Durwood Dunn's last book is a remarkable story of race, religion, and war among Methodists in the southern mountains. More specifically, this is an account of the Civil War-era Holston Conference, named for a river and consisting mostly of eastern Tennessee but also southwestern Virginia and western North Carolina.

Dunn's protagonists are itinerating and local ministers. Itinerants favored adapting Methodism to the larger Southern society by welcoming wealthy slaveholders and downplaying traditional Methodism, including love feasts, class meetings, camp meetings, class leaders, and exhorters. Local ministers, on the other hand, opposed slavery and held to the old Methodist ways. Locals did not vote in annual conferences and resented their lower status.

The split became a bloody during the Civil War. Wartime Bishop John Early, Jubal's brother, ruled autocratically, and pro-Confederate itinerants expelled Unionist local ministers, some of whom were murdered in the bitter Appalachian guerrilla war. After the war, “Little Holston,” as it was often known, fractured into rival conferences, one North and one South, plus independent black Methodist denominations and a segregated black conference in Holston North.

Dunn does not apply lessons from Holston to larger issues and trends. But he skillfully narrates the history of an interesting region, and the book is hard to put down.