Digital Snapshots

Mississippi’s landscape is dotted with houses of worship. From the impressive churches that stand on town squares, to megachurches in the suburbs, to the small wood-frame churches scattered across the rural landscape, they testify to the faith of their membership. Polls conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2014 identify Mississippi as among the most religious states in the country by any measure. Mississippi ties with Alabama with 77 percent of adults who identify as “highly religious” (Massachusetts and New Hampshire tie at the other end of that scale where 33 percent of adults so identify). In both Mississippi and Alabama, 82 percent of adults believe in God without any doubts, and 86 percent of Mississippi’s adults pray daily or weekly. Almost 60 percent read the Bible daily, the highest rate in the nation. Mississippians are overwhelmingly Christian, and most of those are evangelicals.[i] Those figures justify ranking Mississippi as a buckle of the Bible Belt, but that was not always the case. To understand how religion came to exert such a powerful hold on the state today, we must turn to its historical development.

The Colonial and Territorial Period
From his golden palace at Versailles, Louis XV proclaimed the spread of the Catholic faith to be the chief aim of France’s colonial enterprise. It is doubtful that even the King himself believed this bit of propaganda, but if he did, then his Louisiana colony could only be counted a failure. Priests and churches were few in number, and outside of the village of New Orleans, hardly existed at all. The French built Ft. Rosalie among the Natchez Indians in 1716 and a few Catholic missionaries labored there without much success. In 1763 following France’s defeat in the Seven Years War, Louisiana was divided between the Spanish and the British, with the territory east of the Mississippi River going to Britain. The British were impressed by the potential of the Natchez District for development, and it became the most rapidly growing part of British West Florida; by 1774, about 3,000 people resided there. There is no record of Protestant worship in the territory until 1773 when Samuel Swayze, a Congregational minister, moved there from New Jersey with a group of his congregants. After the American Revolution began, the Spanish launched an attack on West Florida from New Orleans and quickly occupied it. The Spanish knew that there were not enough Catholic colonists to develop the region, and they agreed to allow Protestants who settled there to worship privately. As more Protestant settlers moved into the area, they were less willing to worship in private, especially a group of Baptists who settled on Cole’s Creek, a defiance of Spanish law that the authorities could not tolerate. Armed conflict seemed imminent, but the 1795 transfer of the Natchez District to the United States prevented violence.

From the Territorial Period to the Civil War
When the United States took control of the Mississippi Territory about 5,000 people lived there, 40 percent of them enslaved Africans and African Americans. The future contours of the state were already taking shape— plantation agriculture, slavery, and cotton— and the planter elite were amassing great fortunes. At the same time, thousands of farmers who owned few or no enslaved workers poured into the territory. Natchez, the only town of any consequence, was known for “irreligion and every form of vice.”[ii] The most pious settlers were those members of the plain folks who had joined the rapidly growing evangelical churches (the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) before emigrating to Mississippi, but they struggled to gain a foothold, and their scattered congregations attracted only a few hundred members before 1810.

It was the Great Revival, which burst out of Kentucky following the camp meeting revivals at Cane Ridge in 1801, that fueled the growth of the evangelical churches in Mississippi. Soon those meetings attracted thousands of worshippers and resulted in large numbers of conversions and an explosion in church membership. Among the Methodists, membership grew from 132 White and 72 Black members in 1805 to 1,551 White and 410 Black members in 1816. The Baptist churches reported 196 members in 1807 and 1,172 in 1818. These evangelical churches usually had a female majority of about 65 percent, and the churches could not have survived without their work. The Great Revival attracted growing numbers of African American members, as the figures for the Methodists suggests, a phenomenon that fundamentally shaped the religious lives of Black and White people alike in the state. The Black population in the state grew from 40 percent in 1800 to nearly 50 percent in 1830, and after 1840 the state had a Black majority. Most churches in the state were biracial, and Blacks organized their own independent African Baptist churches. In 1825, for example, the largest church in the Union Baptist Association was an African church with 115 members, about one-fifth of the entire association’s members. After the 1820s, Black churches and preachers faced growing restrictions that limited independent churches. Those restrictions forced more Blacks into the biracial churches and contributed to the growth of the “invisible church” where Blacks worshipped in secret out of White supervision.[iii] The issue of slavery plagued the early evangelicals who found it difficult to reconcile it with their faith in the equality of all believers, but that changed as Mississippi ministers helped craft a new theology that justified enslavement through scripture. That pro-slavery theology led to greater separation and discrimination so that enslaved members were moved into the balconies or met at a separate time of the day.

When the United States government forced the removal of the Choctaws and Chickasaws from the northern two-thirds of Mississippi, settlers poured in, many of them already converts to the evangelical churches, which sprang up and grew quickly. Across the state the story was the same, and the Methodist Church grew from 2,235 members in 1818 to 61,000 in 1860. The Baptists grew from about 5,000 members in 1835 to over 41,000 by 1860, and the Presbyterians, the smallest but wealthiest of the three major evangelical denominations, from 634 members in 1830 to over 7,000 by 1861.[iv] Evangelical churches grew from small sects to major denominations, reaching all members of society. The early evangelicals often met in private homes or barns, and their first churches would have been humble log buildings. Timber frame buildings soon replaced those log structures, and growing towns might even boast a brick church building. The growing number of converts and their growing wealth brought more elaborate buildings, especially in the towns. Episcopal churches were often more elaborate, even those in rural areas like those pictured here. Some evangelicals, like Jefferson Davis whose family were Baptists, abandoned the evangelicals for the more elite Episcopal Church which established the Diocese of Mississippi in 1826 with three parishes located in the wealthy plantation districts. By 1855, it had thirty-three parishes and over 900 members. In the 1840s both the Methodists and the Baptists denominations split over the issue of slavery, the issue that propelled the South toward secession and war.

From the Civil War to World War II
As war came to Mississippi, more and more men were called into military service, congregations scattered, and many churches were damaged or destroyed in the conflict while others functioned as hospitals (like St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Raymond, pictured in this collection). Most White ministers in the state supported secession and prayed for a Confederate victory, while African Americans prayed for a different outcome. As Union troops moved into the state, both the Confederacy and the institution of slavery collapsed. When the war ended, the state’s economy was in shambles, the abolition of slavery wiped out the millions of dollars enslavers had invested in their human property, and African Americans abandoned the biracial churches and established their own independent denominations. Black Baptists organized their first association in 1868 and by 1873 the General Missionary Baptist Association of Mississippi had over 325 churches and almost 30,000 members.[v] Post-war revivals among both races saw church memberships rise, and the growth of towns shifted the majority of church members from rural to urban areas. The period from 1900 through the 1920s saw southern per capita income rise faster than the national average, and that economic growth helps explain a church-building boom that began around 1900 (reflected in many of the photographs in this collection). The value of church property in the state jumped by 150 percent from 1900 to 1912.[vi]

A sense of national reconciliation combined with an expanding economy contributed to a growing sense of nationalism, encouraged by the Spanish-American War and World War I. As Mississippi churches joined the national mainstream, they embraced national reforms including temperance and the construction of religious schools, hospitals, and orphanages, efforts often led by women’s religious groups. Those same women often joined in interracial cooperative efforts across the state. Some of those groups and some religious leaders spoke out against lynching and in support of racial justice. They worked across racial lines to improve education for Blacks, to establish summer leadership training schools for Black women, and lobbied the legislature to extend the school year for Black students and to raise teacher salaries. These efforts were flawed by racism and paternalism, but also planted seeds of racial justice and represented the only White resistance to the worsening racial climate during the Jim Crow era.

The prosperity of the 1920s ended with the stock market crash of 1929, and across the state church membership fell; all the major White denominations suffered major losses, the Methodists lost almost 30,000 members from 1926 to 1936. Black Methodists also saw a sharp decline, only Black Baptists bucked that trend. Indeed, one of the most significant religious developments in the period between the wars was the remarkable growth of the Black Baptist churches. By 1936, Black Baptists were the largest denomination in the state with over 300,000 members, over twice the number in White Baptist churches. Black Baptists made up over 40 percent of the total church membership in the entire state. In 1865 Black church membership had been evenly divided between Baptists and Methodists, but by 1936 only about 60,000 Blacks belonged to the three major Black Methodist denominations.[vii]

No one could have predicted how dramatically Protestantism, and particularly evangelical Protestantism, would come to dominate Mississippi’s religious culture among both Blacks and Whites. From their humble beginnings in the state’s early history, the evangelicals came to dominate Mississippi’s religious life more deeply than in any other state. As Mississippi Governor Bill Allain put it in 1985, “people in Mississippi don’t worry about what religion you are anymore – as long as you are religious.”[viii] The churches depicted in this collection, many of which have been lost - reflected in wood and brick - their members’ faith, the financial sacrifices they were willing to make, and the fundraising efforts of their members, especially their women members. It is important to remember that when most of these churches were built, the state was among the nation’s poorest. They are an important part of the historical record documenting the growth and expansion of religion in the state.