One name but several faces

In this richly suggestive overview, a noted historian illuminates the variety and vitality of southern religion by examining three major Protestant denominational families in the region: Baptists, "Christians" (for example, the Churches of Christ), and the "of God" groups (Pentecostals, among others). Ranging in coverage from the colonial period to the present, with special emphasis on the nineteenth century, Samuel S. Hill traces the growth and diversification of each. Of these groups as they have sloughed off old patterns, conventions, and constraints in their neverending searches for systems of belief and modes of expression that better embody their convictions and fit their socioeconomic situations. Throughout One Name but Several Faces, Hill turns again and again to the interrelated themes of freedom, creativity, and discontinuity that emerge from the major transitions of southern religious history: the toppling of the old. Europe-influenced religious establishment and the emergence of Baptists and Methodists; the informal, unofficial "establishment" of folk religious formations; the rapid growth of separate and independent black churches and denominations; and the beginning o