Scott Matthews's 'Religion In The Old South'

Religion In the Old South: Ch 5
In chapter five of “Religion in The Old South,” Matthews highlights the appeal of Christianity to blacks because it deviated from traditional African religion. He explains that “In African religion, much more important than a future event was the continuing contact with the spirit world through the living memory of those who had recently died, on into the realm of those only vaguely remembered, and beyond that into impenetrable mystery” (195). The essence of this assertion is that “Africans had no way of conceiving of history as a linear progression toward a valued, sublime goal in which true believers would be vindicated for all the persecution that they had suffered in God’s name” (195). Moreover in terms of life after death traditional African religion offered “no comfort for the sorrow which afflicted him as a slave”
I mean that without the brutality and graphic nature of the martyrdom, would those being martyred lose some of the heroism given to them. Stated another way, I feel that the characterization within the text is what gives it its appeal. To illustrate my point in Scott Hoffman’s article “Last Night, I Prayed to Matthew.” He states “I argue that a long tradition of popular martyr-making came together with social and political circumstances at a certain historical moment to transform the victim of a hate crime into a popular martyr residing in heaven. In time, this process helped further a growing acceptance of gays and lesbians into America 's mainstream” (Hoffman 2011). Although the black preachers within Mathews’ book do not fall into that same lifestyle category, they do fall into the same category of victim of a hate crime. Does the reader then conclude that the political and social circumstances characterized within Mathews’ book validate their