Wrestling with Religion

Judge Paul Toomer, 1902 Above Columbus and Girard, above the City Mill dam, the Alabama bank of the Chattahoochee steepens while the Georgia side sprawls flat and prone to flooding. On the Alabama ridges lounges the community of Summerville, where I live year round and well-off Columbusites lodge their families during the malaria season.  The trail that plaits along the riverbank below my farm, around boulder and tree trunk, once led up to the footbridge to Clapp's Factory three miles north of town. Now the bridge is gone, the factory in ruins, but industry still thrives in Columbus, plenty jobs for workers who during Reconstruction were recruited from as far away as Manchester, England, where agents offered millhands and their families free passage to Georgia. No longer a road to work, the trail remains a natural park, unspoiled since Indian days. The steep bank prohibits agriculture, and on summer Sundays couples stroll here as if it were Central Park....

Religion in the old South Growing up in an Alabama Protestant town and a Baptist family in the 20th century, I had a clear idea what religion was, but a limited one. Most local religion was austere or invisible in the frontier tradition, all about words and the "truths" they signified, scarcely existing outside of songs, prayers, sermons, books, and pamphlets. A "mixed" religious family was one where a husband and wife disagreed about which church to go to Sunday morning. There was a Catholic church--small but thriving in 1950 as university influence made Auburn vaguely cosmopolitan--but I've heard that the church was founded by mistake. Around 1910, when no establishment of religion meant promoting all Christian denominations equally, students were required to sign a log at the church of their choice every Sunday morning. Since there was no Catholic church in Auburn, if they registered as Catholic, they could sleep in, and the story is that thes...

My great-great-grandfather Green was a devout lay Methodist who founded Sunday Schools wherever he went. He founded Green's chapel in north Alabama, which was my grandfather's and father's home church. My paternal grandfather, Papa Green, was a gentleman and a scholar, retired businessman, and farmer who kept a Bible and newspaper on the table by his rocker. My mother's grandfather donated land for a Baptist church down the hill from his house in central Alabama, where her father and mother, were pillars of the church and sustained a one-room school, also on family land. Grandaddy worked road maintenance in addition to farming to send my mother to Montevallo, the nearby women’s teacher’s college. Mother and Daddy were the first college graduates in their families. Both became teachers and settled in Auburn, Alabama. I grew up in a house just a few blocks from the university and within sight of one of the best public schools in the state. Daddy had converted t...