Ted Ownby

Darren E. Grem

Jr., James G. Thomas

Contributions by Ryan L. Fletcher, Darren E. Grem, Paul Harvey, Alicia Jackson, Ted Ownby, Otis W. Pickett, Arthur Remillard, Chad Seales, and Randall J. Stephens Over more than three decades of teaching at the University of Mississippi, Charles Reagan Wilson's research and writing transformed southern studies in key ways. This volume pays tribute to and extends Wilson's seminal work on southern religion and culture. Using certain episodes and moments in southern religious history, the essays examine the place and power of religion in southern communities and society. It emulates Wilson's model, featuring both majority and minority voices from archives and applying a variety of methods to explain the South's religious diversity and how religion mattered in many arenas of private and public life, often with life-or-death stakes. The volume first concentrates on churches and ministers, and then considers religious and cultural constructions outside formal religious bodies and institutions. It examines the faiths expressed via the region's fields, streets, homes, public squares, recreational venues, roadsides, and stages. In doing so, this book shows that Wilson's groundbreaking work on religion is an essential part of southern studies and crucial for fostering deeper understanding of the South's complicated history and culture.

Essays Honoring Charles Reagan Wilson

Southern Religion, Southern Culture

The Book of Matthew cautions readers that "Ye cannot serve God and mammon." But for at least a century conservative American Protestants have been trying to prove that adage wrong. In The Blessings of Business, Darren E. Grem argues that while preachers, activists, and politicians have all helped spread the gospel, American evangelicalism owes its enduring strength in a large part to private enterprise. Grem argues for a new history of American evangelicalism, demonstrating how its adherents strategically used corporate America--its leaders, businesses, money, ideas, and values--to advance their religious, cultural, and political movement. Beginning before the First World War, conservative evangelicals were able to use businessmen and business methods to retain and expand their public influence in a secularizing, diversifying, and liberalizing age. In the process they became beholden to pro-business stances on matters of theology, race, gender, taxation, trade, and the state, transforming evangelicalism itself into as much of an economic movement as a religious one. The Blessings of Business tells the story of unlikely partnerships between well-known champions of the evangelical movement such as Billy Graham and largely forgotten businessmen like Herbert Taylor, J. Howard Pew, and R.G. LeTourneau. Grem also shows how evangelicals set up their own pro-business organizations and linked the quarterly and yearly growth of "Christian" businesses to their social, religious, and political aspirations. Fascinating and provocative, The Blessings of Business uncovers the strong ties that conservative Christians have forged between the Almighty and the almighty dollar.

Darren E. Grem

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