tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post5202279434245788507..comments2024-03-26T11:33:59.219-06:00Comments on Religion in American History: Hannah Adams' Intellectual Grandchildren; Or, Maybe It Was All Liberal Protestantism, After All?Paul Harveyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13881964303772343114noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-21979789385557535322011-07-09T20:37:15.442-06:002011-07-09T20:37:15.442-06:00"To understand them as they understood themse..."To understand them as they understood themselves," as one fellow put it. As this is all inside baseball for academic types, I must admit I don't understand why it must go deeper than that.<br /><br />The Orsi quote that jumps out at me, per my own observations and studies of y'all, the gentle readership of this blog and those of your ilk [perhaps I should write a book!] is this:<br /><br /><i>"I’ve said someplace that the halls of religious studies departments are filled with ex-ministers and ex-priests and so forth, all of whom have very powerful and very deep and perhaps legitimate concerns about religion and long and complicated histories with religious traditions. I agree that such personal background does play a role in the scholarship, and I think it’s critically important for people to be very clear about what anxieties and commitments they bring before they set out to do this work."</i><br /><br />Such anxieties jump out at me among many or most professional religious historians, and appear to have come to the fore in the recent conference. How to write about these sects and alleged religious experiences [and politically/culturally unacceptable sensibilities!] without appearing to endorse them as true or authentic or valid?<br /><br />Did Bernadette Soubirous see the Blessed Mother or did she "see" her? The problem of phraseology is clear, "alleged" visions. <br /><br />But it seems a proper agnosticism---that we cannot know---is proper. The good journalist simply delineates assertion from fact: Joseph Smith <i>said</i> he received the plates from the Angel Moroni; 8 witnesses <i>affirmed</i> they saw them.<br /><br />The journalist would not write that Smith received the plates from an angel, not that 8 witnesses saw them.<br /><br />Now, there is certainly the chance of mass delusion or individual delusion in any and all claims of religious experience. Is the historian obliged to point out that possibility as boilerplate in each and every work of religious history?<br /><br />Perhaps a disclaimer on the overleaf? A sticker on the cover?<br /><br />What I want from such works is simply to understand these people and movements as they understood themselves. If we were writing of Jim Bakker, we would be obliged to write of his scandals. But can we say he was insincere, that his ministry was pure and cynical opportunism? Or, perhaps more to the concern of religious history's study of groups and movements, that his followers, regardless of his own personal failings, didn't have religious experiences they regarded as authentic?<br /><br />I do understand that the religious historian feels obliged to point out alleged discrepancies in the stories of Joseph Smith or Bernadette of Lourdes. But these seem to me on the order of mention or footnote, if the author feels the need. The Mormon reader probably discounts Bernadette's story, the Roman Catholic discounts Smith's, and the secularist or ex-priest or ex-fundie and/or standard academic reader of these works of religious history discounts them all, or at best swallows them with a shakerful of salt.<br /><br />In other words, the disclaimers on theological truth are stipulated by the reader by accepting the risk of opening the book. When the author feels obliged to make disclaimers anyway, he/she just gets in the way of the narrative.<br /><br />As for Joseph Smith and magic on p.50, well, that's in the narrative and must be told. However, the compatibility of such magic with Joseph Smith's theology should be featured, if we are to understand him as he understood himself; to understand him as Mormonism understands him.Tom Van Dykehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07121072404143877596noreply@blogger.com