God's Conservative Acre

That oldtime religion, based on faith in an all-powerful God and an infallible Bible, is still deeply entrenched in the South. This assessment comes from one of the more knowing observers of the area: Erskine Caldwell, who immortalized the mores of Dixie in such bestselling novels as Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. In a new book of factual reporting called Deep South (Wey-bright & Talley; $6.50), Caldwell gives eyewitness testimony that the basic beliefs of many Southern churches have been left untouched by the changes affecting the rest of U.S. Christianity.

Son of a Presbyterian minister, Caldwell, 64, has toured the rural Southern states every summer for the past three years, visiting revival meetings and churches. Though "rural camp-meetings have been replaced by brick-walled auditoriums and revival tents by rainproof sheds," he writes, the raucous rhythms of lined-out hymns and "the resounding babble of glossalalia" can still be heard--evidence that neither drive-in movies nor television has "diminished the appeal that uninhibited religious exhibitions have as popular entertainment." One Cumberland mountaineer told Caldwell: "I always go to church on Sundays to get my soul saved like the preacher says. He can shout good and loud and I'm satisfied that's the best kind."

Thou Shalt Not. Caldwell also notes that sermons in backwoods churches still concentrate heavily on sins of the flesh--to the point that the message sometimes seems to be more "How to do it" than "Thou shalt not." An evangelist in North Carolina told Caldwell that before his "conversion" he had been a chronic womanizer; past wrongdoings were now an asset, he added, since in his sermons "I always start off talking about the sins I know about firsthand, because people want to know if their sins are about the same or different than mine." Caldwell also notes that many devout Southerners still cannot see the disparity between their concern for personal salvation and their anti-Negro prejudices. One general-store owner boasted that he was "a faithful church member and a good Christian" --then proceeded to excoriate a Jew who had opened a store across the square and was serving Negroes. "Black niggers can walk in there and try on any clothes they please," he protested.

In urban Southern Baptist and Methodist congregations there is a growing spiritual sophistication about interpreting the Bible. But in country villages, among the fervent fundamentalist churchlets, the literal truth of God's word is an unalterable axiom. "Even the mention of Christ walking on water or Jonah being swallowed by a whale can quickly develop into an insoluble controversy if it is suggested that such miracles are symbolic," writes Caldwell. In one such back-country church recently, he says, the congregation became concerned when the minister neglected to specifically reaffirm from the pulpit that Christ was born of a virgin and that God created the earth in six days; after two warnings, the minister "was charged with heresy and ordered to turn in his key to the church door before leaving town."

Caldwell concludes that "the inter woven secular and religious fabric of the Deep South has become threadbare and outmoded with time," and that many Southern Protestants "would be as incapable of justifying their particular denominational membership" as they would their political party. Why, then, does oldtime religion continue to carry on? In the cities, Caldwell suggests, it is pretty much inherited tradition, passed on in much the same way that parents hand down family names or wealth. But in the remote and often poverty-ridden forks-of-the-creek, fundamentalism is a reflection of the people's insecurity and fulfills an emotional need, offering "temporary surcease of loneliness, the promise of instant salvation, and the opportunity to indulge in emotional spasms."

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