Mississippi Praying

This religious history of white Mississippians shows how their faith played a critical role in their response to the Civil Rights Era.

It seems perplexing that a place as proudly Christian as Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its Black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renée Dupont richly details in Mississippi Praying, white southerners’ evangelical religion gave them no reason to view segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy.

Challenging previous scholarship that suggests southern religious support for segregation was weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi 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.

Winner of the 2013 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize presented by the American Society of Church History