A Born -Again Faith

"I have always believed in the Bible," says John Wright, 52, president of Chattanooga's 20-branch American National Bank. "I have always believed that Jesus was the Son of God." For a dozen years, in fact, Wright has been an elder of Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church. But not until last year did he fully accept Jesus as a "personal Saviour." His decision came at a special series of "renewal" services at his church, where he heard a St. Louis minister preach on the famous text from the Gospel of St. John, in which Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must be "born again" to gain eternal life. "The sermon turned my life around," recalls Wright. Now he rises at 5:30 a.m. to read the Bible and pray. He joins fellow Christians in discussion groups and prayer sessions, including one he holds at his bank headquarters before work every Tuesday morning. Once reticent about his faith, he now talks freely about Christ to people he meets. "The Lord has blessed me," explains Wright, "and I want to share what has happened."

Abyss of Sin. Like many a Christian before him, John Wright has been touched by the "good news" of Jesus' life, teachings and atoning death--the redemptive message that Anglo-Saxons dubbed the godspel and early Greek Christians called the euangelion. Among modern American Protestants, enthusiasts like Wright are identified as evangelicals because they give an urgent priority to spreading the gospel announcement. They want every human being to experience the truth that Jesus died to redeem him from the abyss of sin; they preach that faith in Jesus as Lord and Saviour is necessary for salvation, that the Bible is the one unimpeachable guidebook to faith and life. Those who accept the invitation of the good news are converted or "regenerated"--simply a Latinism for born again.

Evangelicals flourish in many parts of the country, but nowhere are they more identified with the prevailing religious culture than in the South. Perhaps 20 million of the South's 32 million Protestants are evangelicals,* as opposed to 5.5 million Roman Catholics and only 500,000 Jews.

Evangelicals cut across racial and sectarian lines, dominating some bodies like the Southern Baptists and the Churches of Christ, acting as a counterweight in others, like the Methodists and Presbyterians. Southerners are the most churchgoing people in the nation, and from camp meeting through riverside baptisms to huge urban congregations, the tone and temper of Southern Protestantism is evangelical.

That is a historical irony. Before the rise of Protestant liberalism in the 19th century, when scholars began to question such keystone doctrines as the deity of Jesus and his resurrection, U.S. Protestantism was generally evangelical. Then came the Civil War and in its wake, the growth of Northern cities and the drift of Northern Protestantism into a more liberal camp.

For the South, of course, the Civil War was a different kind of watershed. Defeated, humiliated, impoverished, the South sorely needed the solace of a firm faith. By hewing to the hard tenets of evangelical religion, Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists and others could lord it over the backsliding Northerners in at least one respect--the purity of their belief. Their fervently reiterated faith in the "blood of the Lamb" gave them, in a phrase from a gospel song, "blessed assurance" of eternal life. Wealth, property, even life itself could be taken away from them at any hour. Heaven could not. That spiritual one-upmanship persists today.

Its otherworldliness also made Southern evangelical Protestantism attractive in the face of social problems. During the late 19th century, when Northern Protestants were beginning to preach the reform-minded Social Gospel, Southern Christians tended to believe that the world's social evils were insurmountable. Religion Scholar Samuel S. Hill Jr. of the University of North Carolina suggests that the churches' heavy emphasis on human guilt may have helped assuage the consciences of white Southern Christians about racial discrimination: those who were born again were forgiven their personal sins, even though other sins might persist unchecked in their society.

Holy War. While foot dragging on racial injustice, white Southern Protestants rushed to join the holy war against alcohol. So ardently was liquor pursued as the sin that begot all others that it seemed to become a scapegoat for Southern social evil. Nowadays a regenerated Christian like Jimmy Carter can discreetly sip a Scotch, but the cause of Prohibition is by no means dead. In a referendum last month, the citizens of Americus, Ga., 10 miles from Plains, voted 1,063 to 939 to exclude liquor by the drink, a triumph for the town's ministers. Strict evangelicals also eschew gambling, tobacco, and dancing.

Before John Kennedy calmed their fears in 1960, some evangelicals questioned whether a Catholic President would let his religion interfere in his duties. Yet evangelicals themselves can energetically wield power to influence politics. Many Southern ministers, believing that parts of the Equal Rights Amendment undercut the scriptural order of family relationships, have opposed it. More parochially, a Presbyterian minister in Charlotte, N.C., sent out a questionnaire last month to nine school-board candidates asking them if they were born-again Christians.

It is a potentially embarrassing question. North Carolina's Billy Graham, by far the best-known U.S. evangelical, observes, with little hyperbole, that in the South "it is impossible to be elected to political office and not be a church member in good standing." But many church-going Southerners are not evangelicals, and some may not even be believing Christians. Last year, when aggressive Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair appeared on an Atlanta radio talk show, dozens of sympathetic listeners phoned in, some of whom declared they were regular churchgoers because of social pressures, not religious conviction.

Altar Call. Despite such minority inclinations, Southerners still clearly feel the need for the comfortable spiritual assurance that a conversion experience can give. The language of piety, often delivered in rolling, stentorian tones by shirt-sleeved, perspiring preachers in tents and open-air meetings, still focuses on events like the "altar call" in which sinners "come forward" to repent and accept Jesus. Warnings of spiritual doom and messages of heavenly promise line Southern highways: sheet-metal signs, boulders and barns emblazoned with phrases like REPENT!, JESUS SAVES and PREPARE TO MEET GOD. For the believer, nothing is impossible: specialists in faith healing offer the sick and disturbed the hope of recovery. Even occasional deaths do not chill the fervor of the mountain Christians who test their faith by handling poisonous snakes. This yearning for spiritual guarantees may have originated in the dangerous life of the backwoods, but the urgency of redemption now attracts businessmen like Tennessee Banker Wright--and Presidential Candidate Carter.

Whether the South's revived visibility means a new vogue for Southern religious forms is a matter of debate. Southern Baptist Spokesman W.C. Fields, observing that the South has "finally joined the Union," believes that "our denominations, our style of worship, our thought patterns, will likely change to be more like the rest of the country." Disputing that, Religion Historian Kenneth K. Bailey of the University of Texas points to the continuing growth of conservative, evangelical churches in the North and West and a new wave of membership losses in liberal, mainstream Protestant denominations. His contention: "The nation is accepting the Southern view of religion."

*Included as evangelicals are those who often prefer to call themselves fundamentalists because they believe in biblical "fundamentals." A distinct wing of evangelicalism, they are almost a separate movement--more exclusive in their religious life, less tolerant of other views and fiercely literalist regarding the Bible.

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