Warm and Friendly Churches: Southern Hospitality, Christian Hospitality, and the Institutional Maintenance of Local Congregations

• In Event: 1580 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Qualitative Studies of Church Culture

Abstract

In this paper I draw on ethnographic and interview data from a community study in Rockdale County, Georgia to demonstrate how the discourse of Southern hospitality became manifested as a set of religious practices. My findings reveal that Rockdale’s Christians drew on the elective affinity between Christian hospitality and Southern hospitality to attended to the institutional maintenance of local congregations in five distinct ways. First, congregations competed for new recruits by practicing ritual niceties the South is known for as they sought to impress first-time visitors and ultimately attract new members. Second, Christians distinguished their various denominational identities by explaining how their unique approaches to the practice of hospitality reflected on the orthodoxy and orthopraxy of specific religious traditions. Third, clergy worked to build God’s kingdom by teaching parishioners how to use the practice of hospitality as they shared the gospel of Jesus Christ with their unbelieving and/or unchurched neighbors. Fourth, congregants sought to grow the size of their churches by habitually extending invitations to attend Sunday morning worship services throughout the course of their normal daily routines.

Author

• Betsie Garner, Tennessee Technological University