The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South by Charles Reagan Wilson (review)

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• The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South by Charles Reagan Wilson
• Douglas E. Thompson

The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South. By Charles Reagan Wilson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. [xvi], 598. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6498-9.)

It would be hard to imagine the field of southern studies without Charles Reagan Wilson. He has reshaped how we study religion in the American South. Scholars like Samuel S. Hill, Donald G. Mathews, and John Lee Eighmy define religion in denominational terms. They have been narrators of the Protestant Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian histories of the region. In contrast, Wilson’s civil religion thesis in Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980) outlines a way to understand the cultural affinity for Lost Cause mythology within white southern identity beyond denominational loyalties. He has helped explain how white southern Protestants’ identity in white supremacy was a feature of public religion in the region. Though conceived to explain the Lost Cause as civil religion, Wilson’s body of work today can be understood as a way to think about the role of religion in the making of the state, or at least in the failure of the Confederacy. Additionally, for almost five decades, Wilson served at the University of Mississippi, first as an editor for the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and then as director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The “Author’s Note” at the end of his newest book, The Southern Way of Life: Meanings of Culture and Civilization in the American South, captures the scope of his engagement with the people and places that have shaped the field as we know it today.

The book’s nine chapters divide into three parts, forming a structure that also serves as Wilson’s understanding of the “field of conceptual history” (p. 4). This “interdisciplinary” approach to the region “considers the evolution of ideas and value systems and how they seem to become commonsensical, natural, and normal over long time periods” (p. 4). The “ideas” examined are notions of “‘southern civilization,’ ‘the southern way of life,’ and ‘southern living’” (p. 4). While the terms may fit neatly into notions of moonlight-and-magnolias storytelling, Wilson shows how the words and the concepts behind those words shifted under changing circumstances, often in conversation with the region’s nonwhite residents. As he has done for much of his career, Wilson explores “the many Souths” as a form of content—from Thomas Jefferson to OutKast—and he uses all academic disciplines that can help us make sense of the region trying to make sense of itself (p. 475). [End Page 418]

In each section, Wilson unpacks his conceptual framework through disciplines beyond history. His source material engages sociologists’ and anthropologists’ ways of thinking as frequently, if not more so, than historians’. But the linear chronology underscores the historian’s craft. He is telling the story of the region, from its planter roots, to explain its conservative nature through the significant changes the American South has seen in the past seventy years.

The first section of the book understands the region as a social construction of a vision of southern civilization. Beginning with a colonial origin story, moving forward into the Reconstruction era, and ending in the early twentieth century, Part 1, “Southern Civilization,” makes good use of source material. White men in the region came to believe that their version of culture would protect and project notions of civilization, which they deemed ancient, and they believed that their contributions were a through line to civilization’s ongoing development. These men were so committed to their vision of a nation that they were willing to destroy the one they were part of to build a new nation in their image. Even in the ashes of the Confederacy, the leaders of the region reimagined the renewing of civilization in the light of the Lost Cause myth. While Wilson gives an accounting for Black and Native voices in the first chapter, he shows how those persons reshaped...