Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars

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Back in print, revised, and enlarged to bring the discussion to the present, Manis shows how two conflicting civil religions emerged in the South during the civil rights movement, each with its own understanding of America's calling and destiny as a nation. Using black and white Baptists in the South as case studies, Manis interprets the civil rights movement as a civil religious conflict between southerners with opposing understandings of America. Originally published in 1987, this new, expanded edition further argues that the civil rights movement and its opposition, with their conflicting images and hopes for America, foreshadowed the ongoing "culture wars" of recent days.In the aftermath of World War II, citizens of every region drew together to affirm their common inheritance as a people and to celebrate the nation's military and moral victories. Such triumphs seemed to confirm America as a beacon to the nations, a "city on a hill." When America and particularly the South turned inward to think about "the American dilemma" of race, the South became a battlefield of conflicting civil faiths. The growing civil rights movement, calling on the nation to "live out the true meaning of its creed, " revealed within the South two separate civic creeds -- one based on freedom by law and equality under God, the other finding in the Constitution a guarantee of individual rights and in the Bible a divine sanction of segregation.Manis explores the southern reaction to civil rights through the words and actions of black and white Baptists, ministers, and laypersons whose rhetoric embodied the conflicting civil religions in the South. Responding to the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Boardof Education, both black and white Baptists urged their fellow citizens to answer God's summons and help bring America to its God-given destiny. But as Brown gave way to the events of the civil rights movement, the segregationist dream of the Southland remaining "white ma