In his captivating study of faith and class, John Hayes examines
the ways folk religion in the early twentieth century allowed the
South's poor--both white and black--to listen, borrow, and learn
from each other about what it meant to live as Christians in a
world of severe struggle. Beneath the well-documented religious
forms of the New South, people caught in the region's poverty
crafted a distinct folk Christianity that spoke from the margins of
capitalist development, giving voice to modern phenomena like
alienation and disenchantment. Through haunting songs of death,
mystical tales of conversion, grassroots sacramental displays, and
an ethic of neighborliness, impoverished folk Christians looked for
the sacred in their midst and affirmed the value of
this
life in
this world.
From Tom Watson and W. E. B. Du Bois over a century ago to
political commentators today, many have ruminated on how, despite
material commonalities, the poor of the South have been perennially
divided by racism. Through his excavation of a folk Christianity of
the poor, which fused strands of African and European tradition
into a new synthesis, John Hayes recovers a historically contingent
moment of interracial exchange generated in hardship.