**4. The American South**

The American South (and most particularly the states of the Deep South) is a deeply religious, and more specifically Protestant, domain. Nine out of ten Southerners identify themselves as Christian, Protestant specifically, (only six out of ten non-Southerners, by contrast, thus identify themselves) and more than half of those as Baptist ([1], p.13). But if Southerners identify themselves as primarily Christian, that Christianity is fractured more along racial than along denominational lines. As Charles Reagan Wilson has remarked:

Sunday morning […] still is the most segregated time in the South. Blacks attend separate churches from whites—the National Baptist convention, not the Southern Baptist Convention; the African Methodist Episcopal Church, not the United Methodist Church; the Church of God in Christ, not the Church of God. Black churches are historic, deeply rooted in a separate black religious tradition ([1], p. 11).

Or, as David Wills has remarked: "The gap between the races […] remains one of the foundational realities of our national religious life […] one of the crucial, central themes in the religious history of the United States" ([13], p. 20). Thus, as soon as we approach the religious arena, we are confronted with contested space, for there is not simply the separation between secular and sacred space but, particularly amongst Baptist congregations, racially designated space.
