Religion
Religion--Protestant Christianity, to be exact--played an important role
in the life of Southern Appalachian mountaineers. Church meetings provided
them with the spiritual guidance they needed to survive in a harsh world,
as well as a welcome opportunity to cease their labors temporarily and gather
together with friends, neighbors, and extended family. Unlike modern Christian
churches, however, which tend to rely on a cadre of seminary-trained clergy,
those in Southern Appalachia encouraged, or at least allowed, laymen with
little or no formal education to assume positions of leadership. It should
thus come as no surprise that the region’s churches exhibited a rather
unique religious culture, one that blended standard theology with folk beliefs.
For the uninitiated, Southern Appalachian church services could be a bit shocking.
Attendees often gave vent to a litany of emotions, ranging from the abject
grief to charismatic joy. In an August 1919 letter to her family, Pi Beta
Phi Settlement School teacher and Tacoma, Washington native Ruth Sturley described
her first visit to Gatlinburg, Tennessee’s White Oak Flats Baptist Church:
“A fierce looking . . . rather elderly man stood on the platform and
started [the congregation] to singing. . . . The ‘spirit dug under the
skin’ of some of the older people. . . . They were . . . standing at
the front of the church weeping. . . . One woman was very much wrought up
and waving her arms--stamping with her feet shouted many times--‘Oh
I’m so happy--I’m so happy!’” A common feature of
Southern Appalachian churches, at least in the Missionary Baptist Churches,
was the “mourner’s bench,” a tradition which dated back
to the American religious revivalism of the 1830s. As an element of salvation,
would-be Christians were expected to kneel on the bench in front of the congregation,
openly exhorting God to forgive them for their transgressions. Sturley witnessed
this custom, noting that “four little boys and three girls towards the
last went to the mourner’s bench and sat there weeping with their heads
bowed on the back of the seats.” All told, she “felt perfectly
strange and out of place” at the service, “and was truly glad
when the affair broke up.”
Theologically speaking, Southern Appalachian churches were Calvinistic; that
is, preachers and their parishoners believed wholeheartedly in predestination,
the theological concept that God foreknows and foreordains those who will
become Christians, and so were disinclined to emphasize the role of human
will and good works as factors in salvation. Although the degree to which
this belief system manifested itself in the mountaineers’ day-to-day
lives is unclear, historians and first-hand observers have suggested that
it fostered in them a tendency to fatalistic inaction. Simply put, during
times of illness or poverty, some among the mountaineers did nothing –
purposefully -- lest their actions be perceived as taking a stand against
the will of God. The key word here is “some,” however, for there
were more than a few mountaineers who chafed under the stern leadership of
local churches. In Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for example, entrepreneur Andy Huff
made no secret of his occasionally combative relationship with the local clergy.
As it regarded “churches and ministers in the county,” Huff once
insisted that there were “too many of both altogether.”
It would be a mistake to overemphasize such divisive matters, however, for
to do so would be to mischaracterize the relationship between Southern Appalachian
churches and the communities that they served. For the most part, mountain
churches played an overwhelmingly positive role in the lives of their parishioners,
providing them with spiritual and social support that they needed to survive
in a harsh and unforgiving world. Consider for a moment the frightening, and
often bewildering perils that mountaineers in the region’s more isolated
corners faced on a daily basis: epidemic diseases that struck down infants
and small children; farming accidents that crippled or even killed a family’s
primary breadwinner; and even natural disasters such as flash-floods and rock-slides
that might destroy an entire harvest. Consider also the fact that mountaineers
were often ill-equipped to deal with such crises: there was precious little
understanding of infectious diseases; precious few trained doctors available
to treat ill family members; and precious little chance of predicting the
success of a given year’s harvest. It is not surprising, then, that
mountaineers tended to develop a deep and abiding faith over the course of
their lives, or that they tended to view the onset of disaster with a fatalism
that, to the outside observer, bordered on serenity. Such, it seems, is often
the nature of faith, particularly when it is accompanied by a certain level
of isolation and physical helplessness.
And of course, churches served as a social center in the more isolated corners
of the region--a place where extended families and friends met to worship,
sing, share news, and otherwise enjoy one another’s company. Little
wonder, then, that the most important events in the life of Southern Appalachian
churches were the annual week-long revivals.
In conclusion, it is fitting that we take a moment to consider the words of
Gatlinburg, Tennessee native Lucinda Oakley Ogle, who described a Southern
Appalachian Church service in her book Queen of the Smokies.” Here,
amid Oakley-Ogle’s simple prose, one finds all of the elements that
one would expect to find: the social importance of church attendance; the
lifelong abiding faith common to the mountain people; and anecdotal evidence
of the isolation and poverty which shaped Southern Appalachian religious expression.
“Uncle Harvey Oakley and Aunt Sarah Kear Oakley,” she wrote, “were
two of the best people who ever lived in the Great Smoky Mountains National
Park. . . . They were both good Missionary Baptists and believed in the Ten
Commandments of the Bible. . . . On Sunday morning all their children, grandchildren,
and kinfolks would meet and rejoice together at the . . . Church on LeConte
Creek, where I was raised. . . . In this church when I was nine years old
. . . I asked God to take me as his child forever. I was baptized in LeConte
Creek with my cousin and best playmate, Muade Oakley. . . . On Sundays, Uncle
Harvey and Aunt Sarah would have all those who came to worship from other
valleys to their house to eat and spend the night if they needed to, including
all the visiting preachers who totaled six or more every time. The people
ate in relays, about 12 at a time because we only had that many dishes.”