| Between the years 1886 and 1918, significant social change took place in the cities, towns, and countryside of the American "New South." This dissertation examines the ways in which the men and women of one southern white Protestant denomination, the Lutheran church in South Carolina, dealt with these changes.;Many southern Protestant denominations increasingly divided during these years into two quite distinctive constituencies. One consisted of a growing population of college-educated, middle-class business leaders who appropriated the New South ideals and goals of their rapidly changing society for religious purposes and wished to expand the church beyond its traditional, more local horizons. In opposition stood rural farmers who still followed patterns of life very similar to those of a half-century before, and who continued to center the church around a generations-old tradition binding together family, neighbors, and wider networks of kin into a community of care and support defined primarily by its local character. Different constituencies within the church thus began to define the "denomination" in different ways: one in theological terms, one in more familial ones.;This study indicates that although the urban clergy controlled the church press and the synodical bureaucracy, rural clergy and lay persons may have been ultimately more influential in determining the directions of the church at large. Southern Lutherans remained conservative both theologically and socially, although the changes initiated in this era marked a turning point in the denomination's life.;Utilizing individual parish records, personal correspondence and papers, the weekly southern Lutheran denominational newspaper, synodical minutes, minutes of the Woman's Home and Foreign Missionary Society, college and seminary catalogues, secular newspapers, parochial reports, and oral histories, this dissertation explores a denominational tradition little examined in the South. The study also moves denominational history away from a history concentrated on institutions, clergy and leadership to one which focuses on the laity, particularly on the sometimes quite differing experiences of men and women within the church. Men and women often differed in their responses to the challenges of their society, and gender tensions played an important role in larger discussions. |
