RELIGION IN AMERICAN HISTORY

New World, New Jerusalem, New Orleans

2012-01-27T08:40:00.005-07:00

Emily Suzanne Clark

“I’m getting along alright I Just Be Praying and talking with the lord I have my service every night Preaching the bible and singing and Praying teaching the People about shurn the fire and Brimstone Rev. 21:8,” self-taught/folk artist and New Orleans street preacher Sister Gertrude Morgan (1900-1980) wrote to a friend during her ministry in New Orleans. Morgan’s art and message were apocalyptic, and she blurred the boundaries between the new world, the New Jerusalem, and New Orleans.

After receiving multiple calls from God to preach the gospel, Morgan arrived to New Orleans in 1939, since she believed “New Orleans is the headquarters of sin.” In the 1960s and 1970s, Morgan – artist, musician, street preacher, and prophet – lived and ministered in the Lower Ninth Ward. She ministered at her home (the Everlasting Gospel Mission house), on the streets of the French Quarter, and at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Though her first revelations initially called her to ministry, her third revelation contained the most important message: God told her that she was to be the bride of Christ. Morgan began to wear all white to signify this relationship. She would later sign her artwork with signatures such as: Bride of Jesus, Bride of Christ, Lamb Bride, Nurse to Doctor Jesus, Missionary Morgan, and Your Boss’s Wife. It was also with this revelation that Morgan began to paint, and the apocalypse almost always permeated her work.

Two of her most popular subjects were images of New Jerusalem and her Revelation charters. Both have distinctive iconographies drawn from the apocalyptic texts of the Bible, popular religious imagery, and even more importantly, Morgan’s life and experiences. Her New Jerusalem paintings share visual elements that locate the biblical text in Morgan’s world. Morgan’s paintings of New Jerusalem always contain images of buildings that look strikingly like stacked shotgun houses. Though she took the city’s architecture with her to the new world, Morgan would not take the city’s sinners to New Jerusalem. Her painting Calling the Dry Bones commands local New Orleanians to “rise up from the beer tables card partys domino games to. God take no part with your worldy lust People whats wrong with you,” and the lower left corner of the painting includes a table of gamblers. Additionally, practitioners of the city’s non-traditional churches would not reach heaven; for example she condemns Spiritual church saint Black Hawk in multiple paintings, often connecting him to Satan. Though New Orleans architecture shapes Morgan’s New Jerusalem cityscape, its “sin” has no place.

Her Revelation images reveal Morgan’s literal reading of biblical text; however it is a unique literal reading. The coming New Jerusalem bears architectural similarities to New Orleans. Furthermore, she saw a distinctive role for herself in the coming apocalypse. In all of her paintings the most common element is herself, and her paintings placed her into the biblical text. Sometimes she played the role of John in the Book of Revelation, by calling herself prophet but painting her interpretation of his vision. Also, as the bride of Christ, she often painted images of her wedding with Jesus.

In addition to painting, Morgan sang and even recorded an album – Let’s Make a Record – consisting of various spirituals, gospel tunes, and largely original Morgan lyrics to the tune of her tambourine. She would also recite scripture and improvise short sermons throughout the tracks. Like her paintings, her music was largely instructional and included her own exegesis of particular texts. The apocalyptic urgency of her paintings is present in her music too; in her song “Power,” she sing/preaches:
Troubling people, don’t let ‘em rest, continue
Let them know they got a soul to save
Shake ‘em up and wake ‘em up
Yes lord, power, power
Yes lord, put their mind on the kingdom
You pay that prayer that power like kingdom come
Now they’re not prepared for the kingdom
They don’t believe in the kingdom, amen
Talkin’ bout everyone got to die, the church say amen.

Morgan stopped painting in 1974, following another revelation from God. She told one of her patrons, “Painting now? Oh no, I’m way too worried. Worrying about what time it is, and praying on people’s cases… You don’t have to look far these days to see fire and brimstone. No sir, it’s just like it was in the days of Noah, only it’s worse, because there’s more people. Tell em God’s wife told you that.” With the end times coming soon, Morgan turned her sole focus onto praying and preaching. Throughout her prophetic career, preaching the coming apocalypse remained her key task. Whether she was a new prophet John of Revelation or a modern-day Noah, Morgan believed we would soon cross into the new world foretold in the Book of Revelation.

By means of her cityscape, Morgan used New Orleans as a model for her images of New Jerusalem, and created her own religious message. She drew from her immediate environment, New Orleans, though she called it “a headquarters of sin,” as the visual template for her vision of the New Jerusalem. Though she looked to the future, her home at the Everlasting Gospel Mission shaped her new world dwelling. When she sang “I got the new world in my view,” that new world greatly resembled the sinful city she came to save.

The Antichrist and the Making of American Antiliberalism

2012-01-26T08:20:00.008-07:00

By Steven P. Miller

FDR, Hitler, Mussolini, Obama, Nicolae Carpathia . . . It’s hard to keep up with all of the possible Antichrists, past and present. We need someone to keep the record straight. More importantly for students of modern American history, we need someone to tease out the connections between eschatology and politics—specifically, between dispensationalism and antiliberalism. That’s where Matthew Sutton comes in. Readers of the New York Times op ed page and viewers of MSNBC know that Sutton is up to the task. His recent presentation at the American Historical Association provided another window into his eagerly anticipated (and NEH-supported) project, tentatively titled American Evangelicals and the Politics of Apocalypse (Harvard). Sutton’s forthcoming piece in The Journal of American History, “Was FDR the Antichrist? The Birth of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism in a Global Age,” shows how eschatology-fueled opposition to the New Deal laid the foundation for the rise of the Religious Right. As the final part of the title suggests, Sutton pays special attention to the inescapably global frame of politically attuned eschatology. Before the March issue hits the newsstands (or, rather, slides into your departmental mail slot), check out this fascinating podcast with JAH editor Edward Linenthal in which Sutton discusses the prophetic—and by extension, the political—implications of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia and FDR’s National Recovery Administration. Beware the Blue Eagle . . .

New Book on Abolitionism and Moral Progress in History

2012-01-26T07:25:00.004-07:00

Randall Stephens

My colleague at ENC and Historically Speaking, Don Yerxa, has been working away on an edited volume for several years. That collection of essays--titled British Abolitionism and the Question of Moral Progress in History--will hit the shelves in March. This timely and illuminating book is the result of a 2007 conference on the topic held in London. I worked a little with Don on the program and created the website here.

The University of South Carolina Press, which is publishing the book, describes the project on its site:

The idea of progress may well be one of the most important products of Western civilization. Yet most historians avoid the subject, especially the notion that there has been significant moral progress over time, and favor contingency and human agency over teleology as the engines of contemporary historical inquiry. In this collection, an international cast of prominent historians uses the abolition of the British slave trade as a case study for exploring the larger interpretive question of moral progress in history.

Approaching their subject from the standpoints of social, economic, religious, scientific, and political history, the fourteen contributors explore connections between religious belief and social transformation, the material and cultural structures needed to translate altruism into successful political movements, and the measurements—if any—historians might use to denote moral progress. In taking up this inquiry, the essayists also broach larger questions of identifying what forces truly can be said to shape history and how one might delineate the capacity and limitations of historiography as a source for instructive philosophical lessons. The result is an illuminating conversation on abolition as a springboard for understanding the nature of historical knowledge in relation to authorial perspective, political and religious values, and postmodern philosophical claims of direction in the human experience. The work serves as a model for approaching the big questions of history with a goal, not of consensus, but of spirited debate and rich engagement.

The contributing authors include:

Eric Arnesen, Jeremy Black, David Brion Davis, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Peter Harrison, David Hempton, Bruce Kuklick, George Marsden, Wilfred McClay, C. Behan McCullagh, Allan Megill, Jon Roberts, Lamin Sanneh, Gary Walton, Donald Yerxa.

Rush out and pre-order your copy!

The Spiritual-Industrial Complex

2012-01-24T02:00:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to introduce our new blog contributor today, whose inaugural post reviews Jonathan Herzog's new work The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Mark Edwards teaches American history and politics at Spring Arbor University in Michigan. He has published numerous articles, including in Diplomatic History, Religion and American Culture, and Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. His first book, The Right of the Protestant Left, is due out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. He is currently at work on a related project, The Christian Origins of the American Century: A Life of Francis Pickens Miller. Welcome to Mark!

by Mark Edwards

The Last Temptation of Christ (1953) iscommunist subversion. A Presidentfollows “God’s Float” into office. Security analysts begin to stockpile WMRs (Weapons of MassRe-enchantment). Creation Science videosbecome mandatory viewing for over 200,000 GIs. Twenty-five million Americans pledge a dollar apiece to build a “FreedomBell” for West Berlin. Radio-vangelistsfrom Mars (the “red” planet, no less!) spark a global Christian groundswell,culminating in the collapse of the Communist bloc. These stories and more are contained inJonathan P. Herzog’s study, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex (2011). The simple pleasure of the read notwithstanding, the real strength hereis Herzog’s situating of Christian anticommunism within public and private institutions. While the narrative of 1950s spiritualrevival is a familiar one, no one has yet offered an empirical explanation forit. Herzog shows convincingly how amyriad of elites manufactured civil religious consent as a “bulwarks” as wellas battering rams against “secularism,” the firstfruits of international communism(8).

Herzog offersand carries through on at least two arguments. First, he argues that the post-World War II revival was the result ofseries of undercover policy decisions. Whilestate and security personnel did draw upon earlier theological analyses of communismas a demonic faith, the Christianization of the burgeoning Military-IndustrialComplex (Herzog focuses mainly on Christian influences) was nevertheless “conceivedin boardrooms rather than camp meetings” (7). Herzog’s recovery of U. S.Information Agency (USIA) propaganda, the Fort Knox experiment in universalmilitary training, and the joint government/business Religion in American Life(RIAL) ad campaign, among other richly detailed examples, more than justify hiscentral claim and imagery. He notes theparadox of a Christian crusade sustained by secular agencies (12). Second, Herzog argues that the treasure troveof Jesus Junk produced by the Spiritual-Industrial Complex weakened publicProtestantism in the long run. Thisclaim is less well developed than the first. All the same, Herzog has led me to think about how the Supreme Courtdecisions against school prayer and Bible reading were consistent the Court’s earlierattack on the perceived excesses of the McCarran and McCarthy scares.

Herzog’s thoughts on secularization possiblyconstitute a third argument. At first, Ifelt the author was introducing unwarranted abstraction into his otherwiseimpressive empirical account. However,it was refreshing to find someone finally drawing upon the insights ofChristian Smith’s collaborative project, TheSecular Revolution (2003). As Herzognotes, Smith understands secularization as a product of inter-group strugglesfor influence (10). One implication ofthis theory is that the religious right isn’t paranoid since “secularhumanists” really are out to get them. As Herzog ably demonstrates, though, Smith’s work places future study ofsecularization squarely in the hands of the historian. The very existence of theSpiritual-Industrial Complex proves that secularization is not an irreversibleprocess but rather a time and place specific phenomenon. Conversely, “sacralization” (Stark’s andFinke’s term for the “reendowment of religion with perceived political, social,economic, or intellectual value”) can also be constructed and deconstructedthrough collective human effort (11). Itis hard to see what the materialism displayed during the Nixon-Khrushchev “KitchenDebate” (1959) had to do with nuking the Spiritual-Industrial Complex, especiallysince celebrations of American abundance (“better fed than red”) had beencrucial ingredients in anticommunism since Herbert Hoover. Still, Herzog’s revisioning of secularizationdoes ask us to set aside our typical condescension towards 1950s “faith infaith.” Christian containment culturewas remarkably sincere if also quite fragile.

Herzog’s book joins a number ofwonderful recent works on postwar public religion, including (but certainly notlimited to) Angela Lahr’s Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares (2007), Andrew Finstuen’s Original Sin and Everyday Protestants (2009),Jason Stevens’s God-Fearing and Free (2010),Darren Dochuk’s From Bible Belt toSunbelt (2010), and Kevin Schultz’s Tri-FaithAmerica (2011). Taken together, thenet effect is to unsettle each other’s studies. For instance, would Herzog’s Complex have become operative if it werenot for the prior mainstreaming of premillennialism by Lahr’sevangelicals? Or did mass-producedbelief in the American Way of Life enjoy stronger sales than did fears of theapocalypse? Similarly, what was therelationship between self-made re-sacralization and Protestant Americananxiety, as explored respectively and respectfully by Finstuen and Stevens? To what extent does Dochuk (as well as StevenMiller) force Herzog to admit that the Spiritual-Industrial Complex was a negotiationbetween “plain folk” believers, their preachers, and a spiritual powerelite? This is especially relevant sinceHerzog draws heavily upon Dochuk and Lahr when making his final claim that theComplex helped coalesce the postwar New Right. Or, does Herzog’s evidence suggest that Dochuk (and Bethany Moreton, forthat matter) rages against Thomas Frank in vain? Finally, is the notion of an inclusive,monolithic Spiritual-Industrial Complex all that helpful given Kevin Schultz’sadmirably nuanced narrative of religious-conflict-within-thin-consensus? Certainly, my intent is not to blacklist anyof these books. Far from it; thequestions arising from them beg for a fuller historiographical essay.

As a point of minor criticism, I did search Herzog’s work in vain fordiversities of Christian anticommunism. Herzogdiscusses the National Association of Evangelicals, but the much larger NationalCouncil of Churches is not mentioned. The World Council of Churches is misleadingly referenced as a mouthpiecefor Eisenhower, Dulles, and the USIA. Herzogis obviously aware of the World Council’s early commitment to superpower“co-existence,” yet his approach leaves the impression of a religiousconformity to Washington-Whitehall priorities that rarely existed. Those shortcomings are part of a largerneglect of liberal anticommunism in general. Does it really matter that Christian Americans used the Cold War differently,some to roll back New Deal social rights and others to advance them? Probably. At the very least, we need to remember that J. Vernon McGee and CarlMcIntire are not America (yet).

Of course,Herzog’s intent was to establish the common institutional origins and nature ofthe 1950s religious revival, not explore its every political economic consequence. In that purpose, Herzog has more thansucceeded. The Spiritual-Industrial Complex should be ideal for sparkingundergraduate and graduate interest in a nation with the soul of a predator drone.

In Heaven as It Is on Earth

2012-01-23T09:52:00.005-07:00

by John Turner

Samuel Brown's In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death is an unusual and remarkable book. Brown, a critical care pulmonologist, offers a rich and persuasive reinterpretation of Joseph Smith's most significant theological and ritual innovations.

I'm working on a fuller review of the book, so a brief encomium must suffice for now. No one working on Joseph Smith or early Mormonism will be able to ignore this work, challenging but rewarding in its careful analysis.

For starters, in his detailed contextualization of Smith's work, Brown moves beyond the existing interpretations of Mormonism's founding prophet (e.g., religious con artist, sincere fraud, magus, etc.):

Smith had a vision, a revelation ... and as his mind roamed over the conceptual landscape he inhabited, myriad phenomena came to speak of this great revelation. Smith was a translator rather than a parrot, an artist rather than a collator.

With his careful attention to the way Smith transformed the theological and philosophical beliefs he inherited and encountered, Brown offers fresh insights into a whole host of flashpoints within the study of early Mormonism: treasure-hunting, Smith's translations of ancient texts, the endowment ceremony, and plural marriage. Moreover, Brown frames all of Joseph Smith's work around the prophet-translator-seer's grief over the death of family members (especially his brother Alvin). Smith's ritual innovations offered himself and other Latter-day Saints the chance to confirm familial ties and also create an ecclesiastical family that would extend beyond the grave.

Brown's book makes much about early Mormonism make sense. Why did so many Latter-day Saints plunge into the muddy Mississippi River to be baptized for their ancestors in 1840? Why did church members nearly overwhelm Brigham Young in a stampede to obtain their endowments before the exodus during the winter of 1845-46? More so than most authors, Brown explains how what at first appear to be esoteric religious rituals held great appeal for (at least some) antebellum Americans living amidst the constant fear that death would separate them from their loved ones. Brown also helps explain the ongoing appeal of Joseph Smith's religious vision:

Ultimately, my impression of the legacy of Joseph Smith is that what matters is who we see beside us when we discover that we are in the precincts of death. Whether mortal or immortal, whether living or dead, what matters is who our companions are, to whom we have committed ourselves ... religion for Joseph Smith and his followers ... provided a company of Saints who could walk toward, and -- earnestly, anxiously -- through death with each other.

Eric Metaxas, Dietrich Bonheoffer, and the Uses of History

2012-01-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

I'm very pleased to post the following from my friend Carolyn Dupont, Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University and author of a forthcoming, very important study entitled Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975, a revision of her Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Kentucky. Oh, and in her spare time, she runs marathons.

By Carolyn Dupont

A few nights ago, I heard prolificauthor Eric Metaxas talk about his new book, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet,Spy. The book continues to garnerglowing reviews and to sell briskly after reaching the top slot on the New York Times bestseller list lastSeptember. Not surprisingly, Metaxasdrew a large and friendly audience. Funny, engaging, and openly evangelical, he recounted—to the extentpossible in a one-hour lecture—the life, theology, courage, and final end ofthe German pastor who openly opposed the Nazi regime, joined a plot to killHitler, and paid with his life. Metaxasargued that an increasingly secular society has buried such stories offaith-inspired heroism, and he has embarked on a mission of recovery. Theaudience clearly found the talk inspiring.

Metaxas emphasized Bonhoeffer’s willingnessto engage hard questions and his devotion to rigorous thinking. Yetdisappointingly, he did not invite his audience of conservative Presbyteriansto a similar examination. Instead, he offereda simple story of heroism that drew a straight and uncomplicated line from“real Christianity” to Bonhoeffer’s courageous deeds. Against the knowledge that adherents of theChristian faith have eagerly abetted the very worst social injustices—materialfamiliar to the readers of this blog—such a narrative requires interrogation. Explainingonly that Bonhoeffer “believed the Bible was the Word of God,” embraced very “orthodox”beliefs, and criticized the liberal theology of his German coreligionists, Metaxasimplied that his audience would recognize Bonhoffer’s version of the faith asmuch like their own.

Yet, little in the denominationalhistory of the church where Metaxas spoke suggests their faith resembles theGerman pastor’s. This communion, thePresbyterian Church in America (PCA), formed in 1973 when fundamentalistelements withdrew from the Southern Presbyterian Church. The personnel andinstitutions that created the new communion came largely from the Deep South,and many had engaged actively in resistance to the struggle for blackequality. Among them, Dr. DonaldPatterson of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi chaired thesteering committee that founded the new PCA. Leaders of the Citizens’ Council (a grass-roots group devoted to whitesupremacy) enjoyed positions of power and responsibility in Patterson’scongregation; his church openly denied admission to black worshippers and hadestablished a Christian school in 1965 to service the needs of whites whenpublic school segregation collapsed under the demands of the Civil Rights Actof 1964. Another important architect ofthe PCA, G. Aiken Taylor, labored prodigiously to undermine the quest for blackequality as the Magnolia State writhed in turmoil in the mid-1960s. Most noteworthy among these endeavors, hecorresponded with Erle Johnston, head of Mississippi’s State SovereigntyCommission, feeding him information in an effort to sabotage civil rightsactivity and asking him to supply similar intelligence for use in articles inthe conservative Presbyterian Journal. Taylor especially sought material that mightchallenge the religious legitimacy of black Mississippians connected to thestruggle.

Personal and institutional connectionsaside, the new communion enshrined a theology—a version of real Christianity,if you will—that had supported and serviced these believers well as theyrejected black demands for equality and personhood. Among the PCA’s most prized doctrines, theyregarded the church as a spiritual institution that had no business “meddlingin political affairs.” In fact, thisgroup regarded the new denomination as necessary to preserve their own morepure theology against the accursed “liberalism” and weak commitments tobiblical inerrancy of the parent denomination. This more liberal theology of the parent faith balanced of “spiritualityof the church” with a notion of social justice based on the life and teachingsof Jesus and had informed its support (belated though it was) of blackAmericans’ struggle for equality.

Indeed, understanding the nature of“real Christianity” in times of social crisis becomes precisely theproblem. Never are arguments about themeanings of the faith more vociferous and salient than in times ofextraordinary upheaval. When on the cuspof dramatic alterations to the social order, people find themselves hotlydebating the meanings of their faith—as in Germany during the rise of the Naziregime, on the eve of the American Civil War, or during the American civilrights movement. Not coincidentally,Christianity fragments in these times, as abstractions about the essence andimplications of faith acquire the most concrete consequences.

Drawing an uncomplicated linebetween Christian faith and Bonhoeffer’s heroism (Metaxas’s depiction) obscuresa central problem: people deeply implicated in evil social systems from whichthey benefit find it difficult—nigh unto impossible—to identify the wickednessin these systems. What, exactly,differentiated Bonhoeffer’s faith from the presumably counterfeit versions thatsustain and defend heinous corporate crimes? How exactly did Bonhoeffer, who “believed the Bible was the Word ofGod,” determine that God willed him to help assassinate the Führer rather thanto “be subject unto the higher powers” as admonished in Romans 13:1?

A rich irony rang as this PCAcongregation in Lexington, Kentucky, so committed to a theology that underminessocial justice, celebrated Dietrich Bonhoeffer as one of their own. Mostof the sincere and decent people who worship there probably know little oftheir history, and they likely fail to appreciate their theology’s utter inadequacyfor challenging systemic sin. Perhapscongregations serious about discovering and living out “real Christianity”should entertain some of the questions above in order to discover why the faithso frequently fails to live up to its benevolent and ameliorative promise. Given my understanding of the man, Bonhoeffermight have asked just these questions.

Places to Send Students in Search of Religion Blog Topics

2012-01-22T18:52:00.001-07:00

By Michael J. Altman

Per the request of Dr. Harvey, I present this cross post from michaeljaltman.net.

I gave a couple of talks around Emory last week about my experience teaching with social media last semester. In the wake of those I'll be posting some resources for folks looking to use blogging or Twitter in their classes. Here is a list of good sites I recommended to students for looking for articles/posts to write their posts about. While I didn't require them to use these, almost every one of them did and they had great results.

Religion Dispatches: http://www.religiondispatches.org

Religion in American History: http://usreligion.blogspot.com

CNN Belief Blog: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com

NY Times Religion: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/r/religion_and_belief/index.html?

Religion News Service: http://religionnews.com/index.php?/rnsblog

Reuter’s Faith World: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/

Washington Post OnFaith: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith

Huffington Post Religion: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/religion/

USA Today Faith & Reason: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/index

Google News- Religion: http://news.google.com/news/section?pz=1&jfkl=true&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&csid=41b9657e37e26fc7&ict=ln

The Revealer: http://therevealer.org/

Killing the Buddha: http://killingthebuddha.com/

Warren Throckmorton: http://wthrockmorton.com/

Revolutionary Con(tra)ceptions: Evangelicals, Family Matters, and Presidential Politics

2012-01-21T14:05:00.001-07:00

by Carol Faulkner

Forreaders of Religion in American History, Saturday’s online New York Times juxtaposes several interesting articles. The firstis a Room-for-Debate exchange on Newt Gingrich’s response to his ex-wife’s allegationthat he asked for an open marriage (“False!”), which received resoundingapproval from a South Carolina audience this week. The second is a column by Mark Oppenheimer on how evangelical voters celebrate the large families of theRepublican presidential candidates. Thethird is an opinion piece on Gingrich’s marital revelations by Gail Collins.Collins and the other NYT writers all puzzle over the evangelical voters’tolerance of hypocrisy and contradiction. These articles also present a unifiedportrait of the conservative evangelical vision of marriage and the family.

Gail Collins is funny and on-target, as always, writing:

South Carolina is probably notthe ideal state in which to be accused of breaking the matrimonial bonds, thensmashing them and jumping up and down on them until they’re just a pile ofmarital powdery dust. But Newt has framed his sexual history — the parts heisn’t totally denying — in terms of a redemption story. (“I’ve had to go to Godfor forgiveness.”) Everybody likes a story of the fallen man who rejects hiswicked ways and starts a new life. Remember how well George W. Bush did withthe one about renouncing alcohol on his 40th birthday? There is, however, a lotof difference between giving up drinking on the eve of middle age and giving upadultery at about the time you’re qualifying for Social Security. Cynics mightsuggest that Newt didn’t so much reform as poop out.

In Mark Oppenheimer’s article,Newt Gingrich’s other weakness might be his two children (his current opponentshave 5-7 children each). According to Oppenheimer, for most of thetwentieth-century, evangelicals viewed large families as undesirable: a sign ofCatholicism, poverty, and/or backwardness. In more recent years, however, someevangelicals have embraced large families as God’s will. An essential part of this worldview is thesubmission of women. Though not all (or even most) evangelicals share this viewof contraception, Oppenheimer writes:

Today, however, even thoseevangelical Protestants who use contraception — the vast majority, it wouldseem — have developed a cultural respect, in some cases a reverence, for thosewho do not.

Oppenheimerrefers to a book by Allan Carlson called Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973,which, according to Oppenheimer, argues that prior to 1920 American Protestantsrejected the use of contraception as sinful and a violation of God’s order tobe fruitful and multiply. After 1920, Carlson suggests, evangelicals fell awayfrom this belief and quickly endorsed the use of contraception.

A briefglance at the book’s description indicates that Carlson is talking about evangelicalleadership rather than lay people, but even so, his argument is somewhat puzzlingfor anyone familiar with the history of American fertility and birth control.American fertility rates began declining as early as 1760, and, in thewell-known demographic transition, dropped steadily over the course of the 19^thcentury. By 1900, American families had an average of 3.5 children. SusanKlepp’s excellent Revolutionary Conceptions shows why and how this decline happened (see my review of Klepp’s book here). What is veryclear is that it could not have happened without the enthusiastic participationof Protestants, including evangelicals. Inaddition, as historian Andrea Tone has demonstrated, even at the height of theComstock laws, Americans—men and women, Protestant and Catholic—purchased andused contraception.Today, the numbers for contraceptive use are overwhelming: 99% of Americanwomen, and 98% of Catholic women (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cecile-richards/birth-control-coverage-a_b_1220668.html).

Today’s evangelicals who condemn contraceptive use are bucking three centuriesof family limitation.

TheRoom-for-Debate exchange asks: If more people considered suchopenness an option, would marriage become a stronger institution — lesssusceptible to cheating and divorce, and more attractive than unmarriedcohabitation?

The writer DanSavage points out that Americans, including South Carolina evangelicals, acceptadultery as a sad fact of marriage: Thelesson in Gingrich’s angry denial and the applause that greeted it: An honestopen relationship is more scandalous, and more politically damaging, than adishonest adulterous relationship.

W. Bradford Wilcox of the NationalMarriage Project believes that tolerance for adultery is bad for women andchildren. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá hope that greater tolerance fordifferent types of relationships will emerge, asking, How many outspoken defenders of “traditional marriage” (whatever thatis) must be exposed as adulterers before voters just roll their eyes at thosetwo words? They also inform readers that “esposas,” the Spanish word forwives, also translates as “handcuffs.” Nice.

AsCollins suggests, South Carolina Republicans may endorse Gingrich’s tale ofmarital redemption. In doing so, they are celebrating a gendered vision ofmarriage and the family in which the man reigns supreme. It may be “traditional” in that this view ofmarriage harkens back to the cultural ideals of the nineteenth century. Whilethe ideal wife was submissive and sexually chaste, not to mention economically,politically, and legally dependent on her husband, the husband had fewrestrictions on his sexual behavior (in or outside the marriage). These conservatives might consider, however,that even in nineteenth-century Christian marriages, wives controlled theirfertility.

CFP: Northwestern University Grad Conference in Religious Studies

2012-01-20T11:04:00.001-07:00

RELIGION AND THE TRANS…

Northwestern University Department of Religious Studies

Graduate Conference

October 12-14, 2012

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Religious Studies Department of Northwestern University invites graduate papers for a conference on “Religion and the Trans…”, to be held in Evanston, Illinois on October 12-14, 2012. We request abstracts by March 16, 2012.

This conference on “Religion and the Trans…” seeks to create conversations on the crossing of geographic and conceptual borders, as well as “the trans” as a fertile space within lived religions. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences have often studied borders as lines on a map that signify the limits between nations and beliefs. More recently, scholars in religious studies and other disciplines have begun to understand borders as sites of movement and flux, home to dynamic relationships involving conflict as well as collaboration. From the rise of religious terrorism that transcends or seeks to transform national identities to the migration of religious communities back, forth, and between cultural or political limits, to interfaith activism across the boundaries of belief, the traditional ways of imagining borders as stable and static are simply insufficient. A striking contemporary example of this was the “Arab Spring” of early 2011, wherein a series of protests and political transformations across the Middle East demonstrated clearly how divisions of faith, ethnicity and nationality can be conduits of change as much as limiting constraints. Our conference will focus on this new understanding of boundaries – whether they are geographic, political, social, or intellectual – as permeable and transformative. We will thus bring together scholars studying religion in relation to topics such as transnational communities, interfaith traditions, multi-cultural rituals, translatable customs, and transdisciplinary approaches to the questions that currently occupy religious studies.

All of these questions deserve thorough exploration in an interdisciplinary setting, and thus the Religious Studies Department seeks papers from across the humanities and social sciences. Broadly conceived, all the fluidities, polarities, and (in)stabilities of religion and the transnational, transcultural, transformative, transcendent, transfigured, transhistorical, transient, et cetera, offers a particularly rich point of discussion for graduate students who approach religion from a number of different fields, including philosophy, anthropology, history, gender studies, political science, sociology, and psychology.

Papers should not exceed fifteen minutes in length and may approach the topic from any discipline or methodology.

Please send a 500-word abstract, along with your name, institution, and year of study to NUreligiousstudiesconference@gmail.com by March 16, 2012.

New Books about Colonial Catholicism

2012-01-20T09:44:00.012-07:00

By Michael Pasquier

For those who study the history of Catholicism in early America, these are very happy times. I’ve been waiting years—YEARS PEOPLE!—for two recent publications that will definitely change the way we think about English, French, and Native American Catholicism in colonial America. They are…

Maura Jane Farrelly’s Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (Oxford University Press 2012) and Tracy Neal Leavelle’s The Catholic Calumet: Colonial Conversions in French and Indian North America (University of Pennsylvania Press 2012)

Christine Leigh Heyrman says, “Maura Farrelly has a fresh and challenging perspective on the Americanization of Roman Catholicism, one that tracks its origins to early Maryland. Papist Patriots bears close reading by all students of American history and religion.”

Colin Calloway says, “With great detail and imagination, Leavelle brings a nuanced approach to conversion as cross-cultural practice, paying balanced attention to missionaries and Indians, analyzing behavior and action, song and speech, rituals and relationships, and considering plural conversions in the context of a volatile colonial world. One of the best studies I have read on the subject.”

Both books are a pleasure to read. They deserve our attention. Thank you Maura and Tracy.

Lilly Endowment ~ Congregational Studies Fellowship ~ Deadline Extended to February 1st

2012-01-19T12:56:00.003-07:00

Engaged Scholars Studying Congregations is a program of mentoring, networking, and study support funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. The Congregational Studies Team is pleased to announce the availability of Fellowships* to support scholars who are interested in disciplined inquiry into the life of local communities of faith. These 18-month fellowships include $18,000 in research support, plus $2000 for related travel. In addition, Fellowships include a program of mentoring by a senior-scholar coach and participation in two summer consultations that bring together the Fellows and coaches with the Team.

Applications are encouraged from scholars in a variety of disciplines — from practical theology to the social sciences, from history to biblical studies and contextual education — for projects that involve learning from and about living communities of faith. Fellows will explore avenues for making that knowledge available for the sake of those communities’ wellbeing, as well as developing strong academic contributions appropriate to their disciplines. Applicants should have completed their graduate work and be placed in a professional position at the time of application. We especially encourage early-career scholars to apply, but will consider applications from persons who have recently been tenured.

Engaged Scholar 2012 Fellowship Instructions

Note that the application deadline has been extended to 1 February 2012. For application information and instructions, visit www.hirr.hartsem.edu or contact the Engaged Scholars project office at Hartford Seminary (engagedscholars@hartsem.edu).

*This program is supported by a major grant from the Lilly Endowment Inc. and is administered by the Congregational Studies Team: Nancy Ammerman, Anthea Butler, Bill McKinney, Omar McRoberts, Larry Mamiya, Gerardo Marti, Joyce Mercer, James Nieman (project director), Bob Schreiter, Steve Warner, and Jack Wertheimer.

The Life of Omar Ibn Said: New Edition

2012-01-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

Paul Harvey

From the latest edition of Choice, a quick review of a new edition of the indispensable short autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, together with a collection of essays on the history of Islam among American slaves; looks to be indispensable for your university library, so I'll reprint the review. Below the review is some more information about the book, from the University of Wisconsin Press website:

Said, Omar ibn. A Muslim American slave: the life of Omar Ibn Said, ed., tr., and introd. by Ala Alryyes. Wisconsin, 2011. 222p afp; ISBN 9780299249540 pbk, $19.95; ISBN9780299249533 e-book, $14.95. Reviewed in 2012feb CHOICE.
In 1966, Derrick Bell acquired an enormously important manuscript, the life of Omar Ibn Said, written in 1831. Said was a Muslim scholar captured in the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. Ala Alryyes (comparative literature, Yale) translated this Arabic text, described as "consisting of 23 pages of quarto paper, of which pages 6 through 13 are left blank." However, Alryyes does more than translate. He says that this "text is a critical study of the text and contexts." To frame this work are debates over its importance by scholars Michael Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. Alryyes contextualizes the work in literary conversations of other slave narratives, general Muslim Qur'anic understandings of the suras used by Said, and 19th-century US literature. Omar Ibn Said's manuscript is of singular importance because it is the only extant autobiography written by a slave in Arabic in the US; it permits comparison with slave narratives by escaped slaves; it contributes to the multilingual history in all genres of American literature; and it offers an opportunity to analyze various ways of reading a text. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, faculty. -- A. B. McCloud, DePaul University From the book's website: "Then there came to our country a big army. It killed many people. It took me, and walked me to the big Sea, and sold me into hands of a Christian man." —Omar Ibn Said Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling “the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,” as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said’s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said’s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes’s comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that “Islam” and “America” are not mutually exclusive terms. “Expertly introduced, edited, and translated from the Arabic by Ala Alryyes, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said offers the fullest historical, cultural, linguistic, and religious contexts for an understanding of this fascinating American slave narrative.” —Werner Sollors, Harvard University Ala Alryyes is associate professor of comparative literature and English at Yale. He is author of Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nations. He lives in Brooklyn.

Historianess on the Great (non) Divide in Colonial Religious History

2012-01-18T15:05:00.002-07:00

Paul Harvey

My friend Historianess (aka Rebecca Goetz, Professor of History at Rice University) is back! She began blogging as "Musings of a Graduate Student" back in the Stone Age (2002), when bloggers had to chisel out their posts on stone tablets, later to be deciphered by experts in ancient scripts. A few years ago, she went on semi-hiatus as she worked on completing what is going to be a major book (coming out with Johns Hopkins later) on conceptions of race and religion in colonial Virginia (more on the book when its due date is closer). Now she has revived Historianess, with some new clothes and a new move Uptown to a wordpress.com address!

In one of her initial posts, she takes on a hardy perennial of colonial religious history -- religious New England versus the irreligious grasping Chesapeake colonies. It makes for a nice contrast in class, useful for a pedagogical tool for students -- which was the "real" early America? Are we more religious, or are we more material, as a country, or can one draw such contrasts. Hardy perennials for the undergraduate classroom discussion-starter, like the little batch of sourdough that you keep using to bake bread.

But like most oversimplifications, or like the sourdough left out uncovered and ready for the resident cat to lap it up, it doesn't hold up very well to much scrutiny or exposure. She writes:

Take religion, for example. New England’s puritans were a pious lot, and the Chesapeake harbored England’s lawless and godless. New Englanders lived in an enchanted, supernatural world, full of devils and witches and portents. In Virginia, damned souls made tobacco for profit (apologies to Edward Bond). It’s a common portrait, and it would make historians’ lives so much simpler if it were true. But it isn’t. Consider this document:

You’d think that this prophetic bit of blood in the laundry came from New England, but if you thought that, you would be wrong. James Horn uses this document from Virginia in 1644 in his book, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (1994), to introduce a chapter on religion and popular belief. Horn argues, quite convincingly and with plenty of evidence, that English society in the Chesapeake was highly religious, and not all that different from New England. Edward Bond, in his Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (2000) makes a similar argument: historians must take the religiosity of English people outside of New England seriously.

Oh well -- another favorite teaching tool bites the dust. Chris Beneke already made me throw away some of my proverbial yellowed class notes, now some others go into the recycle bin. Thanks a lot, Historianess! More seriously, welcome back to the 21st century!

Call for Commentators/Moderators for the Religion and American Culture Caucus (ASA)

2012-01-17T07:43:00.003-07:00

The Religion and American Culture Caucus was highly successful in increasing the number of panels on religion at the Annual Meeting of ASA in 2011, and we hope to repeat the experience in 2012. To that end, the Caucus has organized several panels for submission to the ASA program committee, but some of them are still in need of moderators/commentators. As a moderator/commentator, you would provide brief introductory comments for the panel, manage time, provide comments on each presentation as well as comments that unite the presentations, and manage Q and A. Moderators/commentators can appear on the ASA program only once, so please do not volunteer for this position if you already have a commitment to the ASA program.

Moderators/commentators are needed for panels on the following topics:

Animals and spirituality

American atheism

Catholicism, violence, and nationalism

Celebrity and religion

Liberation theology

Missionaries and empire

Religion and empire in the New World

Religion and Empire in Asia

Mormonism and race

Mormonism and violence

Presidential religion

Religion in early America

Slavery and abolition

Religion and tourism

Religion and war

If you can volunteer to moderate/comment upon one of these panels, please contact Rebecca Barrett-Fox promptly at rbarrettfox@bethelks.edu. As a reminder, panels cannot be submitted without moderators/commentators, so your generosity here might be the difference between a panel being submitted or not.

These are just some of the great topics that panelists are proposing. This year's Annual Meeting promises to be a great one for scholars of religion. Thanks for your help in making that happen!

Occupying MLK Day

2012-01-16T09:51:00.002-07:00

Paul Harvey

Over at Religion Dispatches today, Kerry Pimblott, Anthea Butler, Edward J. Blum, and myself participate in an online forum/dialogue in which we offer some reflections on MLK and his legacy. I conclude that:

It is impossible to conceive of the civil rights movement without placing black Christianity at its center, for it empowered the rank and file who made the movement move. And when it moved, it was able to demolish the system of legal segregation. The history of black Christianity in America made that transformation possible, even as it frustrated some of the deeper-rooted aims of some activists who sought to address issues of income and wealth inequality as much as the formal legal structures of “civil rights.” That remains the prophetic task of the generation misleadingly labeled as “post-racial.”

Kerry extends her reflections further at her own blog Marginalife, in her post "Remembering King: From Survival to Protest," She writes of trying to foster dialogues between churches and activists, in the way that King partially accomplished (but only through dint of great effort, and even then with sporadic success):

I wonder how we go about pushing our churches toward a more activist ministry in the context of a politics of charity or survival. For those of us that are on the margins of institutional church life – often because of our gender, class, race, age, or political views – how do we use the limited influence we do have to carve out spaces of survival that might lead to protest when the time comes? Should we devote our energy to building spaces within congregations or to secular groups outside of them that require less compromise? . . .

On the flip side, in my activist work I find that a lot of organizers not rooted in evangelical church traditions are often surprised and frustrated by the failure of church leaders to support local struggles against racial and economic injustice. They assume that the ties between such battles and a vaguely defined sense of “Christian mission” are logical and essential. The failure of churches to participate, thus, becomes a further indictment of Christian hypocrisy and church irrelevance. However, what this perspective fails to recognize is that religious institutions, like all institutions, must be recruited into the movement – a reality that requires considerable time, energy, and labor.

A New York Yankee in Savannah's Church Courts: Adele Oltman's Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition

2012-01-15T15:06:00.000-07:00

On this Martin Luther King long weekend, I'm delighted to guest post this entry today from Adele Oltman, the author of one of my favorite works in African American religious history of recent years: Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow, published by University of Georgia Press. This work is just out now in paperback, ready for use in your courses!

Oltman's work is revisionist in the best sense, using close research in local church records to compel a rethinking of how we conceptualize a topic in religious history. In the post below, Adele takes off from John Turner's reflections a few days ago on whether scholars should "show their cards" in terms of their personal religious beliefs/backgrounds, using this to reflect on her own unexpectedly rewarding experience as an "outsider" researching in Savannah, Georgia.

Jeff Sharlet usefully summarized Adele's work when it first appeared, in his list of best books for 2008:

Adele Oltman’s Sacred Mission, Wordly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow (University of Georgia) blooms from a careful, revelatory reconstruction of the spiritual and economic lives of black Baptists in Savannah, Georgia into a critical mediation on the competing philosophies of late nineteenth-century black nationalism that upends the simplistic notions of accommodation and resistance through which Jim Crow-era black leadership is often described. Her impressive range of sources—including church records that were nearly destroyed in a fire—support a compelling analysis of how the sacred and secular intertwined to create a foundation from which African Americans claimed citizenship rights. But Oltman provocatively rejects the notion of a continuous line of influence from the churches she studies to those that animated the American Civil Rights Movement a half-century later. The authority of the former had to give way, she argues, before the movement could flourish.

by Adele Oltman

After reading John G. Turner’s post (1/13), in which he quotes David Hollinger and Elizabeth Clark aboutwhether to reveal one’s faith claim in a preface, I was reminded about thecentrality of my own religious orientation when I was trying to gain access tosources for my dissertation back in the 1990s (Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in theAge of Jim Crow). My plan was to write a community study of black Baptistsbefore the civil rights movement. I was searching for a “black theology”(having learned about liberation theology on trips to Central America duringthe civil war years). In preparation for my research I took courses at theUnion Theological Seminary, up the street from my university -- where I was in theHistory Department. When I told my professors at Seminary about my researchplan, which involved knocking on church doors and asking pastors if I could seetheir records, they dismissed it, saying that black churches didn’t saverecords, and even if they had, they’d never give me – an “outsider” – a look atthem.

I had a lot of chutzpah, and I decided to try anyway. Iended up in Savannah, Georgia, knocking on church doors. And when I was askedwhere I was from and what my faith claims were, I told them: New York City andthat I was a “secular Jew.” Already I was an outsider on three counts(including skin color). It turned out that many of the churches did haverecords, and I was precisely the kind of outsider they were willing to showtheir records to (eg, a Yankee and not a Protestant). Skin color turned out notto be an issue. This experience tells us a great deal about the machinery ofpublic memory in the minds of people in the North and the South.

Researching blackBaptist theology and life from so close to the ground uncovered all kinds ofthings, not much of it resembling the liberation theology I had set out tofind. I came across records of church disciplinary hearings (for a range transgressions including “fornication,” moonshinedistilling, backsliding, being a drunkard, attending Daddy Grace’s tentservices, and for behaving in any manner “unbecoming to Christians”). I alsodiscovered that black Baptists went to the white authorities to settle variouschurch disputes. These same people could not vote.

Church discipline and a dogged determination to achievechurch orthodoxy represented black southerners’ ventures into – and reactionsagainst -- the realm of post-Enlightenment “modernity,” where reason(supposedly) replaces faith and sharper spatial distinctions separate thepublic from private in all areas of life. In their appeals to local white civilauthorities to settle church disputes, emerging black middle class Christianswere in fact promoting new forms of rationality that involved the removal fromthe public realm all appeals to emotion and desire that were associated withthe popular classes. They envisaged a rationalized public space.

DuBois wroteabout black churches in the postbellum era operating like local governments,fulfilling sacred and secular rolesin a world in which black people were excluded. Appealing to white authoritiesin civil government thus represented a step toward secularization. By secularization I mean (in the sense thatMark Lilla writes) a separation between church and civil society, a process oflaicization, where the courts move away from the churches and from enforcingbiblical injunction to consider civil law that is passed by a secularlegislature and judiciary. In a context of a rapidly urbanizing South thesestruggles represent encounters with modernity.

Disciplinary hearings and insistence on theologicalorthodoxy would have seemed quaint, if not unbelievable, to those activists whosat in the pews singing freedom songs during the civil rights movement. Thisunintentional engagement with the idea of a “long civil rights movement,”revealed structural changes that needed to occur before black churches couldbecome the “local movement centers” that Aldon Morris wrote about.

While Turner’s point is whether the author should includereligious orientation in her preface, which I didn’t; I did reveal somethingabout my expectations and even desires, so simpatico with the black freedomstruggle. The story is a cautionary tale, reminding us what we all learned inHistory 101 about a prioriinterpretations and even forcing them to comply with the empirical record ifnecessary.

Columbia Guide to Religion in American History

2012-01-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

Paul Harvey

It's always nice when a book finished in the previous decade appears in the subsequent decade. That's the case with our new one, Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, which took a leisurely stroll from manuscript completion to actual book appearance (as rather lengthy books tend to do), but is now ready for your university library purchase! We're very pleased with the look and appearance of the final product, and the extensive vetting of the manuscript made for a better final book as well.

We blogged about this work before, but in case you don't set to memory my blog posts from 2 years ago, I'll repeat some description here. This work is part of the Columbia Guide to American History and Cultures series, intended to provide authoritative introductions to topics in American history/studies. My co-editor Edward J. Blum and I are very proud to be part of that excellent series. Our book begins with a lengthy introduction outlining and exploring what we call ten "paradoxes of American religious history." Following that are a series of twenty essays by top scholars in their respective specialties. One real treat in the book is the outstanding essay on "colonial encounters" by our own Linford Fisher. Mark Noll provides a concise essay on Theology, the ever-perceptive Jason Bivins on Religion and Politics, and the noted scholar of Islam in America Jane Smith on that topic, Timothy Tseng writes about Asian-American religion, Andrew Manis on "Civil Religion and National Identity," and Ira Chernus supplies a brilliantly incisive essay on "Religion, War, and Peace." I could go on, but that's just a sampling. At the end of the work, we provide a fifty-page "A-Z glossary" defining major terms, people and events of American religious history. Concluding the book is an extensive bibliography, filmography, webliography, and discography compiled by my co-blogmeister Randall Stephens; I think a lot of you will find the discography and filmography hugely helpful in selecting materials to show/listen to in class.

I admit personally a lot of emotion invested in this work, too, as we were completing the original draft manuscript just as my father, William Gipson Harvey (1925-2008), passed away. So the book is dedicated to his memory, as someone who ceaseless work in improving his personal knowledge and practice of medicine showed me the virtues of dedication to and love of a craft. My craft is history, not medicine, but the love of the search for knowledge and understanding, and humility before what one doesn't know and understand, are much the same.

Just as a teaser, here's a bit from the beginning of the introduction that Ed and I authored, which gives a sense of the rest of the work:

We begin with a thematicexploration of American religious history from the colonial era to the present,setting the stage for more specific chapters that follow. Readers can thensurvey the variety shorter essays, as well as bibliographic guides andstatistical appendices. In the specific essays that follow, authors have beenasked to attend to the following tasks:

a) suggest a brief narrative overview of the theme;

b) illuminate some of the major questions and lines of inquirythat have guided scholarship on that theme;

c) articulate a thesis statement summarizing the mostup-to-date thinking on the topic;

d) outline areas where more research is needed on aparticular theme/topic, as well as areas of major scholarly argument betweencontending interpretations

e) provide a brief bibliography pointing to the majorscholarly resources on their topic

This book features tension,conflict, and creativity in America’srich religious history. The specific set of twenty essays, written by topscholars in their respective fields, follow specific religious traditions,movements, and time periods. In this broader introduction, we will firstexplore ten themes, hoping to knit together particular threads of the diverseand ever-multiplying scholarship. Each theme highlights a central tensionwithin the larger framework of American religious history. They can be taken assuggestive starting points for deeper inquiry:

· religiousfreedom and repression;

· (In)tolerance, diversity, and pluralism;

· racialized religion and the desire for auniversal god

· male hierarchies and the feminization ofAmerican religion

· communalist visions and their consequentcommercial capitalist dreams; (or, the Protestant ethic and the spirit oftherapeutic consumerism)

· the folk origins of high theology, and thetheological base of popular religious movements

· proselytization, spiritual recruitment, and themarket economy of religion

· the sacralization of secular politics, and thepoliticization of the sacred

· immigration, the globalization of Americanreligious communities, and ethnic insularity and self-definitions

· regional homogeneity amid national diversity

We hope this book provides an introduction and guide tostudying American religious history in all its dynamism and diversity.

The reviewers of the manuscript noted that the book never settles on one approach exactly, that the essays sometimes stand in contrast or contradiction to one another, and that different scholars provide different ways of looking at the same narrative. That, of course, was precisely the point! The introduction attempts to guide the reader through some of the various approaches, pointing out essays that stand in distinct contrast to each other in method, approach, and conclusion. We hope this provides readers with a way of understanding how the field has been shaped over the last generation in constant dialogue, frequent contention, and, at times, fruitful syntheses.

To Tebow or Not to Tebow?

2012-01-13T10:47:00.015-07:00

On the heels of Seth and Matt's posts about Tim Tebow, I thought we might consider (before tomorrow night's expected demolition of said quarterback) whether or not historians of American religion should engage in their own quiet forms of Tebowing.

Now that I've gotten Brigham Young in his grave, I've had time to begin combing through the stacks of journals that have accumulated in my home over the past several years. I felt a bit like Rip Van Winkle.

David Hollinger, from the most recent issue of Fides et Historia:

"Even when authors make a point of telling readers in a preface 'where they are coming from' (a practice I believe has more costs than benefits, not only in regard to religious orientation but in regard to other identities and loyalties), I can sometimes get secular colleagues to allow that the actual argument made by a book is a sound contribution to a profession, transcending the proclaimed faith commitments of the author. But prefaces proclaiming one's faith function like the Surgeon General's warning on a pack of camels."

Hollinger's own warning (to religious believers writing history) isn't the only or most important question raised in the forum, but it might be a matter of practical concern for many readers of this blog.

Other voices continue to promote gentle forms of academic tebowing. From William C. Ringenberg's review of Elizabeth Clark's latest in the December 2011 issue of the Journal of American History: "It is best therefore to openly acknowledge -- to oneself and to others -- one's intellectual orientation (religious or otherwise), to welcome with charity and even hospitality the insights of other interpreters, and then to work together to best find the record of the human past and the meaning of the human condition."

I studied under George Marsden, who most certainly would have affirmed Ringenberg's irenic suggestion. It makes me feel old to hear historians debate these questions, as I remember hearing Marsden and Jon Butler go back and forth on such matters on more than one occasion. Influenced by Marsden's line of reasoning (who wouldn't want to have some sense of where an author is coming from, simply to satiate curiosity?), I referenced my religious background in my first book. Since emerging from the cocoon of graduate school, I realize that even very modest statements along such lines turn off some potential readers. I think that reaction is quite uncharitable on their part, but there is no point offending others unnecessarily or prompting them to dismiss one's work. Believing historians should probably keep in mind that they are writing for religiously diverse audiences. At the same time, those of other faiths or no faiths could perhaps exercise a greater measure of tolerance when encountering expressions of belief.

For my next book, I initially presumed readers would be curious at the outset to know whether or not I'm a Mormon and briefly wrote a few sentences on the matter. Readers will now face the difficult task of figuring it out on their own. I'm happy to meet anyone over coffee to discuss the question.

[As an aside, are there any Mormon equivalents to Tim Tebow? I don't recall the Jimmer last year thanking Jesus at every turn or affirming his belief in Joseph Smith as a prophet.]

The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama: An Interview with Stephen Tuck

2012-01-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

As a long weekend introduction to the upcoming King holiday, I'll post here Edward J. Blum's interview with the renowned Oxford historian Stephen Tuck, whose challenging work on the long history of the black freedom struggle has drawn much attention. We'll have some other material up soon for the holiday, and also on Monday a brief excerpt from my work Through the Storm, through the Night: A History of African American Christianity, and a dialogue between Blum, Anthea Butler, myself (Paul Harvey) and others will be posted at Religion Dispatches; I'll put a note up about that when it happens.

by Edward J. Blum

A new book from Harvard University Press that all of us whostudy civil rights and African American history must read is Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama. I’ve had the wonderful chanceto get to know Professor Tuck at a few conferences and discussing how this work(and his current research) connect to and challenge some main themes in thestudy of race and religion in the modern United States. So I decided to pull aPhil Sinitiere and go to the source for an interview. Here's my interview with historian Stephen Tuck.

Edward J. Blum (EB): Tell us about the title. Where does it come from and whydid you select it?

Stephen Tuck (ST): It’s a line from a prayer offered by a former slave,sometime after the Civil War. The full prayer goes something like this: “Weain’t what we want to be, we ain’t what we ought to be, we ain’t what we gonnabe, but thank God Almighty, we ain’t what we used to be.” Many African Americanleaders would use it, not least Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.

The book really tries to get away from an ‘everythinggradually gets better’ type storyline, which is so common for this type of book(and which the timeframe, emancipation to Obama might suggest). Also, the book tries to get away from lumpingall African Americans together – the one thing most African Americans have had incommon, though, has been a conviction that they suffered a handicap in the U.S.“We Ain’t What We Ought To Be” seemed to capture all that perfectly.

EB: Since this is a blog for religious historians, what doesyour work offer to help us think more thoroughly about religion and AfricanAmerican freedom struggles?

ST: First up, religion and faith is in the story and integral tothe analysis. It couldn’t be otherwise.

Perhaps the most important point the book makes about religionis to move away from the idea of civil rights protest inevitably being aChristian movement, for various reasons: segregationists also invoked God withpower, the black church often opposed civil rights activists, and many civilrights leaders worked outside the church and traditional Christian belief.There’s also the role of Islam. So Martin Luther King – a Baptistpreacher/political activist really is an exception rather than the norm … andneeds explaining.

This is not to say that Christian faith was not influentialin hastening civil rights progress – the church’s support of the Brown decision was important, and ofthose who changed their views on account of their faith (and there are someextremely moving stories), none switched sides towards white supremacy. But onthe whole, religion’s main role was how those for and against racial equalityused it to their own ends.

EB: The “long civil rights movement” concept seemed socontroversial only a few years ago, but now has caught on like wild fire. Isyour book another salvo for the long civil rights movement, or do you see adistinction in the 1940s/50s/ or 60s?

ST: Actually, the book – emancipation to Obama – goes muchlonger than the 1930s-70s framing that’s now in vogue (and the WWI era and1980s+ were probably my favorite chapters to research). But I make adistinction between the long freedom struggle and the short civil rightsmovement – and in the longer view, I think the civil rights movement of 1960-5is really the exception to what goes on before or after. That’s an exception,not exceptional by the way – not more demonstrations, or braver activists, orbetter leaders, or larger organizations, or the culmination of protest … just adifferent form of protest. Different in the sense that the most visible form isseemingly Southern, non-violent, Christian, for integration, national, rightsfocused, televised, with better off men at the forefront … I could go on, butthat’s certainly not typical of other periods.

One more thing. For all the recent controversies, it’s worthremembering that the great John Hope Franklin wrote the first edition of hisslavery to freedom narrative before the modern civil rights movement even started.

EB: Barbara Savage and Curtis Evans have written recentlyabout the “burdens” of black religion – that there were created assumptionsthat it is necessarily a unit (“black religion” or the “Negro church”) and thatit favors civil rights. Based on your research, why do you think thatassumption exists? And how would you judge its claim that African Americanreligion supports civil rights dynamism?

ST: Short answer to why the presumption that black religionfavors civil rights: Martin Luther King … or at least the popular image of him,the preacher who led a movement that changed America.

Black religion did support civil rights activism: aninstitutional base, a supportive theology, a moral argument in the publicsquare. But the opposite was true at many points, too.

As for black religion being seen a unit, the same falseassumptions are there about just about black anything. It was something thatmany black writers railed against -- Ralph Ellison perhaps put it best when hewrote of “the beautiful and confounding complexities of African Americanculture.”

EB: Who was your favorite character to write about?

ST: Hmm, tricky. I guess I’ll go for Emelda West, a grandmotherin so-called ‘Cancer Alley,’ Louisiana, who ended up in Tokyo facing down thedirectors of a firm that was dumping toxic waste near her home. Quite a story. Can I admit to enjoying writing about some of pompous typesthat strutted through the pages too (not least pointing out their flaws!)?

EB: What frustrated you most in the book – either writing itor events that transpired?

ST: Sometimes I think historians of race are like ER doctors –you sort of have to become immune to the horrors that you see and hold on theuplifiting aspects. But there were moments, even so, when racist actions wereso horrendous, or so petty, that research was pretty demoralizing. That’s notthe same as frustrating, I suppose.

As for the writing, maybe I’m looking back with rose-tintedspectacles now, but – apart from the inevitable ‘how can I ever write this’moments – I enjoyed trying to write a readable narrative full of stories.

EB: And what are you working on now?

ST: Three things: religious reactions to the rise of Jim Crow;UK-US relationship on race protest, and a project looking at how Americanhistory is written abroad (and, by implication, in the US).

Tim Tebow and 316

2012-01-11T15:10:00.004-07:00

by Seth Dowland

Since I believe that the Patriots will smite the Broncos this weekend, the Spirit has moved me to follow upon Matt Sutton’s Tebow post with one of my own. I discerned the need to take hold of the cultural obsession with Tebow before the moment passed.

(The Spirit also moved me to reconsider my plan of using only religious verbs in this post after I beheld that tortured first paragraph.)

The Broncos’ most recent win, an overtime playoff triumph over the mighty Steelers, was the most improbable Tebow victory yet. After directing unlikely comeback wins over the Jets, Vikings, and Bears in the regular season, Tebow led the 8-8 Broncos to an upset victory over the league’s #1-ranked defense on Sunday. The game featured his most complete performance as a passer, capped off by an 80-yard strike to star wide receiver Demaryius Thomas on the first play of overtime.

Of course, we’re not talking about Tebow here because of his quarterbacking skills. We’re talking about him because of his very public evangelical faith. Since his days as a championship-winning quarterback at the University of Florida, Tebow has prominently proclaimed his faith in Jesus, from painting scripture verses on his eye-black to declaring that he was “saving himself for marriage” in a memorable 2009 press conference. Tebow’s good looks and purported chastity, alongside his public “Tebowing,” have made him a folk hero to many evangelicals. As Matt points out below, Tebow’s success galvanizes a group that sees itself as embattled by experts who scoff at the truth.

Tebow represents muscular Christianity in its 21st century form. Evangelicals have long been enamored of big-time sports, though their reasons have varied over the years. Mid-19th century Protestants touted sports’ custodial elements, as they kept young men occupied and away from more ignominious pursuits. By the turn of the twentieth century, as historian Clifford Putney has shown, muscular Christians celebrated the “character-building” qualities of sports. And by the end of the twentieth century, big-time sports appealed primarily because of their popularity; celebrity athletes could proclaim the message far and wide. Tebow represents the confluence of all three strains of muscular Christianity: sports have kept him pure, built his character, and given him a bully pulpit unrivaled in American culture. In an era where “Christian” athletes are often caught with their pants down (sometimes literally), Tebow seems like the real deal.

God’s vindication of Tebow seemed to come in Sunday’s box score. Tebow wound up throwing for 316 yards against the Steelers – not only the highest total a quarterback has mustered against Pittsburgh this year but also an echo of one of Tebow’s favorite verses: John 3:16. Tebow has literally painted evangelicals’ favorite passage on his face in past games, and as if any more proof of his divine favor was needed, Tebow managed to throw for 316 yards exactly. Whosoever believeth...

My own taste runs more to the sardonic, I’m afraid. Who knows what that 316 number could stand for? Maybe God had Lamentations on his mind instead.

I guess we’ll find out more on Saturday night.

Tim Tebow and 2012

2012-01-11T13:15:00.003-07:00

by Matt Sutton

As Tim Tebow’s popularity continues to rise, Barack Obama should be starting to sweat.

Americans love the Denver Broncos quarterback. The big virgin does two things extremely well—he wins football games and he praises Jesus. What could be more American than that?

And yet there is far more to the Tebow phenomenon than football. His success is occurring at precisely the moment that Americans seem most disillusioned with politics, Congressional leaders, the president, and the direction the nation is heading. Washington has seemingly been unable to fix crises ranging from the economy to the war in Afghanistan.

Tebow, in contrast, knows how to solve problems. Like Jesus on steroids, he prays, pulverizes defenses, and scores touchdowns. And then he takes a knee to thank God for the Almighty’s help, sparking the phenomenon now dubbed Tebowing. He has turned the lowly Broncos into division champs and now playoffs winners with his confidence and his surprising ability to bring the best out in those around him.

Tebow’s surging popularity can only be understood in the context of his explicit evangelical faith linked with his willingness to use his image to promote the family-values agenda of the Religious Right. Whether filming a 2011 Super Bowl commercial on behalf of the conservative organization Focus on the Family or explaining his experience as a home-schooled missionary kid, his affinities for the G.O.P. are clear.

In the past, many athletes have worn their faith on their sleeves. But this has not driven their jerseys to become NFL bestsellers or their books to the top of the Amazon sales list. Tebow has tapped into something deeper, something that reaches far beyond sports.

Tebow has come to symbolize evangelicalism as a whole. A perennial underdog whose unorthodox style convinced many scouts that he could never succeed in the pros, he has patiently endured the scoffs of critics. Unable to conform to the style of modern play-callers, he has found success by forcing the game to adapt to him rather than adapting to the game. Tebow embodies the traditional gridiron fundamentals of another era, much as evangelicals call for the nation to return to the old time religion.

Believers identify with Tim Tebow. They have long seen themselves as cultural outsiders who do not get a fair shake in the media, the academy, or popular culture. The deck, they believe, is always stacked against them. But in the end, they expect to prevail. Just like Tebow.

The Tebow moment is occurring at a time in which the Religious Right has fragmented. Jerry Falwell is dead, Pat Robertson rarely makes news, and James Dobson is quietly enjoying retirement.

The current Republican leadership has little to offer evangelicals. As the primary-season-merry-go-round continues, the faithful can choose from an adulterous former speaker, a blunt Catholic, a slick Mormon, or an unelectable governor from Texas (who has compared himself to Tebow).

And yet Tebow has infused the same conservative Christians who are looking askew at their presidential choices with a new sense of hope. Tebow overcomes all odds. Tebow proves the experts wrong. Tebow restores faith. Tebow wins.

Tebow is the anti-Obama.

The president entered the White House with a lot more promise than Tebow brought with him to the NFL. Yet in three years in office, Obama has been sacked time and again. The “change” he promised has failed to materialize.

Tebow, in contrast, has brought life to his team, to his adopted city, to the NFL, and to millions of Christians. His wild, unprecedented popularity should tell the Democrats that they had better proceed cautiously. Tebow demonstrates that a lot of people of faith are enthused about the chance to defy the experts and ride an underdog to victory.

There is still a lot of game left to play before Voting Day. Evangelicals, with their relentless passion and their ability to mobilize at the grassroots, have not yet lined up behind a particular Republican.

The Democrats had better start tebowing in the hopes that they do not. The last thing Obama needs is for evangelicals to channel the energy they are putting into supporting Tebow towards the 2012 campaign. If they do, the President may well get blitzed in November.

Grant Opportunity for Community College Instructors: Religious Pluralism in America

2012-01-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Paul Harvey

Just saw this from Twitterstorian Chris Cantwell (@cdc29) on an NEH-funded program for community college instructors at the Newberry Library: "Out of Many: Religious Pluralism in America." I'll just reprint the full announcement below, or click the link above.
______________________________________________________________

Newberry Receives More Than $325,000 from NEH for Community College Program

January 2012

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has granted the Newberry $326,803 to help community college faculty improve their instruction on American religious pluralism. Utilizing the Newberry’s rich collections and expertise, “Out of Many: Religious Pluralism in America” is a two-year, multi-day seminar program that will bring together 20 community college faculty to explore American religious pluralism through discussions with scholars in the field, public programs, and collaborative research focused on curriculum development.

“This is one of what we hope will be many programs involving our area community colleges, which play an important and, sometimes, pivotal role in furthering knowledge and fostering future scholarship,” Spadafora said. “This latest program nicely rounds out our academic programming, which serves undergraduate and graduate students, continuing scholars, short- and long-term Fellows, high-school teachers, and—most recently—community college instructors. We continue to be deeply grateful for the support of the NEH, without which we could not hope to fulfill our mission.”

“Out of Many: Religious Pluralism in America” will provide community college faculty knowledge and resources with which to design new courses or modify existing curriculum to integrate key episodes from America’s past and present that relate to American religious pluralism.

“Courses in history, literature, art, film, and philosophy, as well as more general ‘Introduction to the Humanities’ courses, can all be strengthened conceptually by drawing upon religious pluralism either as a the unifying theme of a new course or as a unit within preexisting syllabi,” Newberry Vice President of Research and Academic Programs Daniel Greene said. “Integrating the study of religious pluralism into the humanities curriculum also holds potentially important social benefits as well. Students will not only learn about the American past by studying religious pluralism, they also will come to better understand the diverse world in which they live.”

The grant was given to the Newberry’s Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture as part of the NEH’s overall Bridging Cultures initiative, which encourages projects that explore the ways in which cultures from around the globe, as well as the myriad subcultures within America’s borders, have influenced American society. Specifically, the Newberry program falls under the NEH’s Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges Grants, which advance the role of the humanities at community colleges through curriculum and faculty development projects.

The project will be directed by Greene and Christopher Cantwell, Assistant Director of the Scholl Center and religious historian who later this year will publish the paper “Beyond the Protestant Nation: Religion and the Narrative of American History” in the journal Fides et Historia. Greene, who last year was promoted from Director of the Scholl Center to his current position, was a curator and historian at the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Indiana University Press, 2011).

“The National Endowment for the Humanities supports projects that document and explore the human endeavor in its many forms,” said NEH Chairman Jim Leach. “Whether it is preserving a valuable historical collection, enabling the production of a film or exhibition, or providing support for scholarly exploration of important topics in the humanities, the grants awarded today ensure that the shared stories of our past are available to communities across the nation for generations to come.”

The Newberry later will launch an expanded, enduring website featuring the faculty-generated teaching resources that stem from the seminars, which can then be used by all community college instructors as an online guide to integrating American religious pluralism into multiple humanities disciplines.

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

Mormon Books in the Wall Street Journal

2012-01-08T19:36:00.000-07:00

Christopher Jones

(cross-posted at Juvenile Instructor)

In Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Samuel Brown, professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of Utah and author of the recently-released In Heaven as It Is on Earth: Joseph Smith and the Early Mormon Conquest of Death (Oxford University Press, 2012), penned a short annotated list of "the five best" books on Mormonism, which included the following:

Grant Hardy, ed., The Book of Mormon: A Reader's Edition (Oxford University Press, 2003)
Richard Bushman, Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Terryl Givens, The Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Creation of Heresy (Oxford University Press, 1997)
Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
Matthew Bowman, The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith (Random House, 2012)

There's quite a bit to discuss here, I think, and perhaps some to quibble with, too. As I understand it, though, Brown's list was aimed at the average WSJ reader who might want to consult a book on the subject if (when?) Mitt Romney secures the Republican nomination for President, so we can probably forgive him for leaving off tomes like Richard Bushman's 500+ pp. biography of Joseph Smith or those volumes focused solely on a specific event or topic in the Latter-day Saint past that sheds little light on the movement today (i.e. those treating the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Mormon trek westward to Utah, etc.).*

Beyond disagreements over whether or not the books listed here are actually the best, here are a few things that stick out to me:

All five books are relatively recent publications (Givens's The Viper on the Hearth being the oldest), with four of the five being published in the last decade. Does this suggest that scholarship has made such significant advances in recent years that earlier classics (Brodie's No Man Knows My History, Shipps's Mormonism, or even Brooks's The Refiner's Fire)? Or is it simply that these books incorporate and converse with the veritable flood of recent scholarship on the subject and speak more directly to Mormonism's place in the 21st century?
The list includes two general surveys of Mormon history and culture (Bushman's and Bowman's), two books dealing with the 19th century (Hardy's edition of the movement's founding text and Givens's examination of early anti-Mormon literature), and only one focused on something that occurred in the 20th century (Flake's splendid treatment of the controversy surrounding the seating of Mormon Apostle Reed Smoot in the U.S. Senate, and it should be pointed out that this episode occurred in the first decade of the century and speaks as much to Mormonism's 19th century legacy of polygamy and avowed outsiderism as it does to its 20th century trajectory). It's no secret (and a continually-voiced frustration among those invested in the field) that Mormon history has focused (like American religious history more generally) on the decades and centuries prior to the 20th century, and Brown's list reflects that observation. It should be noted, though, that Bushman's and (especially) Bowman's (who studies 20th century American religion) books offer insightful and provocative interpretations of Mormonism's more recent past, and that there are several recently-published and forthcoming books treating various aspects of that history as well. This list may well be more evenly balanced between time periods if written even 3 or 4 years from now.
All five authors whose books are included on the list are, in fact, Mormons. There is many ways to interpret that observation, and I'm not sure entirely how to account for it. It brings to mind, of course, ongoing debates among historians of Mormonism (and of course, scholars of religion more generally) about the perils and promises of being an outwardly religious individual and studying religion--debates that are, at long last, finally coming into conversation with one another. But it also raises important questions about the recent boon in Mormon studies more generally. With endowed chairs at several secular universities and an ever-increasing (in terms of quality and quantity) outpouring of scholarship on the subject, Brown's list made me reflect on whether or not there are enough scholars outside the Mormon tradition studying the Latter-day Saint past to help Mormon studies become something more than a perpetual conversation among believers. The answer, I think (hope?), is that there are--our own John Turner's forthcoming biography of Brigham Young will very likely be given serious consideration on any such future lists, Laurie Maffly-Kipp has authored an introduction to another edition of the Book of Mormon, and several young scholars and graduate students outside the Mormon tradition are currently conducting fascinating research on many aspects of Mormonism's past.

____________________________

*Kathleen Flake's The Politics of American Religious Identity is the notable exception, but the event it focuses on speaks so directly to the ongoing concerns over Mitt Romney's Mormonism today that it would be hard to not include given the list's parameters.

The Evangelical Brain Trust

2012-01-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

Paul Harvey

Posting will be light while many of us are at the AHA/ASCH. In the meantime, enjoy this very thoughtful review of Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson's The Anointed, by Molly Worthen, in the New York Times. And this one by John Schmalzbauer. Both are fruitful examinations/appreciations/critiques of the work. See ya'll back here soon.

Guest Review of Seitz's No Closure and an Invitation

2012-01-04T08:31:00.004-07:00

Today's guest review is from Matthew J. Cressler, a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Northwestern University. His work combines African American and Catholic histories as they intersect with conceptions of the American nation. Matt is also the recipient of the American Catholic Historical Association's fourteenth annual John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award. Please join Matt and his colleagues at the round table on Seitz's book at AHA this Saturday, January 7, 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m, Scandal, Resistance, and Practice: A Roundtable on John Seitz’s No Closure, ROUNDTABLE, Chicago Marriott Downtown, Purdue Room.

A Review of John Seitz’s No Closure (2011) and an Invitation to Join the Conversation

Matthew J. Cressler

In May 2004, the Archdiocese of Boston announced that a number of parishes would be closed across the city. The decision to shutdown nearly eighty parishes across the Boston area was a consequence of the immense financial burden of the Catholic sex abuse crisis, as well as longstanding shifts in urban demographics and church attendance. However, by August, it became clear that some groups of Catholics refused to accept the process of parish shutdown. Parishioners across Boston moved into their closed churches and occupied them in “perpetual vigil” – “with their physical and, they repeatedly insisted, 'prayerful' presence they were going to keep the church open despite the decree against it" (10). John Seitz's No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns is an ethnographic study of those resisting communities that sets out to answer two fundamental questions: why did Catholics resist the closure of their parishes and what does this resistance tell us about contemporary American Catholicism? In the course of answering these questions, Seitz illustrates the contours of what many resistors experienced as a “spiritual abuse” that followed, and was a continuation of, the sexual abuse of the Church. Resisting Catholics were forced to reexamine the lines and limits of their engagement with the Church, to reconsider the Catholic past and its meanings in their lives, and to take up the responsibilities of everyday church management and theology.

But if No Closure is specifically about this small community of Boston Catholics resisting church shutdowns in the wake of scandal, I’m much more interested in how it also serves as an incisive exploration into American Catholicism at the turn of the 21st century. Though the decision to occupy parishes certainly wasn't the norm amidst parish shutdowns, religious life in the liminal space of occupied churches sheds light on contemporary American Catholic life in ways oftentimes invisible to scholars. To name just two of the broader theoretical interventions of Seitz’s work, No Closure examines the particularity of the Catholic parish in American religious history and the problem of modernity in the narratives of American Catholic history.

By considering what happens when a diocese takes away a parish – effectively an exploration of the unmaking of sacred space – Seitz illuminates the peculiar relationship Catholics have with religious places. The pain felt by parishioners at the loss of their spiritual home indicates the distinctive significance of the parish in American religious history, wherein the parish served as a site for the creation of a particular kind of American religious subject with a particular orientation toward places and the sacred presences that populate them. Calling attention to the habituation of the ways Catholics experience sacred spaces and presences – he talks about the ways Catholics “practice” the parish and presence – Seitz powerfully argues that “inherited and internalized narratives of sacred presence, not simply unreflective attachment, kept these Catholics in their parishes” (160).

Though narratives of American Catholic history often assume that Catholics progressively modernized over the course of the twentieth century, moving more and more toward a lay-led democratic style of congregational Catholicism, Seitz suggests an alternative model of American Catholic modernity. Far from having shed their attachments to specific sacred spaces and the real presence of the supernatural – things presumed passé to the modern religious subject – resisting Catholics struggled over the sacredness of their own parish spaces against an institutional Church that argued churches were merely brick and mortar. Resistors adopted the postconciliar image of themselves as the "living stones" of the Church at the same time that they defended the physicality of the sacred contained in the stone walls of their parish. No Closure thus breaks down the binary map of American Catholicism after Vatican II, demonstrating that many Catholics continued to experience the upheavals of the conciliar era and developed their own interpretations of the Catholic past that do not map neatly onto the postconciliar liberal-conservative map.

Early on in the book Seitz says "this book is not the end of a conversation, but the opening of one" (20). In the spirit of this invitation, I want to invite everyone interested not only to read this compelling book, but also to literally join the conversation this January. Those of you planning on attending the American Historical Association’s winter meeting this January in Chicago, or any of the various related groups like the American Society of Church History or the American Catholic Historical Association, are invited to “Scandal, Resistance, and Practice: A Roundtable on John Seitz’s No Closure.” John McGreevy, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, John Seitz, and my fellow Northwestern doctoral candidate Brian Clites, will join me in a discussion that will use Seitz’s book to open a conversation on themes such as power dynamics between laity and clergy, the construction of Catholic identities, the sacralization of place, and the many ways Catholics have related to their own past at the turn of the twenty-first century.

God and Country in the Iowa Caucuses

2012-01-04T06:16:00.006-07:00

Randall Stephens

So the close vote in the Iowa Caucus was unprecedented. See Darren Grem's early morning summary here. (He was probably up before I was here in Oslo!)

I found a couple of the candidates' quotes interesting for the purposes of this blog. What does it mean when GOP frontrunners speak of taking back America and comment on America's godly heritage? Would that rhetoric have meaning if Mitt Romney or, perhaps in an alternate universe, Rick Santorum were president? Put another way . . . would these comments have practical applications?

Mitt Romney on Tues, Jan 3:

I think President Obama wants to make us a European style welfare state, where instead of being a merit society, we're an entitlement society, where government's role is to take from some and give to others. What I know is if they do that, they'll substitute envy for ambition, and they'll poison the very spirit of America and keep us from being one nation under God.*

Rick Santorum on Tues, Jan 3:

God has given us this great country to allow his people to be free. I offer a public thanks to God. . . . You have taken the first step toward taking back this country.*

Who Has a Religion? Baker and Wenger on Definitions of Religion in the 1920s

2012-01-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

by Edward J. Blum

“Get anything good for Christmas?” a friend nonchalantlyasked several days after J.C.’s birthday. My enthusiastic response, “Oh yeah, abook on the Klan; was actually reading it Sunday morning listening to acousticsunrise,” was met with irritation in the form of disinterest. The friend didn’treally care what I had received, and he didn’t really want to entertain aconversation about the Klan. He shot back, “weird.” I, of course, was blind tohis hopes for distance and pressed in. “It’s really neat, the author takesseriously the religious ideas of the Klan – from their white robes to theirsense of American history and exceptionalism.” Sadly, the conversation went theway most of mine go with non-academics. The harder I tried for him to see how fascinatingthis was, he just didn’t care, and once again retorted, “yeah, just soundsweird.” At this point, I got it and turned the conversation to a religiousinterest everyone seemed to share: Tim Tebow and the magical run of the DenverBroncos.

I’ve had enough conversations with non-academics who seem togo into snooze mode when I invade their worlds with the past, but I still feltsad that my pal would rather talk about a mediocre quarterback for a mediocreteam than about heritages of hate and what they mean for our nation. But evenmore, I was bummed that my friend did not want to understand that what we thinkabout “religion” influences even stories like that of young man Tebow.

Of course, the book I was trying to tell my friend about wasKelly Baker’s Gospel According to theKlan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930. I don’t want torehearse its main arguments here – how GospelAccording to the Klan looks not just at what the Klan was against, but alsoat what they were for, how it showcases the ways in which their whiteProtestant nationalism pervaded their sense of manliness, femininity, andhistory, or how the Klan’s print culture was so crucial to their sense ofidentity and imagination. Those are all excellently fleshed out in the book andshown so nicely through the Klan’s public writings.

What I would like to draw our attention to is how ProfessorBaker’s study and a slightly older book, Tisa Wenger’s fantastic We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (2009), provide anotherlayer of religious division and redefinition during the 1920s. Wenger showsthat the 1920s conflicts over Pueblo dances became moments when notions of“religion” collided. For the United States government, religion was somethingdistinct and somewhat separable from other spheres of life, but many Pueblo hadno sense of that division. As white modernists who were sympathetic to thePueblo rallied to their side, they helped create the idea that the Indian danceswere “religious” and hence should be protected against federal legislation bythe First Amendment. Yet by forcing American governmental approaches toreligion upon the issue and by defining one aspect of Pueblo behavior asreligious, they helped sever the totality of Pueblo life into supposedlydiscreet parts (religion, land, politics, society, etc.) Thereafter, Nativeclaims to land, remains, or treaty recognitions have been battled on the legaland religious terrain established by the American government.

We all know the 1920s as a time of religious dissension anddebate. Modernists and Fundamentalists raged against one another; Bryan andDarrow battled at the “trial of the century” in a small Tennessee town; SisterAimee Semple McPherson polarized the West with flappers and Pentecostals on oneside and liberals and the mainline on the other. Together, Baker and Wenger addanother layer – the layer of religion itself. In both cases, the verydefinition of “religion” was up for grabs. In Baker’s case, contemporaries ofthe Klan tried to demolish them as non-Christian or as makers of a false faith.The Klan tried hard to create a viable religious worldview, and for an“Invisible Empire,” they sure made it visible in their print culture and publicperformances. For Wenger’s folks, Native American life had to be atomized sothat certain elements could be construed as religious. By obtaining a“religion,” the Pueblo had to give up some of their definitional control.

So to my friend who would rather talk Tebow than Klan robes,I understand. It is less mentally strenuous to debate the case of Tim Tebow –whether accuracy is as important as admiration, whether completion percentagesmatter more than charismatic personhood, or whether we should privilegecomebacks over Christian being. But if we want to get to the core of Tebow orany other fascination rendered “religious” in America, we can get a little helpfrom our friends Kelly Baker and Tisa Wenger. See you all in Chicago.

Teaching, Playing, and Praying: Evangelical Networking and Community Building in Modern America

2012-01-02T21:44:00.003-07:00

Paul Harvey

One more AHA/ASCH session for you all to consider, especially for those of you interested in contemporary evangelical subcultures, home schoolers, and prayer warriors:

Teaching, Playing, and Praying: Evangelical Networking and Community Building in Modern America

AHA Session 48

Friday, January 6, 2012: 9:30 AM-11:30 AM

Chicago Ballroom D (Chicago Marriott Downtown)

Chair:

Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University

Papers:

Community Building and Networking among Homeschoolers in Delaware County, Indiana, 1980–2010
Rachel E. Coleman, Indiana University

Love and Spiritual War: Prayer and Community in Modern America
David W. McConeghy, University of California, Santa Barbara

Comment:

Randall Balmer, Barnard College, Columbia University

Session Abstract
Violence in public schools, anonymous neighborhoods that lack a sense of community, and legalized abortion all represent social, economic, spatial, and demographic changes that threatened the evangelical ideal of Christian schools, Christian neighborhoods, and Christian nation in the late twentieth century. Rather than attacking these problems head-on, many evangelicals built dynamic networks in an effort to realize their ideals outside the mainstream. In this effort evangelicals participated in a paradoxically mainstream American tradition of self-identifying as “outsiders” while endeavoring to create utopias. This panel addresses three such networks in the form of homeschooling, megachurches, and prayer marches. Yet even as evangelicals’ attempts to construct ideal communities are part of a longstanding American tradition, the three papers presented here also reveal the innovative ways in which evangelicals are building networks and communities today.
            First, Rachel Coleman’s study of Christian homeschoolers in Delaware County, Indiana, demonstrates the successes and challenges of local evangelical networking in an era of technology. While Coleman’s homeschool subjects, eager to protect their children from ungodly influences, originally created a “homeschool community” that shut out non-Christian homeschoolers, the Internet soon served to decentralize and democratize homeschooling, offering greater opportunities but less social control. By focusing on the mechanics of this local network’s evolution, Coleman reveals a pattern that sheds light on national homeschooling’s creative solution to the isolation of the digital age.
            Second, and in contrast to the democratizing forces at work in Coleman’s homeschoolers, Lauren Beaupre’s study of Bellevue Baptist Church reveals the increasingly insular communities of modern megachurches. Replacing intimate neighborhoods with religious centers that provided education, recreation, and entertainment, Bellevue and other megachurches holistically attended to a dispersed Christian community. In response to large-scale reorganizations of metropolitan space, community became a religious product for sale in enormous religious complexes that were more like small towns than traditional parishes. Buying into the product was easy, but Beaupre also reveals the challenges created by one-stop shopping for the broader local community.
            Finally, where Coleman sees a Christian alternative to public education and Beaupre highlights a Christian alternative to restoring residential neighborhoods, David McConeghy shows how prayer became a Christian alternative to public policy or legislation. Prayer was both a weapon to be wielded in the “culture war” against secularism and the olive branch shared among divided Christian churches. American communities could be redeemed if they could either be purged of sin or united by revival, and new spatial and geographic prayer techniques emerged to facilitate God’s intercession for spiritual breakthroughs on secular obstacles.
            The three networks examined here affirm the creativity and resourcefulness of evangelicals in attempting to recreate their ideal of Christian schools, Christian neighborhoods, and Christian nation. Yet while education, church, and prayer had long been important to evangelicals, the alternative communities they formed in the late twentieth century differed from previous efforts in their use of communications technologies, economies of scale, and critical geographies. Together these networks show evangelicals adeptly balancing the past and present in order to save American communities.

AHA/ASCH Sessions of Interest

2012-01-02T14:57:00.001-07:00

Paul Harvey

In addition to our session "Reassessing the Significance of Religion in the Twentieth Century United States" this Saturday afternoon at the American Historical Association, which I blogged about previously, here are a few more sessions for you to consider, ranging from a reconsideration of Harry Stout's New England Soul to papers on religious networks in the early modern Atlantic world. See some of you in Chicago! If you have a session that you particularly want to promote here, contact me and we should be able to put it up.

Also, and by the way, if you need something to do Saturday morning but you figure going to our session Saturday afternoon will suffice for your religious history needs, here's a cool session on digital history (follow the link for info), featuring some of the leading lights in presenting history in new ways, including Philip Ethington (who will be talking about geo-historical visualization), Katrina Gulliver (who will discuss her podcasts "Cities in History"), and Jennifer Serventi from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Harry Stout’s The New England Soul after 25 Years

American Society of Church History 9

Friday, January 6, 2012: 9:30 AM-11:30 AM

Promenade Ballroom A (Westin Chicago River North)

Chair:

Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame

Catherine A. Brekus, University of Chicago , James Byrd, Vanderbilt University , Thomas Kidd,Baylor University and Kenneth P. Minkema, Yale University

Comment: Harry S. Stout, Yale University
_______________________________________________

A Place for Grace: Religion and Contests of Identity in theMississippi River Valley, 1812–45

American Society ofChurch History 13

Friday, January 6,2012: 2:30 PM-4:30 PM

Jackson Park Room (Westin Chicago River North)

Chair:

Amanda Porterfield, FloridaState University

Papers:

Not Just "ALamp to Their Feet": Identity and Christian Print in the MississippiValley in the 1810s
Christine Alice Croxall, University of Delaware

"Electricityto the Churches of the East": Home Missions and the Mississippi Valley,1814–45
Brian Franklin, Texas A&M University

"Go Downinto Jordan: No, Mississippi": Mormon Nauvoo and the Rhetoric of Place
Seth Perry, University of Chicago

Comment:

Comment: Amanda Porterfield, Florida StateUniversity
___________________________________________________________

Religious Networks, Alliances, and Friendship in the EarlyModern Atlantic World
AHA Session 109
Saturday, January 7,2012: 9:00 AM-11:00 AM

Los Angeles Room (Chicago Marriott Downtown)

Chair:

Ned C. Landsman, StonyBrook University

Papers:

Catalogues ofFriends: The Meaning of Friendship for Early Modern Religious Seekers
Rosalind J. Beiler, University of Central Florida

Godparents andSocial Networks in Schenectady, New York, 1680–1800
Edward Tebbenhoff, Luther College

"A Part ofOne's Soul": Spiritual Friendship and Evangelical Networks in EarlyAmerica
Janet M. Lindman, Rowan University

Comment: John Fea, Messiah College

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

2012-01-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

Paul Harvey

Some of you may have seen reviewed in the New York Times Book Review today (or in the Wall Street Journal, less insightfully, yesterday) John Barry's new book Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. Barry has been best known for hugely popular works of twentieth-century history, including my favorite Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. Evidently, according to the introduction to this new book, he had set out to write another work on early twentieth-century religion, but he kept pressing backwards to get to the origins of what he was studying, and he ended up at Roger Williams.

Down the road a bit Linford Fisher will be discussing this work in more detail at our blog, along with some thoughts on the founding of what is now his home state (Rhode Island). Until then, for those interested in this work, Barry has an extensive piece up at the Smithsonian magazine, which serves as something as a precis for this work. A brief excerpt:

Williams believed thatpreventing error in religion was impossible, for it required people tointerpret God’s law, and people would inevitably err. He therefore concludedthat government must remove itself from anything that touched upon humanbeings’ relationship with God. A society built on the principles Massachusettsespoused would lead at best to hypocrisy, because forced worship, he wrote,“stincks in God’s nostrils.” At worst, such a society would lead to a foulcorruption—not of the state, which was already corrupt, but of the church.

The dispute definedfor the first time two fault lines that have run through American history eversince. The first, of course, is over the proper relation between government andwhat man has made of God—the church. The second is over the relation between afree individual and government authority—the shape of liberty.

In her New York Times Book Review piece on the book, Joyce Chaplin notes the contrast between the "visions of America" of Williams in Rhode Island and Father Serra in California (and one could easily come up with numerous other examples here):

Consider the 18th-century Catholic missionary, FatherJunípero Serra. He assumed that Spaniards had the right to take up land inCalifornia and that the church had the duty to reorganize Indians intoChristian settlements, by force if necessary. Three thousand miles fromProvidence, at a rest stop on Interstate 280 in Northern California, alarger-than-life image of Serra faces the Pacific. Its back is turned againstWilliams’s far-off statue, as if also against his radical example of what NewWorld societies might represent.

The United States is part Serra,part Williams. A “hedge or wall of Separation” between church and state wasaffirmed by the Constitution; rights for Indians were not. Williams would haveconsidered it a battle half-won. He did not think an “American soul” needed tobe created — such souls already existed within Indians. By largely confiningWilliams’s story to the establishment of liberties for America’s adoptedpopulations, without equal attention to the defense of its indigenousinhabitants, Barry has perhaps underestimated his remarkable subject.

On that subject, as a side note/interview to the Smithsonian piece, Barry has some further thoughts on precisely this issue, posted in interview format.

We'll look forward to Lin's more expert thoughts on this subject and Barry's book in the near future.

Fake Titles 3.0

2011-12-30T09:33:00.005-07:00

Randall Stephens

You can never come up with enough fake titles. Someone has even created a fake title generator. (Here's what I got from the site: Oppressing, Representing, Protesting: Sexuality in George Orwell and the Cultural Ego of Relic in Animal Farm.) So, once again, here are a few fake titles in religious studies and American religious history. (I like to get some ideas from journal titles found on Project Muse.)

White Elephant Gifts of the Spirit: TV Preachers in the 1990s

The Prevangelicals: Pietists, Preachers, and Divinity Pedlars in the Early Modern West

Local Weathermen and the Pornotropics of Doppler Iconography in Cleveland, Ohio, 1997-1999

"Broadminded is spelled s-i-n": The Theology of the Louvin Brothers

Stand Up and Shout It: Bible Quizzing, Performativity, the Politics of Affective Agency, and {Em}bodiment

Whorehouse Faith: The Lived Religion of the Painted Ladies of Chicago's Little Hell, 1880-1906

On the Road Again: Hobo Graphotheologies from Bangor, Maine, to Cave Creek, Arizona, 1929-1950

Raise Your Paws and Praise Him: Dogs at Worship and in Community

The Legend of the Great Salt Lake Mormon Merman, 1890-1902

Planet of the Apes, the Twilight of Scientism, and Dystopian Premillennial Predilections

Tinseltown Preacher Cowboys, Shirtless Suburban Gurus, and Hippie Pretindians of the Southwest: Baby Boomers working off Script during their Religious Quests, 1966-1973

Literature and Secularization: At MLA and in Print

2011-12-29T07:57:00.001-07:00

by Everett Hamner

For any of you blog readers who might be at MLA (program is linked here) rather than AHA in a few days(gasp!), there's a session you won't want to miss. Several of the mostprovocative, insightful scholars at the intersection of religion and literaturewill be participating on a panel entitled "Literature andSecularization" (Friday, 3:30-4:45, WSCC 617). Facilitated by SusannahBrietz Monta (Notre Dame, and editor of Religionand Literature), this roundtable will feature Lori Branch (Iowa, author of Rituals of Spontaneity); John Cox (HopeCollege, Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeareand Skeptical Faith); Tracy Fessenden (Arizona State, Culture and Redemption); William Franke (Vanderbilt, Poetry and Apocalypse); Colin Lovell Jager(Rutgers, New Brunswick, The Book of God);and Michael W. Kaufmann (Temple, coordinator of recent Religion and Literature forum, "Locating thePostsecular").

While I'm in advertising mode, many of you--religious studies and history typesincluded--might well enjoy Amy Hungerford's PostmodernBelief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960 (Princeton, 2010). Ireviewed this for Religion and Literaturerecently (43.1, Spring 2011), and here's the opening paragraph:

Atfirst glance, Amy Hungerford’s second book might seem literary criticism’sanswer to Robert Wuthnow’s After Heaven:Spirituality in America Since the 1950s, which shows how Americans havedrifted away from institutional religious commitments and toward more informal,syncretistic spiritualities. However, Hungerford reveals not just a looseningand recombination of doctrines and practices, but the return of a “belief inmeaninglessness” (xiii) rooted in transcendentalism and Romanticism. Postmodern Belief is an examination offaith without content, trust in the nonsemantic, belief as itself a form ofritual, all as discerned primarily through the work of writers rarelyidentified as religious themselves, but who still “live in oblique relation tothe structures and discourses of institutional religion” (xvi). Rather thanconcerning herself with these authors’ theologies, Hungerford investigatestheir convictions about literature. In fact, “their literary beliefs areultimately best understood as a species of religious thought, and theirliterary practice as a species of religious practice” (xvi).

The Genesis of Jesus Rock: An Interview with David W. Stowe

2011-12-28T04:39:00.006-07:00

Randall Stephens

David W. Stowe is a professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He has written on jazz history, hymns, and rock music. Stowe is the author of a wide range of books and articles, including Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Harvard University Press, 1996); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard University Press, 2004); and, most recently, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Below I interview Stowe about his excellent new book and his insights into Jesus rock and the culture of conservative evangelicalism.

Randall Stephens: What drew you to the topic of the roots of Christian rock?

David W. Stowe: I was intrigued by the historical moment of the early Seventies—1971 to be exact—when it seemed popular music and youth culture were saturated in allusions to Jesus Christ: Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, several Top 40 songs with Jesus in their titles or verses. Why had the Son of God seemingly taken over U.S. popular culture at just that moment—when the countercultural energies of the Sixties were metamorphosing into something new? And did this music play some role in reshaping American culture during the Age of Reagan and beyond?

These struck me as questions worth trying to answer. There was a personal angle as well. I came of age during the Seventies and have always been fascinated by that decade, which I remember now as if it were some kind of dream. So Christian pop music—of which I was completely oblivious until about 15 years ago—was a lens through which to make sense of that strange interlude between Kent State and the Reagan Revolution.

Stephens: Why did a Christian analogue to rock music develop when and where it did?

Stowe: Like many forms of the Sixties counterculture, Christian rock first emerged in California. More precisely Orange County, the epicenter of what was dubbed the Jesus Movement. It was at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa where Chuck Smith famously teamed up with über-Jesus freak Lonnie Frisbee. Larry Norman came out of the Bay Area and had a major impact as well. But it’s important to note that the West Coast didn’t have a monopoly on Jesus music. The Rez Band (still in business) originated in

Milwaukee and made a very successful debut run across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. CCM guitar hero Phil Keaggy did a stint at Love Inn in upstate New York. [Check out the McCartney, Ram-esque Keaggy song in the youtube clip here.] So this Jesus Movement—and the music that went with it—was a national phenomenon.

Stephens: You focus quite a bit of attention on apocalypticism. How did end-times views shape Christian rock and, even, politics?

Stowe: Apocalyptic themes had bounced around in American pop music since early Dylan—“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—and Barry McGuire’s surprise number-one hit of 1965, “Eve of Destruction.” A sense of living in end times tinged the late Sixties counterculture—a certain Cold War fatalism permeated American society for decades--so it made sense that an apocalyptic mindset would filter into the Jesus Movement. Among other things, it makes a catchy theme for a lyric. Witness Larry Norman’s most famous song: “Children died, the days grew cold/A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold/I wish we’d all been ready. . . .”

It didn’t hurt that these messages were being reinforced by the best-selling book of the seventies, Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth. Politically, end-times prophecy tends to work against social and political movements, reformist or revolutionary. What’s the point of transforming the world if God is going to bring the curtain down on the whole sorry human enterprise? So most of the Jesus Freaks—and the musicians they listened to—focused on saving as many souls as they could before the Rapture.

Stephens: By concentrating on artists who were crossover, or more mainstream performers—like Al Green, Bob Dylan, and Aretha Franklin—you extend what most people might think of as Christian music or Christian rock. I wonder if you might say something about the tensions that existed between those who reached a larger, mainstream market and those who were fairly fixed within the Christian genre.

Stowe: This tension was one of the most intriguing aspects of the Christian pop phenomenon. On the one hand, the Jesus Movement tried to cast a wide net and welcome as diverse a following as possible. On the other hand, its theology was quite orthodox. There was a deep suspicion of alternate spiritualities of the kind that were floating around pop music especially after the Beatles went off to the Maharishi’s ashram at Rishikesh. Many of the decade’s most successful artists, whose music invoked religious and Christian themes—the ones you’ve mentioned, but also Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, even Johnny Cash—weren’t embraced by the Jesus Movement. Jesus freaks pretty much ignored them. From a broader historical perspective, though, it was important to make sense of their relation to the baby boom evangelicals who were cutting their spiritual teeth in those years.

Stephens: Could you describe how you think Christian rock has changed since its early days in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

Stowe: It’s become both much more commercially slick and much more musically diverse. In the early days, Christian rock was mostly folk-rock, or just plain folk. Even hard rock was a bit of a stretch. Now one can find every genre of pop music represented in CCM: hardcore, hip-hop, punk, Goth, Norwegian death metal. CCM is now a very large and profitable market genre—outselling jazz and classical combined—so the promotion and production value of the music has gone way up. It’s theology tends to be much more eclectic as well. As I argued in the New York Times last spring, the innocently promiscuous mixing of Christian language in “secular” music doesn’t happen as it did during the early years of Christian rock; the secular/sacred divide seems to have hardened. Although, as is always the case when generalizing about a huge diverse culture form like popular music, important exceptions can be found.

Stephens: What projects are you currently working on?

Stowe: A short book on the varied forms Psalm 137 has taken in North America. That’s the one that begins, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. . . . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” I call it American’s longest-running protest song. Its history stretches from the earliest Pilgrim psalters through adaptation to the American Revolution, abolitionist movement, Harlem Renaissance, civil rights movement, and the widely covered reggae version, “Rivers of Babylon.” It’s a good lens for thinking about the varied social and political uses to which a thirteen-verse Hebrew poem can be put, and the endless inventiveness of music to wrap itself around ideology.

Food and Spirituality in the South: Chick-fil-A and Bessinger Bros. BBQ

2011-12-27T09:56:00.000-07:00

By Michael J. Altman
[Cross-posted at michaeljaltman.net]

A couple delicious articles crossed my plate just before the Christmas weekend and I didn't want the connections between them to sneak by. Over at the wonderfully put together museum of religion and spirituality with a hipster aftertaste, Frequencies, Darren "DEG" Grem has written a piece that dives into the spirituality of the Chick-fil-A sandwich. Meanwhile, in the [web]pages of New York Times Magazine I came across a piece from Jack Hitt on the barbecue feud that has torn apart the Bessinger family of South Carolina in the past two decades. I have spent my whole life in the South. I've spent the past four years in Atlanta, where you can't throw a rock without hitting a white Styrofoam cup of Chik-fil-A lemonande, and before that I spent six years in different parts of the mustard based barbecue region of South Carolina. Reading Grem and Hitt reminded me of the ways food in the South partakes of the sacred, the political, and the domestic. Not that it doesn't do these things in other places, but in the South I can speak from the privileged place of an insider with experience.

That spirituality in the marketplace, or in the chicken sandwich, is both real and illusory at the same time--that it is always already revealing and obscuring--is Grem's strongest point. He writes:

We can’t take Chick-fil-A’s claims about its sandwich at face value because we lose something in the process. We lose the connection between spirituality and the people who make up the marketplace and the networks and chains that support contemporary capitalism. But we also can’t just dismiss these claims about the spirituality of work, of goods, of companies, of people—or stop with investigative exposés of how it has or has not filtered down to the bottom or up to the top of the corporate triangle. That doesn’t really dive into the messy endeavor to explain spirituality in the marketplace, either as a complicated and layered phenomenon or as an organized but diverse and divided movement.

Indeed, spirituality is messy. It is material. It is juicy and topped with pickles. And sometimes it pays for bowl games. Grem challenges those trying to trace the role of spirituality in the market and the market in spirituality to go further than simply following the money, or the prayers, or the products. Where that leads I'm not completely sure and Grem doesn't completely reveal but I think the Lowcountry of South Carolina offers us up a case study.

Jack Hitt's article on the Bessinger brothers various chains of mustard sauced barbecue in the Lowcountry of South Carolina is worth a full read and, for me, served as a reminder of the shock I experienced when I first encountered yellow barbecue. Having grown up in North Carolina my tongue was trained on vinegar and I could never accept the Gospel of the mustard seed. Then in college I gave up pork altogether and so I took my place on the sidelines of the great barbecue debate--though I don't think that dry stuff from down in Alabama ever stood a chance.

Hitt's article focuses on the fallout between the four Bessinger brothers, each of whom are in the BBQ business, in the wake of Maruice Bessinger's decision to raise the confederate battle flag over each of his Maurice's BBQ restaurants. This was Bessinger's response to the decision by the South Carolina legislature to remove the flag from the roof of the capitol building. (It has since been moved to a gilded pole in on the capitol grounds, a spot more visible than it ever was way up on the roof.) Maurice's older brother Melvin, who owns Melvin's BBQ in Charleston, avoided politics and has seen his fortunes improve as his brother's neoconfederate ideology continues to hinder his business. In some ways the whole story is a Cain and Able narrative but everyone has the meat in their offering.

What jumped out to me in the article and why it connected to Grem's piece was the following:

Maybe 200 people turned out at the post-rally barbecue at Maurice's bottling plant. He had set up a giant shed to seat 500, so the gathering looked like a failure. The machines were walled off by pallets of Maurice's boxes, each stamped with the word ''Kosher.'' Maurice, a lay preacher, began the long afternoon of speeches.

''This is our only hope,'' Maurice explained, pointing to the giant Confederate flag behind him. ''As the government gets more and more tyrannical, they will hand over more power to a world government. And then the Antichrist will just come in and say, 'Thank you very much.'''

Maurice is comfortable weaving religion with barbecue: there is a weekly Bible-study session at each of his pits. Later on, in the privacy of his office, he let slip a secret of his sauce. ''The recipe,'' he said, ''is in the Bible.''

''Does it start with Jesus' parable of the mustard seed?'' I joked. Maurice's eyes flared, as if I had correctly guessed that his middle name was Rumpelstiltskin, and he refused to discuss it further.

''You can just say that my Carolina Gold is a heavenly sauce,'' he said. ''I believe that after the rapture there will be a big barbecue, and I hope the Lord will let me cook.''

Hitt was tantalizingly close to getting at the spirituality of the barbecue. But he made the mistake about which Grem warns. He got flippant. He thought he could see through the Bible study to what was "really going on." And Bessinger clammed up. Neoconfederate ideology, conservative Protestantism, pork infused apocalypticism, and the faith of a mustard seed; how do these add up? I really want to know. The mess that Grem prods us towards has been quickly yanked back from Hitt. The connections between the spiritual and the material, and even the political, are there. But what are they?

What does the sacred taste like? Who brings the potato salad to Jesus's mustard based glory? What makes those chicken sandwiches so God blessed delicious? (And DEG, you forgot about he biscuits.) To find these answers we must resist the urge to make jokes. We must remain humble and quite. We must listen. Then maybe we'll find out what it will be like when Christ returns to bless the righteous and smite the tomato and the vinegar based.

Oh, and if you are looking for barbecue in South Carolina, I recommend Shealy's in Batesburg-Leesville. If you can't find it just ask anyone you meet west of Columbia.

Reappraising the Significance of Religion in the Modern U.S.: 2012 AHA Session

2011-12-26T19:03:00.000-07:00

Paul Harvey

Some of you blog readers may be getting ready for the 2012 American Historical Association meeting in sunny Chicago Jan. 5-8 2012. Because the AHA meets in conjunction with the American Society of Church History and the Catholic Historical Association, there are really too many sessions on American religion to list usefully. So instead I'll feature a few sessions of interest that particularly catch my eye in the coming days here, and invite the rest of you to promote sessions of interest to you, either in the comments section or by sending me a guest post.

To start with, here's hoping you'll drop by our session, pasted in below, on "The Evangelical Century: Reappraising the Significance of Religion in the Modern United States." Details below.

Saturday, January 7,2012: 2:30 PM-4:30 PM

Kansas City Room (Chicago Marriott Downtown)

Chair:

Anthea Butler, Universityof Pennsylvania

Papers:

A Reversal ofFortunes: Economic Crisis, Protestant Decline, and the Rise of a NewEvangelical Era
Alison Collis Greene, Mississippi State University

World War II andthe Birth of Modern American Evangelicalism
Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University

The Naked PublicSquare and the Culture War: Why Evangelicalism Mattered in Reagan's America
Steven P. Miller, Webster University

Comment:

Paul W. Harvey, Universityof Colorado Colorado Springs

Session Abstract

The twentieth century United States, according to the standardnarratives, was defined by growing secularism and pluralism. Heavy immigrationof Jews and Catholics in the progressive era, and of Hindus, Buddhists, andMuslims since the 1960s, created what scholar Diana Eck calls “a new religiousAmerica,” one in which no single group has a monopoly on power. The members ofthis panel are not so sure. While there is no doubt that the United States isfar more diverse today than it was in 1900, American evangelicals havenevertheless managed to shape the nation’s trajectory in important ways in thelast one hundred years. Building on new archival research, these papers seek toreappraise the significance of American evangelicalism in the modern UnitedStates.

Alison Greene focuses on an important shift that began in the1930s. Until the Great Depression, the nation’s established churches were on anupward trajectory in both numbers and influence. But the Great Depressioncrippled the Protestant establishment. At the same time, the economic crisismade room for evangelical and pentecostal churches that emphasized individualsalvation and authentic religious experience. While the established churchesstruggled to maintain programming and participation, upstart evangelicals andpentecostals employed creative techniques and a core of committed volunteers tokeep church operations afloat and expand membership. While it would be decadesbefore evangelicals and pentecostals rivaled their established counterparts in numbersand national influence, the Great Depression marked the beginning of a gradualtransition of power from the mainline to its upstart rivals.

Matthew Sutton's paper (revised since the original proposal) discusses the reaction of fundamentalists to World War One, tracing that era as one of the creation of a religious movement that grew to be hyper-patriotic and suspicious of government at the same time.

Steven Miller examines more recent expressions of evangelism. Heargues that the growing prominence of Reagan-era evangelicalism produced twometaphors that profoundly informed subsequent discussions of faith and publiclife: Richard John Neuhaus’ “naked public square” and James Davison Hunter’s“culture war.” Neuhaus argued that secular elites had “systemically excludedfrom policy consideration the operative values of the American people, valuesthat are overwhelmingly grounded in religious belief,” while Hunter described aconflict between “progressive” and “orthodox” forces in American society. Inthe end, neither metaphor could transcend a defining characteristic of latetwentieth-century America: the complex, often ironic influences ofevangelicalism on U.S. politics and culture.

Revival of Religion and American Culture Book Series from University of Alabama Press

2011-12-23T10:59:00.001-07:00

Paul Harvey

Over the last few months, my friends Charles Israel (Auburn University) and John Giggie (University of Alabama) have been making plans to revive the Religion and American Culture series of books published by the University of Alabama Press -- in years past luminaries such as Wayne Flynt, Ed Harrell, and Edith Blumhofer edited this series. You senior scholars and graduate mentors out there, please keep them in mind to send promising dissertations-soon-to-be-book-manuscripts their way.

I received the following email from John recently, and got his permission to repost it here, as an advertisement for this series and as a call for those of you, junior and senior scholars alike, with book manuscripts that you're shopping around to contact the editors, who are aggressively recruiting authors for the series. Here's a bit more information; use the links above to contact Charles and/or John if you have a manuscript or a book project idea for them that you want to discuss:

I wanted to thank you again for agreeing to serve on the editorial advisory board for the new incarnation of the "Religion and American Culture" book series that is sponsored by the University of Alabama Press.

As you may remember, I am co-editing the series with Charles Israel and we are in the process of aggressively recruiting new work for publication in the series. We are preparing to formally announce the series launch in late 2012 and want to be able to make a splash with some very strong first titles. We're asking now for your guidance and help. If you know of any scholars who are working on promising projects that you believe we should consider, or of scholars both junior and senior who are looking for a home for their work, please be so good as to let us know. We're happy to follow up with them by email, phone, or otherwise to extend an open invitation to submit their work for publication consideration.

I want to emphasize that we have every assurance from the editor-in-chief at the University of Alabama Press, who sponsors the series, that we can offer contractual terms that are every bit as competitive as any other press in the country, both for first-time authors submitting revised dissertations and for senior scholars, accordingly. We're also in the favorable position of being able to offer advance publication contracts
when appropriate or necessary.

Announcing Coursekit

2011-12-22T13:59:00.005-07:00

Darren Grem

Undoubtedly, most of y'all have put down your red pens and taken off your "instructor" hats for the winter break. But if I could have your attention (Harvey! You! Yes, you! No fantasy football until I'm done talking!) for just one second, I'd like to invite you to take a look at Coursekit, the newest little teaching engine to come down the line. I'm sure it's been talked about in other spaces, but since I don't remember it being talked about here, I figured I'd give it some free publicity.

Here's a take on where it came from, what it's about, and where it's planning to go:

A couple years ago, I sat in on a "Technology in the Classroom" course. We spent the early part of the day talking about new tools that were available. The discussion turned into a litany of complaints: IT policies that prevented the installation of new software, draconian site-blocking measures, thimble-sized storage allowances. At every turn, each new tool that a teacher wanted to try out would require a fight with administration. The frustration was palpable. "Why are the IT people making pedagogical decisions?" lamented one teacher, "Why do they get the final say about what does and does not happen in my classroom?"

Joseph Cohen, cofounder and CEO of Coursekit agrees. The problem, he says, is that most educational software is bought and sold at the enterprise level. The people deciding what to acquire are not the people using it and that disconnect has allowed unusable software to flourish. . . . [Thus,] On the product design side of things, Coursekit is focused on a user experience that is as simple and elegant as possible. This means that all the basics are there: a calendar, file sharing, submitting assignments, and grading work, but in ways that are stripped down to what Coursekit's user testing has shown them to be the essentials.

The "essentials" are teacher profile, syllabus, posting/comments module (similar to FB), assignments dropbox, and grading platform. If you use Twitter or Wordpress in the classroom, then this streamlines that for you. Additionally, it's 100% free since they've taken a"set up the site, monetize it later" business model.

Like all tools, it has its ups and downs. If you want a more user-friendly interface (unlike BB), then it also seems to be worth considering. I'm not sure if they're going to enhance the personalization of Coursekit soon by making it open to template modification (like Wordpress) or beef up some of the grading and watchdog tools (like Turnitin) that's a part of its competitors. We'll also have to wait and see how it hooks up with other turns in the digital instruction world, such as the move toward digital textbooks, and the still-under-consideration move to see how smartphone apps and iPads might replace those big, gazillion-dollar "smart classrooms" some of the more money-flush colleges installed a few years back. In any case, do know that there's another kid on the block for y'all to consider, especially if you've found (like myself) you're bombarding students with different digital platforms to use in class or for class projects.

The Lily of the Mohawks and the Boom in American Sainthood

2011-12-21T08:37:00.000-07:00

by Kathy Cummings

When a friend of Flannery O'Connor's complained of sexism in theCatholic Church in the 1950s, the novelist dismissed the accusation, pointingout that "the Church would just as soon canonize a woman as aman." A keen observer ofCatholicism, O'Connor was uncharacteristically off the mark in this instance,as women make up only about one-fourth of the Church's canonized saints. Thismakes yesterday's announcement all the more remarkable: in authenticating asecond miracle for Kateri Tekakwitha and for Mother Marianne Cope, PopeBenedict has essentially added two more female U.S. saints to the Catholiccanon (a papal bull of canonization will almost certainly be forthcoming, mostlikely within a year). At present thereare nine canonized saints who lived in the United States or territory thatlater became part of the United States; five of them are women. The imminentaddition of Tekakwitha and Cope tilts the balance of power heavily in women'sfavor, a phenomenon not often witnessed in Catholic circles.

As Linford Fisherdiscussed in this space Monday, Tekakwitha has long been considered a patronsaint of Native Americans and will be the first of their number canonized bythe Catholic Church. She will also be the first American saint who was not amember of a religious community. In thisrespect American saints do correspond with universal patterns. Men and women religious are overrepresented in thecanon of the saints for good reason; religious congregations have thepersonnel, the funding and the institutional memory to sustain a cause forcanonization through the decades or even centuries it takes for a cause tosucceed.

U.S. Catholicsbegan lobbying for a saint of their own in the 1880s. Half a century later, the Catholic Churchcanonized the North American martyrs, eight Jesuit missionaries who were killedin New France in the seventeenth century. Two of those had died in territorythat later became part of upstate New York, and thus they technically countedas U.S. saints. But most American Catholics held off from celebrating until1946, when Frances Cabrini became the first U.S. citizen to be canonized. Thefirst native-born saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton, was canonized in 1975, followedtwo years later by the the canonization of John Neumann, a Bohemian-bornRedemptorist missionary and bishop of Philadelphia. Since then pace ofcanonizations has increased dramatically, with the canonization of Mother RosePhilippine Duchesne (1988) Mother Katharine Drexel (2000), Mother TheodoreGuerin (2006) and Father Damien de Veuster (2009), who like Marianne Cope,served a leper community in Molokai.

We can expect thatTekakwitha and Cope represent the beginning of an even more dramatic uptick inthe total number of American saints. There are over fifty American causes atvarious stages in the process, and many of them made significant progressduring the pontificate of John Paul II. He canonized more people than all of his predecessors combined, in partby streamlining the complicated process. John Paul II was in particularcommitted to canonizing people from among national and ethnic groups that werewithout patron saints. This explains, in part, his decision to waive therequired miracle for Kateri Tekakwitha, which paved the way for her 1980beatification. John Paul II also made a concerted effort to canonize more laypeople. And while he is not oftenregarded as a hero to Catholic feminists, it is worth pointing out that roughlyone-third of the 482 saints he canonized were women, lending, belatedly and perhapsfleetingly, a certain credence to Flannery O'Connor's observation.

Choice Reviews Through the Storm, Through the Night

2011-12-20T19:44:00.000-07:00

Paul Harvey

Pardon the self-promotion interruption, but you're used to it. Now and then I post reviews from the helpful library periodical Choice of books of interest in our field. Today I'm going to seize the blog to post this review of my new book Through the Storm, Through the Night, especially for those of you contemplating your book choices for next semester's classes.

Harvey, Paul. Through the storm, through the night: a history of African American Christianity. Rowman & Littlefield, 2011. 217p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780742564732, $35.00; ISBN 9780742564756 e-book, $34.99. Reviewed in 2012jan CHOICE.

Books abound on the African American religious experience in the US, but Harvey's work is a welcome addition and succinct summary of its 400-year history. Typically in such short monographs, detail is sacrificed for brevity, but Harvey (history, Univ. of Colorado, Colorado Springs) packs great substance through insightful biographies and aptly summarized historical events. He argues against any uniform African American church or religious experience, as African Americans experienced varied contacts with Christianity and often mixed traditional African spiritualism and animistic beliefs. Unquestionably, religious beliefs infused the African American community with hope as they struggled through slavery, Jim Crow legislation, segregation, race-oriented violence, and the civil rights movement. Harvey concludes that though the church is still relevant and Christian denominations are still predominant in the African American community, 21st-century immigrants continue to challenge this narrative, as the Orisha traditions of West and Central Africans, Cuban Santería, Haitian Catholicism and Voodoo, Ethiopian Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islamic influences further heighten diversity. The author notes that clannish and local community traditions among these immigrants overshadow any presumed unity based on skin color. In summary, Harvey creates a broad panoramic of the African American religious experience and challenges future scholars to increase scholarly attention to this field. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. -- M. S. Hill, Gordon College

New Pew Report

2011-12-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

Darren Grem

Quick post to draw your attention to the newly released stats from the Pew folks on "global Christianity." The big takeaway:

A comprehensive demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all ages around the world, representing nearly a third of the estimated 2010 global population of 6.9 billion. Christians are also geographically widespread – so far-flung, in fact, that no single continent or region can indisputably claim to be the center of global Christianity.

In addition to a quiz that might be of use in the classroom, lots of handy tables and maps are available for teaching and reflection on historical trends, including this one:

A Step Closer to a Mohawk Saint

2011-12-19T19:35:00.002-07:00

Linford D. Fisher

Amidst the hustle and bustle of this holiday season—and virtually guaranteed to be overlooked following the exodus of U.S. troops from Iraq and the death of Kim Jong II—a little extra Christmas spirit just emanated from Vatican City. Today Pope Benedict XVI certified the second miracle for Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680), the “Mohawk Saint” from Kahnawake on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River near Montreal. All that remains to complete her long journey to sainthood (which began with her beatification in 1980) is an official papal bull, which is likely to come next year.

Tekakwitha’s interesting story was brought to a wider audience by Allan Greer’s Mohawk Saint (2004)—a terrific book for undergrads, by the way. Having just used this volume in a course this fall (the class included a non-Native student who swears his mother’s name is…wait for it…Kateri Tekakwitha; he said his grandmother was enamored with her life), and having spent a large amount of the class discussion on the various appropriations of her by North American Native Catholics and the ongoing attempts towards her canonization, this news feels especially timely, even if it is not entirely surprising. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to ponder how the effects of colonial-era evangelism continue to play out in the present, sometimes in surprising ways. As is often the case, the papal certifications and forthcoming bull only give “official” legitimacy to a following that is centuries old. Tekakwitha will not be the first Native from the Americas to be named a saint, but she is perhaps the most important one, at least for North American Native Catholics. As Greer and others have pointed out, Tekakwitha has long served as the unofficial patron saint for Native Catholics.

Read more here.

"Connie" Hilton's Praying Uncle Sam

2011-12-19T10:41:00.005-07:00

Randall Stephens

Conrad Hilton, or "Connie" as Don Draper calls him on Mad Men, was passionate about building hotels and securing America against the dual threats of atheism and communism. It was a patriotic-religious mix he shared with millions of Americans. Yet few had the influence or power of a Conrad Hilton.

I wasn't thinking about Hilton, his faith, or his political ideals when I was browsing Life magazine on Google books at the Norwegian National Library this last weekend. I was looking for adverts for a lecture I'll be giving over here called "Advertising the American Dream."

Still, when I saw the Hilton ad, posted here, Life (July 7, 1952), I was taken back. What's going on here with "America on Its Knees"? Uncle Sam looks strangely like Lincoln, had Lincoln not been shot, and lived to be 70, and taken on the role of Uncle Sam. Why the God-and-country-prayer as an advertisement for hotels? People like patriotism and prayer, I guess.

Annabel Jane Wharton writes of Hilton's specific anticommie views and his propensity for civil religion adverts in her Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (University of Chicago Press, 2006). Says Wharton:

Hilton's belief that religious faith was critical in the battle against communism was also, quite literally, publicized. In 1956, an article in the trade magazine Sales Management: The Magazine of Marketing, noted 'The recent rise of Hilton International has coincided with Conrad Hilton's personal fight against Communism . . .' Indeed, Conrad Hilton regularly substituted prayers for advertisements. . . . Hilton was a passionate Catholic. He also had respect for other religions, working closely with Jews and Muslims. He abominated atheists and demonized communists . . . . [He] believed his hotels made a significant contribution to America's struggle against communism in the cold war (139-140).

So, there you have it. Knowing not too much about high-profile anticommunists (and what little I know coming from books on postwar conservatism and some research on the Midwest), I'm curious about how others might have used public venues to preach the anticommunist gospel. As Grant Wacker notes, Billy Graham was an intense holy cold warrior in his early career. The National Association of Manufacturers had its share of ardent anticommunists, one in particular who launched the John Birch Society. Where else did anticommunism and American Christianity link up?

An Interview with Owen Stanwood on The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution

2011-12-17T03:24:00.006-07:00

Randall Stephens

Owen Stanwood is an assistant professor of history at Boston College and a scholar of early America and the British Atlantic world. He has published in the Journal of British Studies, the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, French Colonial History. His wonderfully readable first book, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) looks at "how fears of Catholicism galvanized and transformed Anglo-American political culture during the last decades of the seventeenth century."*

In the interview below I ask Stanwood about his research and writing on antipopery, the intersection of politics and religion in the 17th and 18th centuries, the workings of empire, and the state of the field.

Randall Stephens: You write about the significance of English antipopery in the 17th century. What impact did antipopery have on the political and social order of the age?

Owen Stanwood: Early modern antipopery was above all a language, a form of discourse. Protestants considered "popery" to be a binary opposition to their own, true religion, and thus used conversations about the nature of popery to define the contours and boundaries of their own faith. In the English context, this had both theological and political effects. In the church, different kinds of English Protestants, whether high church Episcopalians or Puritans, critiqued the other side by pointing out their similarities to Catholicism. These same debates often carried over into politics, since many people believed that the theology of popery usually coincided with tyranny and absolutism. So on a number of occasions, most notably the English Revolutions of the 1640s and 1680s, people justified overthrowing their kings by claiming that the monarchs intended to overthrow the true Protestant church. These charges, of course, were usually false, but they had great rhetorical power.

Stephens: Fears of Indian and Catholic plots in the late 17th century, you observe, fueled colonial anxieties. Did New England colonists see those as combined forces?

Stanwood: For most of the 17th century, they did not. Even as late as King Philip's War in the 1670s, most New Englanders saw Indians and Catholics as distinct threats. From the 1670s through the 1690s, an important transition took place. American colonists gradually began to conflate these dangers; they started to believe that Indians were not independent actors, but simply shock troops used by French papists to carry out their bloody schemes. This was important for a number of reasons. For one thing, it represented a molding of the European anti-Catholic tradition to fit conditions in America. And it ended up changing the way colonists perceived Indians. If they had earlier been targets for conversion, and possible allies against Catholic enemies, now they appeared to many English as unconvertible enemies debauched by Catholic superstition. In my mind, this led to new, even more poisoned relations between whites and Indians in the 18th century—and provided a key context for the political transformation that lies at the heart of my book.

Stephens: Could you say something about how militant Protestantism shaped the founding of the American colonies?

Stanwood: Militant Protestantism affected the colonies from the very beginning. First off, English overseas endeavors had a Protestant purpose from the early days of colonization, in that the English, along with the Dutch and French Protestants, wanted to provide a Calvinist counterweight to the Spanish and Portuguese, who dominated the New World. In time the English state stepped back from these religious motivations, but during the seventeenth century the American colonies became favorite refuges for any number of English and European radicals. The Puritans and Quakers are the most well known of these groups, but by the 1680s the colonies from New England to the Caribbean abounded with all kinds of Protestant rebels, from Scottish Covenanters to English Baptists to French Huguenots. Many of these people fled what they considered Antichristian tyranny in Europe, and made it their imperative to keep America Protestant. This is important to remember when we try to understand how imperial politics developed.

Stephens: You write that the “story of the making of empire must necessarily be both intensely local and transatlantic in scope.” How did the aims of London officials and the goals of New World colonists come into conflict? From your reading of the sources, how did empire “work” in the late 17th century?

Stanwood: During the 1670s and 80s officials and colonists feuded for a number of reasons. Essentially, the crown wanted to create a more streamlined, centralized empire to replace the hodgepodge of local arrangements that characterized the 17th-century empire. This reform stepped on a lot of toes, as many of those who had the most power in the colonies found themselves out of favor. It only became a popular movement, however, when ordinary people began to see imperial reform as something that threatened them. Many people started to see imperial reform as part of a massive Catholic plot—mainly because the main proponent of these reforms, King James II, was Catholic, and because people associated centralized power with the pope and Catholic rulers like France's Louis XIV. As people became more frightened and distrustful of their leaders, the empire hardly worked at all; in fact, it was laughably dysfunctional. What all of this suggests is the importance of political rhetoric in running an empire. During the 1680s, rulers were not speaking the same language as the people, and this doomed the first plans for imperial reform.

Stephens: Would you say something about how political unrest in London reverberated across the Atlantic?

Stanwood: The political unrest that most concerns me is the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688-89, when James II lost his kingdom to a popular rebellion led by the king's daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. The effects of this revolution in the colonies were manifold. Many of James II's colonial governors were hard at work reforming the empire, and once colonists heard that the king had fled England for France, they believed that their leaders intended to betray them to the enemy. A series of outrageous rumors circulated from Barbados to Boston, telling of a coordinated design by the French, Indians, Irish servants, and James II's cronies to replace the English system with "popery and tyranny." False though they were, these rumors led to popular rebellions in three colonies, and also provided a language—that of paranoid antipopery—that future imperial leaders could use to keep the empire together.

Stephens: How do you think historians’ understanding of the religio-political milieu of early America has changed in the last 30 years?

Stanwood: There have been two very important transformations, both of which have influenced my research. First, historians of early American religion, like early Americanists generally, have moved away from a national narrative and turned toward a transatlantic one. They now understand that phenomena like Puritanism or early evangelicalism cannot be understood as purely American, but as global movements. In a linked development, historians of religion have turned much more toward popular or "lived" religion, an understanding of how the beliefs of ordinary folks had an impact on history. My book builds on both of these traditions, in that I show how the religious beliefs of ordinary people—in this case, regarding the evils of Catholicism—led to important political changes that altered the face of global politics.

The Origins of the Mormon Moment; or, How to Generate Your Own Such Moment

2011-12-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Christopher Jones

As a follow-up to Paul's post last week on "the Mormon moment in scholarship," and in an attempt to answer the questions posed by Elesha and Curtis in the comments of that post, I'll simply point readers to a post today ("2011: The Year of the Mormon") over at the Mormon blog By Common Consent. Embedded within that post, which surveys a number of individuals, events, and trends in pop culture, politics, sports, and scholarship that kept Mormonism in the spotlight all year long, is what appears to me to be a basic (if slightly complicated) formula for those interested in generating a similar moment for their respective religious movement/scholarly-subject of study/etc. With a giant tip-of-the-hat to the fine folks at BCC, then, here is my formula:

1. Aim for an election year (preferably a presidential election), and ensure that at least two of the candidates are of the specific faith community. If they represent divergent approaches to said faith, and maintain a personal and/or political rivalry dating back several generations, even better.

2. Politicians alone, of course, cannot create such a moment. They need to be buttressed by likeable star athletes that inspire hip-hop songs and videos, rock/pop music sensations that publicly proclaim their faith without coming across too condescending or annoying and incorporate elements of the religion's founding theophany in their music videos, and television programs portraying the more controversial elements of the faith tradition. For scholars of religion, it is particularly important that these figures not only be members of the religion, but also that their respective talents can be explained by alluding to, for example, Thomas Aquinas's theory of scripture. Landing these public figures on the cover of several prominent national publications doesn't hurt, either. Oh yeah, and if the guys behind South Park create the Broadway hit of the year about the religious community, that's just icing on the cake.

3. While loads of publicity may generate a "moment" for the religion, they do not automatically lead to a corresponding "moment" for scholarship on the subject. The key there, of course, is to keep researching and writing. The sheer amount of scholarship focused on Mormons and Mormonism over the past year (or that forthcoming in 2012) really isn't all that unique---historians, sociologists, and others have been generating volumes and volumes of scholarship on the subject for decades now. The key here, as I see it, is that the younger generation of scholars---folks like Pat Mason, Matt Bowman, John Turner, and Spencer Fluhman---are building on the work of their predecessors but also more directly engaging trends in larger fields (American religious history, religious experience, religion and politics, etc.) and demonstrating what the Mormon experience uniquely reveals about those larger subjects, trends, etc. It also helps if the institutional church in question decides to take an active role in that scholarship by expanding and publishing archival collections.

Looking forward to 2012, Paul may be right in wondering if "another mainline moment in being born." But just to be sure, someone may want to put in a call to the South Park guys.

WW II and Religion: CFP

2011-12-15T21:30:00.002-07:00

The Institute on World War II and the Human Experience and the Department of Religion
Florida State University

“World War II and Religion”

November 30-December 1, 2012

Call for Papers

The Institute on World War II and the Human Experience and the Department of Religion of Florida State University seek paper proposals for a two-day conference in Tallahassee, Florida focusing on Religion and World War II. Conference organizers G. Kurt Piehler and John Corrigan seek papers that touch on the institutional, theological, and human impact of religion in World War II. We are interested in the global dimension of this conflict and encourage scholars whose work focuses on Africa, Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and the Soviet Union, as well as Europe and North America.

We are interested in addressing the ways that combatants and civilians drew upon religious ideals and institutions to sustain them in an age of total war, and especially how soldiers, sailors, and aviators behaved religiously in the course of their service. Additionally we solicit papers that consider the roles religious organizations and values played in fostering ethical conduct during the war, providing humanitarian relief, and protecting non-combatants and conscientious objectors, as well as analyses of various kinds of religious justifications for violence, including genocide. Among the questions we seek to address: did religious leaders and institutions foster a climate that encouraged rather than retarded the drift to total war? Are there really no atheists in foxholes? What was the legacy of the war for religious institutions and ideals, especially in the defeated Axis Powers? How did religious institutions discredited by their support of the Axis Powers seek to regain their legitimacy? What kinds of compromises did persons negotiate with their religious beliefs in wartime? In what way was pre-existent religious rhetoric deployed to characterize enemies as evil? How did the war diminish and exacerbate the perception of religious differences?

We encourage contributions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The conference organizers hope to provide travel funding to graduate students and junior scholars to encourage their participation. Plans call for the publication of an anthology drawn from the conference proceedings edited by John Corrigan and G. Kurt Piehler.

Those seeking to participate in the conference should submit a 750 word abstract along with a short 3-5 page c.v. via Microsoft word attachment or PDF File to G. Kurt Piehler at kpiehler@fsu.edu by March 15, 2012. For further information about the conference, please contact John Corrigan at jcorrigan@fsu.edu or G. Kurt Piehler at kpiehler@fsu.edu

RD: Spirits of Enterprise

2011-12-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

Darren Grem

James Lorusso -- a Ph.D. candidate in American religious cultures at Emory -- has a new post at Religion Dispatches on the "spirituality at work" movement and its relationship to free market capitalism. He writes:

We might think of the workplace as an indisputably secular space, but over the last two decades, interest in what’s become known as “workplace spirituality” has grown from a fragmented smattering of unorthodox entrepreneurs and management gurus into a full-fledged movement.

Bringing spirituality into the culture of business, advocates believe, will not only enhance the quality of individual working lives, but also drastically alter the broader conduct of business across the planet.

Aiming at nothing less than a wholesale change in human consciousness, workplace spirituality has the trappings of a full-fledged religious movement—but whose religion? And what’s behind it?

The first round of scholarship on this movement -- David Miller's God at Work and Lake Lambert III's Spirituality, Inc. -- tended to be overly close to the sources. Both tried to relate what the movement was about without being too critical of it. Whether this was intentional or not is debatable. Miller has a whole initiative at Princeton devoted to studying workplace spirituality and it certainly seems like he's in favor of it as a kind of "better" way to do business. Lambert III's book likewise deems workplace spirituality as a type of "religious" experience worth serious consideration by scholars, but as Brittany Shoot's review of the book for RD noted, "capitalism [in Lambert III's treatment] is not examined as a potentially harmful system to some group of workers down the line."

Lorusso is a part of the second round of scholarship on this movement, one that -- as Dan Williams points out -- has been led by historical inquiries into evangelical contributions to contemporary corporatism. In general, those in the second round are more critical, arguing that, at best, spirituality provides a kind of "psychological wage" for those working for self-described spiritual companies. At worst, it fosters spirituality onto people's workaday life or provides a thinly-veiled cover for abuse. Lorusso's forthcoming dissertation will undoubtedly add to this scholarship by redirecting our attention toward the spiritual capitalists and capitalism that Lambert III studied, albeit with a more critical lens and, hopefully, with an eye toward understanding religious/spiritual constructions, appropriations, and inconsistencies inside companies as often dynamic and debated.

The Mainline Protestant Moment? Or Embattled Ecumenicists?

2011-12-12T23:12:00.006-07:00

Paul Harvey

In the previous post about recent scholarship on Mormonism, Elesha wondered, in a facetiously self-interested sort of way, "what it would take to generate a mainline moment in scholarship" (earlier twentieth-century Protestantism being the topic she's working on). A cynic might flippantly say, "well, they had their 'moment,' and it lasted many decades," and I might say that we had a classic product of mainstream Protestantism (the UCC) run for President, and win, in 2008, and it produced not a "moment" but instead hysterical cries about the radical agenda. Can't wait for Round II of that next year.

But Curtis Evans answered more seriously and helpfully in the comments section, by by pointing to some significant moves in that direction, including David Hollinger's OAH Presidential Address, discussed with wonderful insight by David Stowe on our blog here.

And even more seriously, I'm starting to think the moment may be here, albeit focused more on the middle of the century, from the Depression through the Vietnam War, than the earlier part of the century which excellent younger scholars such as Elesha, Curtis, and Matt Hedstrom are investigating.

I was thinking this over as I recently read through Jill Gill's mammoth work of scholarship Embattled Ecumenicism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War, and the Trials of the Protestant Left. Students: if you want to know how to mine the archives effectively, check out the footnotes to this doorstopper.

This is a work that deserves to be called “definitive.” Gill’s comprehensive study of the National Council of Churches and the Vietnam War covers the subject exhaustively. But more than that, the book is a re-examination and, in part, a rehabilitation of mainstream Protestantism in the middle years of the twentieth century. Historians recently have focused attention on close studies of the origins, rise, and politicization of the religious right. Gill’s work counters that trend with a sympathetic, although certainly not uncritical, examination of Protestants who were at once part of “the establishment” but increasingly distanced themselves from it because of the bitter disillusionment of the Vietnam War. Gill also explores the meanings and purposes of “ecumenism,” an ancient Christian ideal that the author finds worthy of a deep reconsideration. The irony is that ecumenism splintered in the face of a conflict where religious leaders managed to unite many mainstream Protestants against the war while serving as “generals without armies” (in the cynical but fairly accurate words of Dean Rusk) and being manipulated first by LBJ and then Nixon. The Vietnam War fractured the Protestant center-left, and helped pave the way for the rise of a resurgent religious right.

In some ways, Gill's book helps explain how we get from John Foster Dulles (a paragon of the mainline Protestant establishment in the 1950s), to the embattled ecumenicists of the 1960s -- in but no longer of the establishment -- to the prophetic but increasingly ignored or irrelevant voices of the 1970s, and the "radical preachers" which Obama-haters promise to resurrect from the dead in 2012, there to play a walk-on part in their war.

Reinforcing my view of a new generation of rising scholarship on the "mainstream," this evening I flipped through a recent edition of Reviews in American History, containing a really thoughtful exploration of William Inboden's Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment. Inboden's work is also reviewed nicely, closer to the time of its publication, here.

Pretty much unbeknownst to me, apparently the pages of the journal Diplomatic History and other scholarly venues have been full of debates about the causal links (if any) between "cultural" factors such as religion and foreign policy decision-making. The reviewer asks, "How does one demonstrate conclusively that cultural phenomena do more than merely condition, or provide context for, the actions of foreign policy-makers?" He cites some skeptics of the "cultural turn" in foreign policy studies, asking skeptical questions to that effect. He then suggests that "more adeptly than any other product of the 'cultural turn' in foreign relations history, Inboden's book demonstrates this causative link between religion and diplomacy." The father of containment, George Kennan, wasn't much for any of this, but once it took hold his idea quickly moved far beyond the intentions of its creator, much to his dismay and exasperation.

These are all works about the "mainstream" from the inception of the high period of the Cold War through the trials of the 1960s -- a period when mainstream Protestants (with considerable sprinkling of folks from other parts of "tri-faith America," of course) were, to a sizable degree, the people who ran everything. I might add that I've just skimmed through another recent work, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle Against Communism in the Early Cold War, recently out with Oxford, in which the mainliners are the central actors. We'll have more extensive coverage of this book on the blog a bit down the road; in the meantime, click the link for interesting coverage and analysis of the book. The review linked above begins:

IN A LETTER to the Vatican in 1947, Harry Truman characterized the United States as a “Christian nation.” For Truman this was likely a statement of fact, an obvious description of what America was and would long remain. For Jonathan Herzog, Truman’s phrase explicates an entire epoch in American politics. The title of his book, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex, inverts Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about a military-industrial complex, suggesting instead a fusion of governmental power and religious zeal.

Darren Dochuk's piece for Perspectives, "Searching Out the Sacred in U.S. Political History," summarizes much of what I'm saying here. After a discussion of the plethora of scholarship on evangelicals and fundamentalists, he goes on to add that

But religion was not just for the downtrodden or embattled; at mid-century it still dictated the dreams of the political elite too. Perhaps no other subset of political history has undergone a more profound shift lately than diplomatic history. Rendered too conventional by some in the 2000s, diplomatic history has emerged in the 2010s as a dynamic field revitalized by new interests in gender, NGOs, globalization, "soft power"…and religion. One exemplary byproduct of this renaissance is William Inboden's Religion and American Foreign Power, 1945–1960, which argues that Protestant notions of liberty and freedom informed U.S. officials' efforts to construct a "godly" front against "atheistic Communism." Once Dwight Eisenhower molded them into a more inclusive, civil religion of American exceptionalism, these notions also came to inspire Jews and Catholics around the world in a broad offensive against the Red Menace. Such was the spiritual essence of U.S. containment strategies, and as Inboden, Andrew Preston, Jason Stevens, Mark T. Edwards, and others emphasize, America's most powerful emissaries never took this essence lightly.

In their minds, America's fight against foreign evils was God's fight against foreign evils, rendering any clean distinction between faith and international relations artificial. If public theology was a wedge for American hegemony abroad, it could also be a subversive influence at home, something historians now stress when talking about the civil-rights era. As Joseph Kosek has shown in Acts of Conscience, even while many public intellectuals championed American imperialism, some spoke out against the prevailing orthodoxy. Reconciliation and brotherhood rather than conquest grounded their creed, fusing their interests with a broader crusade for human rights. These same principles enlivened the "prophetic" strand of Protestantism that bound the southern civil rights movement together. Rooted in an Old Testament tradition that roused black and white activists alike, this prophetic theology, David Chappell shows in A Stone of Hope, sacralized self-sacrifice for social justice and paved the way for nonviolent revolt throughout the South. Chappell's conclusions are now being enriched by studies of civil rights activism in the West. Scott Kurashige, Shana Bernstein, and Mark Brilliant have all shown that multiethnic religious agencies in 1940s California helped trigger the assault on American apartheid.Inspired by this state's rich but contested religious pluralism, they helped marshal local resources and resolve for a nationwide war against Jim Crow and all its intolerances, one they would win in the 1960s.

So what say you, Elesha and others -- is there another mainline moment being born? Perhaps the center could not hold, but its few decades of remarkable power and then fragmentation mark mid-twentieth century American history in ways historians are still fruitfully investigating.

The Mormon Moment in Scholarship

2011-12-12T10:07:00.005-07:00

Paul Harvey

Everyone is discussing the "Mormon moment" thanks to Romney and national politics, and Max Mueller's piece for Religion Dispatches discusses why non-expert pontificators feel free to pontificate on Mormonism's "weirdness" where they would do no such thing about other religious traditions. Don't miss his article.

But it may actually be more the Mormon moment in the scholarly world than anywhere else. Our own John Turner's biography of Brigham Young will be out in a little over a year or so (and scroll down for John's recent post on Joseph Smith's Journals), with Harvard University Press, and the big biography of Parley Pratt by Terryl Givens and Matthew Grow will be reviewed here at the blog in just a little while. And don't forget Patrick Mason's The Mormon Menace, reviewed here at the blog a while back. The world awaits J. Spencer Fluhman's forthcoming study of nineteenth-century anti-Mormon rhetoric, coming out next fall with the University of North Carolina Press; the parts I've seen represent scholarship at its best.

The efflorescence of scholarship in the field is pretty astonishing, keeping up with it impossible. For a little assistance in the latter, I recommend Ben Park's "2011 in Retrospect: A Look at Important Books and Articles in Mormon History," over at Juvenile Instructor. Here are Ben's personal award winners for the year, but go over to his post for a much fuller and more extensive discussion of the variety of recent scholarship in the field.

My picks for a handful of MHA’s awards are as follows. (Drumroll please…)

Best Book: Sam Brown, In Heaven as it Is on Earth
Best Biography: Terryl Givens and Matthew Grow, Parley P. Pratt
Best First Book: Patrick Mason, The Mormon Menace
Best Article: Stapley and Wright, “Female Ritual Healing in Mormonism” (Stapley also gets recognition for “Adoption Sealing Ritual,” which is equally deserving of the award)
Awards of Excellence (2 Articles): Patrick Mason, “God and the People”; Chris Jones, “The Power and Form of Godliness”
Silver Award for Women’s History: Catherine Brekus, “Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency”

AAR Redux (Part 2) from Jeremy Rapport!

2011-12-09T07:24:00.001-07:00

Here's part two of Jeremy's reflections on AAR, in which he discusses legitimation, spirituality, individuals, nature, appropriation and so much more. Part 1 is available here.

“Individuals, Communities, and Religious Authenticity: An AAR Redux”

Jeremy Rapport

The process by which adherents and potential adherents judge religious claims credible is of great interest to new religions scholars. The three papers on Sunday afternoon’s “Strategies of Legitimation in New Religions” focused on authoritative claims-making in three different new religions: a Chinese Buddhist new religion, Erik Hammerstom’s “The Heart of Mind Method”; a neo-pagan Asatru group, Carrie Dohe’s “Jungian Archetypes, Metagentics, and Kenniwick Man”; and a Christian new religion, Spencer Allen’s “Tony Alamo and His New Testament Brand of Christian Polygyny.” The issues these presenters discussed and the questions they raised about the ways discourses of legitimacy function are critical to understanding new religions as well as to thinking through the ways religions work in people’s lives. A community becomes credible and possesses religious legitimacy, all three of the presenters at least implicitly insisted, through a complex mix of appeals to cultural norms, religious traditions, and charismatic claims.

Monday morning I presided at “Religious Appropriations of Secular Culture.” In many ways, this was a fun-filled panel. Highlights included Darryl Victor Caterine’s paper, “Haunted Ground,” based on his recent book of the same name, which examined the role of nature in the gatherings of several metaphysical religions; Ann Duncan’s research on an Edgar Cayce inspired summer camp, “Summer Camp and New Paradigms of Sacred Space in New Religious Movements”; Shannon Harvey’s paper, “Eat Your Way Back to the Godhead” looked at ISKCON cookbooks; and Martha Smith Roberts’ and Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand’s “Hoop Spiritualities,” described their research on hula hoopers who believe the exercise inspires spiritual experiences. Despite the variety of the topics, it would have been impossible to miss the theme of people using conventionally secular forms to facilitate experiences they believe to be religious. Spiritual experiences are everywhere, if you know where to look.

The Sunday afternoon panel on Frequencies, an experimental project on spirituality developed by Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern, was jam packed, despite starting late due to room arrangement problems. The project solicits short pieces on the diverse subjects that the authors think of when they think of the term, “spirituality,” and publishes them on its web site. For me, Frequencies is fascinating in much the same way that AAR is—as way to indulge rapidly one’s varied interests in sometimes ill-defined and/or poorly understood phenomena. Many of the essays on the web site are thought provoking examinations of their topics, and Sunday afternoon’s speakers, all contributors to the project, took to the spirit of the event and the project with full gusto. Julie Byrne performed her remarks on the project in an entirely appropriate, funny, confusing, and thoughtful spoken word piece. Susan Hardin spoke about the genealogy of Frequencies itself. Jeffrey Kripal pointed out the cool factor in the project and in the people involved in it. But what really struck me were Ari Kelman’s remarks. Kelman discussed the project’s apparent lack of the overtly religious (at least to date, contributions are still coming in). Kelman’s comments struck a chord. As much as I enjoy what I have seen of it, I worry that Frequencies is doing nothing to address an overly simplistic dichotomy in popular discussions of the religious and the spiritual, a dichotomy that misrepresents the complex relations among individuals, institutional religions, and cultures. In fairness, Martin Marty’s recent contribution to Frequencies addresses this exact concern, and pieces on more conventionally religious topics are now more commonly appearing. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Frequencies is in danger of metaphorically recreating the tropes and practices of a particular form of spiritual seeking in vogue right now and in the process also risks ignoring a vital reality of the more conventionally religious world, namely that many religious people do not think their lives are devoid of the immediacy and presence of something they understand to be spirituality. I really do not want a project that strikes me as both innovative and insightful to pigeon-hole spirituality as a concept limited to people who understand it to indicate the primary authority of individuals to mediate and create their worlds.

Our investigations of religion have been moving toward a greater interest in the individual’s expression of religious life for the past several decades, with the lived religion approach exemplifying the trend. While that shift toward focusing on the individual as the primary mediator of authentic religious life reflects previously overlooked factors in our study of religion and recent developments in American religious life and thought, scholars must remain cognizant of the vital role of community in religious life. Individuals may indeed be the primary mediators of religious authenticity, but they learn to do that mediation in the context of communities that shape them and how they understand the world.

AAR Redux (Part 1) from Guest Poster Jeremy Rapport

2011-12-08T13:11:00.001-07:00

Today's guest post on the recent AAR meeting in November comes Jeremy Rapport, a visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at The College of Wooster. Jeremy's most recent publications are on New and Alternative Religious Movements in America and American Metaphysical Religions, specifically Christian Science and the Unity School of Christianity. Other attendees of AAR are welcome to send me (Kelly) posts detailing the conference too. The more, the merrrier!

“Individuals, Communities, and Religious Authenticity: An AAR Redux”

Jeremy Rapport

For me, as I suspect is the case for many in our guild, one of the most satisfying parts of AAR is the chance to be intellectually promiscuous for a few days. Briskly and purposively walking from panel to panel belies the strolling and staring my mind is doing as I hear new ideas, interpretations, and accounts of the religious life and thought of people from vastly different times and places. This academic flitting and sipping is reinforced for me because as a member of the New Religious Movements steering committee, I attend the diverse panels our group sponsors. New Religious Movements is a sub-discipline that engages ethnographic, historical, and sociological approaches to studying religion as well as examining religious phenomena from across time and cultures. I can satisfy my intellectual curiosity while also fulfilling my committee obligations.

This year in San Francisco, I attended panels on the Japanese new religion Shinnyo-en, the concept of legitimizing new religions, and a panel discussion with Jonestown survivors. A meeting of the seminar on food and eating and the panel on the experimental project Frequencies were on my agenda. I also presided at a panel on religious appropriations of secular culture. All of the meetings were fascinating and engaging, and many of the papers would be of interest to scholars of religion in America. However, as I thought about the experience over Thanksgiving what really struck me was the emphasis on the authority of the individual in many of the papers. Religion may be a community endeavor, but at least as scholars in contemporary America, we seem to be more and more interested in how individuals shape religious groups and in how groups are trying to satisfy individuals.

Saturday morning began with a session co-sponsored by the Japanese Religions Group and the New Religious Movements Group. Shinnyo-en is a Japanese Buddhist movement that uses a form of medium-guided meditation. With several temples outside of Japan, including in Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York state, it is now both an international and American movement. What grabbed my attention here was Victoria Rose Pinto’s paper, “Floating Prayer: Syncretism, Symbolism, and Ritual in the Lantern Floating Ceremony in Hawai’i.” Shinnyo-en introduced this version of an Obon ancestor ceremony to Hawai’i. People write personal messages and decorate floating lanterns to send out to sea as memorials to significant people and events in their lives. Shinnyo-en still sponsors the event, but as Pinto pointed out, the ceremony has grown well beyond the confines of the single Japanese Buddhist movement that introduced it, and it is now one of the most popular public religious rites in the state. Most of the participants have no formal affiliation with Shinnyo-en. Yet the movement, by creating and facilitating a rite that allows individual expressions of faith, feeling, and connection to a larger world, now has an important role in Hawai’ian public religious life.

It is certainly not news that the complex relationship of food and eating with religion is of great interest to scholars. Meeting now for its fourth year, Saturday afternoon’s seminar “Religion, Food, and Eating in North America” has been discussing papers on this wide-ranging topic with goal of producing an edited volume aimed primarily at undergraduates. I contributed a paper to the seminar at the 2010 meeting in Atlanta. Studies of food and religion invite the inspection of the public and the private, the individual and the community. Looking at how a person’s diet helps to structure his or her religious life shows us that the material has never been as far removed from the spiritual as many Protestants wish it were. Moreover, food is perhaps the most accessible of the roads to teaching undergraduates lived religion, thus this is welcome work on many levels, including as a potential teaching resource and as work that systematically examines how food mediates between individuals and communities, creates identities, structures group practices, and reflects religious principles.

For me, the most powerful event of the AAR was the panel discussion featuring Jonestown survivors on Sunday morning. The terrible and tragic events at Jonestown continue to inspire thoughtful and important work on religion, and justly so since the predominant stereotypes about alternative religions today owe a great deal to those 914 deaths in Guyana in 1978. Tropes about the power of brainwashing administered by a diabolical cult leader developed largely in response to the horrific end of the Peoples Temple. Yet the individual human stories are frequently overlooked, so this panel where survivors shared their stories served as a useful addition to thinking about the meaning and significance of the events. Among the many emotionally moving and fascinating stories, I could not help but be struck by how many of the survivors insisted on the idea that reclaiming their humanity and their dignity involved reclaiming their individuality. Many of those present on Sunday morning declared that Jonestown was not made up of homogenous people, that the takeaway message of the tragedy should be that the only true master is within, that Jones had become an impediment to the functioning of the community, and that people should think very carefully about the degree to which they are willing to sacrifice themselves to pursue their principles. I could not help but wonder if part of the process of the survivors reincorporating themselves into American culture involved relearning how to think about the status and authority of the individual.

To be continued.

Finishing a Good Work

2011-12-07T07:59:00.001-07:00

Darren Grem and Tim Gloege

We invite you to consider a request made by Sarah Morice Brubaker, friend of the late Sarah Hammond. She is sending out an all-call to anyone who might be able or willing to contribute their skills or knowledge toward finishing Sarah's book, God's Business Men: Evangelical Entrepreneurs in Depression and War, which would have been published with University of Chicago Press. It was under contract and in revision.

If you'd like to help out, send e-mail to sarah.morice.brubaker@ptstulsa.edu.

Joseph Smith Journals

2011-12-06T15:33:00.006-07:00

John Turner

One of the great frustrations and blessings of Mormon History is operating within a remarkably deep well of sources and evidence. Thus, new discoveries regularly remind one of one's own relative ignorance. Depending on the day, I refer to this as the curse or blessing of D&C 21:1 ("Behold, there shall be a record kept among you..."), which adorns the wall above the entrance into the Church History Library in Salt Lake City.

Recently, the Church History Department published the second of three annotated volumes of journals kept by Joseph Smith, his clerks, and -- in this case -- Eliza R. Snow, a teacher living in Smith's home who became one of the prophet's plural wives in June 1842.

Much of the discussion of this volume has centered around Joseph Smith's practice of polygamy, first firmly documented with his marriage to Louisa Beaman (one of my favorite women in LDS History) in April 1841. That marriage came slightly before the first journal in this volume; Smith married approximately fifteen additional women by April 1843, when this volume ends. The pages of Smiths' journals provide precious little information about these marriages, but the subject comprises the heart of the editors' introduction to this volume. Those pages do not constitute what most scholars would consider a frank examination of polygamy, but they do affirm that some of the marriages were consummated and that some of the women involved were already married. Most notably, the editors document that Smith married Marinda Hyde, already the wife of Mormon apostle Orson Hyde. The editors (Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson) conclude that the "polyandrous marriages ... were primarily a means of binding other families to his [Smith's] for the spiritual benefit and mutual salvation of all involved." While Smith's practice of plural marriage certainly involved more than lust and sex, in my mind that conclusion (which rests on Richard Bushman's analysis in Rough Stone Rolling) reaches beyond the very fragmentary and contested evidence. Despite a small mountain of scholarship on Mormon polygamy, we know relatively little about how most of its earliest practitioners -- including Joseph Smith -- understood it at the time.

Readers interested in such matters can readily find full treatments elsewhere. The value of this volume lies in the journals themselves, the annotations, and the remaining scholarly apparatus. All reflect the resources and talent that the Church History Department continues to devote to this venture.

I was quickly struck by the passage for December 27, 1841: "Joseph. was with. Brigham [Young], Heber C [Kimball], Willard [Richards]. & John [Taylor] of the twelve, at his office. instructing them in the principles of the kingdom." The annotation for that sentence references Wilford Woodruff's journal: "I had the privilege of seeing for the first time in my day the URIM & THUMMIM," the seer stones that Joseph Smith used during his translation of the Book of Mormon. I had never put those passages together, but I found it noteworthy that Brigham Young probably saw them for the first time on that date as well. Any student of Mormon History will encounter such nuggets throughout the volume.

The chronology, outstanding maps, biographical directory, complex charts of church officers, and bibliography will all also be of great use to anyone active in Mormon Studies. Any instructor with students who might write research papers on Mormon topics should have their libraries buy the (not inexpensive) volumes of the JSP. At this point, it is frustrating not to have access to the index, but it evidently will be available on the JSP website in teh near future. The JSP website also has a number of high-resolution scans of sources available on its website.

"The song lifted her up high": Jeff Sharlet on Faith and Faithlessness

2011-12-05T08:05:00.018-07:00

Kelly Baker

Beefsteaks when I'm hungry

Something tall and cool when I'm dry

Give me greenbacks when the times are hard

Sweet heaven when I die--Blue Dogs, "Sweet Heaven When I Die"

While reading and re-reading Jeff Sharlet's Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country in Between, a couple of songs replayed over and over in my head. His lovely and haunting collections of essays made my thinking musical. Perhaps, it is the beauty of his language, the lyrical quality of his descriptions, that direct me to hymns and pop songs (which is on my taste, not Sharlet's). Perhaps, it is because his reflections on religion, trauma, belief, unbelief, practice and loss feel like poetry. I cannot read his book without music, so songs emerged as the beginnings of my analysis. Every time I started to review this book, the music came to me first. Music evoked spaces I once inhabited as well as spaces in which I currently reside. Thus, I cannot review his book without referring to the accompaniment of music (and please note that John D. Boy at the Immanent Frame also feels this way). Hopefully, Sharlet will not mind since music appears in his work from Cornel West as "blues man" to a club named "the Church" to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Dock Boggs' "Down South Blues" to the songs playing at Sweet Fanny Adams, the motel and bar. Maybe the music even puzzles him a bit too.

The first song starts playing as soon as I see the title, Sweet Heaven When I Die, which my brain somehow translates into "When I die, Hallelujah, by and by" from the Christian hymn, "I'll Fly Away." I misread his title every time I puzzle over the image on the cover. Somehow humming this tune seemed to fit with Sharlet's explorations and excavations of the religious lives of Americans from his college sweetheart's continual return to the Bible to make meaning to the martyrdom of an anarchist to militarization of Christian youth in BattleCry to worship with German evangelicals and the construction of purity. Sharlet, as Brent Plate puts it, catalogs "weird religion." Sharlet's approach both deeply personal and documentary showcases individuals trying to make sense of their lives, their traumas, as well as attempts to create meaning out of chaos. His interlocutors try to find justice, try to heal themselves and others and try to navigate expected and unexpected losses.

Sharlet gives us glimpses into American religions writ small, individuals navigating worlds of faith. He writes about Molly Knott Chilson, his college girlfriend, "Her liberalism became Christian, and her Christianity was gentle and yet thick with the blood of scripture: the darkest passages of the prophets to which she's always been drawn..." (12). Or Cornel West: "His religion is that of the night side of scripture, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and a Christ story as awful as it is redeeming" (50). Or Chava Rosenburg's writing about the Holocaust: "Beauty, not God, sustained her" (132). Vera Schnabel, his interpreter at the German Church of the Way, embraced both Jesus and America via music (and she also hums "I'll Fly Away). Sharlet writes about her conversion:

The song lifted her up high, and up there in the sky she was an angel, just like her black brothers and sisters. She wasn't an America, she wasn't German, she was nothing: She disappeared into the clouds and came out the other side a believer (153).

Moreover, Sharlet catalogs the development of American fundamentalism from the perspective of not only Ron Luce, the founder of BattleCry, but also the young adults at his Honor Academy as they struggle with sin, sexuality and "secularism." The specters of gender loom large in "She Said Yes," as Honor Academy attendees confront limited gender norms as sexuality becomes the language for and of sin. Moreover, Sharlet does not shy away from issues that make religious people and scholars of religion nervous. He tries to figure out the "price tag" of religious movements without turning to discussions of charlatanism or inautheniticity. While following a New Age healer, he notes, "You get what you pay for" (198) without snark. Capitalism resides in religion and spirituality (just ask Darren Grem or Richard King).

The second, likely more trite, song is a pop song. Sharlet cajoles, "Pop is religion, a source of stories and a conduit for myths, the smoke and mirrors by which large groups of people get together and...get 'vulnerable'" (225-226). I heard it on the radio (it stuck with me, haunted me, maybe). "If I Die Young" by the Band Perry reflects on loss, trauma and the "sharp knife of a short life" in a slightly off-kilter melody that reverberates. Sharlet also navigates loss, trauma and the lack of meaning (see also John Corrigan on meaninglessness). Many of the essays circle the trauma of every day life, unintended hurt and the loss of loved ones. In "Bad Moon Rising," the memory of the author's dead mother and uncle haunts while accompanied to the CCR song of the title. Cornel West discusses "death shudders," despair and coming to terms with the "reality of death, ordinary life--waiting to die, living as you never will" (60). In the last essay of the collection, "Born, Again," the life of Dock Boggs is juxtaposed with the loss of a friend's infant and a meditation on "quitting." Sharlet pens:

An input of energy results in motion. Simple math, nothing more than 2+2=4. Pages pile up and become books; babies grow up and become children.

The belief that either will necessarily prosper...that "things will work out," is grotesque: tragic and comic at the same time, funny because it's sad, sad because it's funny, awful because it just might be true. Seen from a distance, through a telescope or at the far remove of "art," a story or a painting or a poem or a song [or scholarship?], both the most mundane of expectations...are the painful spectacle, grievous mismatches of desire and power, of want and the ability to make it so (248-249).

All of Sharlet's interlocutors, his conversants, his interviewees, seek to manage trauma. How do we manage when ordinary life is about wounds rather than hope? How do we make sense of hurt, trauma, death, quitting, capitalism, consumerism, spirituality, music, art, or religion? (Or do we?) What do we do in the grips of a "death shudder"? Sharlet's Sweet Heaven When I Die flirts with old questions of suffering and meaning while suggesting that folks are just "trying to become human" but "not there yet" (259).

But this also proves useful to those of us who "write" religion as our scholarship. Sharlet's work pushes me to think about how we write the lives of our contemporaries or those long dead. How do we write trauma? How are scholars making meaning out of the messiness of individual lives? Or should we embrace the meaningless as an analytic frame too? What happens when we pay attention to religion writ small? What kinds of stories do we gain? And what kind of stories do we lose? The work evokes, and songs become my analysis, which makes me wonder how art can be helpful in our interpretations (Jason Bivins and Julie Bryne likely have much more to say about this). Why does this book come to me in song?

Locavangelism: Eating as Spiritual Practice, Part III

2011-12-04T17:41:00.003-07:00

Editorial note: This is Part III of Rachel Wheeler's discussion of what she calls "locavangelism." Part I is here; Part II is here. The last couple of paragraphs here are a repeat from Part I, which I repeat here as a summary of the series.

by Rachel Wheeler

Why now?

Having attempted to show how various wings of the modern food-centered environmentalist movement draw on patterns of evangelicalism, I’d like to take a stab at answering two questions: why food now? and what does it all mean? The immediate answer to the first question, I believe is 9/11 and the 2008 financial meltdown. Growing your own tomatoes, people are discovering, is a way to economize, enjoy better food, and connect with a past that feels safe during a time of great uncertainty. Locavangelism seems to represent a sort of personal declaration of isolationism. The past decade, beginning with 9/11, has persuaded many that globalization represents a threat rather than an opportunity, and this sense of threat has led many to want to seek a closer connection to the dirt in their own back yards. But I think we can’t stop there. The 1990s were crucially important in laying the groundwork that would eventually produce the locavore movement.

The turn to food, I believe, marks a desire to marry belief and practice, it represents a backlash against an era that liberals and conservatives are seeing as superficial: the go-go-90s witnessed the make-over of many American cities. Everyone celebrated the decreased crime rates, and the cleaner subways – both unquestionably good developments—but the 90s also brought a new era of consumerism and suburbanization with the growth of sprawling McMansion studded developments gobbling up prime farmland on the outskirts of many cities (particularly in the Midwest). Shopping became the number one leisure activity among Americans, and suddenly people traded in their under a dollar coffee habit for $3 (and more) grande skinny caramel macchiatos.

Political liberals got their President in 1992 with Clinton’s election, while Conservatives were laying the groundwork for a Republican take over that came in 1994. Republicans and Democrats had great reason for hope in the 1990s. On the left, the 1990s marked the high point of the “politically correct” or PC movement, when liberals learned to call black people “African-Americans,” and Indians “Native Americans” and feel they were doing their part to right the wrongs of prior, unenlightened times. The 1990s also saw the growing influence of the Religious Right. The Republican Revolution of 1994, and the election of a born-again Christian - George W. Bush-- in 2000, swelled hopes among America’s evangelicals that a conservative Christian agenda would finally be implemented. His election marked an astounding and seemingly unassailable alliance of conservative Christians, fiscal conservatives, and big-business. But neither Clinton nor Bush accomplished what their supporters hoped, leading to a suspicion about the meaning of professions of faith, whether of the PC or the evangelical variety: does calling a person in a wheelchair “physically challenged” rather than handicapped change their experience of being handicapped when public buildings are not accessible? Will a politician who professes to be born again necessarily be above political compromise? Some Conservative Christians began having second thoughts about their enthusiastic alliance with big-business. Liberals and conservatives were dismayed by their leaders’ political (and moral) compromises, though perhaps more often, they were inclined to see the problems as coming from the other side of the political aisle.) As Rod Dreher writes in Crunchy Cons, “Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.”

The writings of locavangelists, of the lefty and Christian Agrarian variety, are rife with professions about the incongruity of belief and action. All the authors considered here write of the impulse to bring belief and action together. The financial implosion has lent further impetus to the desire for change: the promise of ever increasing wealth, of ever increasing house values, has proved illusory and this realization has prompted many to reconsider the meaning of work. If it is not to make more money and buy a bigger house, what is it for? So, I think there is something of a widespread re-alignment of values going on, with many people opting to focus their energies on the familial and the local, shunning the plastic and the consumerist, and seeking above all, the authentic, however that might be constructed. Beavan, the No Impact Man, writes: “I want my work to align with my values. I want to write about what’s important. I want to help change minds. The blurb for Year of Plenty (by Goodwin, the Presbyterian pastor) announces, this is the story of “one family wrestling with what it means to re-integrate life and faith.”

What locavores on the left and right seem to have in common is their emphasis on the importance of practice. It seems to me to be a commentary on what many now see as the superficiality of the 1990s. Both sides are seeking ways to realize their beliefs through actions. It is telling, I think that the environmental movement is growing not by more people heading for escape to a pristine wilderness, but through rediscovering the ancient traditions of agriculture, a turn that seems eminently more practical in a precarious world. As Ragan Sutterfield writes, “the problem with our role in creation is that we don't remember it. In our fallen state we have forgotten our place, both within God's will and love and also in our love and care for creation. We need to be reminded of who we are and what we are about. Practices and disciplines are our primary way of learning to remember, of being recollected to our place and call as creatures. I would like to offer farming, done well, as one of those disciplines.”

I find it fascinating, that a predominantly Protestant country has suddenly discovered “practice.” I don’t know quite what to make of this: it could be a response to the broader political and cultural forces, or it could suggest the assimilation of important religious ideas and practices from other religions. Americans are clearly hungry for practical guidance: Michael Pollan’s prescriptive book Food Rules, was quickly vaulted to the top of best-seller lists. Americans seem to want to be told what to do and many are finding new spiritual rewards in practicing the discipline of eating according to Pollan’s rules. Locavorism may well be the new Kosher, but it is being embraced with evangelical fervor.

The Anointed, the Cross, and the Lynching Tree

2011-12-02T08:36:00.011-07:00

by Edward J. Blum

When W. E. B. Du Bois remembered his time as a student at Harvard University in the late nineteenth century, he recalled an unsettled feeling toward science. It was there than he “began to face scientific race dogma” in the form of “evolution and the ‘Survival of the Fittest.’” Beyond the classroom, he walked into a museum and stood before a demonstration of humankind’s supposed development. He witnessed, “a series of skeletons arranged from a little monkey to a tall well-developed white man, with a Negro barely outranking a chimpanzee.” Needless to say, Du Bois wasn’t happy with what he saw. He spent the rest of his career trying to undermine the “scientific” evidence that placed people of color below whites, and Du Bois saw it as his religion to destroy white supremacy.

I was reminded of Du Bois’s museum experience at the American Academy of Religion. On the way there and then home, I read two new books on the power and place of religion in twentieth and twenty-first century America, beginning with The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age by Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson. Although for very different reasons, the characters studied here shared Du Bois’s displeasure with modern science and especially its focus on evolution. Evangelical experts hate The Anointed, even though many of them haven’t even read the book yet. Some who did thought Stephens and Giberson should have published with another press, one that evangelicals would pay attention to and respect. Liberals seem to love it, even though many of them acknowledge having only read the New York Times piece on it and not the entire book.

Having actually read each page, I can say that this is a terrific book of American religious history. Stephens and Giberson take the reader through the “parallel culture” of many contemporary evangelicals. We tour Ken Ham’s creation museum in Kentucky; we read primary sources with David Barton as he searches for any and all connections between the founding generation and Christianity. We struggle with James Dobson on how to raise children in a multicultural, pluralistic, media-driven world that seems to accept homosexuality as never before. And we rambunctiously and anxiously await Christ’s return with Hal Lindsey and Tim La Haye. We search with Paul Miller, an earnest Christian in New England, to find the right kind of ideas to satisfy evangelical souls.

Sure, evangelical readers won’t like the tone of the book. Stephens and Giberson don’t pull punches. They think Creation Science is “weak science”; they think David Barton is an “amateur.” They think Dobson is “strangely obsessed with homosexuality.” And they wonder about the credibility of some Christian colleges. It strikes me that there is a problem with the tone of the book, but not for the same reason that evangelicals dislike it.

I think the tone issue could have been transformed by a more sophisticated analysis. Stephens and Giberson seem so intent to pull the curtain back from these so-called experts that they miss when and where their expertise becomes a civic problem: their parallel cultures are fine, interesting, indeed even fascinating, until they run into the public, civic, and legal spheres of classrooms and courtrooms. If Stephens and Giberson had clarified when and where “experts” become social problems, then perhaps the authors could have embraced the ingenuity of many of these “evangelical entrepreneurs” or "holy mavericks" (as Shayne Lee and Phil Sinitiere refer to some other leading evangelicals) on their own terms but then challenged them when the issue became the “common good.”

Let me give one farcical example, but other, more realistic ones, are easily imaginable. As scholars, we can think deeply about the meaning of bumper stickers that read: “In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned.” On one hand, this is an inventive commodification of theology; it is a humorous display of one’s faith – a kind of missionary effort that subtly cajoles others to consider that at any moment Jesus could come back. This theology becomes a problem, though, if this individual is so certain of his end times theology that he doesn’t pay taxes, that he refuses to vaccinate his child yet sends her to public schools, or that he refuses to wear a condom when having sex with an individual and hides his knowledge that he has a sexually transmitted disease. At this point, his claim, “trust me, the end is near” is a major problem. It directly impacts the lives and well beings of others. It would have been nice if Stephens and Giberson worked out how and why the distinct contexts where “expertise” is deployed matter.

The Anointed may not convince a lot of evangelicals to abandon their experts, but I fully expect it to work well in US religious history classrooms. Each chapter could be the focus of a particular historical theme: David Barton could be used to discuss how historians have characterized the place of religion and the role of God; Ken Ham could be used to discuss the intersections of religion and science that would include the Scopes trial; James Dobson could get a class into religion, family, and sexuality; and Hal Lindsey can bring us into notions of prophecy, millennialism, and the end times. I imagine teaching this book by developing historical narratives to get to each chapter’s character, have students locate documents in the genre, and then debate the histories, what students found, and what they think of the folks Stephens and Giberson discuss. I think it will lead to a vigorous dialogue, where hopefully no evangelical in the class would feel threatened or discriminated.

After a wonderful time at the AAR, which each year should commission a team of ethnographers to detail the enigmatic people, events, and performances that make it the New Orleans of conferences, I flew home with a treasure in hand: James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree. It’s a book I’ve been long waiting for, since Professor Cone and I had many e-conversations about how to consider lynching as a fundamental religious problem in American history. The book is simply marvelous. Part autobiography, part history, and all cutting theology, The Cross and the Lynching Tree argues that in the United States neither the cross, nor the lynching tree can be understood independent of one another. Individual chapters detail the centrality of lynching to the spiritual core of black American faiths, the failure of Reinhold Niebuhr and his Christian realism to deal with lynching and racial violence, the brilliance of King’s theological vision for his ability to live his theology of the cross, the creative renderings from African American writers and artists of black lynch victims as Christ figures, and some particular ways black women have grappled spiritually with racial violence. Cone concludes that the lynching tree “is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land.”

The Cross and the Lynching Tree is terrific book. Readable, short, and to the point, it re-paints our thinking about race, religion, violence, and theology in the twentieth century. When it came to racial violence, Reinhold Niebuhr stands out neither as ideologically prophetic nor as intellectually powerful. He stood by as his former church in Detroit refused to integrate; he wallowed in self and group pity when African Americans died. Black writers and artists, in contrast, take on the “wild beast” of white supremacy and “fight it” with poetry, paintings, and prose. I couldn’t agree more with the wonderful theologian Shawn Copeland’s endorsement of the book: “At the heart of Cone’s critique lies a passionate quest and challenge for the beloved community. James Cone teaches us still. Will we finally learn?”

After finishing Cone’s wonderful book, I felt grateful that I had learned so much from him over the years. And then I looked back at The Anointed and I thought about all the fuss and fury it has and will evoke. I thought about the earnest Paul Miller and his search for a “secular” friend. I wondered if he had any African American friends. I thought about evangelicals pouring millions of dollars into a Creation Museum, but bristling at any reference to reparations for past wrongs. I thought about end-times theology and how it so often justified white “realism." Billy Graham responded to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech by saying that only after Jesus returned would white and black children play together. Almost a century earlier, Dwight Moody told revival stories of African Americans knowing that their “freedom” and “liberty” would only be true in heaven. Given the other forces evangelicals have been willing to fight with fiery speeches, bloody battles, and billions of dollars – Communism, secular humanism, abortion – why they were so unwilling to put power and military might to work against racism makes them sound either as cowards or as liars.

The white evangelicals in The Anointed and those who so militantly attack Stephens and Giberson for analyzing them without kid gloves may be blind to the world Cone discusses and the work race does. Evangelicals can obsess over issues of museums, child-rearing manuals, and the Founders relationship to religion because they have not and do not suffer as African Americans have or as gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals have. All individuals suffer – to be alive is to suffer at some point. But white evangelicals don’t suffer from structures; they don’t suffer from systems. They may not like certain venues in American society, but no water fountains have been designated “liberal only” and no evangelical has been murdered in the United States because he or she was evangelical. Cone ends where white evangelicals refuse to begin, the places where they never have to go: racial realities of everyday life.

Where is “the gospel of Jesus’ cross revealed today”? Cone asks at the end of his work. His answer is specific and off the radar of the anointed evangelicals: “the criminal justice system where nearly 1/3 of black men between ages of 18 and 28 are in prisons, jails, on parole, or waiting for their day in court.” If one really believes that the age of the dinosaurs, or the private letters of the founders, or the possibility of their sons coming out as gay, or the possibility that Obama may be the Antichrist, are the most pressing moral problems of our age, then a bunch of black men in prison will concern them about as much as the history of enslavement, the plethora of violated land treaties, the brutal past and present of American colonialism, and the lynching of black America. They probably won’t read Cone’s book, but we can wonder. Why do they cry so loudly about The Anointed when they could sob softly and humbly about The Cross and the Lynching Tree?

Musings on Latino/a Religion

2011-12-01T18:48:00.003-07:00

Paul Harvey

Our former blog contributor here, Arlene Sanchez-Walsh, has begun her own blog over at Patheos: Musings on Latino/a Religion. We'll put it on our sideroll here. Here's her opening post, and I invite all to follow what should be an important conversation there.
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Musings on Latino/a Religion
by Arlene Sanchez-Walsh

So I was talking to my colleagues awhile ago, and we all wondered aloud, where are all the Latinos/as? Why aren’t we in the “emergent” convo? Why aren’t we published in all these religion blogs? Why are we invisible? You’d be surprised how much variety there is out there among those of us who have the luxury of calling ourselves descendents of the La Raza, described by writer José Vasconcelos, as the amalgamation of the Empire…which is what we are. Over the next few months, to give our young writers some exposure, and to get me used to writing this blog on Latino/a religion, cultura and politics, I hope this blog serves a few purposes. Simply put, we want to be heard, we do have something to say, and with the contributions of my friends and colleagues, I hope we can do just that.

So along with being a space for my musings on religion, culture and the Latino/a religious imagination, I am going to introduce you to some new writers, thinkers, raconteurs, and traviesos/as (trouble makers). Why? who cares? Well, if the coming demographic earthquake that will turn 1/3 of this country Latino/a by 2050 is correct…not only to most of us desperately need to get to really know who we are, we, including me, need to brush up on our Español, and we need to start speaking for ourselves and not allow others to define who we are, who we should be, who we should vote for, and what causes are most important. As you will see, we are more than immigration, more than farm workers, more than cholos/as, more than anything the dominant culture has every imagined. I hope you follow me on Twitter @AmichelSW and I am also on Facebook.

Bienvenidos!

Barbara Savage Wins Grawemeyer Award

2011-12-01T07:54:00.007-07:00

Paul Harvey

Congratulations to Barbara Savage, whose recent work Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion has received the 2012 Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Here is the announcement:

Book with insights on black politics, religion wins Grawemeyer Award

A book filled with fresh insights on the relationship between black politics and religion has earned its author the 2012 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion.

Barbara D. Savage, a professor of history and American social thought at the University of Pennsylvania, is receiving the prize for the ideas set forth in her book, “Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion,” published in 2008 by Harvard University Press.

“Besides explaining why it is misleading to speak of ‘the black church’ given the enormous diversity among African American congregations, Savage challenges the popular belief that black churches have been prophetic and politically active throughout history,” Garrett said.The book introduces important new perspectives on the study of black religion and the political role of African American churches, said award director Susan Garrett.
Savage also shows how black women excluded from religious leadership and the formal study of black religion became leaders outside their churches, including Nannie Helen Burroughs, who founded one of the nation’s first vocational schools for women.
A Penn faculty member since 1995, Savage teaches courses on American religious and social reform, 20th Century African American history and the relationship between media and politics. She has held administrative posts at Penn’s Center for Africana Studies and previously worked as a staff member in the U.S. Congress.
The University of Louisville presents four Grawemeyer Awards each year for outstanding works in music composition, world order, psychology and education. The university and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary jointly give a fifth award in religion. This year’s awards are $100,000 each.

FSU Graduate Student Symposium Call for Papers Deadline Extended

2011-11-29T19:10:00.004-07:00

Call for Papers: The Florida State University Department of Religion
11th Annual Graduate Student Symposium
February 17-19, 2012 • Tallahassee, Florida

The Florida State University Department of Religion is pleased to announce its 11th Annual Graduate Student Symposium to be held February 17-19, 2012 in Tallahassee, Florida. This year we are pleased that Center for the Advancement of Human Rights at FSU will be co-sponsoring the Symposium.

Last year’s symposium was a huge success, allowing over forty presenters from over twenty universities and departments as varied as Religion, Geography, Psychology, and Philosophy to share their research, learn from one another, and meet many of their peers and future colleagues.

This year’s symposium will be centered on the theme “Beyond Borders: Constructing, Deconstructing and Transgressing Boundaries.”

Dr. Manuel A. Vásquez, of the University of Florida, will deliver this year’s keynote address. His lecture is tentatively titled “Beyond the Fetishism of Commodities? Hyper-Animism and Materiality in the Present Age.” Also, we are pleased to host Dr. Kathryn Lofton of Yale University as a guest respondent.

Due to our commitment to collaborative scholarship, students from all fields with interdisciplinary interests in the study of religion and at all levels of graduate study are encouraged to submit paper proposals.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: Building and Maintaining Identities; Communities, both Local and Global; Scholars Manufacturing Subjects; Strategies of Empowerment and Subjugation; Limits of Embodiment; Political, Ethical and/or Gender Conflicts; Discourses of (In)Justice.

Presentations should be approximately 15 to 20 minutes in length and will receive faculty responses. In addition, every year respondents select the best graduate paper to receive the Leo F. Sandon Award, an endowed award named for the Religion Department's former chair.

The due date for proposals has been extended. Proposals including an abstract of approximately 300 words, a list of key terms, and a one-page CV should be submitted by December 10, 2011 for review. Final papers must be submitted by January 15, 2012. Please send proposals to Michael Graziano at fsureligionsymposium@gmail.com.

Thank you for your interest. We look forward to hearing from you or your students and seeing you at the 2012 Graduate Student Symposium at Florida State University.

Sarah Ruth Hammond, 1977-2011

2011-11-29T16:14:00.005-07:00

Note: The following sad news came to me today via Linn Tonstad, Professor of Christian Theology at Southern Methodist University, concerning the passing of her friend Sarah Ruth Hammond, a recent PhD. from Yale University who was teaching most recently at William & Mary.

Update: the New York Times religion writer Mark Oppenheimer has posted his memorial tribute on his blog, here. At Religion Dispatches, Sarah Morice-Brubaker reflects on her meeting Sarah as a freshman in college and knowing her as recently as rooming together just a week and a half ago at the AAR. An official announcement and memorial from the Provost at William & Mary is here.

Sarah Ruth Hammond
by Linn Tonstad

Sarah Ruth Hammond, a brilliant young scholar of American religious history, died this weekend. At the time, she was working as a visiting assistant professor at the College of William & Mary. Sarah received her PhD from Yale’s Religious Studies department in 2010, for a dissertation entitled, “‘God’s Business Men’: Entrepreneurial Evangelicals in Depression and War.” Sarah received numerous fellowships during graduate study, including a Mellon fellowship, a Franke fellowship, and a Lake Fellowship from the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at Indiana University. Sarah received her BA from Yale University in 1999. Her first book was under contract with the University of Chicago Press, and her article, “‘God Is My Partner’: An Evangelical Business Man Confronts Depression and War,” had recently been published in Church History (September 2011). Sarah was 34 years old when she died.

Others will be better qualified than I to assess the loss her death represents for the future of American religious history. I do know that Sarah was one of the smartest and most vivacious people I’ve ever known, and that there is little question that, had she lived, she would have been a central figure in the next generation of American religious historians. I first met Sarah at the orientation for incoming PhD students in religious studies at Yale in the fall of 2003. We quickly became close, and accompanied one another through many of the vagaries of graduate study, romantic entanglements and disentanglements, and other various challenges of spending significant portions of your twenties and thirties training to read and interpret texts rather than people. Sarah loved music, and (remember, we met in 2003) she would bring stacks of CDs over to my apartment and we would spend hours talking while exchanging albums from Steve Earle and Warren Zevon, and obsessing over the excellence of the band Pulp. (We heard Jarvis Cocker play a concert in New York once, at which he did not indulge us with a single song from Pulp days, yet all was wonderful anyway.) Sarah was a passionate runner and an activist for many Democratic and progressive causes, overcoming her natural shyness to canvass door to door and work in phone banks when issues were particularly exigent. Her devotion to excellence at Scrabble was legendary, extending to the point of photographically recording the board after games. Her cats, Gandalf and Thea, assisted greatly in the writing of her dissertation by destroying staplers, knocking over stacks of research, and disappearing at the whisper of a stranger’s entrance.