intellectualism, and political conservatism. Such an emphasis on (and admiration for) countervailing religious attitudes and forms of social engagement prevails in the first half of the volume. In this way, the volume serves as a kind of time capsule back to when scholars first began writing against Samuel Hill and C. Vann Woodward's school of southern history and social critique, which largely cast the South's white evangelicals as hopelessly individualistic and, therefore, sideline supporters of the racial status quo. Much of Flynt's early work on the social gospel in Alabama and evangelical minorities (such as white Presbyterians) uncovered reformist moments and motivations. The volume's early-to-middling chapters assess the relative importance of such contrarian or minority agents in the white South while taking account of other understudied arenas of religious life, such as southern cities like Birmingham, and overlooked groups, particularly women. Dissent and disagreement, rather than simpleminded or singular conformity, marked the religious experiences of Flynt's subjects, as most pointedly demonstrated in the volume's longest chapter, a study of Mt. Hebron Baptist Church in Leeds, Alabama. Like many rural forms of Baptist community, Flynt argues, Mt. Hebron's members departed from official denominational protocols and politics, forging local interests to congregational culture and (at times) radical activities. The result, as Flynt reminds us, was a historically fluid community that exhibited more exceptions than rules regarding racial attitudes, roles for men and women, pastoral styles of leadership, and politics.

Flynt's skill for taking account of the complexities of evangelicalism is perhaps best exemplified by his chapter on the Great Depression, an era and religious experience that remains under-researched in the literature (outside, of course, the recent work of Alison Collis Greene). Charting the “interior world” of the South's poor whites during the 1930s, the chapter (based off his presidential address to the Southern Historical Association in 2004) argues for evangelicalism's positive functions, most notably its contributions to “self-worth, equality, interpersonal acts of kindness and charity, a sense of community, hope in a world of adversity, ultimate vindication in a world of powerlessness, emotional release in a world of drab routine, and social stability in a world of violence and familial dysfunction” (246). Flynt's assessment of Depression-era white and black faith communities as hardly “strange, escapist, or inconsistent” (269), especially in terms of social reform and political activity, complements the focus of the volume's closing few chapters, each of which details the political implications of evangelical grievances, this time in the post-1960s era of denominational in-fighting and wavering social dominance. Though clearly more in favor of the progressive politics that evangelicals preached in the early twentieth century and, at times, promoted in the midst of the more recent “culture wars,” Flynt nevertheless remains fair in detailing the various evangelical political efforts with which he disagrees, from the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention to local Baptist crusades to solidify communal support for “family values.” He also concludes that, in many ways, “the South's battle over God” (288) reveals an array of differing interpretations, especially regarding political routes forward for those inside and outside the Baptist fold. In this way, Flynt's conclusion circles back to the volume's main framework and thesis—namely, that diversity rather than uniformity marks the southern evangelical experience, much as it has marked Flynt's own Baptist upbringing and subsequent career of making sense of the complicated social and religious worlds, interior and public, that white and black southerners have made for themselves.

For many contemporary scholars, Southern Religion and Christian Diversity in the Twentieth Century may read a bit old-fashioned. “Religion,” “southern,” and even “Baptist” and “evangelical” are self-evident, essentialist, list-fitting categories, not constructed identities for the sake of social positioning and power. The volume also largely utilizes mini–social histories and organizational studies oriented around a few units of analysis: the denomination, the pastor, the congregation, and the church member. That said, Flynt's volume should be read and selections from it taught. It documents some of the first forays into the critical study of “southern religion” that went outside denominational or congregational containers, and it honors Flynt's efforts to figure out subjects that, at the time, remained off the historian's radar, whether women, poor whites and blacks, or countercultural religionists. As a historiographic retrospective and role model for pointed, sensitive scholarship, this volume is valuable. But it is also valuable for further cementing Flynt's reputation as not only one of the leading lights in the field of southern history but also one of the most steadfast chroniclers of the cultural and political pursuits that religious communities—especially white Baptists like and unlike himself—have fashioned, forgotten, or forsaken.