Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-haunted South

From Glory to God for All Things, a posting on evangelizing the South from an Orthodox Church perspective:

When asked once why the South had produced so many writers and artists, without hesitation [Flannery O'Connor] said, “Because we lost the War.” That’s part of who we are in the South. A culture, or a person, that has never lost doesn’t understand a big part of human experience. . .

Flannery O’Connor described the South as “Christ haunted.”. . . Christ-haunted — Southern Christianity is split down the middle, head and heart divided asunder. There is head religion: some tincture of Calvin, all about law and judgement, righteousness and sin, the fearful grace of the sovereign God tamed by respectability. Then there is heart religion: Pentecost, revivals, Jesus and the Holy Ghost called forth on demand to save souls and soothe the heartaches of life. And there are redneck existentialists, too, who want nothing of either, like Hazel Motes in O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, who preaches the Church Without Christ: it ain’t got no Jesus to die for you and make you feel guilty about it.

Read it all.