High Mountains Rising (40 page)

Finney's techniques or New Measures reflected the shifting theology of the era in which he lived. They centered more on the individual's own initiative in the experience of salvation than on the initiative of the Holy Spirit in a more communal process that Nash had recognized and emphasized. Nash and Finney soon parted ways, as Nash insisted that the Holy Spirit needed no “techniques” to be prompted to act but only open humility. Finney was very successful in using the emotional appeal he generated with his techniques to fill churches and create a swelling of religious fervor in urban America that found concrete expression in good works or works righteousness that scholars call the era of American benevolence. Home missionaries later sent to evangelize and uplift mountain people in Appalachia were a direct result of these developments.
²⁵

The conflict between Nash's very humble style of prayerful waiting and Finney's “take control” attitude can be seen as an intersection crystallizing the ongoing conflict between much of Appalachia and much of America in religion and many other spheres. In religion we see clearly the conflict in values and worldview—often best understood as competing models of humanness (what it means to be human and what that entails)—as it has persisted for nearly two centuries after Finney and Old Father Nash parted ways in the late 1820s.

Many today still consider religion in the mountains as too docile and passive, identifying it with a “pie-in-the-sky, bye-and-bye” attitude toward God and the world. They have little understanding of the patience and humility with which most mountain people approach faith and God's presence and action in their everyday lives. An appreciation of the wealth of this tradition is growing, however, an understanding that Appalachia's riches are not all in its timber and coal. Much more resides in the breadth of its soul as it is given life and expression through religious cultures that are distinctive to the people living in its mountain regions, its sacred places that are among the oldest—if not the oldest—in the world.

NOTES

1.
The classic text in this regard is Elmer T. Clark,
The Small Sects in America
, rev. ed. (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965).

2.
Fatalism is a common theme in social science writing. Nathan L. Gerrard epitomizes this emphasis in his “Churches of the Stationary Poor in Appalachia,” in
Change in Rural Appalachia: Implications for Action Programs
, ed. John D. Photiadis and Harry K. Schwarzweller (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 99–114.

3.
Mary Lee Daugherty makes this point about hope-infused, situational realism in her excellent article “Serpent-Handling as Sacrament,”
Theology Today
33:3 (Oct. 1976): 232–43.

4.
See this book's list of suggested reading for Howard Dorgan's groundbreaking, field-based books on contemporary Old Time Baptists in Appalachia.

5.
John Wallhausser's sensitive article on Kentucky's Old Regular Baptists was among the first written from a religious studies perspective: “I Can Almost See Heaven from Here,”
Katallagete
8:2 (Spring 1983): 2–10. Melanie L. Sovine's “A Sweet Hope in My Breast: Belief and Ritual in the Primitive Baptist Church” (master's thesis, University of Georgia, 1978) is exceptionally good for understanding the theology of Calvinism as many of Appalachia's contemporary Old Time Baptists practice it. By extension, Sovine's thesis also helps us to see how Old Time Baptists' understanding of Calvinism has influenced much of the theology of Appalachia's Holiness people.

6.
Becky Simpson (1936– ), founder of Cranks Creek Survival Center, a self-help organization in eastern Kentucky's Harlan County, distinguishes between religion and salvation, framed in this understanding of faith, and comments perceptively on the helping stance of today's “big churches,” which she says are defined as much by their greed as by the need they seek to meet. See Deborah Vansau McCauley and Laura E. Porter (with Patricia Parker Brunner; photographs by Warren E. Brunner),
Mountain Holiness: A Photographic Narrative
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 78, 79.

7.
Brother Coy Miser (1918–92), a Holiness preacher and coalminer from Pennington Gap in southwest Virginia, expresses such a worldview in explaining how
God lives “in the hearts of the people.” “In the mountains in particular,” he notes, “about all the churches and about all the preachers abut the heart.” See Deborah Vansau McCauley,
Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 335–36.

8.
We find the earliest direct statement of this conflict between emerging mountain religious cultures and the developing Protestant national culture in John F. Scher-merhorn and Samuel J. Mills,
A Correct View of That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains, with Regard to Religion and Morals
(Hartford, Conn.: Peter B. Gleason, 1814); facsimile reprint in
To Win the West: Missionary Viewpoints, 1814–1815
, ed. Edwin S. Gaustad (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 1–52. At that time Appalachia
was
“the West” (ca. 1810s), “Southwest” (ca. 1850s), or “Old Southwest” (late 1800s), reaching beyond the Alleghenies but no farther than the Mississippi River. Today these three terms designate parts of the Southwestern continental United States, highlighting Native American and early Spanish regional cultures.

9.
Raise the Dead
(Waltham, Mass.: James Rutenbeck, 1998) is an important and beautiful film study about Appalachia's independent Holiness tradition. The film features H. Richard Hall, an old-time tent evangelist from Cleveland, Tennessee, who has traveled for more than fifty years holding revivals throughout Appalachia. It also features Sister Eula Shelton of War, West Virginia, in the coalmining county of McDowell. Sister Shelton is a woman in her seventies who founded and supports with three other women the Jesus Church, which she pastors and in which she preaches in a storefront building. See “Study Guide for the Documentary Film,” <
http://www.frif.com/new99/guide/raisded.pdf
>.

10.
Becky Simpson of Harlan County in Kentucky states, “I can look at the mountains and that's something that God made and it's like love to me” (quoted in McCauley and Porter,
Mountain Holiness
, 78).

11.
See “Two Men of God: The Praying Rock, Watchman on the Wall,” in
Foxfire 9: General Stores, the Jud Nelson Wagon, a Praying Rock, a Catawba Indian Potter
—
and Haint Tales, Quilting, Home Cures, and Log Cabins Revisited
, ed. Eliot Wigginton and Margie Bennett (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1986), 321–45, plates 347–69. The first man of God featured in this excellent oral history and extensive photo study is Brother Charlie Bry Phillips (d. 1975), a Missionary Baptist preacher from Rabun County, Georgia, whose “praying rock” this chapter highlights. The second is Brother Harrison Mayes (1898–1986) of Middlesboro, Kentucky, an independent Holiness coalminer famous for his worldwide sign ministry, which he began in 1918. Brother Mayes is also featured in Eleanor Dickinson and Barbara Benziger,
Revival!
(New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

12.
Although conclusions about Scotch-Irish sacramental revivalism and their applications to the communal conversion experience and plain-folk camp meeting religion on the Appalachian frontier require much digging in these dense social histories, the essentials are found in Marilyn J. Westerkamp,
Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Leigh Eric Schmidt,
Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1989); and Paul K. Conkin,
Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

13.
Rhys Isaacs's
Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) and J. Stephen Kroll-Smith's “In Search of Status Power: The Baptist Revival in Colonial Virginia, 1760–1776” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982) help to provide the tools for reaching the conclusions that follow in this paragraph.

14.
The foundational study by Dickson D. Bruce Jr. must be taken into account:
And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974). For a dense but good social history, see Ellen Eslinger,
Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).

15.
Henry D. Shapiro goes into some depth about the influences of home missionaries on popular perceptions in
Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). David E. Whisnant's
Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and Planning in Appalachia
(Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1980) is also required reading for understanding mountain people's “alienation and cultural stripping” (p. ix) through “missionary, planning, and development efforts” (p. xvi).

16.
Loyal Jones's important essay explores the conflict: “Old-Time Baptists and Mainline Christianity,” in
An Appalachian Symposium: Essays in Honor of Cratis D. Williams
, ed. J. W. Williamson (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian State University Press, 1977), 120–30.

17.
The first look at coal camps and miners on the subject of religion is by William John Bryant Livingston, “Coal Miners and Religion: A Study of Logan County” (Th.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Va., 1951). An early important investigation of millworkers and religion located in the southern Piedmont of North Carolina is Liston Pope,
Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942). John R. Earle, Dean D. Knudsen, and Donald W. Shriver Jr. provide follow-up research in
Spindles and Spires: A Re-study of Religion and Social Change in Gastonia
(Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1976).

18.
Catherine L. Albanese offers this pathbreaking recognition of Appalachian mountain religion's regional character in “Regional Religion: A Case Study of Religion in Appalachia,” chapter 10 in her book
America: Religions and Religion
, 3d ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1998), 324–49. An early and indispensable source is John C. Campbell, “VIII. The Growth of Denominationalism in the Highlands” and “IX. The Religious Life of the Rural Highlands,” both in his book
The Southern Highlander and His Homeland
(1921; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969), 152–75, 176–94.

19.
Robert T. Handy's landmark book
A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) provides the conceptual framework for understanding national denominational trends that we may apply to denominational likenesses and differences with religious life in
Appalachia and how these trends affected denominations' interaction with Appalachia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

20.
Jeff Todd Titon's
Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988) is a good, comprehensive model of an interpretive investigation into a local church community's oral culture.

21.
Dickinson and Benziger's
Revival!
is the first and only work on mountain religion to embody this approach.
Revival!
embraces oral literature, but it especially emphasizes material culture not only through photographs of mountain religion's art and artifacts but also through Dickinson's own line drawings of people at worship services.

22.
Loyal Jones's book
Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), winner of the W. D. Weatherford Award, has taken the route of oral history and oral literature in a revealing manner in which it has not previously been developed.

23.
Melanie L. Sovine's “Studying Religious Belief Systems in Their Social Historical Context,” in
Appalachia and America: Autonomy and Regional Dependence
, ed. Allen Batteau (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 48–67, provides a helpful interpretation that is still timely.

24.
Whitney R. Cross's landmark social history
The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950) was the first of its kind in American religious studies.

25.
About this era, see especially Melanie L. Sovine's insightful chapter “Traditionalism, Antimissionism, and the Primitive Baptist Religion,” in
Reshaping the Image of Appalachia
, ed. Loyal Jones (Berea, Ky.: Appalachian Center, Berea College, 1986), 32–44.

14