It was not flesh and blood, but soul and spirit that counted now.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Fanatics (1901)
Edward J. Blum
Department of History
University of Kentucky
Abstract
Through an exploration of Albion Tourgée’s and Thomas Dixon’s most noteworthy novels, A Fool’s Errand, Bricks Without Straw, The Leopard’s Spots, and The Clansman, this study seeks to investigate how religious ideologies influenced postwar America and the Civil War and Reconstruction novel. It reveals intersections of race, gender, and religion in relation to southern churches, northern missionaries, and regional reconciliation.
Using religion as a lens to view these novels, this essay sheds new light on Dixon’s and Tourgée’s works and also offers a new method of analysis for Civil War and Reconstruction novels. In fact, attention to religion exposes both differences and similarities in these texts. While Dixon described northern faith as corrupt, Tourgée viewed southern Christianity as hypocritical; although Dixon mocked Yankee missionaries to the South as idiotic blunderers, Tourgée praised them as angels sent from above. These differences, however, should not obfuscate the points they shared. Both depicted the Ku Klux Klan as a quasi-religious organization; both acknowledged the crucial position of southern churches as locations of cultural hegemony; and, finally, both believed that religion and the Protestant God must play a role in regional reconciliation. In short, these novelists used religion as a way to articulate regional differences and regional reconciliation, while they also employed religious motifs to explain racial and gender mores.