In his new book, “Praying in the Pine Straw,” journalist Robert C. Morgan deals with two subjects we all grapple with at some point: religion and time.

Morgan, a 1971 graduate of the University of Mobile, spent more than two decades as a reporter and columnist for Gulf Coast Newspapers (now Gulf Coast Media) in Baldwin County. He now lives in Foley, where he has written several books. His latest, “Praying in the Pine Straw,” published by the University of Alabama press, is now available.

It looks to the turn of the 20th century when much of the country was seeing what The Birmingham News called an “increasing number of freak cults.” Morgan details an important historic element in the Alabama Protestant religious and cultural experience, namely, frontier religion that came through the camp-meeting phenomenon of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

It’s a personal story for Morgan, who uses two main sources — state newspaper articles on camp-meetings and unpublished autobiographical writings of his great great-grandfather, the Rev. Joseph Harvey Fendley, a Baptist preacher born in 1836 in Wilcox County. Fendley was a renowned mainline denomination church-planter in southwest Alabama. The documents Morgan uses include a letter written while Fendley was a wounded Confederate soldier following Chickamauga.

Morgan traces the search in Alabama — politically, socially and culturally — for the “old-time religion." He goes from its roots as America’s “Second Great Awakening” in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in the early 19th century to the dogged determination in Alabama that such a religious awakening and revival could happen again “in the wilderness.”

“It’s a hope that lives on and continues to influence the state,” Morgan said.

Then there were those who used a genuine search for God by the devout to further their own purposes.

“It includes accounts of everything from drunkenness to general rowdy behavior to capitalists looking to make a buck off people looking to commune with the Almighty in woodland settings where camp-meetings were held,” Morgan said. “Sadly, the need for law and order became part of tenting in the Alabama woodlands because of those ‘tents of distraction,’ as one source called them — horse-racing, hooking-up romantically and the politicians who showed up looking not so much for God, but votes.”

Morgan’s approach in "Praying in the Pine Straw" is to let state newspaper sources speak objectively but also allow the Fendley to speak subjectively to show a different pilgrim track — those experiences that made camping in the wilderness both memorable and dangerous.

“I try to communicate that Alabama campers, or ‘tenters,’ had all along been coping with the assault of time and what it was doing to the camp-meeting institution,” Morgan said.

Civilization and sawmills were doing away with the wilderness; the coming of the train ultimately offered destinations and entertainment/social opportunities other than the camp-meeting, same as the automobile ultimately would.

Over time, the physical expressions that once signaled the Almighty’s presence among campers — being “slain in the spirit,” “jerked into holy submission” or sent into fits of “holy laughter” — became punch lines for humorists and jokesters, who offered behind-the-scenes looks at what went on in camp-meeting, some of it fictitious, some regretfully factual.

“I was acutely reminded of the assault of time and our powerlessness against it during the writing of this book and its production process,” Morgan said. “I dedicated this book to my mother, Barbara, who passed away around the time I contracted with the University of Alabama Press to publish the book.”

The introduction to "Praying in the Pine Straw" is largely personal and deals with Morgan’s own experiences with revivalism and camp-meeting influences.

“I started out following in the reverend’s footsteps as a Baptist minister but eventually left the ministry and became a journalist, a profession from which I retired in 2010,” Morgan said.

His research and reporting skills are at work in "Praying in the Pine Straw" conveying the good and the bad of camp meetings — both Fendley’s ministry of the faithful and the experiences that brought out the worst inclinations that permeate Alabama’s history.