Ray Waddle's Journal

by Ray Waddle

Iwas watching the tense annual Alabama-Tennessee football rivalry on TV the other weekend and thinking about a new poll that says Southern identity is fading away.

Only well-heeled Republicans and other political conservatives still hold hard to a Southern label, according to a new Vanderbilt poll. It seems the “Southerner” is disappearing, an identity diluted by 24-hour mass media and the migration here by non-Southerners.

If Southern identity is tied up simply with loyalty to states’ rights and quaint notions that the Civil War was not about slavery, then good riddance. It’s about 140 years overdue.

But race is a national problem; it’s no longer a Southern distinctive. Contempt for centralized government — that’s an American trait too, not a strictly Southern instinct.

Southernness means more than those things now, and it’s nonsense to say it’s disappearing.

Newcomers see it and feel it every day still: Even in 2003, it’s different here. The South means humidity, courtesy, Faulkner, ancestor-worship, ice-box pie, and football on fine autumn afternoons.

It also means churches on every corner. Fifty years ago writer Flannery O’Connor (Georgian through and through) declared the South “Christ-haunted.” It’s still true — a region of church picnics, Calvinism, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” and no beer sales on Sunday morning. Drive around town on a Sabbath morn: Main streets are deserted; you can sense the sweet homecoming of worship hour. Southerners should make something of it. They should rise up and publicize a religious style they have made their own — a style that could save the world. It’s based, of course, on the South’ s two major traits — Bible-reading and good manners. That’s what the world needs now, a combination of the two in a time when almost–medieval religious violence and angry cartoonish culture wars threaten to redefine and radicalize the mainstream of belief and practice.

Southerners can still claim to live in the strongest Bible-reading region in the nation, with stout worshipgoing habits and strong loyalties to their denominations. And southern hospitality is no urban legend. The old courtesies — the soft-spoken deference, the everyday diplomacy — surface wherever you go. Add it all up and you have a moderate mainline style of religious practice in the face of world-convulsing change and cruelty. For 30 years now, it’s been fashionable to disdain this style as too luke-warm, too liberal, too boring for primetime. Paid alarmists make lots of self-serving distortions at the expense of these churches. In the South, though, these congregations remain conspicuous — Presbyterian, United Methodist, Disciples of Christ, Episcopal, joined by Catholics, Jews and others who still care about things that are dismissed as politically correct, like interfaith work, neighborhood social services and ethnic diversity.

This religious bloc, the reliable moderates, remains the backbone of communities (Nashville, for instance), keeping the body politic from spinning off into insane paranoid directions. These believers quietly do so much of the unglamorous work of running soup kitchens and other charities, without getting much credit or seeking it. They are faithful worshipers who keep their Bibles handy and discuss complex social issues at Sunday school. They just aren’t that showy about it or have a stomach for noisy publicity. They embody a set of American religious values that evolved after the ordeal of World War II, when believers were weary of fascist bigotry and world suffering. These values went by the name of denominationalism — tolerant, patient, faithful, international in scope. The style favors decency and charity, not doctrinal shouting matches. It prefers trust in God’s universe, not bloodshed in God’s name.

Today it goes against the grain of the times. A hundred trends conspire against it. Much of America, it seems, has turned away from it, moved on to megachurch excitements or culture war smackdowns on syndicated talk shows. But the mainline churches of the 21st century South have a story to tell — a story about belonging to a tradition, a message of redemption, baptized in old memories of military defeat and slavery sin and wrapped in an enduring spirit of down-home courtesy. A potent brew. (But how to explain the region’s fierce preoccupation with Southern football? My theory: We watch our football match-ups on Saturday, venting steam and aggressions and sectional loyalties, until all is well again just in time for Sunday morning services.)

The South has managed to export other values to the world — NASCAR, Elvis, suburban Republicanism, the Dixie Chicks and blackened red snapper. It’s time to share its humane churchgoing identity too. Ya’ll know it’s true.

Ray Waddle, based in Nashville, is author of
a new book, A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time.