From christ-haunted region to anomic anyplace: Religion in the 20th century south

"“While the South is hardly Christ-centered,” Flannery O’Connor memorably declared in 1960 on the college lecture circuit, “it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows.”1 A Catholic in a regional sea of Protestants, a single woman in a patriarchal culture, a writer and intellectual living on a farm in rural Georgia, O’Connor in these remarks tersely and brilliantly evoked something elemental about the mid-20th century South: that its denizens—women and men, rich and poor, black and white—couldn’t imagine themselves in wholly secular, “modern” categories; they were shaped in indelible ways by theological imagination and longings for sacred reality. The South’s public square, as a basic consequence, was noticeably not “naked,” but clothed in all sorts of ways by the traces and trappings of religion, specifically Protestant Christianity."(...