Shouting in the Backwoods: Sound, Space, and Religious Democratization in the Early South
This article investigates the sonic and spatial properties of “evangelical” experience in the eighteenth-century South. Utilizing an array of manuscript letters and diaries, I argue that, while scholars have explained the intellectual convictions responsible for Southern revivalists’ democratic impu...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2024
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| In: |
Religion and American culture
Year: 2024, Volume: 34, Issue: 1, Pages: 102-133 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article investigates the sonic and spatial properties of “evangelical” experience in the eighteenth-century South. Utilizing an array of manuscript letters and diaries, I argue that, while scholars have explained the intellectual convictions responsible for Southern revivalists’ democratic impulse, we must also acknowledge the equally formative role of space and sound. By highlighting how upper-crust whites racialized space and sound in the unawakened South, this article shows that, as revivalists popularized loud, open-air practices, they actively redefined Christian experience in spaces and sounds long-defined as Indian, Black, and lower-class. In doing so, New Lights couched their movement in a radically new sensorium that distinguished them from entrenched ecclesial bodies and empowered would-be followers to, as the South Carolina Baptist Edmund Botsford put it, “think & act for your selves.” |
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| ISSN: | 1533-8568 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion and American culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/rac.2025.6 |
