Scholars of religion in the American South are once again indebted to Paul Harvey for pushing against the boundaries of their field. In his previous works, Harvey challenged readers to rethink how they define and intellectually map the region's historical religious experience. Unlike historians who have focused on either black or white religion, Harvey believes that the key to understanding the region's religious culture is taking on the seemingly separate religious worlds of whites and blacks under a singular analytical framework. Likewise, historians must be willing to consider that Christians in the South contemplated the soul of man beyond the walls of churches and the constraints of formal theology. In his latest work, Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South, Harvey has fashioned an excellent monograph that began as a series of lectures at Mercer University in 2008. The book offers a refreshing examination of how Protestants in the American South grappled with “intractable religious and philosophical questions through religious expression and belief” (2–3) not only in formal institutions but also in their art, literature, folklore, and music.

Harvey describes a religious world far more nuanced than many historians have previously acknowledged. He does not suggest that the Old South experienced pluralism as some historians have tried to emphasize—he contends that the region was a bastion of evangelical Protestantism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—but he does argue that any analysis of southern religion must include a broader array of actors, rather than just the “usual suspects” of the ministry and active laity. To understand how southerners, black and white, tried to answer “what is the soul of man?” one must conduct a broad survey of southern culture to include literature, folklore, and music. Harvey argues that “southern evangelicalism,” a category long used to lump together the region's religious experience “is not capacious enough to capture the complex religious life of Christians in the region” (2). Though evangelicalism was indeed powerful, southerners turned to cultural archetypes, literature, and musical expression to understand the soul of man.

The book is organized into three lengthy chapters, all of which offer sweeping chronologies, as Harvey weaves through several centuries of religious experience through creative thematic and topical angles. In the first chapter, Harvey identifies four biblical, literary, and folkloric archetypes that white and black Christians have defined and redefined since the eighteenth century: Jesus, Moses, Absalom, and the Trickster. In the experiences and stories about these figures, southerners have wrestled with the nature of good and evil, sacred and profane, peace and violence, love and hate. The second chapter explores southern ideas of freedom, specifically the paradox of religious freedom and racial oppression as understood by white and black Christians. The final chapter, and arguably the most fascinating, is devoted to southern images of Jesus. Harvey argues that whites and blacks fashioned and refashioned images of Jesus to adapt to a myriad of social conditions; yet, the same ambiguity that allowed Jesus to be so malleable also “left narrative holes that trickster and Absalom stories filled in” (157).

Harvey's sources are broad ranging as he deftly analyzes the lyrics and experiences of Blind Willie Johnson and Johnny Cash along with the theology and thought of Frederick Douglass and Charles Colcock Jones. Harvey also presents arresting works of vernacular art as evidence of Jesus imagery in the twentieth century, autobiographical reflections of Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Moody, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and the literature of William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Some readers may find the presentation of Harvey's evidence too relaxed and somewhat scattershot, but the author readily admits that the presentation of his sources is somewhat informal and that his intention is to be suggestive rather than definitive. As such, Harvey is able to push the boundaries of the field in new and creative ways.

While the relaxed methodology reflects the origins of the project as a series of lectures, readers will nevertheless delight taking in what Harvey has to say. He is a scholar who has read deep and wide in the field and he has given a great deal of thought to the nature of southern religion. Distilled in these pages are the illuminating observations of an historian in full stride. The book will no doubt provide historians of American religion much intellectual fodder. It will no doubt garnish a large readership.