For more than fifty years, Koinonia Farm and its members have sought to overcome an oppressive racial and economic system in rural southwest Georgia that perpetuates bifurcation of blacks and whites and that, they believe, has no foundation in the Christian Gospel. As an alternative, Koinonia presents itself as a model, an example of what the Kingdom of God will be like when racial and economic barriers fall and common sharing and interracial living are standard. Two white Baptist ministers developed a religious ethic different from the region’s prevailing one and sought to implement it at Koinonia. Local response ranged from a period of bombings and boycott during the height of the hostility to an awkward accommodation to Koinonia’s continued presence. Koinonia’s leaders moved from an early paternalism that inhibited any real progress to more recent approaches that incorporate local African Americans fully into the community. This study uses the history of Koinonia to account for changing social conditions in the South during this century, to explain the evolving role religion has played in southern society, to document an indigenous challenge to a supposedly dominant white Protestant evangelicalism, and to examine the connections between religion and racial divisions in the South and, by extension, in America.