Book Review: Carolyn Renee Dupont, Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1975

Abstract

On a picturesque Easter Sunday morning in 1964, Bishops Charles Golden, a black Mississippian, and James Matthews, his white colleague, arrived together for worship at Galloway Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi. As the bishops walked up the steps to enter the sanctuary, ushers informed them that the congregation's policy was not to allow African Americans to worship at Galloway. The short vignette of the turning away of interracial worshippers at a white congregation aptly illustrates white Mississippians active resistance to black equality-the central argument in Carolyn Renee Dupont's Mississippi Praying.Unlike the historiography on the resistance to racial equality during the civil rights era, Dupont places religion at the center in the fight against black equality. More specifically, Dupont examines the relationship between white evangelicals and white supremacy through the religious history of Southern Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the state of Mississippi during the civil rights struggle. In contrast to previous historians who claim that white Christians were passive and weak in support of integration, Dupont's argument is that white Mississippi evangelicals tenaciously fought against racial equality. Although white moderates were not engaging in a public protest of Jim Crow practices, moderates in Mississippi were a presence in the religious landscape limiting the strength of the segregationist position in churches.The more sociologically informed part of Mississippi Praying refutes the popular misconception that racial inequality is a product of individual attitudes and convincingly demonstrates how white Mississippians benefited from economic, political, and educational arrangements that perpetuated segregation. Despite the quotidian interactions and close proximity of blacks and whites, the cosmology of W. Bower (