After the end of Reconstruction, a relationship formed between road building and Southern religious life that would impact the racial and religious landscape of the United States well into the twentieth century. Infrastructure projects are usually portrayed as harbingers of national unity and universal mobility. Yet southern road development helped to produce a Jim Crow landscape of roadside Confederate memorials and other spaces that explicitly entangled Old South nostalgia with economic strategy. This project examines Good Roads Associations in North Carolina and Florida, showing how and why the citizens and state officials affiliated with them couched road building in religious terms. It argues that the physical properties and social powers of roads served to sanctify the political and racial regimes that shaped the South and the nation after Reconstruction, and to link those regimes to pre-existing efforts at imperial expansion and Indigenous subjugation. Whites promoted road development as crucial to southern spiritual and political resurgence after Civil War defeat, while African-American southerners were often forced to build those roads on chain gangs as convict laborers. Roadbuilding prompted southerners to situate themselves in the “civilizing” narratives of ongoing U.S. empire in the West and South, to narrate the white supremacist “redemption” of Southern states from Reconstruction governance, and to contest the moral politics of labor after Emancipation. The project also shows how religious practices on chain gangs offered tools of material resistance to the budding carceral state. Like modern roads themselves, which often failed to materialize and only benefited the white and the privileged when they did, the normative visions of southern, Anglo-Protestant modernity roads served to produce were contingent and contested.