In The Sacred Mirror, Robert Elder explores the complex interplay between Southern religion and Southern honor in the Deep South, defined here as South Carolina and Georgia, from 1760 to 1860. Following in the footsteps of Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Elder sees honor as a pre-modern code of ethics in which communal authority shaped identity. Many scholars of Southern religion have seen Christianity and the code of honor to be in conflict, but Elder sees them as growing out of the same traditional and communal relationships. The evangelical presence in the Lowcountry dated back to the First Great Awakening, but the number of congregations remained small until the Great Revival, when church memberships exploded. Early evangelicals did not so much reject honor and shame as they redefined those concepts through scripture and contrasted worldly and Christian honor. While evangelicalism was in part defined by individual conversion, converts were ushered into a new community of believers where honor and shame were to be judged.
The evangelical movement grew steadily in the early decades of the nineteenth century, but the Nullification Revivals transformed the Deep South into a genuinely evangelical culture. These revivals caught fire in South Carolina and Georgia at the same time the debate over the Tariff of Abominations and the threat of nullification and war animated the population. Elder draws on sermons from the revival period to demonstrate that the language of Christian honor played an important role in those meetings. The dramatic growth in church membership blurred the lines between the evangelicals and the larger community and brought in more members from the planter class, thereby erasing the social distinctions that had once separated the yeomen evangelicals from the planters. Elder agrees with Stephanie McCurry who first argued that the Nullification Revivals “transformed the lowcountry into an evangelical society” (34), though Elder would extend that into the Upcountry as well.
As some evangelicals grew in wealth and refinement, a more polished, educated clergy arose from their ranks, particularly well-suited to the towns and cities. Those ministers adopted a more polished, academic preaching style. Elder identifies a link between oratory and honor, and contends that oratory was more important in the South than in other parts of the nation. After 1830, evangelicals continued to contrast Christian and worldly honor, but increasingly they targeted atheists and infidels outside the region for condemnation rather than the sinful elites within their own society. As sectionalism increased in the 1850s, the evangelical message became more conservative and elevated resistance to abolition and Northern tyranny as elements of Christian honor, a transformation that effectively merged Christian and worldly honor.
Just how evangelicals understood honor and shame comes into focus through an examination of church discipline. While a major goal of discipline was to reclaim individual sinners, it also served to tie individuals more closed to the community of faith. Disciplinary hearings resonated outside the church doors because individual transgressions endangered the sinner, threatened the congregation, and brought public shame on the entire body of Christ. As the churches grew and became the dominant institutions in the community, discipline was increasingly used to enforce community norms, not just religious ones. Increasingly, the church was one “of the public stages where honor, reputation, and identity were shaped and contested” (77).
Some historians have seen the masculine code of honor as standing in opposition to the feminized code of evangelicalism, but Elder argues that the “moral communities” (79) of honor and evangelicalism overlapped. Gender played a significant role in church discipline; for example, Georgia Baptists excluded twice as many men as women even though the typical church had a female majority. Charges of violence, cases most closely tied to the code of honor, were the least likely to end in exclusion. Elder suggests, without any real evidence, that as men aged, they found it easier to reconcile Christian and worldly honor. Women found it easier to reconcile the demands of Christian and worldly honor which were more closely allied for them than for men. Very few white women were excluded for sexual transgressions, though at least half of the black women who faced exclusion were expelled for a sexual offense, thereby highlighting the contrast between white women's honor and black women's dishonor. Christian honor may have challenged some aspects of masculine worldly honor, while it reinforced the code of honor applied to women in Southern society.
The author identifies a symbiotic relationship between slavery and Southern honor. When blacks joined evangelical churches, they were ushered into a community where Christian rituals stood in marked contrast to the rituals of social death that defined their lives within the slave system. Through baptism and communion, blacks gained a new and elevated social existence, one defined by their personal conversion experience. Conversion transformed social death into everlasting life. While the law did not recognize slave marriages, churches regularly disciplined enslaved members for adultery and fornication. Black preachers and deacons played important roles in biracial churches, often reflecting the roles these individuals played on the plantations. Evangelicalism supported and defended slavery, but black Christians found in the churches recognition of their humanity and a space to act out their communal and individual identities, thereby combatting the threat of social death.
The Civil War brought dramatic changes to Southern evangelical churches and to the communities in which they were embedded. Religious discipline declined sharply, and the culture of honor, so essential to the social and cultural fabric of the Old South, largely disappeared. Elder argues against a view of Southern evangelicalism as a radical movement of the region's plain folk against the culture of the gentry, as a movement that began in opposition to slavery, but ended as its chief defender. That view, he believes, fit well in a broader interpretation of the South as essentially pre-modern, pre-capitalist society, but he sees evangelicalism as a mix of the traditional and modern. Across the Atlantic World, the rise of evangelicalism was associated with the rise of the marketplace and a more modern sense of individualism. Measured by the growth of institutions, the professionalization of the clergy, the decline in church discipline, and the creation of an individual identity, evangelicalism played a major role in the modernization of the South.
Elder's assessment of the role of evangelicalism in the region, his evaluation of it as both modern and traditional, and his understanding of the ways in which Christian honor and worldly honor were reconciled in evangelical churches, are fresh and important contributions to our understanding of both honor and evangelicalism. Despite his stated focus on South Carolina and Georgia, he paints with a broad brush, and misses an opportunity to explore in greater depth and detail the differences between the Lowcountry and the Backcountry, between the planter districts and the Pine Barrens or Wiregrass region, between the small cotton towns and the sophisticated urban centers of Charleston and Savannah. Did honor mean the same thing across time and place and across class boundaries? Such distinctions, which appear so important in the work of Stephanie McCurry and Rachel Klein, for instance, are oddly flattened out in Elder's work.
