Religious diversity in the South?

This week, I was particularly interested in Drew Gilpin Faust’s The Creation of Confederate Nationalism.  Faust examines the project of Confederate nationalism and examines how religion provided a significant underpinning for this burgeoning nationalism.  Faust also looks at how both elite and popular sentiments were important parts of this process: it was neither entirely top-down nor entirely bottom-up.

However, in her discussion of religion, I felt as though she glossed over any possible religious diversity among southerners.  Perhaps I noticed this because it seemed to be such a contrast from Kidd’s book last week, in which he showed how groups with different religious beliefs (namely, deists and evangelicals) allied in support of a particular goal, religious liberty.  In contrast, Faust’s southerners seem pretty homogeneous, at least religiously.  Although she acknowledges their class differences in the first chapter, it is unclear in the second chapter what sort of differences in religious belief existed among them.  For the past few weeks in this class, we have discussed whether some elites may have been employing popular rhetoric that they did not necessarily believe in to drum up popular support.   However, despite her assertion that nationalism was not only top-down, Faust gives little insight into what diversity of religious belief there might be “on the ground.”  Did Southerners themselves gloss over distinctions among denominations in order to forge a common culture?  If so, discussing this seems as if it would actually strengthen Faust’s argument about the Confederate national project.

Furthermore, Noll and Goen, while introducing the topic of religious diversity, did not really help to answer my question.  Both depict religious differences, but situate them fairly neatly along the North/South divide.  Neither really spoke to any sort of diversity of religious belief within the South.