2024/12/01 by Connor S. Kenaston · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #American History and Culture #European history and politics #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaae263
openalex publication_date 2024/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
In Dixie Heretic, Tennant McWilliams provides readers with a fine-grained biography of the minister and social reformer Renwick C. Kennedy. This exhaustively researched social history offers an intimate portrait of a white southern minister and his efforts to change white Christians' attitudes about race and poverty. Kennedy grew up in an aristocratic white southern family and soon became an aspiring Associate Reformed Presbyterian (Arp) minister. While attending Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1920s, Kennedy embraced neo-orthodox Christianity and its emphasis on both individual piety and Social Gospel reform. After graduation, Kennedy moved to the Deep South and eventually became the minister of an Arp congregation in a small sundown town within Alabama's Black belt. After witnessing acts of white supremacist violence, Kennedy came to believe that he had a mandate from God to convert his fellow white southerners from their “Half Christianity of only Bible reading and pietism” (p. 5). The minister regularly preached and wrote about economic and racial justice. During the Great Depression, he wrote extensively for magazines such as Christian Century and the New Republic. In these articles, Kennedy lambasted white southern racism and hypocrisy, leading one friend to dub him “our Dixie heretic” (p. 149). Yet, his sermons and writings generally failed to provoke any response whatsoever from white neighbors and congregants.