FIGHTING FOR REVIVAL - Clemson University

through the end of the 1700s in most of the South. Isaac shows that evangelicals in
Virginia had by the time of the Revolution and shortly thereafter become more firmly
established, but even in Virginia during this period they constituted only ten percent of
the religious community. The oppositional nature of evangelicalism’s spread through
Virginia serves as a precursor to similar developments throughout the rest of the South in
the early nineteenth century, but South Carolina, with its history of religious toleration,
proved the exception rather than the rule. The seed had been firmly planted in Virginia,
and the vine of Protestant evangelicalism proved as durable as the kudzu of later
Southern lore. There were detractors throughout, but in the end the sheer passion
associated with this new form of religion proved stronger than any opposition to it. As in
Virginia, even those in South Carolina who were initially introduced to Protestant
evangelicalism with intent of “violent opposition” often later came “under conviction and
experienced conversion.” 91
Noted Southern religious historian Donald G. Mathews stated that “Evangelicals
developed a view of the world which affected, although it did not completely dominate,
all southerners.” 92 This emerging influence on larger Southern culture did not come all at
once across the South, but building upon the inroads made in Virginia and the coastal
91 Charles Reagan Willson, ed., Religion in the South (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1985), 5-6, 14-19; Rhys Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, 147-177;
Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South, 46-47, 81-90; Helen Lee Turner, “The
Evangelical Traditions I: Baptists,” in Religion in South Carolina, Charles H. Lippy,
ed., 24-32; A.V. Huff, Jr., “The Evangelical Traditions II: Methodists,” in Religion
in South Carolina, Charles H. Lippy, ed., 35-42; John. B. Boles, “Evangelical
Protestantism in the South” in Religion in the South, Charles Reagan Wilson, ed., 13-
34.
92 Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South, 58.
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