Hard, Hard Religion
John Hayes
The University of North Carolina Press 
Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik / Christentum
Beschreibung
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.
Kundenbewertungen
post-Populist communal ideal, Bible Belt, ethic of neighborliness, New South, Lloyd Chandler, capitalism and Christianity, oral culture, Southern States—middle class, religious life of the poor, grave decorations, Vera Hall, folk sermons, Devil lore, Folk Christianity, Southern States—poor, Flannery O’Connor’s South, interracial exchange in the South, Blind Willie Johnson, class in American religion, conversion narratives, medieval/modernist life affirmation, Christmas lore, liminality and enchantment, “Conversation with Death”, grassroots sacramentalism