Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham (review)

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• Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham
• Stephen R. Haynes

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church. By Christopher Alan Graham. Foreword by Melanie Mullen. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 215. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4880-5; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4879-9.)

Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church by Christopher Alan Graham traces the history of a single congregation: St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia. But because the church has existed in the same urban neighborhood since the 1840s, the book is also the story of an evolving South, as well as of white Christians’ attempts to adapt to changing racial and social landscapes. Located downtown near the Virginia state capitol, St. Paul’s has always attracted Richmonders of wealth and influence. From its founding, the church was embedded in the culture of chattel [End Page 625] slavery (in 1845, most of St. Paul’s members and vestry members were enslavers); and during the Civil War St. Paul’s “bec[a]me a de facto state church for the slaveholding republic,” where Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were regular visitors (p. 37).

By 1870, St. Paul’s had become popular among tourists as the place where President Davis was at worship when General Lee sent news of the breaking of Confederate lines near Petersburg. After Davis’s death in 1889, the vestry moved to inscribe the church’s Confederate connections in “‘two conspicuous windows’” that were “‘dedicated as memorials to perpetuate’” the names and legacies of Lee and Davis (p. 53). Revealed in 1892, the Lee and Davis windows translated these heroes of the Lost Cause into quasi-biblical figures who were compared to Moses and St. Paul, respectively. These and other ecclesiastical tributes to the Confederate past lead Graham to call St. Paul’s “the ‘religious shrine of the Confederacy’” that “stood second to no other religious institution in contributing to the larger Lost Cause ideology” (pp. 76, 61).

In one fascinating chapter, Graham explores the church’s history in the early twentieth century, when Lost Cause–based racial paternalism struggled for St. Paul’s soul with the Social Gospel preached by W. Russell Bowie, who became rector in 1911. During this era, St. Paul’s became a leader in interracial cooperation while holding on to racial paternalism and “romanticized notions of faithful slaves and beloved ‘mammies’” (p. 77). In a chapter titled “St. Paul’s in Reaction,” Graham traces the church’s response to judicial and ecclesiastical attacks on segregation, which he describes as a genteel, paternalistic middle path between immediate integration and massive resistance. While emphasizing, in the words of vestrymen, the maintenance of “‘courtesies, consideration and love’” across racial boundaries, St. Paul’s resisted statements by church bodies and “‘non-parochial clergy’” that portrayed racial separation as an expression of sin (pp. 112, 114).

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in St. Paul’s history began in 1969, when it hired John Shelby Spong as rector. Although it would be decades before he gained international notoriety for abandoning traditional Christian beliefs, Spong was determined to shake things up in the traditional congregation. In addition to preaching an uncompromising antisegregationist message, he demanded that St. Paul’s stop flying a Confederate flag from the church portico and proposed an outreach program whose first grant established a medical clinic in a historically Black neighborhood. According to Graham, Spong also reframed the church’s history by lifting up Russell Bowie, the socially progressive former rector, and ignoring Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Embracing Spong’s legacy, St. Paul’s hired its first Black pastor in the mid-1970s and elected its first Black vestry member a decade later.

Today the church that once celebrated “itself as the ‘Shrine of the South’ and ‘The Church where Lee and Davis worshipped’” calls itself “‘An Urban Church for ALL People’” (p. 142). In fact, Graham tells us, the transformation has been so complete that when the church decided to remove Confederate iconography from its windows in 2015, most...