Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975
“Provides a wealth of insight. . . . Dupont has offered the single best study documenting and analyzing the conflicted role of white southern Protestant churches, and their leaders, in reacting to the civil rights struggle. Her analysis is compelling, her writing forceful and fluid, and her research substantial and original.”-Paul Harvey,University of Colorado"Mississippi Prayinghelps us better understand how white southerners made sense of their Christian faith and their segregationist practices. Dupont shows how the evangelical faith of many white Mississippians, far from being a source of other worldly escape from the political realm, served as a bulwark in their fight to maintain white supremacy. It is a critical story for properly understanding both the southern civil rights struggle and the history of modern American Christianity."-Joseph Crespino,Emory University"I am grateful to her for further recovering the central role of religion in the civil rights era."-Patheos.com,"By examining white Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian confrontations with the civil rights movement, Dupont (Eastern Kentucky Univ.) offers a compelling answer to the question of why the most religious state in the US was also its most racist."-E.R. Crowther,CHOICE