Before the Bible Belt fastened itself across the South, competing
factions of evangelicals fought over their faith's future, and a
contrarian sect, self-named the Primitive Baptists, made its stand.
Joshua Guthman here tells the story of how a band of antimissionary
and antirevivalistic Baptists defended Calvinism, America's oldest
Protestant creed, from what they feared were the unbridled forces
of evangelical greed and power. In their harrowing confessions of
faith and in the quavering uncertainty of their singing, Guthman
finds the emotional catalyst of the Primitives' early
nineteenth-century movement: a searing experience of doubt that
motivated believers rather than paralyzed them.
But Primitives' old orthodoxies proved startlingly flexible. After
the Civil War, African American Primitives elevated a renewed
Calvinism coursing with freedom's energies. Tracing the faith into
the twentieth century, Guthman demonstrates how a Primitive Baptist
spirit, unmoored from its original theological underpinnings,
seeped into the music of renowned southern artists such as Roscoe
Holcomb and Ralph Stanley, whose "high lonesome sound" appealed to
popular audiences searching for meaning in the drift of postwar
American life. In an account that weaves together religious,
emotional, and musical histories,
Strangers Below
demonstrates the unlikely but enduring influence of Primitive
Baptists on American religious and cultural life.