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As the author of this document, I had promised to respond to VANGUARD12345's further comments about my statement that "Mobile is a Baptist-saturated city." That was some time ago, and I don't know if he/she is still around, but I feel I should make at least a general response. I offer a few points specific to the issue further below, but first I need to say this: "Up from Southern Baptism" might or might not become something more than a first chapter of an entire book, but what it was never intended to be is a dissertation on the sociological aspects of the city of Mobile! So I do not care a whit whether or not someone at The Mobile Register (or elsewhere) might want to nitpick one sentence of mine that makes a (possibly) arguable statement about the city's religious complexion. It would be like a reviewer of Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery" seizing on the author's statement: "I was born in a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen feet square," and arguing at length about whether or not slave cabins actually had those particular dimensions. Washington was not writing as an archaeologist of slave plantations; he was conveying his personal experience of slavery and its aftermath, his struggle to overcome the conditions of his birth, and his thoughts on the best way to advance the circumstances of his people. Similarly, my book (if I ever actually expand it to that length) would be some combination of personal memoir and reflections (with perhaps some scholarship on Southern Baptist history and theology) on the doctrine of hell and its effects on people. Unless one could show that Baptists were an insignificant factor in Mobile's culture (something only an ignorant or crazy person could contend), then to try to discredit me by attacking my statement about the city being "Baptist saturated" as an exaggeration would indeed be akin to dismissing Washington's life story and his thoughts on race because he (possibly) exaggerated the diminutiveness of the cabin where he was born. Now for my general response to the question of Baptist dominance of Mobile, by which I mean religious dominance certainly, but also cultural and political as well -- VANGUARD12345 makes a lot of the Catholic influence in Mobile. So for the record: I am not at all ignorant of the significant role that the Catholic church and its local leaders and lay people played in Mobile's past and continue to play today. It is a large part of what gives Mobile a flavor that is distinctly different from the rest of Alabama. Mobile was settled by the French and owned by Spain for many years. This made it, like New Orleans, historically Catholic. Catholics are a significant portion of the population (though outnumbered by Baptists!); their bishops, priests and ordinary members are frequently active and outspoken on political and social issues and often wield a good deal of influence in those matters. As a long-established Jesuit institution, Springhill College has had a major and ongoing impact on Mobile's development and on its culture. Mardi Gras itself stems ultimately from Catholic customs, or least the customs of Catholic France. Having said that, I stand by my statement that Mobile is (and certainly was when I was a child) a "Baptist saturated" city. Just compare Mobile with "Catholic saturated" New Orleans, 150 miles away. In Mobile you cannot buy hard liquor outside of a state liquor store; when I was young you could not even buy wine in a grocery store. In New Orleans the supermarkets have row after row of liquor of all kinds; at one time, and probably still, you could find drug stores with liquor aisles. I remember an uncle who made regular trips from Mobile to New Orleans to stock up on liquor because it was so available there, and relatively less expensive too. Now certainly part of this difference is because the state of Alabama as a whole makes the laws concerning where retail liquor-by-the-bottle may be sold. Yet this sort of neurotic Baptist attitude toward drinking extended to other areas. Baptists drank -- the adults in my life did at least -- but they did so furtively and with what seemed a sense of shame. For many years it was hard to find a restaurant in Mobile where you could buy a beer; the exceptions tended be the seafood restaurants (the more famous of which were owned by Catholics or others with roots in fishing communities such as the Catholic town of Bayou La Batre). I remember my mother wanting to enjoy a drink while sitting on her carport, but being afraid to because the preacher might drive by, and hers was not an isolated attitude. Whereas when I lived in New Orleans people openly drank everywhere (not just on Bourbon Street), without fear of censure or embarrassment. You can check this difference out for yourself: Drive into New Orleans on one of the major highways and count the number of billboards advertising liquor. Then do the same in Mobile. The difference will be startling. What accou

02/22/2009

As I finish I want to say that once again, I will come back and delete anything that appears to have repeated 5 or six times as I have had trouble getting this all in. For anyone just coming here to read it, start at "The problem with the demographics" down page. Because this posts the opposite of how you should read. And the 1905 thing was meant to highlight the pre WWII demographics as opposed to the post WWII demographics. Quick synopsis for the unaquainted. In WWII workers from N. Alabama, the Mississippi Pine Belt and the Wiregrass of Alabama came into Mobile to work in the shipyard and that caused a demographic shock to the area And now my conclusion At any rate, I wish you the best of luck but think you should consider some of the points I make because the editor of the Register is a Catholic (his brother now represents Macon in Congress) McGill grad, the register staff has more Catholics on it than other religions, I know that the editorial board is plurality Catholic, and I know that the line "Baptist saturated" is likely to be refuted line by line by a Mobile Press Register editorial, especially when the Mardi Gras court pictures that will be in the paper in a month will have the traditional stream of Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists and Jews. Best of luck to you though, cause it seems like this could have the makings of something interesting. One area you might focus on is how your particular community related to things like Mardi Gras, because I'm sure it came up and I'd love to hear the Baptist perspective on that

Before I finish this, I will note that my carryover seems to be messing up. So to repeat and going back to my quarter numbers.....I had mentioned a Baptist quarter of 100,000 composed of the western and northern sections of the county....and that it was 80% or more white...My estimate is, that section probably has no more than 3,000 catholics total, which would be the equivalent of 3% of that population Cursory review of church locations in the county reveals these things. Majority of white baptist churches are not in the city. Almost all of the churches in the northern sections of the county are evangelical of some kind. Catholic churches are either in the city or in Bayou La Batre-Coden. The Lutheran churches west of 65 are all within a 2 mile radius of the Cottage Hill/Hillcrest intersection, which gives you an idea of what might be concentrated in the area I don't know when you were here last but since you left town Corpus Christi, Our Savior and St. Dominics have become the Catholic equivalents of megachurches. They all have seating either equal to or greater than the cathedral downtown. That's because they were always regional churches and as the Catholic population shifted west they just grew. Before I post the conclusion, I just want to say that I have been having problems putting something up so if anything has repeated mulitple times (and it is one part that I think might), I'll delete it as soon as I can see it coming up because that's unintentional on my part, cause I don't know why its not showing up and everything else is

The main thing to remember about Mobile is that Mobile is as much a town about who holds the cards as who fills the pews. St. Paul's, which is an Episcopalian school, has as many Catholics in its student body as it does Episcopalians owing to it's status as the neighborhood school for Spring Hill. I don't doubt that you were in a Baptist saturated environment but I contend that this may have had as much to do with neighborhood as it did on anything else. After doing a double take on what you wrote I noticed that you mentioned the church at the corner of Emogene and Sage. Most of that area had the bricks laid down in 40's. The Catholic Church that serves that area is Pius which is somewhere near the Ralston intersection. That area would have had more of a "newer Mobile" demographic as opposed to a "traditional Mobile" demographic. A religious survey of all citizens black and white in 1905 found that over 40% of the total citizenry of Mobile was Catholic and when you combine that with what the racial realities were at the time that meant that over half of the Mobile white population was Catholic. It explains why every city commission Mobile ever had contained a minimum of one Catholic on it, be it Lyons, Langan, Outlaw or someone else

The key thing to remember though is that, despite the geographic disparities, still looking at the city a few things standout. Since 1985, the city council has had a minimum of 3 Catholic seats. Until Carroll was elected those would be all white seats, so basically 3/4's of the white membership. I know it currently stands at 3, and if the one that has a Catholic sounding name but which I can't confirm is one also that would bring the total to 4 of 7 seats. No matter what their countywide numbers are, Baptists are critically underrepresented in the higher echelons in Mobile society. It is only in this decade that they have had major political successes and even then, many of the "Baptists" usually have Catholics in the family....not many are totally invested in that community

I also know that when we had the city commission, the only two Baptists elected were Greenough and Mims and both of them, moreso Mims, reached out to the Catholics in their geographic areas and they were more geographic politicians as opposed to Langan and Outlaw which has Catholics in general as a base. Since we switched to direct elections we have not had a white Baptist mayor, there hasnt been a major citywide white Baptist candidate ever I dont think. The only 2 elected to the city council both courted Catholic support and I had thought both were Catholic till told otherwise because they acted and campaigned as if they were. Now, I will grant you this. The city proper is half black. Of those blacks, I would say 70% of them are Baptist, which combined with the white Baptists would make Mobile more than half Baptist. But the key demarcator is race and there I can't deny that there is a black Mobile and a white Mobile.

Having said all of this, I would say that in the city itself, including the easter-christmas Catholics that there are probably 35-40k white Catholics in the Mobile city limits itself. That is a conservative estimate and I may be overestimating the numbers in Theodore and Grand Bay. That would be the equivalent of 40% of the white population. Of the white Baptists in question, very few of them live east of I-65 in any fashion. I would place most of them in Theodore, Tillman's Corner and other areas that straddle I-10. I would say that it is reasonable to believe that there are about 25,000 white Baptists in the city itself. That makes them the 2nd religion in the city, but in that they only count for 25% of the white population and in areas like Midtown that number probably drops to below 15% I would say that there are about 8,000 Episcopalians in the city, 2,000 Greek Orthodox, 5,000 Lutherans, and 2,000 Jews. These are all low ball numbers but when combined with the Catholic numbers comes out to a number of 51-57k or 51-57% of the white population. I would say that the Methodists are the third religion in the city and that they probably are only slightly behind the Baptists in terms of numbers, so if you use my in city Baptist numbers, that brings the maximum number of Baptists in the city proper to around 35,000 or around 35% of the white population. Notice that I am not dealing with black baptists because white baptists and black baptists are different things because of well, for reasons that we both should know. Granted I took a liberty with coming up with my figures, but I account for the fact that those religious surveys ask churches, not people, and my numbers are based on what I believe would happen if the U.S. census had a check for religion.

I would say that in this section at least 50,000 people are Baptist (and the number for the whole county was 120,000) and that the Evangelicals of all stripes probably combine to make up about 80% of the population. It is also a stretch to call this area Mobile at all. It has never had strong cultural ties to Mobile in the post-plantation era and with the exception of Mount Vernon which is like the Black Belt most of these areas are an extension of Mississippi's Pine Belt into Alabama and are basically one in the same with Washington County. Now working on my numbers and just concentrating in the Catholic quarter, the most Catholic areas of the county are Midtown, which remains predominantly Catholic. Spring Hill, which is basically wealthy and as such is skewed Catholic because of the rare thing in Mobile of Catholicism being the old guard religion and the areas in southeast Mobile County like Bayou La Batre-Coden-Belle Fontaine and Mon Louis. It varies but in general Catholics tend to live in the city itself, and in areas of the south county that are no more than 5-10 miles away from either the bay or the gulf and the closer to each body of water you get, the higher the number of Catholics and non-evangelicals. Let's be honest, if we took someone to Bayou la Batre and didn't tell them what state they were in and let them spend the day there they would think they were in a Louisiana cajun town. You need to also remember the fundamental difference between the evangelical faiths and the more mainstream faiths like Catholicism, Episcopalianism, and so on. There are no Christmas and Easter Baptists. If you are a Baptist then you are a Baptist and you are listening to pastor's sermon every week and reflecting on it to help live your life. It's not that way in the Catholic church. If you go to a Midnight Mass on Christmas, 75% of that church that's all dressed up will be the people who only go a few times a year. They will go all dressed up too. The same is true for Easter Vigil. That doesn't really happen in the Baptist faith, which is why I trust that survey for Baptist churches but not for churches where there is not a history of lay engagement. There is also the fact that Catholics as the old guard do not need the church for networking as much as Baptists do because Catholics are in the mystic societies, they have the deep ties to the area and because in general the average Catholic in the city is of higher social standing than the average Baptist. So networking through the church is less important. If you're in the Jaycees, then being in church every week becomes less important

The problem with the demographic study you cited is twofold. First, that study is not the same thing as a U.S. census because what that study is monitoring for is religious attendance and the statistics it is drawing upon are taken from the churches themselves The problem with that is that in the Catholic Church when you register as a member of a parish they actually publish your name in a parish directory and they ask you to tithe. The number of Catholics that the census you refer to numbers is a way too conservative number because the majority of Catholics aren't in church every week and those Catholics are not the ones who are going to sign up for a parish list. Mobile is an old Catholic community and not a growing Catholic community and so the attendance will always underperform true numbers. I believe that if you did a U.S. census on the thing where it was checked off like an ethnicity the number in the county would be around 75,000 rather than the 40,000 that the study in question names. The thing to remember in all of this is that of those Catholics, all but a few thousand are white whereas the Baptists are biracial. Blacks are more Baptist at a much higher clip than whites in the South at large. But even touching on that, the problem is also demography. I don't dispute that there are about 120,000 or so Baptists and that they may even be white Baptists in the county as a whole but as you'll recall Mobile County has more land in it than Rhode Island and that it is 70 miles from Dauphin Island to Mount Vernon/Citronelle The thing is, of those 125,000 Baptists, my estimate is based on where churches are and where they aren't, that about half of them live in what I call the Evangelical quarter. Or to put it another way, if you start a few miles north of I-10 at the Mississippi state line, and draw that as a straight line until it reaches I-10, running along I-10 until you reach Snow Road running north along that line until you reach Lott and using the Lott gradient until you reach the Tensaw Delta and the Baldwin line. Now in this region lives 300,000 of Mobile County's citizens and roughly 95% of it's black citizens. I would also call this region the Catholic quarter because I would guess that 85% of the county's Catholics also live in this region. It is 50% white, 50% black with each group having about 145,000 people. This is what I would call, when combined with the 50,000 people on the immediate Eastern Shore (Daphne, Spanish Fort, Fairhope and the beach towns) cultural Mobile. These are the areas that have been historically tied to Mobile, where native Mobilians have moved to. The other 100,000 residents of the county, those that live outside of this block are overwhelmingly white. There are no blacks in this section with the exception of Mount Vernon (which oddly enough has the only Catholic concentration of this area)

VANGUARD12345: It's fine with me if you post your response in segments. That's what I am doing in m own response to your first comment. (And I still want to address the cultural aspect of Baptism in Mobile). By the eay, in one of my responses below, I addressed you by the username PAUDRIAT3215. I have no idea where that I picked that up from! So there's no confusion, I meant to address it to you. (You didn't somehow change your username between your first posting and now, did you?) Anyway, tomorrow when I'm fresher, I'll finish my train of thought with some comments about the cultural aspects of Mobile as a "Baptist saturated city." You do seem to have a great familiarity with my hometown. Are you from there?

01/18/2009

Would it be a problem if I reposted the other elements of my response (which I sent to you in message form) in segments so that I can get it to all show up

01/17/2009

PAUDRIAT3215: Thanks again for you comment. It got me to start delving deeper into these issues. Demographically, I think the idea of Mobile as "Baptist saturated" is pretty easy to support. The best figures I could find were from The Association of Religion Data Archives. They do not have a break-down for the city of Mobile by itself but they do for Mobile County (which includes the city). T The ARDA data (for year 2000, the latest) show that of every 1,000 people you meet in Mobile County, 246.5 (nearly one-quarter!) will be Southern Baptist, far and away the most of any group. Only 90.1 (less than one-tenth) will be Catholic, and just 16 will be Episcopal. Among the rest, the (non-Southern Baptist) denominations categorized as "Evangelical Protestant" taken together have about as many adherents in Mobile as does the Catholic Church. Several even call themselves Baptist, adding a bit to the overall Baptist total. Reference: http://www.thearda.com/mapsReports/re... - Steve

01/17/2009

Thank you for your comment - yours is the first I've received. I guess there are three aspects I might address: 1) The perceptions of a 12- or 13-year-old boy at a particular place and time (Mobile in the early 1960s), 2) the demographic realities of Mobile's religious mix, and 3) the cultural realities of Mobile's religious mix (which is what you seem to be focusing on). As to the first aspect, I hope it is clear enough that in my first chapter I am trying to stay with the point-of-view of my young self, whether or not it completely squares with reality. Thus, I have tried to express my young self's understanding of Baptist (or Christian fundamentalist) theology, even if, as is possible, an expert in that theology might well come along to tell me that I didn't get this or that point quite right. (If this book becomes a disquisition on Southern Baptism, then I would feel it my duty to do more research to make sure my understanding of the theology is entirely accurate.) Similarly, when I say that "Mobile is a Baptist-saturated city," I am expressing my perception of my community at that time from the perspective of one who was immersed in the Baptist culture, through family, friends, and, of course, church. That perspective might have been skewed, certainly. But I actually think I had it more right than not, as I will explain in comments addressing aspects 2 and 3 above.

01/17/2009