Salem Repossessed

Paul Harvey

My graduate student Brad Hart, who blogs at American Creation, has pointed me to "Salem Repossessed" from the July 2008 issue of the William & Mary Quarterly. The issue includes a substantive forum featuring an all-star lineup of scholars of the Salem Witch Trials. I have yet to see it, doubt I'll get to it for a while, so in the meantime I'm depending on Brad's posts on the articles, the first of which is here. Thanks to Brad for keeping us up to scholarly date on this historical perennial.

(I should add that at American Creation, Brad and others have taken on the Sisyphean task of arguing against the various "America was founded as a Christian nation" cranks and wannabe theocrats, whose ahistorical nonsense seems to be proliferating in certain sectors of the evangelical subculture).

My students will be discussing the trials in Theory and Methods of History soon, using the nice chapter on it in After the Fact and the primary documents at the wonderful Salem Witch Trial documents site (and also using the documents compiled in David Hall's Witch Hunting in 17th-Century New England). For me, it's always been a reliable exericse in demonstrating the vagaries of historical interpretation. Last year, a student used a map from the documents website to visually trash the Boyer/Nissenbaum thesis; I'm not sure if he was right, but it sure made for a fun class period.

The contents for the special issue:

Third Series, Volume 65, Number 3 July 2008

Forum: Salem Repossessed

Jane Kamensky, Salem Obsessed; Or, Plus Ça Change: An Introduction

Margo Burns and Bernard Rosenthal, Examination of the Records of the Salem Witch Trials

Richard Latner, Salem Witchcraft, Factionalism, and Social Change Reconsidered: Were Salem’s Witch-Hunters Modernization’s Failures?

Benjamin C. Ray, The Geography of Witchcraft Accusations in 1692 Salem Village
Web Supplement

John Demos, What Goes Around Comes Around

Mary Beth Norton, Essex County Witchcraft

Carol F. Karlsen, Salem Revisited

Sarah Rivett, Our Salem, Ourselves

Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed in Retrospect

Religion at Colonial Williamsburg

BY JOHN FEA

It has been over thirty years since I last visited Colonial Williamsburg. (I have vivid memories of sitting on the edge of a hotel bed with my father watching Richard Nixon resign the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974). So when I was invited to do a book talk on Virginia's Northern Neck, I thought I would turn the trip into a little family excursion to this so-called "National Treasure."

I have been writing a bit about Williamsburg over at my blog, but I thought I would comment here on the role religion plays at America's premier living history museum. Here are a few random thoughts:

First, I noticed that the re-enactors (particularly George Washington) made a lot of references to "God" and "Providence" in their speeches. (I did not hear "Jesus" or "Jesus Christ" mentioned). This, I think, is an accurate reflection of how Washington would have spoken, but I wonder how much pressure the "powers that be" at CW have received from the large number of conservative evangelicals and "Christian America" types who may have petitioned for more religious language. While I can't verify this, I have heard that the administration at Williamsburg have tried to address this issue.

Second, the stock of colonial and revolutionary history at the Williamsburg Book Sellers (located in the CW Visitors Center) is quite impressive. They had a nice section on early American religion, which included both scholarly and popular treatments of the era. The closest thing they had to "Christian America" literature was Peter Lillback's George Washington's Sacred Fire, an extended argument for Washington's Christianity.

Third, the Jamestown National Park treats the role of religion in the colony, but they are careful to explain that it was not the driving force behind the settlement. There is a foundation of an Anglican Church dating back to 1639 located next to the newly discovered Jamestown fort. As the story goes, in 1994 archaeologist William Kelso started digging for the fort in the place he did because he believed that if the church had been previously found, then the fort could not have been far away. He, of course, was right.

Fourth, the National Park Service has a monument to Rev. Robert Hunt, the first Anglican who dedicated the settlement to the glory of God. There is also a huge cross behind the fort, a symbol of the original Anglican presence in Jamestown. Both of these religious displays played an important role in last year's 400th anniversary celebrations sponsored by Pat Robertson and a Christian America organization called Providence Forum. (I have blogged about these before).

Fifth, the African-American and Baptist experience in Virginia is vividly portrayed in a program that focuses on Gowan Pamphlet, a Black preacher, and James Ireland, a white Baptist preacher who was supposedly the most persecuted Baptist in the colony. This presentation was excellent and the characters were very clear about Virginia Baptist's early commitment to the separation of church and state.

Sixth, I stopped in at the historic Wren Building on the campus of William and Mary College. Those who follow religious news may remember the 2006 debate over whether or not a cross should be displayed in the Wren Building Chapel. (W&M religion professor David Holmes debated conservative think tanker Dinesh D'Souza on this issue. You can see the debate here.) What struck me about my visit to the Wren Chapel was the fact that this cross is actually quite small (about two feet in height). From what I understand, a compromise was reached in this case. The cross remains in the chapel, but it is now on display on the side of the room in a glass case rather than on the altar where it was originally located.

Overall, I was quite impressed with the way religion was integrated into everyday life at Colonial Williamsburg and the surrounding historical parks. It seems that one would be hard pressed to criticize the Foundation for failing to take notice of this essential aspect of early American life.

What We Can Expect From McCain at Compassion Forum 2

John Fea

As a follow up to Matt Sutton's recent post about the Obama-McCain showdown at Rick Warren's church I thought our readers might find this video interesting. (This is painful to watch on so many levels).



ADDENDUM:
In the comments section, John Turner has offered a different view of McCain as a man of faith that is worth adding to this post. (Much less painful and, from where I sit, quite inspiring).

New Blog: American Creation

John Fea

Our readers should be aware of the folks over at American Creation, a new group blog "to promote discussion, debate and insight into the religious aspects of America's founding." They have an eclectic group of contributors who do a great job of scouring the web for materials related to Christianity and the Founding. It looks like part of their mission is to debunk the "Christian America" myth circulating among certain sectors of American evangelicalism. One of their contributors, Jon Rowe, is the most dogged critic of the Christian America thesis I have ever run across and I have learned much from reading his own blog over the last few years.

As some of you know, I am writing a popular book for the church tentatively titled "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Primer for Christians," so needless to say I will be checking American Creation often.

Obama and the Gospel of Cal Thomas

By Art Remillard

When Cal Thomas had this picture taken, he must have told the photographer, “OK, I want something that just screams, ‘I am a self-righteous [fill in the blank].’’” Think I’m wrong? Then read his recent article, “Barack Obama is Not a Christian.” No, Thomas doesn’t run with the “Obama is a Muslim” canard. Rather, he references a 2004 interview Obama gave with Chicago Sun-Times columnist “God Girl” Cathleen Falsani (read the entire interview here). After his set-up, Thomas mentions an exchange on salvation...

Falsani correctly brings up John 14:6 (and how many journalists would know such a verse, much less ask a question based on it?) in which Jesus says of Himself, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” That sounds pretty exclusive, but Obama says it depends on how this verse is heard. According to Falsani, Obama thinks that “all people of faith — Christians, Jews, Muslims, animists, everyone — know the same God.” (her words)

If that is so, Jesus wasted his time coming to Earth and he certainly did not have to suffer the pain of rejection and crucifixion if there are ways to God other than through Himself.

Perhaps I have a different interview, but I couldn’t locate where, exactly, Obama said this. But I suspect Thomas was pointing to where Obama reasoned...

I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell. I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity. That’s just not part of my religious makeup.

The Horor! Indeed, depicting a companionate God sounds pretty darn scandalous. This led Thomas to conclude…

Obama can call himself anything he likes, but there is a clear requirement for one to qualify as a Christian and Obama doesn’t meet that requirement. One cannot deny central tenets of the Christian faith, including the deity and uniqueness of Christ as the sole mediator between God and Man and be a Christian. Such people do have a label applied to them in Scripture. They are called a “false prophet.”

I hope some national journalist or commentator with knowledge of such things asks Obama about this and doesn’t let him get away with re-writing Scripture to suit his political ends.

TAKE THAT LIBERAL MEDIA!!!! But wait, I’m confused? Why does the esteemed columnist Thomas only want “the media” (boooo) to press Obama? Why not John McCain? Imagine this question in a press conference: “Senator McCain, do you find it unfortunate that your potential running mate, Governor Romney, will be burning in the fiery pits of hell for all eternity after he dies?” I mean, fair is fair, right?

"Evangelicalism Rebounds in Academe"

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Another day, another breathless report of the evangelical incursion. This time, our journalistic source is an admirable one: Rice University sociologist D. Michael Lindsay (author of Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite) writing for the May 9, 2008 issue of The Chronicle Review. Of familiar pitch is the exclamatory that “evangelicalism is rebounding,” the statistical joy at evangelical Ivy League elitism, and the inevitable ethnic revelation (“I found that 90 percent of the members of the Yale chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ are Asian-American”).

After five paragraphs of such rehearsal, the article transitions to a narrative useful for any students of evangelicalism and fundamentalism seeking quotations on the mind(s) of those Christian men (and women, though fewer of those are imagined) pressing into hallowed halls. Lindsey serves up a summation of “evangelical scholarship” and its meeting of the “intellectual mainstream.” Included in the primer is an exuberant presentation of evangelical scholars, scholarship on evangelicals, and evangelical scholarship. The piece presumes an anxious readership, liberal and loathing of the menace that seems to have more money, more organizational power, and more disregard for plural postulates than the dominant academic mainstream. To that cohort, Lindsay supplies a comforting reminder and some clarification. His point is quelling: most of the evangelicals who have invaded liberal arts lands are of a cosmopolitan bent, and eager to keep the apple cart (his metaphor) upright. The question is whether the apple cart, frightened of its new handler, may collapse under the weight of presumptive infection. Lindsay says, rightly: probably not.

More on Steven Waldman, Founding Faith

PAUL HARVEY

John Fea gave our blog an extensive and thoughtful review of STeven Waldman's Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America here (or just scroll down).

Terry Gross's interview on Fresh Air with Waldman is linked here. An introductory blurb:

Fresh Air from WHYY, March 11, 2008 · Was America meant to be a Christian nation? Author Steven Waldman attempts to answer this and other questions related to America's religious history in his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America.

Waldman is the co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a website devoted to spirituality and faith issues. In tandem with his book, Beliefnet has opened an online archive of historical documents related to the separation of church and state, and religious freedom in America.

There's also a short excerpt from the volume linked to the Fresh Air site.

Because It's Pure.

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

How often do we get a clamor for more, not less? In the world of soap opera sex, requests for sensual expression have always wobbled between romantic desire and daytime discretion. Intimacy during casserole prep is best capped a little pawing, maybe a fade to candlelight close-up. As the decades have droned on (drone indeed, since soap operas function about five years back in fashion, and ten years earlier in social stylistic), more appendages have been exposed, but still: it’s a lot more fantasy talk more than fantasy action.

Over the last month, however, new worlds of dreaming have entered daytime possibility. I speak of the clamor for more love (not less) between Luke Snyder and Noah Mayer, a love match spotlighted in As The World Turns. Since they officially united in September, the couple hasn’t kissed once on-screen, not even after a Christmas declaration of love (which included a climactic cutaway to mistletoe) or a Valentine’s Day ATWT couples round-up (in which everyone saw smooch save Luke and Noah, who hugged it out). Angry viewers began a kissing campaign, demanding more love action from this too-talky tale. The fans have constructed a large letter-writing campaign, posted an online petition, and developed a web site that counts the days, hours, minutes and seconds since last lip lock.

Any talk of homosexuality in this country necessarily turns to thoughts of religion, but in this case, we don’t have to press to any moral abstraction to find talk of God. ATWT makes it easy on us, as this particular opera is owned by one very special soap: Procter & Gamble Productions Inc. CBS executives consult on the series, but the creative direction is set by P&G, makers of (among other cleansing products) Ivory soap. Nearly 129 years ago, Harley Proctor sat in a little Episcopal church in Cincinnati, listening to the Anglican lesson. It was from thee forty-fifth Psalm: “All thy garments smell of myrrh and aloes and cassia out of ivory palaces whereby they have made thee glad.” The Biblically-inspired Ivory suds propagated not only cleanliness, but also holiness: a color and a principle tied up in a new wave of national sale. Through a simultaneous invocation of scientific discourses (ads described Ivory as “99 and 44/100 per cent pure”) and moral imaginaries, Proctor and Gamble brought soap to the people. “Who wants pure soap?” asked one ad, “Pretty nearly everybody. Why do they want it? Because it’s pure.”

From the first ad for Ivory (published in December 1882 in a Christian weekly, The Independent) till today, P&G has meant more than quick clean. It has offered a baptism-by-product, a wash of sacred cleanliness. “Americans are the apostles of personal cleanliness,” explained the Cleanliness Journal, funded in part by P&G, “Ours is primarily a character building, Americanizing enterprise for all people and we continue strong in our belief that cleanliness is akin to godliness.” Today, the godliness suggested is a contested one, tugging between a culture in love with clean (boy kisses are impure kisses) and a culture infatuated with green (ATWT is one of the few soaps continuing to profit in an era of declining daytime ratings). “It’s always hard to please a diverse audience,” explained P&G’s PR rep, “and we have a diverse audience.” Which side will win? Harley’s prim Protestantism or Luke and Noah’s most profitable, if dangerously impious, lust? Fortunately for P&G, there is a precedent: their early ads sold nothing so happily as white male-on-male flesh. Christianity is indeed a confusing sexual arbiter.

Providence and the Invention of the United States

BY JOHN FEA

Last June thousands of conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists gathered together in Virginia for an event called the Jamestown Quadricentennial: A Celebration of America’s Providential History, 1607-2007, sponsored by an organization called Vision Forum Ministries. The eight day celebration included “Faith and Freedom Tours” of Williamsburg and Jamestown, seminars on America’s providential history, worship services, children’s programs, and a host of other patriotic commemorations. It was a showcase of the 400th anniversary of the first English colony in America--Christian Right style.

I am assuming that most of the readers of this blog would agree that this event is disturbing on so many levels. I have blogged on topics like this before and will probably blog on topics like this again. But one cannot deny that the folks at Vision Forum Ministries, in their promotion of the providence of God in history, have tapped into a longstanding tradition in American politics and intellectual life. This is the theme of Nicholas Guyatt’s great new book, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1865 (Cambridge UP, 2007).

In historicizing the notion of providence, Guyatt shows that this idea “played a leading role in the invention of an American national identity before 1865." The depth of his research and the breadth of his scope are quite impressive. He packs this book with so much information that at times it became a burden to work through it all. But Guyatt writes well, and as a result this will be the standard text on the topic for many years to come. Even if you never get around to reading all 300+ pages it is a book worth having on your shelf as a reference tool for when one of David Barton's young and eager disciples takes that front row seat in your lecture hall.

For Guyatt, providentialism is more than just a “belief that God intervenes in human history.” It is a rather complex system of theological ideas that have manifested themselves in a variety of different ways in our nation's past. Throughout American history providence has been promoted in terms of the covenantal belief that nations rise and fall based upon their obedience to God, the idea that some nations—like the United States-- are chosen to play a special role in human history, and the practice of interpreting current events through the grid of biblical prophecy. Throughout the period between Jamestown and the Civil War, providence was used over and over again as a tool to achieve political ends. Guyatt explores the role that providence played in European colonization, the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the British response to the American Revolution, early national historiography, anti-slavery movements, pro-slavery ideology, Indian removal, the rise of nationalism in the early republic, the American Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Guyatt does not have an axe to grind. As tempting as it might be to draw contemporary lessons from the history of providentialism in early America, he remains a true historian, leaving it up to us to tease out the implications of his work. Yet the implications are there, and they are easily discovered. One cannot read this book without seeing the serious problems that providentialism has caused in America. With this in mind, the argument of Guyatt’s entire study is probably best summed by a quote he uses from Ambrose Bierce’s 1911 satire, The Devil’s Dictionary. Bierce defines “providence” as an idea that is “unexpectedly and conspicuously beneficial to the person so describing it.” At least that is how it has usually played out in United States history.

National Religious History Week -- Not

PAUL HARVEY

Quite possibly much ado about nothing, likely an election-year stunt to fire up the base rather than some grave evidence of the theocrats on the march. But still -- courtesy of Tenured Radical, here's a discussion of a House Resolution to establish a National Religious History Week -- aka "America is a Christian Nation" week. Here's an excerpt from the resolution:

"Whereas political scientists have documented that the most frequently-cited source in the political period known as The Founding Era was the Bible" and "Whereas the United States Supreme Court has declared throughout the course of our Nation's history that the United States is 'a Christian country', 'a Christian nation', 'a Christian people', 'a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being' and that 'we cannot read into the Bill of Rights a philosophy of hostility to religion....'"

Apparently the bill's sponsors have not talked to John Fea, among others.

Here's the best portion from The Radical's take:

The bill clips a fistful of historical "facts" that link American political institutions to Christianity, including the presence of a Gutenberg Bible in the Library of Congress. These facts are stripped of their historical context, and strung together in chronological order, to "prove" that the United States is, and was intended to be by its founders, a Christian nation . . . Curiously, it also suggests that religion really has no history as such -- only a timeless present that can be used to re-order a political past in the interests of a contemporary interest group, a charge often aimed at leftist academics by cultural conservatives who want to minimize the importance of race and gender to national history.

UPDATE: Another History Blog looks under the hood of the "facts" stated in the resolution, briefly; Chris Rodda does so, more extensively, here. Truthiness reigns in this regiment of the right.

One presumes this will collapse of its own absurdity.

Superhero Scholars and Manhattan Mormons

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Some days it feels like all I do is monitor Mormons. I thought for sure I’d stay on the fray with this one, leaving to smarter, more expert voices the daily LDS crime watch. But then Frank Rich had to make the compare and contrast maneuver, blessing Mademoiselle Oprah while mocking Mormon Mitt, and it was over: them was fighting words. It was perhaps unsurprising (for us, historians of U.S. religion) that Rich found a way to condemn Mormons as racist and applaud Oprah Winfrey as beneficent in the same column; the religiously observant have always been the source for uninformed censure. Likewise, African American entertainers have long enjoyed condescending white applause. Now, Romney and Winfrey had something in common: the prejudicial presumptions of their cultured despisers.

With this silly mid-December rant, Rich ripped me into action. Hours lost checking blogs for easy bigotry and tracking presidential candidates’ adjectival inferences about marriage and family. Someone (somewhere) is wounding a religious subject, and now we (students of religion, custodians of sectarian self-esteem) are superheroes to the cause, using pluralist slogans and large explanatory reference works (rather than invisibility or shifts in the space-time continuum) to protect Gotham from prejudicial talk.

We’ve made some friends along the way. Noah Feldman showed up with a lovely, if somewhat derivative, defense of religious freedom. The New Yorker, too, has patronized (patronizingly) the LDS back story, paralleling it in other issues with the Scientology Celebrity Center and the ironic development of New England megachurches. Sunday magazines and weekly cultural reporters alike have tuned in to watch, raptly, devotions done for the divine in this, our bright new un-secular America. Key tonal and topical shifts in such articles include the pursuit of the ironic contrast (they claim to love family but look at those divorcing Osmonds!), ironic invocation of capital (does God really want them to own hotel chains?), and the suspicious (paranoid, really) stare at familial portraits (how can anyone look that good all the time?). Sure, counterfeits and confidence men define the American experience, but c’mon: take a break. Just let the brothers (and sisters) believe.

But how can we, when they’re always up to hilarious self-contradiction? Gawker (evil beast) turned me to yet another anthropological tour of Mormonia. This time, the Mormons take Manhattan. Or, as the wily minds at the New York Observer put it: “Mormons of Manhattan!” (As a sidebar, I’ll just say: I’ve missed the headlining exclamation point. Glad to know that punctuation, once saved for murderous scandal and the sinking Lusitania, has returned in service of urban legends like, you know, Christians in Gotham.)

The article, posing as ethnographic report, is so deliciously self-satisfied that it should become required reading for classes on nativism (classes on anything, really: critical thinking never had such easy mush). This is how hate sneaks in: under the guise of charmed observance. See the young Mormon lass (Nobu waitress and stand-up comic) talk marriage to the unmarried, wear vintage over secret undergarments, trade Converse kicks for suede pumps! See the young Mormon lass talk loneliness and her Harvard education over fries and a (let us hope decaffeinated) diet Coke! See young Mormons seek other young Mormon singles! See young Mormons buy a pre-war classic six! See them never drink! Organize effectively! And taste the pleasures of our pleasure-soaked city without once (never once) breaking monetary stride. “If there’s one theme you hear over and over again from young Mormons, it’s that the Word of Wisdom ultimately gives them a leg up in the ultra-competitive New York business world—they’re never hung over, after all, and they never have to worry about STDs or being pregnant or blacking out and knocking their teeth out.” (As another sidebar, may I just beg young non-Mormon Manhattan to be wary of dental damage? Fun isn’t really fun that necessitates Novacaine.)

Finally (as climax) the article ends with a teaser quote, taking a turn every young bigot needs to make the cause go from potential to real. I speak, of course, of sexing the subject. “Then again, dating non-Mormons isn’t easy either, Ms. Baker said. ‘I’m a decently attractive girl, and guys immediately go to—well, they see it click in their head: Oh, my God, I’m talking to a virgin'.” All across the isle that morning, young boys (some young lasses) found a new fantasy, one to replace (temporarily, till someone else so tantalizes with their sultry oppression) faded pin-ups of Maria Monk and Sally Hemings. “Mormons Take Manhattan!” and our hearts, too. I just need to find my cape.

Native Voices from the Revolutionary Era: New Primary Source Texts

PAUL HARVEY

I'm out for the next several days, but wanted to leave you with a couple of recommendations for the New Year, for some primary texts that might otherwise escape your attention.

Here's the first: The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Literature and Leadership in Eighteenth-Century Native America.

Some years ago, a scholar collected and published the indispensable writings of William Apess: On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, featuring his famous autobiography A Son of the Forest and his blistering appreciation of King Philip. The new collected writings of Occom provide an excellent resource as well. Here's the description from the book jacket:

This volume brings together for the first time the known writings of the pioneering Native American religious and political leader, intellectual, and author, Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). The largest surviving archive of American Indian writing before Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux; 1858-1939), Occom's writings offer unparalleled views into a Native American intellectual and cultural universe in the era of colonialization and the early United States. His letters, sermons, journals, prose, petitions, and hymns--many of them never before published--document the emergence of pantribal political consciousness among the Native peoples of New England as well as Native efforts to adapt Christianity as a tool of decolonialization. Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.

Occom's writings have been discussed in a number of places previously, most crucially in Joanna Brooks's American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures. But this compilation allows for ready access to the complete body of works.

A related title from a few years back, of a figure less important then Occom but certainly worth study: To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson 1751-1776 . From the Library Journal:

These transcriptions of diaries, letters, and sermons of Johnson, a Mohegan (Mohican) teacher and visionary leader, break stereotypes. With prominent ancestors and literate parents, Johnson lived in a community that valued both Mohegan and European cultures. His writing style, learned under the tutelage of Eleazer Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth College, is indistinguishable from that of other writers (Indian or white) trained in prerevolutionary missionary schools, but attention to editor/author Murray's interpretation reveals issues and facts about Mohegan life, including plans for "Brotherton," a Christian Indian town, realized only after the Revolution and Johnson's death. Murray (English, Queen's Univ., Kingston, Ontario) emphasizes the individual writer, following such examples as James Axtell's The Invasion Within (1985). Johnson's humility is striking, as is his commitment to his people. This book makes another Indian "voice" more accessible and gives helpful instruction in the genres and forms of early American writing. Recommended for all Native American collections and for academic libraries.

Finally, a related but lesser-known secondary text: Bernd Peyer, The Tutor'd Mind: Indian Missionary-Writers in Antebellum America.

I find historians often not aware of the ready availability of texts such as these, which are full of rich material for American religious history scholars. Brooks's work noted above is, for my money, the best introduction and analysis of the subject.

The Search for Solid Rock

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

Millennial thinking needs new tropes. At the very least, it needs new energy, since plots for endgame take an increasingly absurdist slant (or they star Will Smith, whose apocalypse seems inevitable the longer he stands so near to Tom Cruise). What with war, Hillary Clinton’s criticized tableau, and holiday merriment straight around the weekly corner, we have ample material to fuel fantasies of new tomorrow (prefaced by bleak todays, but no matter: the righteous will survive).

To wit: the quest to free Joe Francis. What might be said about a world (any world, really, but let’s stick to ours, geographic and political) that worries so about a man (any man, really, but let’s stick to this one, this prescient pornographer) accused of (for real) more than 70 counts, including racketeering, drug trafficking, prostitution and promoting the sexual performance of children. Who is Joe Francis, you might ask (if, say, you lean more towards piano parties and Lutheran bake sales than late night infomercials or the pleasures of South Padre Island)? Well, to answer this question, you should take a trip to his website, a rattan- and bamboo-inflected wander through the genius of Joe Francis, the 37-year-old founder of the Girls Gone Wild franchise.

At that website, and in a Sunday New York Times article, we learn about Joe’s current incarceration and lavish lifestyle. We learn, too, about the location of the “hottest girls” (“My experience has been that anytime you go south of the Mason Dixon line, the girls seem to get more attractive.”) and the sexual options of a Peeping entrepreneur (in short, quite a wide array). Most importantly, though, we learn that constitutional rights are being infringed: “Girls Gone Wild founder and CEO Joe Francis has been sitting in jail for eight months, not because he’s been convicted of a crime, but because he’s been denied his 8th Amendment Constitutional right to bail. It seems certain officials in a small Florida town are intent on making some sort of example of him.”

Some sort of example, indeed. Exemplifying what? The details of the case are intricate and appealing, including as they do Larry Flynt self-analogies, lying teenage hotties, and tax evasion as the kicker. As is almost always the case in such sparkle-studded imprisonments, both sides have their fair share of idiocies and aggrandizements. Most critical, though, is Joe Francis himself, standing at the center, martyred to a democracy and an economy that gave him the opportunity to give to others so much (“Cassandra and Brittany know how to have a good time -- and all they need is each other!”) and all he wants to do is keep giving (“as you explore this site, I think you’ll come to find that my desires, dreams and disappointments aren’t terribly different from your own”). The problem is, of course, that government officials just can’t stand him (or for what he stands) and so they are violating his rights (and yours).

Constitutionality litters the airwaves this week. “What Article VI does not do, and was never intended to do, is deny me the right to say, as loudly as I may choose, that I will on no account vote for a smirking hick like Mike Huckabee,” explains Mr. Hitchens in another subtle rampage against religiosity. “Isn't it amazing how self-pitying and self-aggrandizing the religious freaks in this country are?” As posts on this blog have explored, and opinion pages nationwide have professed, this is a moment for religious inquiry to serve the spastic clatter of politics. Are we not, to some extent, called upon to respond, to leaven Hitchens’ monomaniacal bigotry and reflect upon Mr. Francis’ sacrificial sense of self? Some may say we should stay far from such talk; after all, to be an intellectual is to practice arts and methods too rigorous for punditry. Our footnotes will never make it, and so we will serve only the précis, not the proof. Yet. As we ponder Mitt’s Mormon mug and Hillary’s deepening lines, as we smirk at Jamie Lynn Spear’s baby bump and roll in our tinseled excess, a moment for messianism (or critical reflections on the need for messianism) wouldn’t be so outlandish. Because if Joe Francis is the only letter we’re getting from prison nowadays, then I think we have a real problem on our hands. Birmingham never seemed so very far away.

Review Roundup

BookForum has a roundup of reviews (HT) on a variety of books in American religious history, ranging from Garry Wills's Head and Heart: American Christianities, to Charles Reagan Wilson's Judgement and Grace in Dixie, to Terry Givens' history of Mormon culture.

I'll just mention a few that caught my eye. Jane Smiley (the novelist, I'm presuming) reviews Frank Schaeffer's (son of Francis Schaeffer, whose intellectual retreat at L'Abri and various books inspired some of the intellectual side of the religious right) memoir Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Frank was something of an evangelical celebrity for a while in the 1980s, mostly for his association and co-authorship of books and films (notably including Whatever Happened to the Human Race?) with his father. But his memoir shows him to be a not-very-happy camper, hard to blame him with a mother who was, ahem, very problematic, as well as an association with those from the religious right who his father considered "co-belligerents" on the one hand, but also as "loonies." Frank considers all of the leading evangelical lights with whom he associated in the 1980s -- Graham, Robertson, Dobson, etc. -- either insane, or power-hungry, or just plain strange. One could invoke Freud here; but one won't.

I'll be interested to see what Barry Hankins has to say about all this in his biography of Francis Schaeffer which he's currently completing; I suspect the story is more complicated than what the memoir suggests. Smiley concludes cynically but in line with the bitterness (so I gather) of this particular memoir:

One lesson of all of Frank Schaeffer's work is that the inherent contradictions and terrors of Calvinist doctrine have been intolerable to the very family most famous in our day for spreading them. Another is that however the Schaeffers tried to mitigate those cruelties with personal kindness, their allies and associates have gone wholesale for the divisive, the inhumane and the mercenary. Francis Schaeffer's failure was that he didn't learn, from the very cultural history that he loved, the simple historical truth that tribalism and damnation are what organized religion does best.

Next up is Rich Barlow's review of Garry Wills, Head and Heart, a lengthy book for the normally more laconic Wills. The reviewer summarizes the thesis this way:

Definition is the first step to comprehension, and Wills deftly defines the two great tides of American faith, what he calls "Enlightened" and "Evangelical" religion. The former treasures reason for unlocking "the laws of nature and of nature's God" and deems compassion the commandment of those laws. Evangelicals profess "an experiential relationship with Jesus as their savior, along with biblical inerrancy and a mission to save others. . . . The emphasis of Enlightened religion is on the head. The emphasis of Evangelicals is on the heart." The Puritans were heart-believers. The Founding Fathers, aware of Puritan intolerance and its collateral damage, such as Dyer's execution, were head-believers. Wills sides with Enlightened religion.

Another review linked there, from the historian Glenn C. Altschuler, concludes that Wills's partisanship for "Enlightened" and over-reaching estimate of the influence of "Evangelical" religion somewhat mars the text. Oh my, so many books, so little time.

Finally, from The American Scholar, Ethan Fishman's "Unto Caesar: Religious groups that have allied themselves with politicians, and vice versa, have ignored at their peril the lessons of Roger Williams and U.S. history," continues a discussion that we've been having on this blog courtesy of John Fea.

A key passage from Fishman's article connects the differing yet related concerns of Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson, and the costs of the contemporary ignorance or flaunting of those concerns:

The two religious clauses of the First Amendment reflect the different concerns of Jefferson and Williams. Jefferson’s fear that one church would gain control of government resulted in the establishment clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Williams’s emphasis on protecting the independence of churches became the free exercise clause: “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Taken together, these two clauses prohibit government from either helping churches or hurting them. These few words set into law the standard of neutrality that Williams and Jefferson prescribed.

The Bush administration has sought to undermine almost every one of the contributions Williams and Jefferson made to the tradition of religious freedom in the United States. By giving religious denominations the power to directly influence public policy, it has allowed them to force their tenets on others. The administration has also exploited religion for the sake of gaining and maintaining political power. And it has used religious faith to justify the carnage caused by the war in Iraq.

A bit further down, Fishman concludes:

Roger Williams acknowledged that even the most devout religious communities cannot avoid living in the wilderness of the temporal world. The role that government plays in maintaining temporal order is valuable to religious and irreligious citizens alike. How, then, are churches supposed to resist the temptation to cross the line between mere coexistence with government and active political participation? In the eighth century B.C. the prophet Isaiah responded by teaching the Jewish people to strive to be in the world but not of it, and Williams sought to apply Isaiah’s message to colonial New England.

In June 2007 the National Association of Evangelicals debated whether to advise members to “guard against over-identifying Christian goals with a single political party, lest nonbelievers think that the Christian faith is essentially political in nature.” Perhaps that debate will cause the Bush administration and complicit religious groups to reexamine their policies in light of Isaiah’s teachings and Williams’s views.

You have your assignment. Discuss. One at a time, please. And you, in the back row, yo, turn OFF the cell phone, even if your ring tone is set to "Precious Lord, Take My Hand."

Fea's Op-Ed

A must-read: our contributing editor John Fea's piece "Is America a Christian Nation: What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong," from the History News Network. My favorite paragraph:

Thinking historically does not mean that people cannot learn from the past -- they should and must. But they should be careful how they use historical examples. Exploring the past requires a concern for what it was really like. The past is like a foreign country. Those who enter it as guests should try to understand its foreignness in a way that respects our dead ancestors who inhabit it. We must not invade the past with the goal of remaking it into our own image. The past may not always be useful when we want to invoke it. But only when we confront it head-on, without preconceived agendas, will we be able to learn from it and let it transform us.

Can I get a witness?

John Fea, "The Staying Power of Christian America"

The Staying Power of Christian America: What is a Historian to Do?

A week or two ago I commented on the recent poll by Vanderbilt’s First Amendment Center that found over half of Americans believe that the United States Constitution is a Christian document. Indeed, as John Turner has noted in his most recent post, the Christian Right, and particularly their view of American history, is alive and well.

What should historians think about such a survey? Some of them, like a prominent early American historian I spoke with recently about this matter, simply ignore such data. They write-off the Christian Right’s view of history from their elite perches in the ivory tower and return to their offices to continue writing their important new monograph on some subject that few average people care about. “There are no reputable historians who believe this stuff,” this scholar told me, as if such an authoritative assertion alone is all that is needed to dismiss the Christian Right’s historical errors.

While I agree that “no reputable historians” believe that America was founded as a Christian nation, I do not think this prominent historian’s blanket dismissal really gets us anywhere. It fails to take seriously, or even consider, the millions of Americans who actually do believe that America is a Christian nation and reveals just how detached some of us are from everyday life. At a time when public history is on the rise and historians are becoming more confident in their ability to educate mass audiences, why do these faulty views of the American founding still hold sway? In the 1980s, evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell, Peter Marshall, Francis Schaeffer, and John Whitehead, among others, began to use American history as a tool to promote their political and moral agendas. Shortly thereafter evangelical scholars Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden published The Search for Christian America (1983) to challenge the Moral Majority’s view of the past. And according to most evangelical academics and historians, they dismantled it.

But while these three prominent evangelicals convinced a whole bunch of thoughtful believers that they had been duped by Falwell, Marshall, Schaeffer, and company, I wonder just how much of an impact this excellent book has had among ordinary evangelicals. When I say “ordinary evangelicals” I am referring to the history buffs in the pew who know just enough about the past to be dangerous.

While The Search for Christian America continues to be a valuable book (I use portions of it in my Age of the American Revolution course), it seem to have done very little to curb the Christian nation crowd. By the 1990s the Moral Majority had given way to the Religious Right and with it a whole new cast of so-called historians who were ready to carry the Christian nation torch. Enter David Barton, William Federer, and Newt Gingrich. Enter Tim LaHaye (who was known more in evangelical circles as the author of a book about sex than his now famous Left Behind novels) and D. James Kennedy (who was known for his books on personal evangelism), both established evangelical leaders who jumped on the Christian history bandwagon. All of these men wrote as if Noll, Hatch, and Marsden’s argument did not exist. A few years ago when Time named the most influential evangelicals in America, both Noll and Barton were on the list.

Thoughtful evangelicals, and especially evangelical historians, should be discouraged by the staying power of the Christian heritage movement, but how do they stem this revisionist tide? First they must admit that the Christian Right does a better job of promoting their view of the past. Second, they must do more to reach evangelical audiences. Let’s face it—the leaders of the Christian Right are better public historians than we are.

Granted, there have been a score of books trying to debunk this faulty view of history and a few of them do a pretty good job. Works by Randall Balmer, Michelle Goldberg, Laurence Moore and Issac Kramnick, Susan Jacoby, Brooke Allen, and Chris Hedges may be informative, but they all preach to the choir. They are screeds against the Christian Right’s view of American history (among other things) written for people who get great pleasure from reading screeds against the Christian Right’s view of American history. Most evangelicals who find these books and read them already agree with their anti-Christian nation arguments. In other words, they are not being read by the evangelicals who need to have their minds changed about how to interpret the Revolutionary-era. They are written instead to offer ammunition for the opponents of the Christian Right.

This then leads to the discussion I hope we can have on this blog. What is a historian to do? Should we care? How do we educate Christians who uphold this faulty view of the past? Is it possible? If so, then how?

The Death of America as a Christian Nation? Hold the Funeral! He's Not Dead Yet!

Hold the Funeral! --BY JOHN FEA

I have been a fan of Diane Butler Bass’s work ever since I read her award-winning Standing Against the Whirlwind: Evangelical Episcopalians in Nineteenth-Century America (1995) during my graduate school years. I have not read some of her more recent books on American religious practice (although I hope to get to Christianity for the Rest of Us soon—waiting for the paperback!), but I do look forward to reading her occasional columns on sojo.net. (If you ever attended a vacation Bible school as a kid you must read Bass’s “Sock Puppet Church”).

Her most recent Sojourners essay, “American Christendom, RIP,” is a reflection on the death of D. James Kennedy, the Ft. Lauderdale Presbyterian minister who was a major leader of the Christian Right. (At last check a whopping 187 people had commented on the piece!). Like many pundits, Bass argues that Kennedy’s passing and the recent death of Jerry Falwell mark a “generational shift of leadership now occurring in evangelical Christian circles.” She focuses much of the piece on Kennedy’s enthusiastic cheerleading for the idea that America is a “Christian nation.” Indeed, Kennedy spent a good part of his final decades preaching sermons, writing books, and producing videos that extolled America’s Christian founding. Much of this work was done under the auspices of his recently closed Center for Reclaiming America for Christ. According to Bass, a new generation of evangelicals, particularly those who read theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon and are affiliated with the emerging church, is no longer interested in Kennedy’s “Christian America” because his “nostalgic world bears no resemblance to their own.” Young evangelicals find no use for Kennedy’s Christian civilization of the 1950s and prefer a progressive, confessional, and Anabaptist-informed political theology that understands the church as a countercultural agent in the world.

Fair enough. Bass has her finger on the pulse of the emerging church movement. It is true that the leaders of the emerging church have hitched their wagons to the wisdom emanating from Duke Divinity School. But perhaps we should wait just a bit before we hold a funeral for “American Christendom.” As Paul Harvey noted yesterday on this blog, a recent poll from Vanderbilt University’s First Amendment Center found 55% of those surveyed believe that the Constitution establishes a Christian nation. While it should not surprise us that 74% of Republicans surveyed believe that the Constitution should be interpreted in this way, it is a bit shocking to find that 50% of Democrats and 47% of Independents also hold to this view.

I do not know much about the First Amendment Center or the reliability of their polling data (I tend to agree with Paul that these numbers seem a bit high). But it does seem that Bass may be too optimistic about the impending doom of Christian Right “history.”

I hope to get back to the triumph of Christian Right history in a later post.