Overview:
This study has focused on religion in Southern Appalachia as one example -- a case study -- of regional religion in the United States. Looking at one instance of how geographical closeness, common history, and the presence of increasing cultural complexity create a distinctive and contractive response can give us some idea of how the process works in other areas, of how spatial boundaries emphasize religious difference. In the Appalachian case, Native Americans were supplanted by Euro-American settlers, mostly English, Scotch-Irish, and German. Living together in the mountains, they developed a distinctive "mountain character." Respect for nature was key, but mountaineers always saw beyond nature the controlling power of a supernatural world. Meanwhile, they emphasized ties of kinship and friendship they developed over the years.
With this background, organized and extraordinary religion was mostly Protestant and, in large measure, Calvinist. Fed by the revivals, a sectarian spirit grew among the mountaineers, yet there was much that the different sects held in common even as they disputed. The mountain creed taught predestination as well as the importance of the Bible and of strong feeling in religion. The mountain code stressed personal holiness and yet, influenced by ordinary religion in the mountains, could be permissive regarding human weaknesses. The mountain cultus expressed the centrality of preaching and the significance of ordinances such as baptism and foot washing.
Ordinary religion was pervasive in the hills, where many of the people were unchurched. The Bible was quoted and used for divination, healers were thought to possess metaphysical powers, planting took place according to the astrological signs, and natural coincidences were viewed as predictions of human destiny. Especially after the Civil War and through the early and middle years of the twentieth century, this pattern of ordinary and extraordinary crystallized into a religion of contraction, of turning inward in a response that emphasized separation.
The horizon of pluralism in a religiously expansionist United States signaled changes that many in the mountains hoped to avoid, and the overtures of liberal churches seemed to miss the mark for many. As changes began to come to Appalachia, however, its religion -- already a reflection of historic American Protestantism -- became more and more like the contemporary "one religion" of the nation.
This was in at least one way typical. For if there was a "one religion"
in the United States, by the late twentieth century it existed not merely
in the hypothetical "mainstream" center. Its traces could also
be found in less obvious places. It mingled, moreover, with other patterns
of expansion and contraction within the culture. In the late twentieth century,
the mountain culture of contraction was paralleled by the contractive religion
of a strong conservative Protestantism outside the hills. Meanwhile, the
religion of expansion flourished and preached a dawning of the New Age.
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