Dixie heretic the civil rights odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy
"Dixie Heretic is a life-and-times biography of the minister and social reformer Renwick C. Kennedy (1900-1985), an impassioned, tortured man who strove ardently to make his white Alabama congregants 'more Christian' by acknowledging their own racism and greed, and who not only lived...
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| Format: | Buch |
| Sprache: | English |
| Veröffentlicht: |
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
University of Alabama Press
[2023]
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| Schriftenreihe: | Religion and American culture
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| Zusammenfassung: | "Dixie Heretic is a life-and-times biography of the minister and social reformer Renwick C. Kennedy (1900-1985), an impassioned, tortured man who strove ardently to make his white Alabama congregants 'more Christian' by acknowledging their own racism and greed, and who not only lived but chronicled carefully many of the forces culminating in the right-wing conservative movement today. As McWilliams relates, Kennedy came from 'upcountry' South Carolina, a place rife with Scotch-Irish Associate Reformed Presbyterians. They lived by biblical infallibility and a strain of individual piety and salvation focused on the hereafter. In the early 1920s, however, his ministerial studies took him to Princeton Theological Seminary. There, he encountered the 'Presbyterian Conflict' over science, fundamentalism, and the social gospel, and he emerged a radical Christian socialist. Like a few other articulate practitioners of 'Neo-orthodoxy,' young Kennedy stayed true to the literalist Bible, and the salvation and piety allegiances of his youth. But he embraced not only the Social Gospel's mandate to solve earthly problems of poverty and prejudice but many cardinal tenets of modern science, as well. To Kennedy, this posed no contradiction. In 1927 Kennedy moved to Camden, Alabama, the seat of Wilcox County, where he soon married and started a family. Meanwhile, his ministry for social change dominated his Wilcox pastorates, filled with the very people from whom he derived: the Scotch-Irish. Quietly, he came to believe that God had a mandate for him: to confront and change the behaviors and beliefs of his congregations, notably their attitudes about race and poverty. And to do this, he found, he had to attack what he considered traditionalist Christian hypocrisy - 'half Christianity,' or non-social gospel Christianity - some of which he came to see as a form of proto-fascism, if not fascism itself. He soon turned to penning confrontational short stories, many published in Christian Century and some in the New Republic and set in his fictitious 'Yaupon County.' In some of these stories he overtly revealed his allegiances as a Social Gospel Christian and as an adamant supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's Democratic party. He spared no one, not even members of his own congregation. He also abandoned his pacifism and urged US intervention in World War II: he hoped that the defeat of racial fascism abroad might somehow grow white hearts at home. Ultimately, to help eliminate 'the anti-Christ, the mad dog, Hitler,' Kennedy joined the U.S. Army. |
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| Beschreibung: | xii, 512 Seiten Illustrationen, Karten 23 cm |
| ISBN: | 9780817321611 0817321616 9780817360887 0817360883 |