High Mountains Rising (39 page)

A regional religion may be as geographically compact and specific as the traditions found in Little Italy in Boston or in Chinatown in San Francisco. It may be as subtly diffuse in geography and particulars as the variety of Native American traditions found in the Four Corners of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. We witness worldwide the phenomenon of regional religious traditions in sacred places lodged especially in mountain regions. The Himalayas are the earth's tallest and newest mountain ranges and home to the spiritually rich regional religious traditions of Nepal and Tibet. The Appalachian mountains, worn down by the millennia, are among the oldest mountain ranges in the world—many would claim the oldest.

Mountains and mountain regions have always been religious hotspots in our world, from Moses bringing down the tablets of the Ten Commandments written by the finger of Jehovah on Mt. Sinai in the desert wilderness to Jesus of Nazareth retreating to a mountain many times during his ministry to preach, to pray, or to undergo prophetic and transfiguring experiences. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,” wrote the psalmist, “from whence
cometh my help” (Psalm 121:1,KJV, the English translation preferred by most of Appalachia's mountain people). “The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little hills, by righteousness” (Psalm 72:3, KJV). In any Bible concordance such as Strong's or Young's, we find hundreds of line references to “hill,” “mount,” and “mountain.” The biblical identification of hills and mountains as holy places to flee to, to seek refuge in, and to become closer to God in has not escaped the understandings and experiences of mountain people. Appalachia's mountain people have a love for their mountains that powerfully affects their religious sensibilities.
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It is common for Holiness people to have a small cabin or shack or a large rock up the mountainside from their homes to go to when they meditate and pray. Many other mountain people who live in more rural areas of Appalachia and, in fact, the world also have this practice.
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When Albanese provides us with the basic elements of creed, code, cultus, and community as a way for understanding regional religious traditions, this is what she means. Creeds are word based, be they oral or written; they point to what people believe or how they cognitively express their faith. The Old Time Baptists publish written creeds in their associational minutes. Independent Holiness churches commonly have informal, oral creeds, regardless of church participants' level of literacy. Sometimes these informal creeds are chalked on a blackboard, formulated by participants in the local church community. Codes delineate how people should act or behave; they are the unspoken boundaries or limits of personal conduct, whether at a meeting in the church house or in everyday life. Cultuses specify how people worship, referring to worship practices that shape and complement the preaching, singing, and praying that are foundational to their worship. Communities refer to a people and their shared traditions, histories, and place or landscape. No exact formula governs how these four elements combine or work together to create a regional religious tradition. Being aware of them is a beginning point for understanding mountain religious cultures as making up Appalachia's regional religious tradition.

We have already identified mountain people's Calvinistic emphases on salvation as “a sweet hope in my breast” and on grace and the Holy Spirit, which are often given voice through heartfelt, expressive, and even ecstatic worship practices, be their church traditions Holiness or Old Time Baptist. We have just identified mountain people's sacred place or landscape as the mountains of Appalachia. Four major streams of religious traditions intertwine to create a common, shared history. Sixteenth-century Pietism had its roots in the European Reformation; the German Baptist Brethren or Dunkers were among Appalachia's first settlers in the mid-eighteenth century in western (later West) Virginia and brought with them the
tradition of footwashing. Early-seventeenth-century Scotch-Irish Presbyterian sacramental revivalism, from southwestern Scotland and Ulster, reached its peak in the Great Revival on the Appalachian frontier at the Cane Ridge sacramental meeting in Kentucky in August 1801 that included in large numbers not only Presbyterians but also Methodists and Baptists.
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Eighteenth-century Baptist revival culture in Virginia,
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as it made its way into the Appalachian frontier through migration and settlement, was also a key component for refining initial issues of doctrine and polity specific to Appalachia's Old Time Baptists in the early nineteenth century. It was important for solidifying an emphasis on the communal conversion experience, first introduced by Scotch-Irish sacramental revivalism.

This form of revivalism, centered on the communal conversion experience, is particularly characteristic of mountain religion and a customary hope at every worship gathering to this day, whether Holiness or Old Time Baptist (who do not use the word
revival
to describe this experience). It is sharply distinguished from the type of revivalism centered on the
individual
conversion experience—usually occurring in a setting much larger, more anonymous, and highly scripted or controlled—that emerged in the nineteenth century as a defining characteristic of American evangelicalism and evolved in the United States outside the areas where mountain religion is most pronounced.

The fourth major stream of religious tradition intertwining with the other three is plain-folk camp meeting religion,
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which had its roots in a blend of Scotch-Irish sacramental revivalism and Baptist revival culture as they changed and evolved during the Great Revival on the Appalachian frontier in the early nineteenth century. It became the basis of worship life especially for independent Holiness churches, which, to this day, continue the traditions of plain-folk camp meeting religion in their tiny church houses or meetings in people's homes. As we have noted, their night-centered meetings last an average of three hours and are held usually on more than one weeknight and on the weekend. We may describe them as camp-meeting night services in miniature, even with the small numbers who are usually present. They continue in the same or a modified form the worship practices that once drew great throngs of people for consecutive day meetings and especially night meetings in the early nineteenth century. These early camp meetings became an integral part of mountain religion's oral and material culture by the time Appalachia emerged as a distinct region in the early 1850s, and their regional influences continue to be felt beyond today's independent Holiness meetings.

From the onset of industrialization in the 1880s to the War on Poverty in the 1960s, the religious lives and cultures of mountain people, from
Holiness to Old Time Baptist, have been targeted by home missionaries (though less so by settlement schools).
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This is an anomaly in the history of American home missions: For the first and only time, white American Protestants were sent to evangelize and uplift other white American Protestants already well established in their own religious cultures and long sharing the same heritages as those of the home missionaries sent to “help” them.
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In like manner, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the founding of coal and mill towns. Invariably, the churches established and ministers brought in (the Methodists, in particular) were those of the mill and coal company owners and managers.
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A common complaint of management was that the church they had set up for the benefit of the coal camp at large was not the church used by coalminers and their families, who persisted in their mountain Holiness or Old Time Baptist church traditions.

The most prominent variant to this scenario was Eastern European immigration to coal camps. During industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the coal areas, especially in West Virginia, received fairly large numbers of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox immigrants. The churches they founded persist in some areas today. Beckley, West Virginia, a coalmining center, is home to the Antiochian Orthodox Church, many of whose members are now far more native to Appalachia than to the heritage that originally planted this tradition in Beckley. Roman Catholic art influences the material culture of Appalachia's regional religious tradition. Portrayals such as the Sacred Heart of Jesus are found often in Holiness churches and in people's homes throughout Appalachia's coal areas. Most mountain people tend not to identify such art as Roman Catholic but simply as pictures of Jesus.

Gaining momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, the mass exodus of young Appalachians for jobs outside the region created the phenomenon of out-migration and a type of Appalachian religion for export; indeed, these traditions specific to Appalachia exist outside the region today only through out-migration. Serpent-handling Appalachian Christians are found in Ohio and Indiana; Old Regular Baptists settle in retirement locations in Florida. Nearly all who can do so travel back to the region frequently for an infusion of religious cultures and communal sensibilities grounded in land, people (read “family”), history, and traditions.

In terms of geography, Appalachia is distinguished by having the largest regional religious tradition in the United States.
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This distinctiveness stands apart from the expanded boundaries so recently established by the Appalachian Regional Commission for purposes of regional redevelopment. The ARC's boundaries extend north to Coharie County in New York State and south to Kemper County in Mississippi. Appalachia's regional
religious tradition for the most part remains within the historically and commonly understood but never rigid geographic boundaries we identified earlier, with its more central areas. Appalachia is also distinguished by having the nation's oldest regional religious tradition, second only to New England, in terms of Christianity in general and American Protestantism in particular.

Many religious traditions, such as the major Protestant denominations that dominated America's public arenas until the mid-twentieth century, are known through a historical complex of main events, institutional developments, extensive written documentation, and prominent individuals.
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Other than the galvanizing event of Cane Ridge in August 1801 and the minutes or records written over two hundred years by Appalachia's Old Time Baptists, we know about Appalachian mountain religion primarily through its oral literature and material culture. Through these two avenues we are able to identify clues and hear historical echoes that guide us to an understanding of mountain religion's place not only within the various cultures of Appalachia but on the landscapes of American religions.

Oral literature (or, more broadly, oral culture) consists of the preaching, singing, and praying, the conversion narratives and testimonies, the stories, and other forms of oral or spoken religious expression given voice both in and outside the church house.
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Material culture encompasses what we can see and touch, in this instance not only people themselves (what they wear and how they behave in a religious setting or when giving religious expression) but also the three-dimensional creations that come from their hands: from the structures of church houses, to how they are decorated without and within, to the wealth of religious art and artifacts. Understanding mountain religion through its oral literature and material culture in order to comprehend its clues and historical echoes brings us into a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches.
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We must first understand that the components of oral and material culture mean the transmission of a tradition—in this case a regionally specific religious tradition—from one generation to the next over many generations. This interpretive context brings us into such possibilities as identifying the clues and historical echoes in mountain people's art and music and leads us into such realms as cultural anthropology, literary criticism, oral history,
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and cultural geography. For all of these, religious studies must lay a foundation, or at least a sturdy framework, to provide a methodological direction appropriate to a focus on religious life distinctive to the mountain regions of Appalachia.
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It is important to study mountain religion as
religion
, not as a cultural expression subordinated to something else, such as economics (which usually casts mountain religion as a product of “
colonialism” or a “subculture of poverty”) or sociology (which typically depicts mountain religion as individualistic, sectarian, fatalistic, and emotionally excessive).

The influence of Appalachia's mountain religious cultures on American religious history and their deliberate, self-conscious differentiation from religious cultures that now dominate the national landscape—notably American evangelicalism and fundamentalism—can be understood in an encapsulated form in the relationship and conflict between Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), the “father of modern revivalism,” and his mentor, Daniel Nash Sr. (1775–1831). Nash was known by all as Old Father Nash, a Presbyterian and a frontier preacher from what was called the burned-over district of western New York because of frequent revivals sweeping the area in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century.
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Nash led prayer meetings that often resulted in a revival, inviting and helping to fan the flames of the Holy Spirit in his listeners. Finney observed Nash and formulated revival techniques based on Nash's patterns of action and prayer, which Finney used to create revivals as he moved on to more urban areas in the East, including New York City. Finney taught and published these revival techniques, which came to be called “New Measures,” as tools for a new type of emerging evangelism that was advanced in later decades by Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and the twentieth century's giant, Billy Graham.