Who Has a Religion? Baker and Wenger on Definitions of Religion in the 1920s
by Edward J. Blum
“Get anything good for Christmas?” a friend nonchalantly asked several days after J.C.’s birthday. My enthusiastic response, “Oh yeah, a book on the Klan; was actually reading it Sunday morning listening to acoustic sunrise,” was met with irritation in the form of disinterest. The friend didn’t really care what I had received, and he didn’t really want to entertain a conversation about the Klan. He shot back, “weird.” I, of course, was blind to his hopes for distance and pressed in. “It’s really neat, the author takes seriously the religious ideas of the Klan – from their white robes to their sense of American history and exceptionalism.” Sadly, the conversation went the way most of mine go with non-academics. The harder I tried for him to see how fascinating this was, he just didn’t care, and once again retorted, “yeah, just sounds weird.” At this point, I got it and turned the conversation to a religious interest everyone seemed to share: Tim Tebow and the magical run of the Denver Broncos.
“Get anything good for Christmas?” a friend nonchalantly asked several days after J.C.’s birthday. My enthusiastic response, “Oh yeah, a book on the Klan; was actually reading it Sunday morning listening to acoustic sunrise,” was met with irritation in the form of disinterest. The friend didn’t really care what I had received, and he didn’t really want to entertain a conversation about the Klan. He shot back, “weird.” I, of course, was blind to his hopes for distance and pressed in. “It’s really neat, the author takes seriously the religious ideas of the Klan – from their white robes to their sense of American history and exceptionalism.” Sadly, the conversation went the way most of mine go with non-academics. The harder I tried for him to see how fascinating this was, he just didn’t care, and once again retorted, “yeah, just sounds weird.” At this point, I got it and turned the conversation to a religious interest everyone seemed to share: Tim Tebow and the magical run of the Denver Broncos.
I’ve had enough conversations with non-academics who seem to
go into snooze mode when I invade their worlds with the past, but I still felt
sad that my pal would rather talk about a mediocre quarterback for a mediocre
team than about heritages of hate and what they mean for our nation. But even
more, I was bummed that my friend did not want to understand that what we think
about “religion” influences even stories like that of young man Tebow.
Of course, the book I was trying to tell my friend about was
Kelly Baker’s Gospel According to theKlan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930. I don’t want to
rehearse its main arguments here – how Gospel
According to the Klan looks not just at what the Klan was against, but also
at what they were for, how it showcases the ways in which their white
Protestant nationalism pervaded their sense of manliness, femininity, and
history, or how the Klan’s print culture was so crucial to their sense of
identity and imagination. Those are all excellently fleshed out in the book and
shown so nicely through the Klan’s public writings.
What I would like to draw our attention to is how Professor
Baker’s study and a slightly older book, Tisa Wenger’s fantastic We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (2009), provide another
layer of religious division and redefinition during the 1920s. Wenger shows
that the 1920s conflicts over Pueblo dances became moments when notions of
“religion” collided. For the United States government, religion was something
distinct and somewhat separable from other spheres of life, but many Pueblo had
no sense of that division. As white modernists who were sympathetic to the
Pueblo rallied to their side, they helped create the idea that the Indian dances
were “religious” and hence should be protected against federal legislation by
the First Amendment. Yet by forcing American governmental approaches to
religion upon the issue and by defining one aspect of Pueblo behavior as
religious, they helped sever the totality of Pueblo life into supposedly
discreet parts (religion, land, politics, society, etc.) Thereafter, Native
claims to land, remains, or treaty recognitions have been battled on the legal
and religious terrain established by the American government.
We all know the 1920s as a time of religious dissension and
debate. Modernists and Fundamentalists raged against one another; Bryan and
Darrow battled at the “trial of the century” in a small Tennessee town; Sister
Aimee Semple McPherson polarized the West with flappers and Pentecostals on one
side and liberals and the mainline on the other. Together, Baker and Wenger add
another layer – the layer of religion itself. In both cases, the very
definition of “religion” was up for grabs. In Baker’s case, contemporaries of
the Klan tried to demolish them as non-Christian or as makers of a false faith.
The Klan tried hard to create a viable religious worldview, and for an
“Invisible Empire,” they sure made it visible in their print culture and public
performances. For Wenger’s folks, Native American life had to be atomized so
that certain elements could be construed as religious. By obtaining a
“religion,” the Pueblo had to give up some of their definitional control.
So to my friend who would rather talk Tebow than Klan robes,
I understand. It is less mentally strenuous to debate the case of Tim Tebow –
whether accuracy is as important as admiration, whether completion percentages
matter more than charismatic personhood, or whether we should privilege
comebacks over Christian being. But if we want to get to the core of Tebow or
any other fascination rendered “religious” in America, we can get a little help
from our friends Kelly Baker and Tisa Wenger. See you all in Chicago.
Comments
thanks for this interesting comparison Wenger's and Baker's book. As to your non-academic friend not having an interest in your discussion of religion and the Klan, it reminded me of a phone conversation when a non-academic friend asked me to give a very brief description of my first book project (his way of hinting he only wanted minimal details). Somehow, I went on longer than anticipated and felt for a while that he was simply rather quite. Finally, I said to him, what do you think? No answer. I had to hang up the phone because I got no response. His wife called me back, laughing hysterically. She said her husband (my friend) was lying on the couch with his son on his chest, and phone resting next to him (which apparently had slipped out of his hand). My conversation was so stimulating that it bored him to sleep. Well, at least he tried to feign some interest early on.
So to my friend who would rather talk Tebow than Klan robes, I understand. It is less mentally strenuous to debate the case of Tim Tebow – whether accuracy is as important as admiration, whether completion percentages matter more than charismatic personhood, or whether we should privilege comebacks over Christian being.
the KKK you speak of was nearly 100 years ago, and had fewer fans, even accounting for population growth.
Tebow is now.
Although they both suck.