Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era

Arthur Remillard

University of Georgia Press, 2011 - History - 234 pages

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Lost Cause gave white southerners a new collective identity anchored in the stories, symbols, and rituals of the defeated Confederacy. Historians have used the idea of civil religion to explain how this powerful memory gave the white South a unique sense of national meaning, purpose, and destiny. The civil religious perspectives of everyone else, meanwhile, have gone unnoticed.

Arthur Remillard fills this void by investigating the civil religious dis­courses of a wide array of people and groups—blacks and whites, men and women, northerners and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, as well as Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Focusing on the Wiregrass Gulf South region—an area covering north Florida, southwest Georgia, and southeast Alabama—Remillard argues that the Lost Cause was but one civil religious topic among many. Even within the white majority, civil religious language influenced a range of issues, such as progress, race, gender, and religious tolerance. Moreover, minority groups developed sacred values and beliefs that competed for space in the civil religious landscape.

About the author

Arthur Remillard is an assistant professor of religious studies at Saint Francis University. He has served as the managing editor and book review editor for the Journal of Southern Religion since 2002.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era; New southern studies
• Author: Arthur Remillard
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2011
• ISBN: 0820341398, 9780820341392
• Length: 234 pages
• Subjects: History / United States / 19th Century; Religion / Religion, Politics & State; Social Science / Sociology of Religion