Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era (The New Southern Studies Ser.) - Softcover

Remillard, Arthur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820341398 ISBN 13: 9780820341392

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2011

Synopsis

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Lost Cause gave white southerners a new collective identity anchored in the stories, symbols, and rituals of the defeated Confederacy. Historians have used the idea of civil religion to explain how this powerful memory gave the white South a unique sense of national meaning, purpose, and destiny. The civil religious perspectives of everyone else, meanwhile, have gone unnoticed.

Arthur Remillard fills this void by investigating the civil religious dis­courses of a wide array of people and groups―blacks and whites, men and women, northerners and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, as well as Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Focusing on the Wiregrass Gulf South region―an area covering north Florida, southwest Georgia, and southeast Alabama―Remillard argues that the Lost Cause was but one civil religious topic among many. Even within the white majority, civil religious language influenced a range of issues, such as progress, race, gender, and religious tolerance. Moreover, minority groups developed sacred values and beliefs that competed for space in the civil religious landscape.

About this title

About the Author:

ARTHUR REMILLARD is an assistant professor of religious studies at Saint Francis University. He has served as the managing editor and book review editor for the Journal of Southern Religion.

Review:

Co-winner of the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Award from the Florida Historical Society

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0820341398
• ISBN 13: 9780820341392
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248