It is notable how many southern examples Jon Butler used to demonstrate the “jack-in-the-box” problem. The civil rights movement, the new Christian Right, the Scopes Trial, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Reed, Jimmy Carter, Jerry Falwell—all had connections to southern contexts. Thus, each simultaneously illustrated the religion problem in modern U.S. history and suggested the South as a good place to begin solving it.

That certainly made sense in 2004. By then, modern southern religious history was in full swing. Early guides like Samuel S. Hill Jr., Kenneth K. Bailey, David E. Harrell Jr., Wayne Flynt, and Charles Reagan Wilson had established it as a scholarly subfield within both southern history and American religious history, culminating in 1984 with the authoritative, if largely-pre-1877-focused, Encyclopedia of Religion in the South.Footnote ¹ Nancy T. Ammerman, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Ted Ownby, Andrew M. Manis, Charles Marsh, Joel Alvis Jr., David L. Chappell, Paul Harvey, Charles A. Israel, and Barry G. Hankins further enriched scholarship on the modern religious South in the 1990s and early 2000s. Each complemented, or outpaced, non-southernists in quantity and quality of work. They also centered religion when considering secularization, modernity, the state, and politics. The Journal of Southern Religion, published annually online from 1998 to 2020, signaled the subfield’s fuller maturation and exceptionality, as it had no other religion-specific, regionalist equivalent.Footnote ² Textbooks like Major Problems in the History of the American South included “The Religious South” as a necessary thematic chapter for undergraduate and graduate courses in modern southern history. The revised and expanded Encyclopedia of Religion in the South, in the works by 2004 and released the following year, signaled the subfield’s firm scholarly standing, this time with more balance between Old and New South.Footnote ³ Hence, if anyone had a jack-in-the-box faith, it seemed like y’all did, meaning non-southernists, rather than historians of the modern South.

But a flourishing, well-developed subfield did not a full solution make. The Journal of Southern History published only one piece from 1989 to 2004 privileging religion in its analysis of the post-1877 South. (It concerned civil rights evangelist Will Campbell. Coincidentally, the journal did publish another piece on religion in the same year as Butler’s article. It concerned the Scopes Trial.) Legacy state journals like the Journal of Mississippi History, Georgia Historical Quarterly, or Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, along with innovative new outlets like Southern Cultures, only published occasional pieces on religion in the modern context. Monographs on the modern South or southern politics could gain readership and win prestigious awards with no more than passing references to religion. Doctoral qualifying exams on the “New South” had no real compulsion to include religious history, and dissertators could treat religion as peripheral. The Southern Historical Association’s annual meeting held panel after panel that, more often than not, presented an areligious modern South as the socio-economic or political norm. Hence, it was not just “y’all” that held to a jack-in-the-box faith. Butler’s charge could have applied to swaths of the southern historical profession as a whole.

So, did Butler’s piece convert the modern South’s historians to his point of view? Has scholarship on the modern, religious South published since 2004 assuaged Butler’s problem? To an extent, yes on both counts. But other developments, some coinciding, some contextual, mattered too.

First, “the myth of southern exceptionalism” became a new interpretative framework. It forced historians to write less assuredly about the South’s isolation or distinctiveness regarding its history, religious or otherwise.Footnote ⁴ Second and relatedly, methodological and historiographic developments further nudged the field out of its regionalist box. That led to a kind of de-conversion among a younger generation of scholars from South-specific, jack-in-the-box faiths, especially any essentialist linkage of evangelicalism to a fixed or impermeable “Bible Belt” identity.Footnote ⁵ As a result of both trends, works on southern religion could and did add to the growing literature addressing “the new political history,” “the new history of capitalism,” “the long civil rights movement,” “the new suburban history,” “the new labor history,” and “the problem of American conservatism,” as well as interdisciplinary fields like media studies, religious studies, American studies, and transnational studies. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, search committees stopped advertising faculty positions in “southern history.” One had to be a U.S. historian first, southern historian second or third. Generally, one also had to frontload application letters with cross-regional specializations in, say, labor or business or race, although one’s subjects or evidence could wind through the South. Little wonder early-career historians in the late 2000s and 2010s had CVs listing publications in journals and edited volumes that might not have had “southern” in the name. Randall Stephens, Steven P. Miller, Bethany Moreton, Daniel K. Williams, Darren Dochuk, Jarod Roll, Kate Bowler, Carolyn Renée DuPont, Allison Collis Greene, John Hayes, and I, among other junior and senior scholars, worked with such historiographic and professional considerations in mind.Footnote ⁶

That said, Butler’s piece did become something of a polestar for fresh scholarship on modern southern religion, especially if aiming to push the subfield beyond received regionalist or disciplinary boxes. Just as important for that endeavor, and for the religion problem’s patchwork “solving,” was the Religion in American History (RiAH) blog. Founded and first edited by Paul Harvey—a historian of race and religion in the South—and active from 2005 to 2019, RiAH provided a critical route for up-and-coming and established scholars to encounter co-travelers, both across the historical profession and in other fields like sociology and religious studies.Footnote ⁷ The overall result was the undeniable legitimization of modern southern religious history as “mainstream” U.S. history. Yet, notable gaps remained and still remain in the literature, some even identified by Butler himself two decades ago.

The Great Depression is a major gap in the literature on modern American religious life, whether focused on the South or not. The 1930s were transformative years and a key remembrance and reference point for later religious culture and politics. Hard times produced a wide array of religious figures and movements that still await the kind of the treatment that Jarod Roll gave the Missouri bootheel’s spirits of rebellion, or John Hayes gave the interracial faiths of the New South’s poor. Indeed, outside of Alison Collis Greene’s study of the Mississippi Delta and Roll and Erik Gellman’s examination of religious laborers in the working-class South, little is known about southern religiosity’s impact on politics during the Depression, especially in other localities that contributed to the New Deal state’s formation.Footnote ⁸ In a similar vein, revisiting race and southern religious progressivism might extend Wayne Flynt’s foundational work on the subject and further undercut notions of southern conservative essentialism. It would also help to further historicize and complicate the received categories of “white” equaling “evangelical” and other problematic framings related to race and “mainline” or “progressive.” Also, by centering race outside the timeline of the civil rights South or extending race beyond the usual Black-white binary, scholarship might better draw the region into conversation with works on liberal religion and progressive politics already published.Footnote ⁹

Historians have written excellent studies of the gendered rituals, sexual anxieties, and racial codings of southern religion, especially during the Jim Crow era. Updated treatments could result in perspectives that do not begin or end with the maintenance of racialized, patriarchal structures or inevitable zealotry for Jesus and John Wayne. Coincidentally, Jane Dailey’s thought-provoking “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred After Brown” appeared in The Journal of American History a few months after Butler’s piece. Have its arguments been incorporated well enough? Could it provide another starting point for better solving Butler’s problem? Possibly on the first score. Certainly, on the second. The work would be timely. Gender, sex, and sexuality today affect citizenry and politics as powerfully as race and social class. Yet not much scholarship connects the regional and cross-regional dots between sex, the secular, and the sacred before, after, and long after Brown.Footnote ¹⁰

The broader cultural turn in historical scholarship during the 1970s and 1980s helped remake southern religious history into an interdisciplinary subfield, well informed by religious studies, sociological theory, and anthropological methods. The willingness to move beyond institutions and ideas into the realm of religious habitus meant the more intellectual or socio-theological fixations of religious historians in other regions had less purchase. The result has been fascinating work that explained why secularization barely stood a chance versus the “religion of the Lost Cause,” “the cult of southern beauty,” “the southern rite of human sacrifice” (meaning lynching), “St. Elvis of Rock n’ Roll,” racialized “civil religions” and “secular spectacles,” and “flashes of a southern spirit” in everything from foodways to Faulkner to folk art. (Not to mention that ultimate concern known as high-school or big-time college football.)Footnote ¹¹ Intellectual, denominational, and congregational history went somewhat out of fashion since the cultural turn, but it could receive a fresh look. In other words, the work of Nancy T. Ammerman on the Southern Baptist Convention and Joel Alvis Jr. on the southern Presbyterians awaits contemporary methodological reframing.Footnote ¹² Relatedly, non-denominationalism’s political output or contributions to southern forms of secularization, and how it refashioned or broke the region’s institutional commitments, also seems like a promising subject of interest, as does the long—if subdued—social or political history of southern skeptics, seekers, secularists, “exvangelicals,” or “nones.”Footnote ¹³

Metropolitanization is a national story, of course, but the reluctance to view the city and suburbia as seats of religious transformation and politicization in southern quarters has kept the region from having a greater say about religion’s place in urban and suburban history.Footnote ¹⁴ That could change, along with another subfield in need of revival: environmental history. Southern soils, coastlines, forests, rivers, and fields, along with the region’s flora and fauna, are all lead indicators for a world of climate change. Similarly, the region’s intermittent fandom for apocalypticism might offer preparatory insight into how the past will impinge on what comes next, especially if cooler heads lose out to hotter temperatures. So might the South’s complex history with modern science, technology, and engineering. Few works, other than Darren Dochuk’s magisterial study of the oil industry, go beyond Scopes to tell about the STEM South’s sacred implications, especially as rockets went skyward, air-conditioning proliferated, defense contracts piled up, and the personal computer, internet, and smartphone re-segregated users and communities by algorithm.Footnote ¹⁵ The roots of such techno-politics run back to World War II and a warfare state apparatus that revolutionized southern life and politics. The South’s Second World War needs more attention as a multi-faceted religious experience, especially as regional, national, and global politics seem to rhyme with the religious fervor and strengthening state of the 1930s and 1940s, and the militant crusading that followed from a Cold War South.

Regarding other matters of recent and future import, a religious history of the southern border seems long overdue. The U.S.-Mexico border is the clearest example of the South’s imagined and actual demarcation. It is also the best example of what a punitive federal state looks like in practice, and thus definitions of “acceptable” religious persons and citizens as tied to matters of race, gender, labor, and migration.Footnote ¹⁶ Any interest in modern borderlands should also fit into a broader study of the trans-Gulf South as a modern religious, cultural, economic, and migratory complex. Finally, as the 1980s–2000s come into historical purview, scholars should use the South to nuance the somewhat under-religious political tomes already produced about “Reaganland” or “the Age of Reagan.” Administrations from George H.W. Bush to Barack Obama also depended on religious appeals, language, and motifs that should be viewed as intentional, ordinary, and with regional precedents and invocations. The same goes for Trumpism, which should never shock the well-read southern historian. It is not a radically new iteration of strongman politics or illiberal veneration for anyone aware of segregationist whites’ long defense of “white Christian nationalism” and faith in the demagogic authoritarianism of elected officials from Huey Long to George Wallace. Neither are conservative crusaders today that far removed from mid-to-late-twentieth-century militants and moderates seeking to keep sacred and dominant a “southern way of life” more “American” than most observers and pundits then or now might admit.Footnote ¹⁷

The South (whatever it is, wherever it is, whomever it entails) endures as a historiographic polestar and problem. It does so twenty years after Butler implied that the region’s modern religious history seemed more like the former than the latter. Moving forward, if y’all-in-the-box faiths continue, hopefully they do so as good problems to have, inviting further investigation into historians’ positionality and received assumptions, especially about where the most persistent faiths of wide-ranging social and political import reside and thrive.