Anchors of Faith. Martha Dickson
Era (1789 and 1836). Nevertheless, by 1890, Baptists outnumbered all other denominations in Alabama (46 percent) and Mississippi (52 percent), while trailing only Methodists in Florida (29 percent). Today, Baptists of one sort or another are second only to Roman Catholics in the number of adherents in the United States.
Presbyterians. Mostly Scottish and Scotch-Irish, Presbyterians were early in America. Presbyterians, however, did not spread throughout the country as did the Methodists and Baptists, particularly in the frontier areas. Presbyterian churches could only be formed on the approval of the presbytery and with certain exact ecclesiastical conditions. Presbyterian church doctrine required an educated clergy with at least six years of study. Such training and clergy were simply unavailable in most of early America. Consequently, thousands of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in frontier areas of America were left without church or minister. Many became Baptists. While Presbyterians were spending years getting ready to preach, Baptists were already preaching.
Episcopalians. The Church of England in America, forerunner of the Episcopal Church, traces its beginnings to the founding of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; the first church in Virginia was established two years later. In 1649, the Church of England was granted a charter to form a missionary organization, and its work began to spread throughout the English colonies. After the American Revolution, having lost their connection with the Church of England and their privileged status in the royal colonies, American Anglicans were left with little organization and not one American bishop. A convention was called in Maryland in 1780 for organizational purposes, and here the name Protestant Episcopal Church was first used. The General Convention of 1789 united the various state churches into one national church and also adopted a constitution and a modified version of the Book of Common Prayer.
An Episcopal presence was first introduced in Mississippi Territory in 1790 when Episcopal missionary Adam Cloud came to the Natchez area. The Reverend Cloud was forced to leave after a few years, and Episcopal services were not resumed until 1798 when a second clergyman came and began services in the Natchez courthouse. Trinity Episcopal Church of Natchez was founded in 1822 and is today the oldest Episcopal church building in Mississippi.
Episcopal church work in Alabama was first organized as a parish in Mobile (1825) followed by another parish in Tuscaloosa the following year. In 1830, a Connecticut Episcopal bishop was sent to Mobile to organize the Southern states into dioceses. By 1832, the Episcopal General Convention recognized parishes in Mobile, Tuscaloosa, Greensboro, Selma, Montgomery, and Florence, with the Mobile parish considered the strongest. Today there are two Episcopal dioceses in Alabama.
The first full-fledged Episcopal Church in Florida was founded in Tallahassee in 1838 when members of mission churches throughout the area met to form the Diocese of Florida. Today there are five Episcopal dioceses in Florida. Interestingly, a number of Florida’s early Episcopal churches were built, mostly on the East Coast, to accommodate the influx of Northern winter visitors who wanted to worship in the style and manner to which they were accustomed.
Roman Catholics. A Spanish Catholic imprint was established in what is now the Southern United States when the first permanent Catholic parish was planted in St. Augustine in 1565. Soon Spanish explorers, often accompanied by Catholic missionaries, spread along the Gulf Coast establishing settlements and missions, venturing into the vast Mississippi Valley as well.
When Mobile was founded in 1706 and New Orleans in 1718, French explorers and settlers also established a French Catholic presence. In 1727, New Orleans was selected as the site of the first Catholic school and first organized charity work in the Deep South, a school for girls, an orphanage, and a hospital.
In these early years of Catholicism, the See of Quebec exercised spiritual direction over all the French provinces in North America, an area stretching the length of the Mississippi Valley down to Louisiana. In time, however, Catholic work dwindled away in the Southern inland territories leaving mainly a French Catholic presence along the Gulf Coast, and there only in the larger settlements. At the close of the American Revolution, only twenty-four Catholic priests were reported to be in the entire United States. By the time the Mississippi Territory was purchased by the United States, it was reportedly without a Catholic priest. Roman Catholic clerical leadership was lacking as most of the missionary priests had returned to their home countries.
The nineteenth century saw a great wave of Roman Catholic immigrants, primarily Irish, which had enormous impact on the Catholic Church in the United States, straining resources and ministry. By 1890, this flood of immigrants swelled to over six million Catholics. In many ways, Irish Catholics have influenced American Catholicism; they have provided most of the bishops and controlled most of the Catholic colleges and seminaries.
Although Roman Catholicism is the largest denomination in the United States today, in the South, especially the rural South, Catholics have remained a minority. From the time of the great influx of immigrants, the Catholic Church has remained mostly urban in location and outreach. Catholic immigrants entering a mostly Protestant South and an agrarian culture found that Southern Protestants viewed them with suspicion, wary of their diverse cultural and social practices, as well as what Protestants saw as Catholic ties to foreign influence.
The greatest problem facing the Roman Catholic Church in the South, however, in its early days and later, has been the shortage of priests and bishops and these clerics overburdened with administrative duties. Religious orders of women have traditionally taken up the slack, teaching in schools and supervising orphanages and hospitals. Today, of course, vocations in the religious orders have declined precipitously.
African American Denominations. In general, African Americans and whites worshiped together in the antebellum South. Usually, the former sat in slave galleries or, in smaller churches, at the back. They took communion after whites. Occasionally, separate worship services or sermons were held for slaves. It was only after the Civil War that congregations split along color lines.
In 1990, C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya listed seven major denominations comprising the African American worship experience, which, in their words, were the “independent, historic, and totally black controlled denominations, which were founded after the Free American Society of 1787 and which constituted the core of black Christians.” Usually poor and rural, these congregations tended to meet in vernacular church buildings, a few of which appear in this book.
African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), African American Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion), and Christian (formerly Colored) Methodist Episcopal Church (CME). By the close of the nineteenth century, more than two-thirds of black Methodists of Alabama left the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to join the earlier-organized black denominations African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) and African American Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion). With so many black members leaving to join other denominations, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, gave all black churches and property belonging to them a new denomination, Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (CME), which initiated a name change in 1954 to Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.
The AME Church is one of the oldest and largest Methodist bodies in the world, founded in 1814 in Philadelphia by a former slave. The AME Zion Church formed in 1821 in New York, separating from New York’s Methodist Church. Efforts were made by the Philadephia AME Church to bring AME Zion under its umbrella, but members in New York preferred to create their own denomination. Property rights within the Methodist Church system became a problem resulting in an 1816 ruling in favor of the AME Church.
AME Zion Church membership increased rapidly in the South after the Civil War and today is found all across the United States. AME Zion affirms traditional Methodist doctrine, but its worship styles tend to be more exuberant than those of white Methodist churches. The denomination is strongly evangelistic and has an active social justice ministry.
In Mississippi, after years of separate church conferences, white and black Methodist conferences came together and in 1988 merged into the Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church.
National Missionary Baptists. By the 1950s, black Baptist churches could choose to become members of the Southern Baptist Convention, previously almost all white, although cultural and political interests continued to be divisive, limiting choice. With a membership today estimated at a million,