Mississippi Praying

Winner of the 2013 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize presented by the American Society of Church History Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians’ intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality. During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renée Dupont richly details, white southerners’ evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy. Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi’s religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi’s evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South.

Peter Slade examines Mission Mississippi's model of racial reconciliation (which stresses one-on-one, individual friendships among religious people of different races) and considers whether it can effectively address the issue of social justice. Slade argues that Mission Mississippi's goal of "changing Mississippi one relationship at a time" is both a pragmatic strategy and a theological statement of hope for social and economic change in Mississippi.

Some vols. include supplemental journals of "such proceedings of the sessions, as, during the time they were depending, were ordered to be kept secret, and respecting which the injunction of secrecy was afterwards taken off by the order of the House."

As a field of research, settler colonial studies has developed dynamically in recent years. This volume contributes a set of much-needed empirical analyses of the microhistory and practices of settler colonialism. Incorporating six case studies from across the Anglo-world, including the United States, Australia, and South Africa, this book examines the roles different actors played in this process, their individual experiences, and the social and physical (re-)organization of settler colonial space. They reconstruct the complexities of settler responses to Indigenous resistance, guided by fear or religious convictions; and explore the settlers’ potential to manoeuvre on higher political levels, legitimizing frontier violence as a patriotic duty to the common good. In addition, they examine the production and circulation of knowledge about land, and discuss the ways in which socio-ecological systems were manipulated by stock farmers whose success depended upon an effective integration into a world-wide economic system. Overall, the volume presents a unique combination of microhistorical analysis and environmental history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies.