Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction : what is the soul of man? -- Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the trickster : narratives of the evangelical South -- "Because i was a master" : religion, race and southern ideas of freedom -- Suffering saint : Jesus in the South.

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Paul Harvey uses four characters that are important symbols of religious expression in the American South to survey major themes of religion, race, and southern history. The figure of Moses helps us better understand how whites saw themselves as a chosen people in situations of suffering and war and how Africans and African Americans reworked certain stories in the Bible to suit their own purposes. By applying the figure of Jesus to the central concerns of life, Harvey argues, southern evangelicals were instrumental in turning him into an American figure. The ghostly presence of the Trickster, hovering at the edges of the sacred world, sheds light on the Euro-American and African American folk religions that existed alongside Christianity. Finally, Harvey explores twentieth-century renderings of the biblical story of Absalom in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom and in works from Toni Morrison and Edward P. Jones.