Spirits in the Night

Paul Harvey

Today's Weekend Edition Sunday features an interview with Jeffrey Symynkywicz, the author of The Gospel According to Bruce Springsteen: Rock and Redemption from Asbury Park to Magic. No "Spirit in the Night" in the interview, but here's his exegesis on "Jungleland":

In an interview, host Liane Hansen takes Symynkywicz through a few choice Springsteen songs, including the last song on Born to Run, "Jungle Land." Symynkywicz says it's an ethics song about perceived powers and the powers that be. Ultimately, he says, "Jungle Land" gives the sense that the bad guys have won — until that famous last scream from Springsteen.

"That scream is the exhaustion and the pain of living life in this world," Symynkywicz says. "In that scream is a defiance that it's not going to be the last word."

And yes, it's a middle-aged white guy thing, so shut up already. I'm counting on the youngsters here, especially you Ed and Katie and Randall and Luke, to resurrect our hipness quotient after this brief excursion to the heart of middle America.

In what should be, with any sense, one of my few stabs at quasi-hipness in the field of book reviewing, I once compared Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's Mind of the Master Class to a recent Springsteen recording:

I rather feel about it [the book Mind of the Master Class] as I did listening to Bruce Springsteen's Devils and Dust--the critics praised it, eminent music-listening friends loved it, and I admired it in parts, but I could not help feeling that the talents of the artist were constrained by the form, that something was being held back, and that I was denied the impassioned masterpiece that I wanted to hear/read. Yes, this is an aesthetic rather than an intellectual critique, but there you have it. Oh, for the days of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle--Springsteen's flawed, sprawling, but ultimately grand equivalent, I believe, to Eugene Genovese's problematic but still matchlessly interesting work Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974). By contrast, Mind of the Master Class . . . somehow lacks the majestic narrative that carried forward the earlier classic.

I'm going on 50, what can I say? But Bruce is about as religious a songwriter as you'll ever find. As he constantly reminds us, we're all hiding on the backstreets, tying faith between our teeth.

Graphic Therapy for the Religiously Afflicted

In our ongoing effort to go interdisciplinary here at Religion in American History, welcome to our new contributing editor Everett Hamner. Everett is a just-minted Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa, and this fall will be teaching in English and Religious Studies at Western Illinois University. Everett's dissertation topic, Spectacles of Faith, will interest many of you; here's a brief description:

This project examines intersections of science and religion via twentieth century American fictions. Starting with the Scopes trial and the satires of Sinclair Lewis, it considers objectivism and scapegoating in Ralph Ellison, technological transcendence in Walker Percy, intuition and quantum physics in Ursula K. Le Guin, and memory in U.S. and Latin American science fiction film. Showing how literature and cinema illuminate the science-religion nexus, and vice versa, it reveals an expansion beyond early-century oppositions of fundamentalism and scientism toward the conflations of Cold War era civil religion, and from there toward postmodern efforts to integrate faith and reason.

As you can see, it's another of those small-and-narrow topic dissertations :)

Welcome to Everett, who inaugurates his contributing editorship with a post on religion, comics, and popular culture.
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Graphic Therapy for the Religiously Afflicted

Confession: I am not a historian. I’m a newly minted assistant professor of English and an incurably interdisciplinary former seminarian. Still, I owe this blog. For the past two years, the majority of my working hours (and a few others) have been devoted to completing my dissertation, Spectacles of Faith: Technology, Religion, and American Fiction. Such isolating endeavors necessitate edifying and entertaining respites, and Religion and American History has regularly provided both. Time to start paying up. I could start with a review of some recent critical study, but I’ll save that. For now, a tale of how I faced life once the diss was done, the grad college was happy, and I no longer needed to spend 10-hour days cuddling with Microsoft Word. I turned to comics.

Defy the assumption for a moment that I am discussing male superheroes winning the hearts of two-dimensional women by defeating equally flat bad guys. You will still find plenty of that at your local comics retailer, and some of it is probably better than I think. What I can pass on, though, is a set of recommendations for those who, for one reason or another, occasionally find themselves tired of academic tomes, but still needing more mental stimulus than that provided by the average television show. And admittedly, this is particularly aimed at those fascinated by intersections of religion, race, and popular culture.

If you are new to the serious reading of serious comics (or “sequential art,” as Will Eisner defines it), a great place to start is Hillary Chute’s “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative” in the March 2008 PMLA (123.2). Chute provides a clear overview of basic definitions, references many of the best works in the field, and offers sharp insights into comics’ nonsynchronous presentation of the visual and the verbal. Less recently but more entertainingly, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) guides neophytes and experienced readers alike through the complexities of graphic narrative via the form itself. A gifted artist, writer, and aesthetician, McCloud further hones Eisner’s definition (“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”), and in the process delighted and instructed this reader at once.

Enough on the how-to: you want to know why historians of American religion should care (or at least how to convince your chair that this is scholarly research). Please turn immediately to Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003) and Kevin Huizenga’s Curses (2006). Thompson’s 582-page autobiography of first love, adolescent sexuality, and Midwestern, Protestant fundamentalism is achingly good. The narrative’s power derives not only from obvious depths of personal experience and reflection, but also from its self-conscious dramatization of the author’s reconciliation (and potentially the reader’s) with his religious and romantic past. Huizenga’s work is shorter (as an interrelated collection rather than a graphic novel), but his “Glenn Ganges stories” seek a slightly more erudite audience, fictionalizing philosophy of religion and American consumerism with equal ease. As in Blankets, the setting is suburbia, but readers will find themselves wrestling with Origen and Neibuhr before it’s over.

One last set of leads for those with a particular interest in race and religion (this is for you, Ed). First, if you haven’t read Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1973-91), do it—enough said. This uncanny rendering of the Holocaust via mice and kitties is far from the only significant work in the area, though. James Sturm’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2001) powerfully blends baseball and anti-Semitism, while his similar work alongside Rich Tommaso, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (2007), throws a similar pitch to African-American history. Graphic narrative about black racial and religious experience is particularly on the rise: see Matt Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro (2008) and Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo’s Bluesman (2006) and The Castaways (2007). Similarly poignant reflections on immigration and class-based injustice may be found in Will Eisner’s Invisible People (1992) and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006).

There is much more, of course, but consider these recommended starting points, and do drop me a line if you find yourself moved. I work principally on religion, science, and American literature and film, but there may be a course and/or an article on this material in my future, and I’d enjoy hearing from you … even if you are a historian.

Inheritors of Unwanted Legacies

Today's post comes to us from our friend and occasional guest poster Judith Weisenfeld, Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of the recent and excellent volume Hollywood be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949. Judith discusses some recent documentaries on the entangled history of race, slavery, communal myths, and religion in American history.

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Inheritors of Unwanted Legacies
Judith Weisenfeld

On July 29, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the non-binding respolution H.Res. 194 (http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=hr110-194) formally “apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans” and committing to rectifying “the lingering consequences of the misdeeds committed against African-Americans under slavery and Jim Crow.” Predictably, my reading of responses posted on online news sites turned up many people arguing that this as far too little and far too late and many insisting that these sins of the past have nothing to do with them. Some, however, took the opportunity to respond at length to the question of what kinds of responses to the legacies of slavery and racism are useful and appropriate.

Coincidentally, I recently saw two new documentaries made by white women dealing with the implications of their families’ histories as participants in America’s long traditions of racism. Katrina Browne’s Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, which premiered on PBS’s POV in June, follows ten descendants of the DeWolf family of Bristol, Rhode Island as they struggle to come to terms with their ancestors’ tremendous success as slave traders from the mid 18th century through the early 19th century and slave plantation owners in Cuba well into the 19th century. The film follows this group as they retrace the steps of the slave trade from Ghana to Cuba to Bristol and consider the economic, political, and moral consequences of their ancestors’ business in each location. In addition to building the economy of Bristol through their active traffic in people, the DeWolfs were important figures in the local Episcopal Church. Many of the descendants featured in the film are active members of churches and see their work as fundamentally religious. The information the film presents about the profound ways in which Northern communities were implicated in the Atlantic slave trade and American, Caribbean, and Latin American systems of slavery is compelling and makes clear that, while the documentary began as a personal project, it is not simply the story of one family. At the same time, the focus remains on the individual emotional journeys of participants, with Browne serving as narrator and commentator. I sometimes found it difficult and at other times moving to observe their struggles, but was generally made uncomfortable by Browne’s sighing, worried narration which contributed to a certain aura of self-indulgence on the part of the DeWolf descendants.

A good deal of screen time is devoted to conversations among the ten participants about what, if anything, their inheritance enjoins them to do and, although no single path emerges, we do get a sense at the film’s end of the actions various family members take. One of these was a campaign to get the Episcopal Church to apologize for its involvement in the slave trade and in slavery. A dialogue project has emerged from the film and discussion materials and information about screenings are available (although I was a little taken aback by the division of viewing guides into ones for African Americans, “European Americans,” “multi-racial” people, and “other race groups and ethnicities”). Traces of the Trade is just out on DVD soon and so easily obtained.

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths chronicles the 2007 Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, where she grew up. The oldest Mardi Gras in America, Mobile’s celebration remains racially segregated, with an all-white association crowning what they understand to be the true and only King and Queen of Mardi Gras. An all-black group, founded in 1939 in response to Mobile’s black residents only having access to the celebration as servants, musicians, or fire carriers (this remains the case today), crowns its own King and Queen. 2007’s white Mardi Gras Queen descends from an infamous slave trader who brought an illegal shipment of Africans to Mobile in 1860 and, as it turns out, that year’s black Mardi Gras Queen descends from one of the Africans on board that ship. The mystic societies that sponsor balls and parades – The Order of Myths is one of these – remain inaccessible to black members and many of the white participants Brown interviews insist that they simply want to maintain their traditions and, besides, the “coloreds” like it that way.

What makes this film so compelling is the skill with which Brown accomplishes observational, cinema verité documentary – she chose informational title screens rather than a voice-over narration – and refuses easy resolution. This is not to say that her perspective is not apparent. Her emotional presence informs everything, especially the editing, which moves the film along quickly primarily through juxtaposition of scenes of the separate black and white events. It did seem to me, however, that the editing sometimes relegated the black participants in service of Brown’s desire to show the separate but unequal nature of the celebrations rather than allowing these people’s stories their own integrity. We learn late in the film precisely how Brown is connected to Mobile’s Mardi Gras and it seems to me a good decision for her to have withheld that information for so long. It is clear that the filmmaker has an investment in the past and future of Mobile’s rituals and, despite a few missteps, she does a remarkable job of presenting a complicated vision of one small portion of contemporary American race relations. In his review in New York Magazine, David Edelstein sums up the source of the film’s power and effectiveness well: “In the telling, The Order of Myths sounds obvious, and its underlying racial politics might be. But Brown is scrutinizing the surface, the tension between individuals and their ways. You try to read their faces, and it’s as if they’re wearing Mardi Gras masks, held in place by… what? Fear? It’s no wonder. Without the order of myths, what’s left?” The film’s website has information on the limited schedule of screenings, but I sincerely hope that we will see a DVD release soon. [Editors' note: my Netflix queue gives a January release date for the DVD).
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Update: We have received the following information on getting the DVD, especially to show for classes and the like, for The Order of Myths: "it is available for purchase on DVD with Public Performance Rights. You can order it online through our website, at www.cinemaguild.com (select New Releases along the top), or by calling or faxing us directly at Tel: (212) 685-6242, or Fax: (212) 685-4717.

God's Hunky Bodies

Kelly Baker

In my Religions in the U.S. class, I use images of Jesus to demonstrate different theological movements: the feminized Jesus, Warner Salman's Jesus, an African American Jesus, etc. I also use an image of Jesus from the Book of Mormon in which Jesus is preaching to Native American peoples. What I point out to students is that this rendition of Jesus is always so muscular. He's got huge biceps, a chiseled chin, and flowing hair. I pass around my copy of the Book of Mormon, so that they can see that the other figures depicted in the sacred text are also sufficiently muscled. Moroni buries the golden plates as his forearms and biceps ripple and bulge. The images make it clear that these religious men are manly men with the strength to prove it. Masculinity exudes from them.

Recent agitation over a calendar of shirtless Mormon missionaries made me reflect on the above images and why glorifying male bodies proved inflammatory in this particular context. Steve Freiss, in an article entitled "Mormon Beefcake," explored the controversy over the calendar and the excommunication of the calendar's creator, Chad Hardy. For the author, the fusion of religion and sexuality that appeared in the calendar led to Hardy's punishment. "Men on a Mission," after all, juxtaposed pictures of smiling Mormon men in their missionary attire (white shirt, tie, black pants, and name tag) with images of the men shirtless in various poses with smoldering gazes. Freiss writes:

Hardy says the church has accused him of using religion to sell sex. But he prefers to think of it as the other way around: he's using eye-catching and unexpected images of usually buttoned-up men to draw attention to the charitable and civic contributions of the faith. Until his excommunication, Hardy was a sixth-generation Mormon who some six years ago stopped attending church, tithing or wearing the requisite sacred undergarments, but he insisted he still admires the church and wanted to use the calendar a form of outreach. "I have my own feelings about the church; they're personal," he said. "I don't want to make the church look bad. I want this to be a positive thing for these guys."

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The calendar also features a biography of each model, mentioning the place where he served his mission and some thoughts on his faith. None are particularly provocative poses by beefcake calendar standards, although Mr. October 2008 does have a finger tugging down his belt and exposing the elastic of his underwear.

Interestingly, one of the participants for the 2009 calendar, Christopher Hayes, thought the calendar might demonstrate that Mormons were part of the mainstream. Freiss noted:

Hayes's mother, in fact, urged him on after the 2008 edition was cited as the "Hot Calendar" of the year by Rolling Stone magazine. Hayes's mother and grandparents even attended the photo shoot in Las Vegas in March. "What we're doing is showing people that Mormons aren't the weird, sheltered people that people think we are. It was more of an acceptance of us as people."

On Hardy's website, Mormons Exposed, one can buy the calendar, declare a secret crush on the models, buy a t-shirt with your favorite model, and learn about auditions for new models. Additionally, the FAQ section addresses questions about the purpose of the calendar and the larger project of Mormons Exposed. The website echoes Hayes's sentiments:

Behind the eye-candy, this calendar has a deeper story - one that can reshape perceptions, heighten awareness, and perhaps encourage and inspire a broadened acceptance of human and religious diversity. The fact that twelve young returned missionaries are posing shirtless will certainly raise eyebrows, but may also help to sort out some common misconceptions about Mormons. The shock value of what these traditionally conservative young men have helped to create has the power to build a dialogue that encourages people across every belief system and walk of life to defy stereotypes, step out of judgment and embrace tolerance.
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The twelve former missionaries who "bare their testimony" on the pages of the Men on a Mission calendar were hand-selected for their striking good looks and powerful spiritual devotion. They are men who were comfortable enough in their own beliefs, and independent and brave enough to take a stand for what they believe in regardless of what others may think. By slightly stepping away from the Mormon traditions of modest dress, these missionaries show the world they can have a strong faith and be proud of who they are, both with a sense of individualism and a sense humor at the same time.

The message is by showing Mormon "eye-candy," the website hopes to counter stereotypes of Mormons in larger culture. Muscled bodies demonstrate that these young men are no different than other half-dressed religious people? Baring their chests lays bare their devotion to their faith as well as highlights their virility. Folks who scoff at Mormon missionaries on bikes have missed the sheer prowess of their masculinity, and the calendar serves as a corrective to show that Mormons, just like other religious Americans, are willing to showcase their bodies (for their faith in this instance). Undressing for tolerance is not an idea I have encountered before, but it could work if hard bodies distract folks from their religious prejudices. (If this catches on, please let me know.) However, I think the paean to tolerance and supposed humor of the calendar were lost on LDS officials.

Hardy claims that his excommunication was due to his personal behavior not the calendar, but not all agree with his claims. Richard Bushman, noted Mormon scholar, chalked the issue up to the combination of the erotic with imagery of the missionaries.This fusion suggested that missionaries are more than chaste evangelists for the faith but rather are sexual creatures as well. The glorification of male bodies and sexuality seems to be problematic because the calendar makes it obvious that missionaries are sexual beings despite the uniform. Moreover, the conception that gazing on these men builds religious commitment might prove to be a bit of a stretch. Lust might not be the approved way to become more faithful. (See Gary Laderman's Ecstatic Sex on the complicated relationship of religion and sexuality at Religion Dispatches.)

Yet muscled Mormon bodies have presence in Mormon visual imagery. However, muscled angels and religious figures are tucked safely away in sacred text. They also have their shirts on. (Editor's note: I stand corrected most have their shirts on. Please see the comments section.) Their muscles signal virility and strength of the tradition rather than sexual objectification. The calendar lacks the sacred legitimacy despite Hardy's commitment to using sexuality to sell religion. This falls outside the bounds of previous masculine representation. Muscled religious figures promoted the faith, but how do shirtless missionaries contribute?

Moreover, the issue of who consumes the calendar also adds to the controversy. Hardy noted that "Men on a Mission" was quite popular among gay men. The issue of eroticism proves tricky, but the possibility of homoeroticism is more difficult for the leadership of LDS because gay members must remain chaste. Hardy, however, is not discouraged by the commotion over "Men on a Mission" because his next calendar entitled "Hot Muffins" will contain images of Mormon mothers and their recipes. Risque pictures of Mormon moms might prove even more controversial than the barely clad missionaries.

Religious Roadtripping

Kelly Baker

In the summer of the staycation or a summer of piled up deadlines, journeying to the religious sites of Americana might not be our top priority. I already blogged on my deep desire to go the Holy Land Experience, but I thought I might highlight Timothy Beal's Roadside Religion:In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (2005). Beal does a roadtrip to explore what he calls "outsider religion" in America, and he takes his family along for the ride. I have toyed with assigning this book to my Religions in the U.S. class to make them think about classifications like "mainstream" and "outsider" as well as to problematize visions of American religious history that focus on the immateriality of faith. The faith(s) Beal finds are decidedly material, creative (gardens, signs proclaiming the end of times, a massive recreation of the Ten Commandments, etc.), and evangelizing.

So, here's my review of the work from the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture:

Beal, Timothy K. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. 216 pp., $14.00 (USD). ISBN: 0-8070-1063-4 (paper).

[1] Timothy Beal does something that I have always yearned to do; he packs his loved ones in a motor home and travels the country to examine what he calls “roadside religion,” allowing me to live vicariously through his encounter with the land of religious kitsch in his fascinating work. Beal’s family traverses the American countryside to explore Holy Land USA, the Holy Land Experience, a recreation of Noah’s ark, biblical mini-golf, Precious Moments Inspiration Park, a miniature grotto, a cabinet of rosaries, and multiple gardens devoted to crosses and messages about salvation and damnation. This roadside approach to American religion uncovers the novelty and complexity of religion in America, and adds to the already colourful landscape of “mainstream” religions in the United States. Beal classifies these material expressions of faith as “outsider religion,” which he derives from understandings of “outsider art” as art by the untrained. Thus, outsider religion becomes his term for those untrained in the realms of theology or denominational doctrine. He wants to present the marginality of the creators as well as their creativity and devotion. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “it is precisely in their marginality that they open avenues for exploring themes and issues that are central to American religious life, such as pilgrimage, the nostalgia for lost origins, the desire to create sacred time and space, creativity as religious devotion, apocalypticism, spectacle, exile, and the relation between religious vision and social marginality” (7).

[2] Roadside Religion is Beal’s documentation of various religious spaces and the people who inhabit them—which he mostly accomplishes with empathy and tact—and the reader is a tag-along in motor home as he makes stops at these exotic yet mundane places. Beal also interrogates the nostalgia that is part and parcel of creating these spaces, and the attempts by various creators to get to something original and real, even while using artifice. At Holy Land USA, the author presents the park as a pilgrimage that moves pilgrims through the biblical story in a natural setting. He is a bit more conflicted at the Holy Land Experience; the park seems like a religious Disneyland, and is conveniently located in Orlando. Moreover, Beals feels ambivalent about the subtext of the religious amusement park. He writes, “Beneath the explicit aim of giving guests a glimpse of life during biblical times is a far more zealous ideological interest in promoting a very specific biblical theology of the end of times” (63). He dislikes the Holy Land Experience because it appears to uplift Christian Zionism, and seems more ideological than experiential. What is fascinating about Beal’s work is that he seems to appreciate some sites more because of their authenticity as opposed to their ideology. He is most critical of sites that are created by organizations rather than individuals; he feels more at home in Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens than at the Disney-similar Holy Land Experience. Throughout the descriptions of journeys to golf courses, a proposed site for the new Noah’s ark, and even the Precious Moments Chapel, this work is really about highlighting the religious experiences of individuals in gardens, sculptures, or miniaturized grottoes.

[3] As a result, this work was interesting to me as an American religious historian as well as someone who dabbles in ethnographic method. Roadside Religion demonstrates how exotic religious expression can be on American soil. I have toyed with the idea of providing it to my “Religion in the U.S.” classes as a conversation starter for how diverse religion can be at the individual level; it would also be a good primer in how fascinating popular religion is as a field of study. What proved most interesting and thought provoking was a comment that Beal makes early on in his work about his daughter’s perception of what religious studies scholars actually do. He writes, “My daughter, Sophie, recently told me what she thinks of my work as a religion scholar. She said it seems like what I like to do is make creepy things interesting” (12). The creepy things with which Beal enchants the reader are the careful and caring analyses of the various religious peoples he encounters. Beal wants his informants to be taken seriously in their unique practices and experiences, and he opens up their worldviews for the reader to see and understand. His renderings present these folks as they see themselves, which is good ethnographic praxis. He shows that practices that appear as absurd are really not absurd at all, but committed expressions of faith.

[4] Yet, questions remain: Are his informants really outsiders? Does the term “outsider religion” help or hinder this study? I would agree that these folks cannot be placed firmly in the mainstream, but some of their practices might. Signs made of scrap wood and metal with messages of damnation and repentance remind me of paid, roadside advertisements in my local Florida. Gardens with religious iconography and signage remind me of previous neighbours, whose front lawn was covered with a decent-sized statue of the Virgin Mary, a permanent Nativity scene, and angels of all sizes including one firmly planted in bird fountain. Are the outsiders he documents more committed to their cause than my neighbours? Or are these elements of the materiality of religious experience hiding under our noses? Beal’s informants produce more elaborate material presentations of religious belief, but I think some who we could classify as part of the mainstream practice their faith in a similar way. Beal’s informants might be marginalized, but people come to play biblical rounds of golf and see the largest Ten Commandments. This terminology limits the study. Beal’s informants show the strange and often appealing renderings of religious faith and practice, and the term “outsider religion” limits his larger presentation of these people and their understandings of religion.

[5] Despite this, Beal’s Roadside Religion was an interesting venue into an often-occluded piece of America’s religious landscape, and I would recommend the book for undergraduates, anyone interested in a religious road trip, and scholars of American religious history who would like to show the diversity and materiality of religious practice.

The Theodicy of George Carlin

Paul Harvey

"Like so many of his cultural brethren, Carlin could not begin to uncurl his fingers from the rosary beads he spat upon," Kathryn Lofton writes in her piece Theodicy of George Carlin, just up at Religion Dispatches. Must reading as usual from our esteemed colleague, and must reading for all ambivalent fans (as I was) of Carlin.

Jacob on the Golf Course

Art Remillard

Every now and again, I see a modern rendering of Jacob's dramatic wrestling match with an angel (or God, or Esau, or his "dark twin"...you pick). Consider, for example, a recent professional golf tournament. Playing on a ruptured ACL and two stress fractures in his leg, Tiger Woods endured 5 days and 91 holes of U.S. Open competition before claiming victory. Afterward, we learned of his injuries and that Woods will be unable to compete for the rest of the season because of them. Fans and journalists remain astonished, and the golfer has become the object of pious adoration. “The simple fact,” gushed one sportswriter, “is there are no words to explain satisfactorily what we saw . . . ; no ordinary measure of achievement by which to judge Tiger's [success]; and no way of really knowing just how much mental and physical agony he went through.”

Like Jacob, Woods struggled through a laborious competition despite a painful leg injury. But I saw the shadow of Jacob fall more directly over Woods’s unlikely challenger, Rocco Mediate, who one golf analyst remarked, “looks like the guy who cleans Tiger's swimming pool.” (Classy, eh?). By most standards, Mediate is an average professional golfer. He’s 45 years old, at the end of his career, has few wins to his credit, and suffers from a bad back. Nevertheless, Mediate nearly won. During the tournament, fans slowly grew enchanted with the unassuming golfer. And since his loss, Mediate's endeavor has reached legendary status. One sportswriter called him “the every man’s hero,” and another concluded, “Tiger may have won, but Mediate showed more control, character and guts than any Woods challenger in memory.”

Mediate did not win in the traditional sense, but neither did Jacob. This suggests that a noble loss can be just as compelling as a thrilling victory. Why? “People talk about looking for the meaning of life,” Joseph Campbell once remarked, “what you’re really looking for is an experience of life. And one of the experiences is a good fight.” What a sporting event can do, he continued, is showcase a “good fight,” contain the violence, and give people an exhilarating experience of life. No doubt, Mediate’s heroic accomplishment wasn’t defeating the giant, but rather standing up to him and fighting the good fight.

Radio Religion

Kelly Baker

This American Life is my favorite NPR show. Since I am currently in a lull (no more writing or editing the dissertation just waiting for the defense), I find myself listening to the show more and more often via podcast and audiobook. So, I thought I would promote my favorite episodes on religion, people figuring out religion, and the American religious landscape. (The podcast is free to listen to from the website.) These could also be excerpted quite well for classes. I have started using some of This American Life's podcasts for my gender and religion class, and I will incorporate them into my Religion in the U.S. class for Spring 2009.

Devil on My Shoulder

How does the Devil work? We hear stories from five different people who say they found themselves inexplicably doing something random and bad, something which made no sense to them at all. Host Ira Glass explains why this might be, cadging a bit from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. (This episode discusses Hell House and the Amish rite of rumspringa).

Godless America

At a time when House Majority Leader Tom Delay calls for enacting a "Biblical world view" in government, when Christians are asserting their ideals in the selection of judges, in public school science classes and elsewhere, This American Life spends an hour trying to remember why anyone liked the separation of church and state in the first place. (A fascinating look at advocates for a "Christian" amendment to the Constitution, perspectives on the "wall of separation," and an interview with Isaac Kramnick, the co-author of The Godless Constitution.)

Heretics

Carlton Pearson's church, Higher Dimensions, was once one of the biggest in the city, drawing crowds of 5,000 people every Sunday. But several years ago, scandal engulfed the reverend. He didn't have an affair. He didn't embezzle lots of money. His sin was something that to a lot of people is far worse: He stopped believing in Hell.

Shouting Across the Divide

A Muslim woman persuades her husband that their family would be happier if they left the West Bank and moved to America. They do, and things are good...until September 11. After that, the elementary school their daughter goes to begins using a textbook that says Muslims want to kill Christians. This and other stories of what happens when Muslims and non-Muslims try to communicate, and misfire.

Happy listening!

My (Hopeful) Summer Vacation

Kelly Baker

Several years ago a colleague of mine suggested a road trip for the graduate students to the Holy Land Experience, What better way to relax for budding religious historians than a theme park that included recreations of Herod's Temple and Jerusalem as well as biblically-themed souvenirs? Orlando was not actually that far from Tallahassee, and I immediately fell in love with the idea (it would allow me to make a pilgrimage to the Mouse as well). However, the trip was not meant to be. My spouse could not imagine a worse vacation than hanging out with scholar-tourists in replicated religious environments, even if the park had ice cream.

Thus, my dream of the Holy Land Experience was delayed (possibly permanently). Luckily for me, Newsweek provides an interesting take on the park and its guests. In "Crucifixion and Ice Cream," Joan Branham, an associate professor of Art History at Providence College, tackles the aesthetic as well as audience participation. She writes:

Amid cell phones ringing, video cams rolling and ice cream melting under the Florida sun, a blood-spattered Jesus stumbles through the crowd on his way to Golgotha, where nasty Roman soldiers strip him, nail him to the cross and crucify him—while perspiring tourists look on in Bermuda shorts. After the resurrection sequence, visitors applaud and line up for a photo op, not with Mickey or Minnie, but a disciple or bloody-handed yet friendly centurion. Welcome to Orlando's most unusual theme park, the Holy Land Experience.

Built in 2001 at a cost of $16 million, the Holy Land Experience recreates the ancient city of Jerusalem to "take you 2,000 years back in time to the world of the Bible" where "it brings to life ancient Israel." Dominating the theme park is a towering replica of Herod's Temple, much like Cinderella's Castle just down Interstate 4. Also on display are recreations of the Qumran caves (site of the Dead Sea Scrolls), the Garden Tomb of Jesus, the Wilderness Tabernacle with an Ark of the Covenant light and sound show and a Byzantine Scriptorium where tourists learn about the history of Bible production. A gift shop sells Star of David necklaces with Christian crosses embedded in them and olive wood from the real Holy Land.

...

In 2007, Trinity Broadcast Network (the world's largest religious channel, based in Santa Ana, Calif.) bought the park and softened the language that once targeted Jews "to graciously proclaim to all people … the need for personal salvation through Jesus." TBN chief of staff Paul Crouch Jr. says "any and all are welcome" at the park. "All types have been there: Jewish, all Christian denominations, Catholic nuns, Mennonites … The park wants people educated in the Torah, the Wilderness Tabernacle, but there is a Messianic element."

(Newsweek also provides a video of the Crucifixion re-enactment and Branham's commentary. The audience, it seems, is not sure how to react to the event.)

So, I have yet to coerce my significant other into a trip to the Holy Land Experience, but his will seems to be slipping. My summer vacation, instead, includes a defense and teaching, but all the while I will be angling for a trip to a faux Jerusalem and a stopover at the land of the Mouse.

Jesus Made in America

Paul Harvey

To the literature on Jesus in America, represented most notably and recently by Stephen Prothero's pithy and readable American Jesus and Richard Wightman Fox's lengthier and more scholarly Jesus in America, one may now add Stephen Nichols, Jesus Made in America.

Unlike Fox and Prothero, Nichols writes from an overtly confessional, evangelical viewpoint. Nonetheless, there's a good deal here for readers from various persuasions; in particular, Nichols provides an interesting exploration of Jesus in the movies, and acidly surveys as well Jesus in Contemporary Christian Gospel (no theologians need apply) and in the contemporary religious right.

Matthew Hall has a nice short blog review of the work here, which concludes:

The final chapter is sure to be the most provocative of the book. There will be many conservative evangelicals who will share Nichols’ discomfort with seeing Jesus branded on t-shirts and “Jesus is my girlfriend” Christian pop tunes. But Nichols argues that the Religious Right has just as easily appropriated (co-opted?) an “American Jesus” that suits its commitments to fiscal conservatism and a particular brand of neocon foreign policy. Here he commends Darryl Hart’s proposal in A Secular State: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State, one that has a lot of merit to it. As Nichols notes (following Hart), evangelicals on both the right and the left have exhibited a tendency to co-opt Jesus as a medium for their political ideologies and policies. In the end, however, the otherworldly nature of historic Protestantism is largely subsumed.

One suspects that evangelicals of every stripe will find something that makes them squeamish. But then again, perhaps that’s just what Nichols is going for here. If American evangelicals are to recover any cultural capital and religious credibility, they will likely have to dispense with their penchant for sentimentalized caricatures of Jesus and mass-marketed religion. Whether or not that will happen is hard to say. After all, America is a religious marketplace where supply and demand are in play just as strongly as on Wall Street.

This work, like others in the genre (with the exception of one fine chapter in Prothero), has little to say about how Jesus has been received and represented among African Americans and Native Americans, nor how Jesus has been racialized in American history. For that story, stay tuned for Ed Blum and Paul Harvey's Jesus in Red, White and Black, which we hope to complete by the end of this year.

Penitente Renaissance

I recently reviewed a rather unusual picture text on the Penitente Brotherhoods of northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado, for a local interest newsletter. It occurred to me the book's subject may be of interest to a wider audience. While this is a work of an enthusiast and caretaker of a tradition, not a scholarly book per se, the subject may interest some readers of this blog, and some of you may want to get this for your school libraries. Hope this is of interest to some --

Ruben E. Archuleta, Manifesting Hope: Penitente Renaissance (Pueblo West, CO: El Jefe, 2007).

Such a labor of love as Ruben E. Archuleta's Manifesting Hope: Penitente Renaissance could only have been accomplished by an insider to a religious tradition famous, and sometimes infamous, for its secretiveness and insularity. Author Ruben Archuleta, formerly the Chief of Police in Pueblo and now an author and santero, writes that “the Hermanos of Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico are as fine men as anywhere to be found. They are holy, endowed, by an age-old spirituality, especially the spirituality of the orders of begging friars. As Fray Angelico Chavez taught in My Penitente Land, the Brotherhoods live in the lands of sheep and shepherds, living in the rough, dry barren uplands similar to those of Palestine and Extremadura” (27). The abundant and extravagantly produced color photographs in this volume lie as testament both to the rugged and isolated rural conditions in the New Mexico/Colorado highlands that rural and largely Hispanic residents have faced, as well as the remarkable durability of religious practices in these depopulated counties that stand about as far (not geographically, but culturally) from megachurches and pop “praise music” as one could get.

Archuleta’s work on the Penitentes makes a nice accompaniment to scholarly works in this area, notably including Marta Weigle’s Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood, originally a University of Pennsylvania dissertation in 1971 which still stands as the most thorough and complete documentation of the history and cultures of the La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno (The Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene), popularly known as “The Penitentes.” Established, in all likelihood, sometime in the early nineteenth century, the Society is based in northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado in Hispanic communities largely removed from the major arteries of American life. The Penitentes are known for organized yearly processions commemorating Christ’s suffering. In years past, sometimes those commemorations featured acts of penance such as self-flagellation, from which the Penitentes gained a bit of dark renown.

Historically, the Penitentes were hardly viewed so favorably as they appear in books such as this one specifically designed to honor them. From their earlier days in the nineteenth century, Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy expressed his displeasure with Hispano practices, mostly by attempting to ban them. Of course, Lamy faced a formidable opponent in Fray Antonio Jose Martinez, who had been a defender of Hispano rights in Mexican territory prior to the North American conquest. Lamy attempted to institute a regime of European Tridentine Catholic practices, which forbade practices not specifically sanctioned by centralized church authorities. Much later, in the twentieth century, the Church finally recognized the Brothers as a legitimate part of church tradition. By that time, it appeared the Penitentes could die out entirely; that did not happen, as this book testifies, but the numerous photographs of older men, eroding walls and roofs on the moradas, and counties facing significant economic and social challenges suggest that the Penitente renaissance remains a work in progress, and the brotherhood a legacy of southwestern Hispano Catholicism whose future is both promising (due, in part, to outsider interest in the santos and other artistic monuments to southwestern Latino devotion) and imperiled (due to an aging population and struggling local branches of the brotherhood).

For years, I have assigned to American religious history students a classic of the field: Robert Orsi’s Madonna of 115th St., a work which studies the practice of penitential Catholicism among (mostly female) Italian Catholics in uptown New York, East Harlem, from the late nineteenth century and down through much of the twentieth century. In the case of the devotions paid to this apparition of the Madonna, women control virtually everything about the practice. Italian-American men, largely anticlerical in sentiment, serve at most as auxiliaries to a set of practices which enshrine female suffering and sacrifice. After discussing this book with students, I often ask them, why are Catholic devotional and penitential practices so largely contained with the worlds of women, while parallel practices in the Latino Catholic world are defined and regulated by men? In asking this question, I am thinking primarily of the Brothers of Light and the Brothers of Blood, the orders which have carried on the practices so colorfully documented in this book. Someday, maybe, a scholar in American religious studies will suggest why the Penitentes, so unusually for American Catholic devotional practice, remain a world of men, with women primarily serving as auxiliaries and helpmeets. In the meantime, this book will provide both information and visual pleasure to its readers.

Teaching American Religion Through Film

KELLY BAKER

The H-Amrel listserv currently has an ongoing discussion about useful films for teaching American religious history. The most popular suggestions seem to be Black Robe, The Apostle, anything by PBS's American Experience, and Malcolm X.

So following this discussion, I would encourage our blog readers to post their favorite films in the comments section. I currently like to use a documentary on Appalachian snake handlers called the Holy Ghost People, available here, and I am toying with Jesus Camp and Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People's Temple. (Also, Internet Archive has great resources, including documentaries and video clips, for class.)

Mormon Domination (of Popular Culture)

Kelly Baker

It seems that Newsweek's on a roll this week for Mormon coverage. In a previous post today, Art highlighted the article on Short Creek and its law enforcement legacy. Another article, "America's Next Top Mormon," trumpeted the prominence of Mormons on television. (They are everywhere! American Idol! Dancing With the Stars!) The author, Sally Atkinson, sees a surge of Mormon contestants on reality television as signal of LDS's growing (pop) cultural dominance. While I am not convinced by her thesis, I am intrigued by her reaction to Mormons invading our precious reality T.V. programs. Does this (gulp) mean Americans want wholesome, religious competitors on shows like Rock of Love or Big Brother? The wholesomeness (no rated "R" movies!) is part of where Atkinson thinks the appeal lies. Atkinson writes:

Wholesome, likable Mormon competitors are now so plentiful that some viewers have taken to playing Spot the Mormon. Former "Idol" contestant Carmen Rasmusen, herself a Mormon, says one of this season's early episodes set off her Mormon radar when she heard White tell the judges she'd never seen an R-rated movie. "My husband and I just looked at each other and said, 'She's totally Mormon.' I mean, who else would say something like that?" With all the conniving, back-stabbing and sexuality on reality TV, it may seem like a strange place for Mormons to congregate. That cultural disconnect is obviously part of the attraction for viewers and casting directors alike. Take the strange spectacle last month of a beautiful young Mormon woman— the "Idaho virgin," as she came to be known—sucking the toes of the eligible bachelor on MTV's racy "That's Amore." Or the contestant on this year's "America's Next Top Model" who said maybe her elimination was for the best, as she would have been uncomfortable doing a nude shoot. But for Mormon contestants themselves the motivation is more complex, whether it's testing the limits of their religion, showing America that Mormons aren't the insular community they're often perceived to be, or the one that crosses all denominations: the hunger for fame.

In reality TV terms, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in a sweet spot demographically: still small enough that members get excited to see one of their own in the spotlight, but large enough that when they watch together and vote they can affect results and ratings. Mormons reserve Monday nights for Family Home Evening, and when Marie Osmond competed on the family-friendly "Dancing With the Stars" last year, she benefited from having the voting fall on a Monday each week. In fact, all three Mormon contestants made it to the final four that season.

While "Idol"'s voting night is Tuesday, some Mormons around the country still get together for viewing parties and pour in the votes after each show. "Idol"'s producers won't disclose voting numbers, but Rasmusen says producer Ken Warwick once stopped her before a results show and told her she usually did pretty well in the East Coast voting but that her "numbers just soared" when the mountain states kicked in. "I was so happy to hear that people were voting like crazy and supporting me," she says. "Utah does a great job rallying around its people." Lauren Faber, an eighth-grader in Provo, votes for Archuleta as many times as she can each week for at least 20 minutes, "no matter what—even when he messed up that once." That will undoubtedly be music to Archuleta's ears, although last week Osmond spoke out in the church-owned Deseret News, saying that White and Archuleta should be judged based on their talent, not their religion. "I mean, you don't hear other people saying, 'One of the finalists is a Catholic' or 'One of them is a Presbyterian' or 'One of them is Jewish'."

But Mormons don't do well only on shows where the audience votes. "There must be something about the Mormon community that makes these people so self-confident and so open," says Lynne Spillman, a casting director for "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race." She thinks that coming from a large family probably helps in a game like "Survivor," with its complicated group dynamics mirroring sibling rivalries. "They also have these incredible experiences through their missions," she says, "and can relate to being dropped off in the middle of somewhere they've never been and having to make it."

I am curious to what our readers and contributors think about this piece. It strikes me as exoticizing Mormons by pointing out their (gasp) normality (Katie argues "charmed observance" can sometimes function for naughty purposes in this post). Am I hyper-sensitive because of the FLDS media coverage (more on that to come) or my tendency to look for the nefarious because my own research? Or is there something else going on in the need to document the Mormon presence on all these shows? Are Mormons becoming mainstream, at least in pop culture, as Atkinson seems to suggest? I am just not sure, but now, I will be on the lookout for the religious commitment of my favorite reality T.V. show "stars." Perhaps, Rock of Love will add a lovely Mormon to the cast, but for some reason, I doubt it.

Religion Dispatches: The Cult of Oprah

Kelly Baker

For those of you seeking any thing to read besides student term papers (back to grading for me), I would quickly recommend Gary Laderman's piece on Oprah over at Religion Dispatches. Laderman reflects upon a recent attack on Oprah that appeared on YouTube, not GodTube (how strange!). Here's a preview:

On March 26 of this year "The Church of Oprah Exposed" was posted on YouTube receiving, as of this writing, 5,916,675 views. At the heart of the video's popularity is the allegation that the billionaire host of the most popular talk show in the history of television threatens Christianity and that she is, as LivePrayer.com's Bill Keller believes, attempting to establish a cult. Keller, who likens Oprah's views to "spiritual crack," joins others in conservative Christian circles who point to comments of hers that have been floating around the web for some time: "... One of the mistakes that human beings make is believing that there is only one way to live... there couldn't possibly be just one way [to God]..."

Deg's Dispatches, Part IX

Dispatches from LeConte Hall 323 – Part IX
by Darren Grem

We finished the class up this week with the “culture wars.” By this point, my students should know that the “culture wars” ain’t all that new. Americans have been struggling to “define America” for quite some time, and religion has played a vital role in that struggle. Still, I wanted them to focus on the issues that have been divisive in the past forty years and why religious affiliations and affections have exacerbated those divisions or helped overcome them.

The “uncoverage” approach offered some interesting opportunities to navigate the culture wars, and I thought it best to begin by manufacturing a miniature culture war in class. I had the students watch clips from Jesus Camp and peruse several web pages connected with Harvard’s Pluralism Project. How would the youngsters and adults portrayed in Jesus Camp respond to the efforts of the Pluralism Project? In turn, how would those who support “pluralism” view militant evangelicals and their youth camps? Personally, I don’t like Jesus Camp very much as a documentary. And I have several qualms with the Pluralism Project’s thesis about the “new religious America,” but that’s why I picked both of these “sources.” I wanted students to use the sources to see where fundamental disagreements, mutual disparagement, and cultural disconnections could come from. Although we didn’t engage in a debate as in classes past (with the students acting out these dynamics as the historical actors themselves), we did have a fruitful, informal debate about how the participants in the various Jesus camps and the Pluralism Project contribute to and exemplify contemporary struggles to define America. Indeed, by the end of our debate, the students concluded that our subjects had differing takes on acceptable “traditions” and “innovations.” As such, the next few class sessions attempted to add more perspective on such questions of “tradition” and “innovation.” Students read about another miniature culture war – Catholic conflicts over Vatican II – and then read documents detailing the religious experiences of American Buddhists and Muslims. We used these documents to talk about how the “culture wars” reach into any number of religious corners and are not just limited to the classic "Jesusland vs. U.S. of Canada" binary. Clearly, cultural conflicts hit different religious groups in different ways, thus making notions of “tradition” and “innovation” less predictable than expected. Still, to ensure that they had a framework for understanding the political aftereffects of the culture wars, I gave a lecture on the Religious Rights, Religious Lefts, and Religious Middles, and why some members of each group have had more influence over the political process than others.

I made a number of these final classes optional in terms of attendance and reading because the students were starting work on their Final Assignment. Taking a cue from Lendol Calder’s Final Assignment – in which he has students pick between a conservative and liberal interpretation of post-war American history and defend their choice with documentary evidence – I had the students write a proposal for a national curriculum that would address America’s “religious literacy.” A number of students were thrown by the term “proposal,” and I had to clarify for them that what I wanted was essentially an argumentative essay about what documents they would use to increase American religious illiteracy. The goal of this project was to provide an alternative to the standard, final exam. Like a final exam, they had to treat American religious history as comprehensively as possible, but also select what documents and issues they wanted to emphasize as the “high points” that Americans needed to know. Since they weren’t under the time crunch of the usual three hour in-class exam, they could mull over ideas, use all the texts available to them, and, hopefully, show that they had learned something about how to think and write like historians, proposing a solution to a problem and defending it with historical analysis and documentation.

I’m currently grading these assignments, and I’ll offer some final thoughts about them – and the pros and cons of the "uncoverage" approach as a whole – in my final post. Until then...

Proctor and Gamble, Out of the Closet

BY KATHRYN LOFTON
and the Burnt-Over District sisterhood

As a special end-of-the-semester treat, As The World Turns has finally given its viewers the demanded embrace between Noah and Luke. For those worried about super-delegates and electoral tallies, this is a story that gives hope again to the democratization of Christianity. Through Hershey kiss campaigns, online petitions, and wails to Proctor and Gamble, celebrants of on-screen love got the goods. Now the struggle will be that age-old drama: how to keep it hot. Fans of Moonlighting wish them well.

Happy Earth Day! (And the Count Down to the Eco-Apocalypse)

Kelly Baker

With local radio stations handing out saplings for Albuquerqueans to plant, various emails on list-s