For James Hudnut-Beumler, the Anne Potter Wilson Distinguished Professor of American Religious History at Vanderbilt University and Presbyterian minister, the South is too often represented by academics and journalists as monolithically evangelical Protestant: the land of conservative Baptists. He sets out in Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table to present the range of Christian beliefs and practices in the New South—what he calls the “Now South” --while asking if there is really anything distinctively southern about them.

Hudnut-Beumler's methodology is to offer the reader a church historian's insightful description of various religious gatherings and services he attended and accounts of interviews with people he met on his travels: a kind of ethnographic tourism. Hudnut-Beumler's intention is to show the richness and variety of the region's lived religion while at the same time presenting his findings in a form that may gain readers outside the academy. Randall Balmer's, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (Oxford University Press, 1989) is perhaps the most successful example of this genre.

The south is numerically overwhelmingly Christian, but Hudnut-Beumler argues that the range of beliefs and practices is in fact so great that we should talk of its “Christianities.” Commonalities do emerge for Hudnut-Beumler from these disparate southern Christianities. He describes a region in which “people take religion seriously enough that it is disputed” (28) and where a biblical Christian imaginary “continues to fund a vocabulary of redemption, sin sacrifice, a mother's love, and prodigal sons” (8). Most significant for Hudnut-Beumler is a common commitment to the practice of hospitality—the welcome table of the title—though the forms this hospitality takes and the people to whom it is extended varies considerably. In the opening chapter, Hudnut-Beumler proposes three simplified categories of southern churches’ self-understanding that influences how and to whom they extend hospitality: “magisterial” churches bear “responsibility for all souls in society” declaring “y'all come” (35); “gathered” churches extend hospitality to those who respond to the message and come inside “the blessed community” (35); and the “refuge” churches found in the black and Hispanic communities “where people can be received with hospitality among their own kind without prejudice” (36).

Hudnut-Beumler's decade of travels took him from New Orleans to Lynchburg, Virginia and most states in between. He covers a similarly ambitious swath of territory in the pages of Strangers and Friends at the Welcome Table, including: immigration, neo-Confederates, Pentecostalism, religion and politics, the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans, the rise of megachurches, the Prosperity Gospel, Catholic migration, the homeschooling movement, and the emergence of LGBT-affirming congregations. Inevitably, readers will find that they have travelled some of these roads before but they will also discover new destinations. The reader benefits from Hudnut-Beumler's skills as a historian in his succinct delving into the background of the Now South, such as when he lays out the waves of Catholic migration to the South as background to his visit to the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, Alabama.

In concentrating on the “Now South,” Hudnut-Beumler's journeys are directed in part by the string of dramatic events that have repeatedly drawn the national media spotlight to the region and its Christianities. He started his project examining a post-Katrina South (he devotes two chapters to faith-based disaster relief in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast), but mid-research came the terrible massacres at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston and at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, both of which shape the narrative. Through no fault of the author, between final draft and publication, the questions historians need to ask of the southern religious landscape have lurched in new directions. It appears that Hudnut-Beumler added the last changes to his manuscript in the early days of Trump's presidency, just months before the riots in Charlottesville and the credible allegations of sexual assault made against U.S. senate candidate Roy Moore. This leaves the book with an oddly anachronistic assessment of Roy Moore: he will not, it transpires, mainly “be remembered for his demonstration of his Christian faith behind his judicial robes” (103). There is no consideration of the impact of Trump's election on southern Christianities; in particular, the overwhelming and unwavering support of southern white evangelicals for Donald Trump despite his apparent association with many of the causes and behaviors so long disavowed by the Moral Majority (gambling, pornography, adultery, divorce).

While employing a kindness and generosity in his descriptions of the people and communities he encounters, Hudnut-Beumler is not neutral. In his description of his visit to a homeschooling convention in Spartanburg, South Carolina, he worries about the effect of the increasingly “atomized education delivery system[s]” for the future (213–214). He also demonstrates his theological approval for the magisterial and inclusive “Matthew 25” and the “whomsoever” churches (a reference to John 3:16) in the disproportionate attention he pays to these demographically insignificant congregations. Openly gay-affirming congregations make up less than one percent of churches in the region, yet Hudnut-Beumler devotes his final chapter to this movement. The reason is his admiration and concern for those who have decided to be “proudly Christian and gay” despite ‘the southern Christians who exclude and decry their LGBT neighbors” (216). Hudnut-Beumler claims in his introduction that his “mode of analysis is American religious history, not theology” and that in this study of different Christianities he will “not choose among them according to any standard theological truth” (5–6). He does, however, show the way different theologies inform the practices of Christian hospitality from the devastation of Katrina to the Pulse Nightclub shootings. In this way, a historian renders perhaps the most profound form of theological analysis. As any of the southern preachers Hudnut-Beumler encountered could tell you, “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matt 7:16, KJV).