“It has long been a given among historians of religion in the South that Calvinism had little, if any, purchase among the enslaved or their descendants, that the doctrines of predestination were invariably arms of the status quo, and that a sin-obsessed Calvinism was simply inimical to the emancipationist energies coursing through black America in the decades after the Civil War.”

What inspired you to write Strangers Below: Primitive Baptists and American Culture?

I heard the Primitives before I knew anything about them. It was their singing. There was a keening voice begging God for deliverance, a voice answered in long sonorous swells by other voices, all of them unspooling a modal melody, and the hymn itself sung so slowly as to melt its text into an incantatory strain that sounded to me like people calling up spirits. It struck me dead. I had never heard anything like it. It was beautiful. Those sounds possessed me and puzzled me and would not let me go.

Then, when I started learning about the Primitives just to satisfy my curiosity, I only became more fascinated and confused. I learned that they were Calvinists,  that they opposed missionary efforts, thought revivals were a kind of sinister emotional theater, and that they had split acrimoniously from their fellow Baptists early in the nineteenth century. These bare facts only raised more questions. Evangelicals opposed to missions? Predestinarian Calvinists in the come-to-Jesus South? Doubters planted among the legions of the assured? And then that there were, by the 1830s, tens of thousands of them crowding churches from Florida’s swamplands to Illinois’s prairie? Tell me more, I thought.

What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

That the Primitive Baptists’ story is an unlikely one, but a vital one, an American one. Beneath that message are three stories.

The first one prowls the early decades of the nineteenth century when the Primitives’ rise marked a crisis within the bounds of American evangelicalism. The Primitives’ peculiar status as both children and adversaries of evangelicalism allows us to rethink the origins of the Bible Belt as a fight, not between the churched and the unchurched or between insurgent evangelicals and a curdled Anglican establishment, but between different factions of evangelicals over the future of American Protestantism. Primitives were Calvinists, they were doubters, and they belonged to a community of believers engaged in constant anguished discussion about their own minds.

When Primitive Baptists sang the words of their old hymn—”I am a stranger here below / and what I am ’tis hard to know”—they sang from personal experience. But the emotional uncertainty that colored Primitive Baptist selfhood motivated believers rather than paralyzed them. It propelled them towards a community of like-minded souls, and it stirred those souls to action as a more ardent brand of evangelical Protestantism crowded church pews. So this first story ultimately shows that antebellum fights over the fate of American Protestantism were catalyzed not so much by organized structures of denomination, social class, and ideology, but rather by believers’ unpredictable emotional experiences.

The second story unfolds in the late-nineteenth century when African-American Primitives reconstructed Calvinism’s withered frame to build an education movement grounded in what they described as their “hardshell” Calvinist identity: rugged yet flexible, durable yet capable of adaptation. This is a tale that has entirely escaped notice even though its burdens and aspirations tell us something new about African Americans, Calvinism’s complex fate, and the religious reconstruction of the post-Civil War South.

It has long been a given among historians of religion in the South that Calvinism had little, if any, purchase among the enslaved or their descendants, that the doctrines of predestination were invariably arms of the status quo, and that a sin-obsessed Calvinism was simply inimical to the emancipationist energies coursing through black America in the decades after the Civil War. How can I put this gently? The black Primitives I write about complicate all these hoary assumptions. Their black Calvinism was at once organizationally dynamic and theologically orthodox. Their story is a crucial and until-now overlooked chapter in the reinvention of black religious life during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

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