I recently had a chance to interview Robert Elder, assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University, about his excellent new book, The Sacred Mirror: Evangelicalism, Honor, and Identity in the Deep South, 1790-1860 (UNC Press). You can follow Robert on Twitter at @southernphd.
1. How did you get interested in the topic of evangelical Christianity and “honor” in the antebellum South? What did “honor” mean to Southerners?
Honor is a slippery concept, but one way to define an honor culture is one in which individual identity is largely determined by communal opinion. Reputation is incredibly important, but it’s also quite fragile and has to be protected. The duel is probably the best known example of honor culture in the Southern context, but scholars who study honor will tell you that the desire for honor and the avoidance of shame influence pretty much every aspect of life in an honor culture, from child-rearing to business transactions.
I knew when I started graduate school that I wanted to study honor culture, but I hadn’t settled on a topic. I happened to look through a version of the Methodist Doctrines and Disciplines published in 1798 and read the (very detailed!) instructions for publicly excommunicating a member from the church, and I realized that many Southerners during this era would have interpreted excommunication as a public shaming ritual. I became fascinated by how the context of an honor/shame culture might have shaped Southern evangelicalism (mainly Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists).
2. How does your book change the way that historians have typically thought about the relationship between Southern evangelicals and honor?
Nobody had written a full-length study of it, but most recent histories agreed that early evangelicals challenged the South’s honor culture, especially the violence, drinking, and rigid hierarchies or gender, race, and class that were integral to it. But sadly, so the story went, this didn’t last, and beginning in the 1820s evangelicals found ways to make their churches comfortable for Southern white men by abandoning their counter-cultural critiques of honor. In this sense, Southern evangelicals followed the same sad trajectory with honor—from opposition to accommodation—that they followed with slavery.
I argue that this narrative is too simple. Early evangelicals may have critiqued what they called “worldly honor,” but they didn’t discard or reject the idea of honor, or of shame. They simply redefined the community of reference. They drew on biblical texts to argue that “true honor comes from God alone” (John 5:44) and that true (and everlasting) shame belonged only to those who rejected their message.
The public nature of church discipline, which in the Baptist tradition was carried out by the whole congregation, practically assured that concerns about honor and shame would be present in evangelical churches, and when you read the church record books with an awareness of cultural context this point leaps out at you. In fact, Southerners were probably predisposed to the communal, public form of church discipline because of their assumptions about communal authority, which helps to explain why Southern evangelicals practiced church discipline more rigorously (Southern Baptists excommunicated about 2 percent of their members a year during this period) and for longer than their Northern counterparts.
3. Your book digs deep into church discipline records for evidence. Why are those records so valuable?
Church disciplinary records are really a window into the life of a community. Baptists and Presbyterians, in particular, kept wonderful congregation-level records, and many of them survive in archives today. Whenever someone in the congregation was accused of “disorderly” behavior or voluntarily confessed a sin, the church or session clerk wrote it down, sometimes in great detail.
Luckily, in South Carolina there was a WPA project in the 1930s that sent out volunteers to transcribe church record books all over the state. In many cases, the originals are lost or not easily accessible, but we have the transcriptions.
4. How differently were women and men, or blacks and whites, treated in church proceedings?
On one hand, the effort by evangelical churches during this period to hold their members to the same moral standards is impressive, especially in the context of a Southern legal system that had dramatically different standards for men and women, and which viewed slaves as property. On the other hand, you can often clearly see cultural norms affecting disciplinary standards in the church. For instance, throughout this period men accused of violence in defense of their honor were often treated quite leniently. Sexual offenses were often treated as much more serious for women than for men, which makes sense if you understand the strict sexual boundaries that accompanied female honor.
Churches struggled with how to enforce white marital norms on black members whose marriages were not legally recognized by Southern society and who had little control over whether a spouse was sold away to another part of the country. Few churches challenged masters’ authority, and sometimes churches seemed to be directly reinforcing slavery (disciplining slaves for disobedience to a master, for instance).
5. You write that “Southern men often struggled to reconcile their honor and their religion,” but “the same was not true for Southern women.” Why was this the case? How might your book help us understand why women have often been the majority of church members in America?
One of the fascinating things to see in these church records is the effort by Southern men (black and white) to reconcile the demands of honor and the example of Jesus, which could not have been more different. I like to sum up what I found in the records as the “I know it was wrong, but I had to do it” defense, which essentially acknowledged that what men had to do to defend their honor was sinful, and required repentance, but had to be done anyway (this defense is still around, or was when I went to college in South Carolina!).
Women experienced almost none of this dissonance between the cultural demands of honor and evangelicalism. Female standards of honor, most importantly chastity and modesty, fit perfectly with evangelical standards of behavior for women. This helps to explain both why women were attracted to evangelical churches in larger numbers than men (observers at the time and since have seen women as more naturally religious, which makes little sense) and why they were much less often the subjects of church discipline. In the book I call this overlapping of honor and religion for women the “twice sacred circle.”
6. White evangelical leaders in the South rarely questioned slavery per se, especially after the 1780s, and some actively promoted proslavery ideology. Why then did so many African Americans still join Southern evangelical churches?
One of the puzzles for historians studying Southern evangelicalism has been why so many enslaved people sought church membership (as opposed to simply attending), when by doing so they subjected themselves to church discipline, effectively inviting even more oversight of their lives. But if we understand slavery as a constant dishonor—some scholars use the term “social death”—then enslaved people would have experienced the rituals of evangelicalism, such as baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and church discipline, as rare acknowledgments of their claims to personhood (which is basically what honor is). Church discipline, however unevenly practiced, was an acknowledgement of an enslaved person’s moral agency, something the Southern legal system didn’t acknowledge. I think that affirmation mattered a great deal.
