Religion and Revolution: A Review of James Byrd's Sacred Scripture, Sacred War

Christopher Jones

Three weeks ago, I attended “The American Revolution Reborn: Perspective for the 21^st Century,” a conference sponsored by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Intended to “identify new directions and new trends in scholarship on the American Revolution,” it featured four panels of pre-circulated papers, prepared comments to each paper by several experts in the field, and a Q&A with audience members. Each panel was centered on one of four unifying themes: “Global Perspectives, Power, Violence, and Civil War.” In his concluding comments at the conference’s end, Michael Zuckerman noted that the original CFP solicited papers on “Religion and Revolution,” but only two papers fitting that theme were submitted, and the organizers quickly scrapped the planned panel on religion and interchanged it for one on global perspectives.

It has now been nearly 50 years since the publication of Alan Heimert’s Religion and the American Mind, an ambitious attempt to draw a direct connection between the “Great Awakening” of the mid eighteenth century and the American Revolution that followed thereafter. Heimert’s book was widely met with not only skepticism but also sharp criticism. Twenty-seven years later, Jon Butler would proclaim the American Revolution, “at its heart … a profoundly secular event.” As scholarly interest in the Revolution has shifted in recent years and decades from the ideological origins of the conflict to wartime experience, comparative analysis, and a more explicitly “Atlantic world” framework, it appears that we are now in the midst of a renaissance of scholarship on religion and the American Revolution.

Building on several smart monographs (Dee Andrews’s The Methodists and Revolutionary America is a personal favorite) and insightful articles (Harry Stout’s 1977 WMQ piece on religion, communication networks, and the ideological origins of the Revolution comes to mind) published over the years, scholars today are working toward understanding the reciprocal relationship between religion and revolution in the eighteenth century. Thomas Kidd’s Religion and the American Revolution (OUP, 2010) is perhaps the most notable contribution to date. RiAH blogger John Fea is busily at work on a project examining the Revolution in the Mid-Atlantic colonies as a Presbyterian rebellion and Kate Carté Engel (whose paper was one of the two on religion at the MCEAS conference) is doing fascinating work on the Revolution’s impact on transatlantic Protestant networks.

Louis Armstrong was the First Man to Walk on the Moon . . . or Why You Should Do the AP Grading

By Karen Johnson.

 Have you ever wondered who graded the essay portion of that AP history test you took way back in high school?  While it may seem like the “invisible hand” of a distant computer or some “animal spirit” throwing nuts at a wall might have determined your score, this is one assessment that is graded the old-fashioned way: with real, flesh and blood people!  A vast group of high school teachers, graduate students, and college professors of history recently converged on Louisville, KY where I and 1200 of my closest friends worked for seven days to grade 1.3 million essays, written by 437,000 high school students. And just in case you’re wondering, that is just shy of 1,100 essays per grader!  Why, you might ask, would anyone in their right mind desire to do that, much less over their summer break?  I’ll tell you . . . and in the process, encourage you to apply to be a reader next year. 

To be honest, one of the strongest motivators for coming back for my second year of grading is  the money, plain and simple.  If you’re a graduate student, I know I’m speaking your language.  One week of grading paid me about the same as one month of my graduate student stipend.  Grading can help make the lean summer months much fatter.  Like an all-expenses paid working vacation, the College Board throws in your transportation, room and board.  Plus, Louisville is a great place to explore with a small stipend for two evenings eating out.

But beyond the money, the greatest benefit to me has been the educational value that I have taken away from the experience.  The AP grading offers a chance to collaborate with high school teachers who are often at the top of their game, a rare opportunity for those of us who teach at the college level.  I’ve come away with numerous  ideas and strategies for incorporating best practices into my classroom.  Next, the AP grading teaches you to use a rubric, and to use it well.  I have found that this makes my own grading, and crafting of assignments, much easier.  The grading also gives readers a chance to hear great historians speak.  This year Carol Sue Humphrey and Andrew Bacevich spoke to the readers.  Last year we heard from Gordon Wood.  In addition, going to the grading will give you a chance to see how the College Board rolls out its new test.  In the 2014-2015 school year, they are switching from a coverage model of testing U.S. history that requires students to know a little bit about everything to a more skills-based model that requires students to practice historical thinking.  This shift matches much of the discussion going on in history education circles, and the AP grading is a place where conversations about this trend abound. 

Finally, it’s actually fun.  When you go year after year, you make friends from across the country.  You can laugh at the AP cartoonist’s cartoons (inspired by lines from students’ essays, like “Louis Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon,” or “Upton Sinclair wrote ‘Welcome to the Jungle.’”).  

If you’re interested, go here for instructions on how to apply to be a reader.  If you’re at the college level, you must have taught at least one class comparable to the AP class in the past three years.  And let me know if you’re in Louisville next year!

CFP: Religion and Politics in 20th-century America

"Beyond the Culture Wars: Recasting Religion and Politics in 20th-century America"

March 27-29, 2014
Washington University in St. Louis

The John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics invites conference paper proposals from Ph.D. students working on the history of twentieth-century U.S. religion, politics, and society. "Beyond the Culture Wars: Recasting Religion and Politics in 20th-century America" will take place March 27-29, 2014, on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. Senior and junior scholars will present papers that address the conference's two main aims: (1) to take stock of recent advances and points of exchange in the historical study of U.S. religion and politics; (2) to introduce fresh, integrated scholarship that maps out new directions in this burgeoning field. Ph.D. students are invited to submit a short C.V. (2 pages maximum) and precis (1 page maximum) of their proposed paper, which should be drawn from original research. Applicants chosen to participate in the conference will be awarded a $500.00 travel stipend.

Please email application materials (C.V. and precis) as one attachment to rap@wustl.edu by August 15, 2013. Successful applicants will be notified by September 15, 2013. Please direct any questions or concerns to Darren Dochuk at ddochuk@wustl.edu.

Modern Summer of Love: On Secularism in Antebellum America -- the Finale

Editor's Note: Today concludes our week-long series on John Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America, including responses from five scholars given at last year's American Academy of Religion, and today with John's consideration of those responses. Thanks to all the participants! 

 Confessions of a genealogist

John Lardas Modern

11.19.12 [delivered]

American Academy of Religion * Chicago, IL

 Thank you for the avalanche of assessment, this heap of hard-nosed questioning. Chad, Finbarr, Katie, Chip, and Paul—I am lucky to have such attentive and capacious readers. There is no higher honor than having your book read and read well and read with such a generous spirit of critical engagement.  It is more, much more, than I could have ever hoped for.

Apologies from the get go—It is impossible to do justice to the whole of each of these critiques but I will try to address as many points and questions as I can—some directly, some indirectly. Given how many of the questions are questions of style, I thought it would be good to frame my response around the genre of storytelling known as genealogy. So here it goes.

Welcome to the History-Machines! On Secularism in Antebellum America, Part V of VI. Paul Johnson Responds

Editor's Note: Today is the last of our five responses to John Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America; tomorrow Modern will conclude the series with his own reflections on these responses.  Previously we featured responses by Kathryn Lofton, Chip Callahan, Finbarr Curtis, Chad Seales, and an introduction by Amy Koehlinger.   Turn your radio on. 

Paul Johnson, University of Michigan

On Secularism in Antebellum America

History-Machines! Featuring the Pequod, the Nautilus, the Secularism Book, the Harrow, Mr. Spear’s Penetrator, and Other Astonishing Inventions

To gauge what this machine can do, I will try to engage its gears in various comparative tasks. I begin by lining it up alongside the same author’s earlier work of a decade prior. Modern’s first book, The Bop Apocalypse (2001), relied heavily on Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West as its prism, showing the Beat writers uses of, and responses to Spengler. Through Spengler’s text, Modern bent the Beats and the ‘50s back toward 1918, and the sentiment melancholy that followed the Great War.  That melancholy still lingered in the lives of the Beats. Their lifestyles and writing reflected a metaphysical quest created under the cloud of a different global threat, that of nuclear apocalypse and the Cold War, but one that echoed an earlier existential grip of radical contingency, namely the idea that you might cease to be, and at any time. 

Out of, and in part against that melancholy, the Beats forged an alternative vision to mainstream 1950s religion.  In place of a “Protestant, Catholic, Jew” version of 1950s American religiosity, the Beats’ practices were shambling and diverse, including at least Burrough’s Scientology, Kerouac’s Buddhism, and Ginsberg’s psychedelia—all of them “exceeding religion” in order to enact their “drama of ultimate consequences” (Modern 2001: 6). They sought and found that drama in the mundane world of life on the streets, on the back roads and in the freight yards, their eyes always scanning for new and unconventional sites and techniques of religious power.

Eventful 1851

That work foreshadowed the important present book, Secularism in Antebellum America (2011), which focuses on 1851 instead of 1950. Yet the two work together, and via a similar structure of pivoting off a key text—Decline, in one case, Moby Dick, in the other—to explore a historical juncture when “religion” was exceeded.

Modern Summer of Love: On Secularism in Antebellum America, Part IV of VI

Editor's Note: Continuing on with our series on Secularism in Antebellum America, today's contribution comes from Kathryn Lofton, newly tenured Professor of Religious Studies, American Studies, History, and Divinity at Yale University. Previously we featured responses by Chip Callahan, Finbarr Curtis, Chad Seales, and an introduction by Amy Koehlinger.  

CHAPTER 4 – THE TOUCH OF THE SECULAR

Kathryn Lofton

for a Panel at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion:

A Fabulous Rumor: Critical Interpretations of

John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America

(University of Chicago Press, 2011)

phrenology calipers and bust, circa 1825 [http://antiquescientifica.com/catalog.htm]

There is a transaction that occurs in nearly every teen movie or cinematic mob solicitation.  Our heroine, usually somewhat on the margins of social acceptability, receives a Siren call to join the outsider fun.  Maybe it’s playing hooky, or getting into a tricked-out Oldsmobile, or maybe it’s participation in an international criminal conspiracy. Whatever the situation, the soliciting inquiry is the same: Are you in or are you out?

This question defines anyone’s inaugural encounter with the work of John Lardas Modern.  I first met John through this chapter when it was published in a preliminary form in a 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion as “Ghosts of Sing Sing, or the Metaphysics of Secularism.” That journal article begins:

Secularism is more than an ideology. It is a moral force, a connective tissue, a widely shared and massively intricate set of political and epistemological assumptions. And like anything in excess of ideology, secularism defies logic, particularly its own (Durkheim 1995). In antebellum America, for example, secularism structured the institutions of commerce, consumerism, and journalistic objectivity even as it affected the ways of church governance and the means of missionary outreach. (Modern 2007: 615)

This passage includes two hallmarks of Modern’s work. The first is the positioning of the secular within the religious, as Modern does when suggests secularism structured church governance and missionary work.  In a recent essay, Modern reiterates that “secularism [is] my shorthand for the discursive phenomena that go into making up the conceptual terrain of religion (and its antitheses).” (Modern 2012: 447) The latter may seem to be old hat in U.S. religious history, but it’s only recently accomplished, and Modern has been a central contributor to its argument, forcing scholars of religion in America to acknowledge the ways secular logics influenced the development and dissemination of American religions. You’re either in or you’re out: you either see that the secular constructs the religious, or you don’t.

The second Lardas Modern component—subtle here but preponderant throughout Secularism in Antebellum America, is the upending of common language games to disorient analytical presumptions.  Here I point you to the phrase that begins the third sentence of the above opener, when Modern writes, “And like anything in excess of ideology…” Modern’s writing is filled with these kinds of phrases, phrases which you might correct as a usage error (how can something be in excess of ideology?) in an undergraduate essay.  But if you made such a choice with Modern, you would be left behind as the Oldsmobile car squealed off.  You’re either in or you’re out: you either understand that nouns are newly definable, or you don’t.

Modern Summer of Love: On Secularism in Antebellum America, Part III of VI. Chip Callahan Responds

The Author of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Being

Richard J. Callahan, Jr.

for a Panel at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion:

A Fabulous Rumor: Critical Interpretations of

John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America

(University of Chicago Press, 2011)

John Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America is a beautiful book. I mean that in a variety of senses. It is conceptually beautiful, literarily beautiful, and physically beautiful. All of these beautiful pieces illustrate the care that Modern has put into this work. It is clearly the product of hard labor and great thoughtfulness. From the start the reader senses that Modern has voyaged out beyond the safe harbors of American Religious History and returned with a new vision. He is able to see Antebellum religious history with new eyes that were formed in his voyages through the lands of social theory, genealogy, anthropologies of modernity and secularity, and literary criticism.

It’s an itinerary not unfamiliar to contemporary scholars of Religious Studies, though its application to the study of American religion is still novel in a field that is so dominated by historians. He tells us that there were big, important changes to religion in the Antebellum period, which is a plot line with which we are familiar. But we have come to expect those changes to be narrated in terms of revivals, enthusiasms, Arminianism, and democratization. Instead, Modern presents us with a new story of Antebellum American religion, which is in fact a story of Antebellum American secularism. The two co-exist; more, they are co-constitutive. Modern paints the big changes in Antebellum religion in terms of a new way of understanding what religion is, a new type of religious subject and self that is bound up with the emergence (or production?) of the secular.

Modern Summer of Love: On Secularism in Antebellum America, Part II of VI. Finbarr Curtis Responds.

Continuing on with our series on the book Secularism in Antebellum America, today we feature the response by Finbarr Curtis, given at last year's AAR session dedicated to the book. Previously we've posted an introduction to the series by Amy Koehlinger, and a leadoff response by Chad Seales. 

Dropping Science like Galileo Dropped the Orange: John Modern’s Spiritual Boutique

Finbarr Curtis

Georgia Southern University

“Spirituality is just a word.”[1] So proclaims John Modern to open his chapter entitled “Toward and Genealogy of Spirituality.”  This is not to say that words are insignificant.  For a genealogist, words are never really just words.  As participants in projects of classification, words in Modern’s book mark an epistemic logic that delineates what sorts of things count as spiritual, or as religious, or as scientific.  In the Common Sense Realism that is the object of Modern’s inquiry, particular usages of words efface traces of their own history in favor of a confident representation of the world as it is.  Trying to locate the common sense of spirituality, Modern looks to antebellum America to uncover how the word spiritual has come to connote a sense of a free, creative, original, authentic and interior private experience that exists outside of institutional formations at the same time that the spiritual is called on to animate nurturing and sympathetic public space. 

In this post, I will ask questions about four interlocking words that demand special attention: secular, liberal, spiritual, and genealogy.  The first two are often run together, especially in postcolonial critiques of secular liberalism.  Modern’s book is indebted to but differs from many postcolonial scholars. 

Modern Summer of Love: On Secularism in Antebellum America, Part I of VI. Chad Seales Responds

For our responses to Secularism in Antebellum America, first given at the American Academy of Religion last year, our leadoff hitter is Chad Seales, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He will lay down the bunt single to get the run-scoring-machine started. Then beginning tomorrow we will each day post responses to each subsequent chapter of the book. 2nd at bat will be Finbarr Curtis (Georgia Southern University); then, Chip Callahan (University of Missouri). Cleaning up the bases will be Katie Lofton (Yale University and one of the first contributing editors of this blog); and finally, Paul Johnson (University of Michigan) will follow with the inside-the-park-home run. We will conclude with reflections from John Modern of Franklin and Marshall College, and the blog freq.uenci.es.

As Amy Koehlinger just explained in her post earlier today introducing the series, the responses are posted in deliberate order, as each respondent takes on one particular chapter of the work. 

A Hint of Irony:

Evangelical Secularism 

  

The Picture Alphabet in Prose and Verse (New York: American Tract Society, n.d.)

What is evangelical about evangelical secularism?  This is my question for John.

I ask because the author writes of the difference between falsehood and irony:

For at the end of the day, evangelical secularism was anathema to evangelical understandings of how the world was in essence.  To be clear, this is not to accuse mid-century evangelicals of false consciousness.  I do, however, want to stress the ironies of evangelical practice, that is, how their flight from the mediating grasp of subjective bias and political institutions generated something like the imperial discourse of secularism – the atmosphere in and through which they recognized and conducted themselves as evangelicals.  And although evangelicals were not the only Americans who breathed in this atmosphere or dispersed it through their actions, they did develop a convincing ontology that made the recognition of secularism an unreasonable proposition.  The mediations of secularism, however, were as pervasive as they were incomprehensible (117). 

Evangelical secularism was anathema to evangelical understandings.  But, John argues in other parts of this chapter, evangelicals used secularism.  They used it with an “agenda,” and they used it as a “maneuver” (70).  They intended to use it to “reproduce religious life.”  And by John’s account, they succeeded.  But, I assume, they did not necessarily reproduce their religious life.  They formatted the conversation – all conversations – about (true) religion. 

And the mechanism of their particular making unmade them in the generalities of its universalism.  That which they possessed was no longer their possession.   Yet, this unintentional unmaking was not a function of false consciousness.  “At the end of the day,” evangelical intent was not misguided and evangelical self-consciousness of that intent was not false, despite the venial affect.  It was, instead, ironic.  Distinguishing falsehood from irony, John signals his disinterest in the faulty faculties of mental states and announces against that dismissal the intrigue of his subject: the discursive practice of their knowledge production, or what he calls evangelical secularism.

But he also writes this: 

Modern Summer of Love: Critical Interpretations of John Lardas Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America -- Introduction

A big pre-summer and pre-6th-birthday-of-this-blog treat for everyone: starting today and over the next several days we will be running a series of responses to John Modern's book Secularism in Antebellum America.We first covered the book with a review by John Turner; and over at Immanent Frame, Michael Warner had an extended and extremely lucid discussion of the book. Last year this book was the featured text for responses at the "Author Meets Critics" session of the American Academy of Religion, at the warm and cozy McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago (a locale which actually reminded me of one certain great white whale which also serves as one inspiration and guiding spirit for this book).

We'll begin with this introduction by Amy Koehlinger, Oregon State University, who presided over the session at the AAR. She will describe the entries to come later today and over the next five days.

Introduction by Amy Koehlinger

A Fabulous Rumor: Critical Interpretations of John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

The 2012 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion featured a provocative and well-attended session on John Lardas Modern’s Secularism in Antebellum America.  While book panels are often framed as author-meets-critics, this book session was a bit different, billing itself as “an experimental panel for an experimental book.”  Since Secularism in Antebellum America moved through what John describes as a “scenic rather than synthetic” assortment of topics arranged in four chapters and an epilogue, the panel was organized to reflect the narrative scenery of the book, with each panelist focusing her or his commentary on a specific chapter. The experimental format of the panel was an attempt to create a scholarly conversation that engaged with John’s book in a usual forum (then the AAR, here our beloved Religion in American History blog) without flattening its intellectual edges or undermining the provocative way it opened new ways to think and write about the matrix of bodies and culture, technologies, imaginings and hauntings that shaped how religious people were able to know themselves and “true religion” in antebellum America.  

The entries of this series will thus proceed in the same way, as a progression of scholarly meditations on specific chapters of Secularism in Antebellum America.  With the blog as with the book, don’t be lulled by the format of partition into a perception that each entry/chapter functions as a discrete integer in a tidy mathematical description of secularism: 1+1+1+1+1=5.  Rather, as each chapter of Modern’s book is an evocation, an act of conjure that tries to draw forth for historical examination the elusive, spectral presences that haunted the antebellum American psyche, the better to understand the forces that conditioned what Modern calls “the metaphysics of the secular,” so each of the scholarly entries that follows engages with the intellectual specters from a single chapter of Modern’s book in an attempt to sharpen the clarity of otherwise elusive manifestations.

Sacred Borders

by John Turner

I'm adapting the following review from a recent post on The Anxious Bench, partly because my mind is recovering from post-Mormon History Association haziness and laziness and because the below book is one of my favorites in recent years:

Until recent decades at least, nearly all Americans have believed in an unchanging God, "the same yesterday, today and forever." If God does not change, does God's manner and rate of revelation change over time?

Typically, those who have wrestled with the issue of canon in the history of American religion have made only crude differentiation among different groups. In colonial America, there were the Quakers and nearly everyone else. In antebellum America, things became a bit more complex, but there were Shakers, Mormons, and a cluster of prophets on the one hand and "Bible alone" anti-creedal evangelicals on the other extreme. Toss in Emerson and Thoreau.

Enter David Holland's eloquent and intelligent Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America. For anyone who teaches in the field of American religious history, this is essential reading. It should assume a venerable place on graduate school exam lists.

Holland's argument is extended and detailed; it eludes simple summary. The subtitle of the book points to its breadth. He brings into conversation and contest both those whose belief in ongoing revelation threatened (sometimes mildly, sometimes obviously and severely) a closed biblical canon and those who answered such threats and policed the canon's borders. What I realized while reading Sacred Borders is that many, if not most, Christians believe in at least enough continuing revelation to pose some sort of threat to a strictly closed canon. At the same time, nearly all who challenged the closed canon maintained some sort of belief in canonicity; indeed, many pulled back from the logical conclusions of their ideas out of a traditionalist respect for the Bible. Along the way, Holland engages the early Puritans, Quakers (from George Keith to Elias Hicks), deists, Jonathan Edwards, prophets (such as Nimrod Hughes), Swedenborgians, Shakers, Mormons, Adventists, Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and more.

The Image of Mormons

First, a note to congratulate the one, the only, J. Spencer Fluhman, whose book A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in 19th-Century America, won the best first book award at the just-concluded Mormon History Association. And congratulations to Christopher Jones, winner of Best Article Award for his piece Mormonism in the Methodist Marketplace: James Covel and the Historical Background of Doctrine and Covenants 39-40" in BYU Studies Quarterly. Also, congrats. to our contributor John Turner, whose biography of Brigham YOung won the Best Biography award.

And, a note from Jared Farmer, whose wonderful and pedagogically rich e-book Mormons in the Media, 1830-2012 we blogged about last year. 

Dear fellow followers of Mormon (and/or Utah) history,

Please excuse the impersonal nature of this note. I simply want to call your attention to a newly launched website that serves as the permanent home for my two (!) free e-books:

• Mormons in the Media, 1830–2012 (revised edition, now in iBooks format as well as PDF)
• The Image of Mormons: A Sourcebook for Teachers and Students

jaredfarmer.net/e-books/

Feel free to share this link with anyone who might be interested.

OAH Lecturers and American Religious History

Randall Stephens

Some readers might know about the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship Program.  In 1981 OAH president Gerda Lerner launched the initiative as "a speakers bureau dedicated to American history."  Participants traverse the US, speaking at universities, high schools, libraries, and community centers on subjects ranging across time and place. 

In the past few years quite a number of the lecturers appointed happen to work on some aspect of American religious history.  I was fortunate enough to be named a lecturer starting this year, along with fellow blogmeister Paul Harvey, and some other scholars in the field: Angela D. Dillard, Darren Dochuk, Kevin M. Kruse, and Melani McAlister.  (Shameless pitch: Invite us to your college or university!)

Maybe the number of those with a religious focus is a reflection of the current popularity of religious history, and a sign of the growing number of scholars who study religion.  Six years back, James O'Toole wrote a piece for Historically Speaking about the rising stock of the subfield.  (I included that in a short book I edited for the University of SC Press.) Writing about the "Post-Ahlstrom" era, O'Toole observed:

Religious Pluralism at the Newberry: A Public Lecture

By Chris Cantwell

Just a brief announcement to let everyone in the Chicagoland area (or, #Chicagolandia as it's come to be known) that noted religious studies scholar Diana Eck will be speaking at the Newberry Library on June 26, 2013 at 6:00pm. Eck, as many of the readers probably know, is a Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University who has written extensively on Hinduism in India. She is also the founding director of Harvard's renowned Pluralism Project.

It's this latter focus on America's religious diversity that will be the subject of Eck's lecture at the Newberry. The talk is the final public program of the "Out of Many: Religious Pluralism in America" program I run at the Newberry and is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities' Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges initiative. We hope to be able to record and publish the talk as a podcast, as we did with Martin Marty's lecture last summer. The project also has a couple of forthcoming digital projects that promise to be wonderful teaching resources, so stay tuned.

The talk is free and open to the public, and will be held in the Newberry's Ruggles Hall. Find all of the details on the talk here.

Blessed

Paul Harvey
 
[Lucinda Williams, "Blessed"}

Our blog is almost at its 6th birthday! Ok, June 21 technically, but close enough. With so much coming up on the blog this month -- more on that below -- today happened to be a good day to celebrate.

We're blessed to have entered a new era on the blog this year, with a new redesign and a roster of regular contributors who have given generously of their time and energy to post each day. And you all are blessed that our regular contributors cover so many of the days of the month that I post very infrequently now, and am getting close to my ideal of phasing myself out entirely (I mean, Manu Ginobili knows it's time to stop flopping and call it quits, and that seems a good model to follow after I watch our contributors lead us to the championship).

Further, we are blessed to have as one of our newest contributors Kate Bowler of Duke Divinity School, whose book Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel has just been released by Oxford! Those of you who have met the author, or followed her contributions here, will recognize the qualities of razor-sharp prose and wit that she either imported from The Great White North or learned from her academic advisor, the legendary raconteur Grant Wacker (or both). Those qualities are plenty in evidence here as she explains how "the prosperity gospel articulated a language of aspiration that spoke of materialism and transcendence in a single breath." What is notable here, also, is how the prose and the analysis never descends to condescension, in describing a movement where parody tends to be the easiest go-to option.

We''ll have more to say about this down the road once we have a chance to read it all the way through, so for the moment here's a bit more about the work.

Kate Bowler's Blessed is the first book to fully explore the origins, unifying themes, and major figures of a burgeoning movement that now claims millions of followers in America. Bowler traces the roots of the prosperity gospel: from the touring mesmerists, metaphysical sages, pentecostal healers, business oracles, and princely prophets of the early 20th century; through mid-century positive thinkers like Norman Vincent Peale and revivalists like Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin; to today's hugely successful prosperity preachers. Bowler focuses on such contemporary figures as Creflo Dollar, pastor of Atlanta's 30,000-member World Changers Church International; Joel Osteen, known as "the smiling preacher," with a weekly audience of seven million; T. D. Jakes, named by Time magazine one of America's most influential new religious leaders; Joyce Meyer, evangelist and women's empowerment guru; and many others. At almost any moment, day or night, the American public can tune in to these preachers-on TV, radio, podcasts, and in their megachurches-to hear the message that God desires to bless them with wealth and health. Bowler offers an interpretive framework for scholars and general readers alike to understand the diverse expressions of Christian abundance as a cohesive movement bound by shared understandings and common goals.

And finally, a little preview of coming attractions: starting next week on June 12th, we'll be running a six-day series on John Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America, featuring five responses to the book at last year's "author meets critics" session in the North American Religions section of the AAR. The responses will be from Chad Seales, Finbarr Curtis, Chip Callahan, Paul Johnson, and Katie Lofton, and then we'll wrap it up with reflections on the responses by John Lardas Modern. And yes, that is pretty much the all-star team of Religious Studies, so get ready to rumble with some pretty hefty essay blog posts coming up. 

Then just a bit later on this month and through the summer, we'll have a lot of reviews of new and newish books, including Christopher Jones's look at James Byrd's new book Sacred Scripture, Sacred War, and Jonathan den Hartog on some new books in earlier American religious history, and much else besides. 

Finally, we are blessed to have you all out there, reading, commenting, and sending along your feedback. Long may you prosper.

Know Your Archives: American Antiquarian Society Edition

By Jonathan Den Hartog

Those readers who have followed this blog for a while know of a regular feature called "Know Your Archives." I did a quick search and discovered that one of these posts had not yet been devoted to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. If I missed it, please let me know--and link it in the comments.

I'm spending June at the AAS, so I'm not thinking about too many other academic topics beyond getting into the archive and working hard daily. (Now, thinking about other things, like moving my family halfway across the continent, yes. But that would be a different post.) As a result, I thought it would be great to connect the AAS with resources for studying American Religion.

Place, Space, and Movement in Historical Research

Trevor Burrows

I want to use my post today to ask an admittedly broad and open question of this blog’s readers and contributors.  The journal Religion has posted an intriguing preview of a forthcoming issue on the theme of “urban Christianities.”  In the introduction, "Urban Christianities: Place-Making in Late Modernity," James Bielo points to Robert Orsi’s seminal collection on urban religion, Gods of the City, as a jumping-off point for the issue, wherein six authors will consider the theme as presented in a variety of locales ranging from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Lagos, Nigeria.  Considering some of the recent posts here that have touched on questions of space, place, and movement - I’m thinking especially of the wonderful posts around Michael Pasquier’s edited collection, Gods of the Mississippi - the issue promises to be of interest to many RiAH readers.


Based on their descriptions, most of the articles appear to deal with more contemporary subjects.  There is nothing wrong or even surprising about this, of course, but it did get me wondering about specifically historical studies that deal especially well and creatively with similar themes.  A number of the essays in Orsi’s aforementioned collection also considered more recent or contemporary subjects (with several notable exceptions, including Orsi’s own contributions and Diane Winston’s work on the Salvation Army).  Over the last several days, I've been chewing on a pretty basic question: which historians, or what texts, have dealt productively with these themes in explicitly historical scholarship?  (I should admit that I'm thinking about this with somewhat selfish intent as I am considering how my own research, which deals with matters of religious pluralism and interreligious dialogue/collaboration in primarily urban settings, might benefit from more attention to these types of questions.)

Happy Book Birthday

Quick happy birthday to The Right of the Protestant Left: God's Totalitarianism by RiAH blog contributor Mark Edwards. It turned one this week and the Journal of American History decided to sing it a song with a review from Matthew Avery Sutton.

(colorized version of Paul Harvey's first birthday party)

It's Not Me, It's You

Professor reading own reviews to the assembled.

By Kate Bowler
 
The sweet summer cannot fully begin until the season of self-hatred is at an end. It's student evaluation time and by now they should be on your desks, your laptops, or your wastebaskets wetted with tears. Every year I hear professors casually trade wisdom about the act of reading and processing student evaluations. So today I thought I'd categorize the comments that have felled even the mightiest American religious historians among us followed by the best advice I've heard so far.

You Didn't Talk About...
 Alas, this student is not really interested in what you said. After 13 weeks with you, they are very disturbed by what you didn't say. Most likely, they are listing nationalities, religious minorities, or events in American history and adding a question mark. American Taoism + the Vietnam War? Ukrainian Catholics + the Great Depression? These question marks are there to remind you that if this course was a survey or had dates in the title of any kind, your failure to recognize these realities has probably ruined the course. The result can be endless paranoia about the perennial question of coverage.

Aimless Pilgrim Seeks Gods of the Mississippi... Find Me at the Source

Art Remillard

In early 2008, Mike Pasquier e-mailed me his proposal for Gods of the Mississippi, an edited volume examining the religious cultures of the Mississippi River. Mike only wanted my feedback; but what he got was my request to contribute an article. There was only one problem—I didn't know the first thing about the Mississippi River. So Mike gave me a reading list. He also suggested that I focus on the Upper Mississippi since he needed some more articles on matters north of St. Louis. So I took his suggestions and, for good measure, I planned a road trip.

That May, I drove to northern Minnesota for a two week trek down the Great River Road. I started at Lake Itasca, home to the Mississippi's headwaters. Arriving in the early morning, I sat down near a rock bridge that demarcates the river’s origin. The scene was relatively quiet, with only a handful of visitors in view.

Then the school buses arrived. And scores of students scurried to the waters, as teachers tactically positioned themselves at the rock bridge. They instructed their pupils to walk carefully from rock to rock across the tumbling waters. I would later learn that the rock-bridge-walk is something of a sacred tradition. "I grew up thinking of it as a rite of passage, somewhere between baptism and confirmation," quipped one Minnesotan. I watched the children carefully process at first; then I witnessed a regression into pure chaos. In the blink of an eye, they departed from the rocks and shores and plunged into the frigid waters, splashing each other the entire time. The war of all against all was on.

Reminded that teachers are not sufficiently compensated for their labors, I left the headwaters and toured Itasca State Park, scanning the exhibits and talking with visitors and employees. All the while, my ears tuned in to the sounds of ritual activity. In addition to crossing the rock bridge, visitors often make a wish at the headwaters. They then wait 90 days for the results, since this is the time it takes for water to travel from Itasca to the Gulf. I also heard stories of baptisms, weddings, and engagements at the headwaters; as well as memorial services and divorce paper signings.

It was the stories of intrepid travelers, though, that most caught my attention—especially the bicyclists, boaters, walkers, and even swimmers who start or finish their journey at Itasca.