tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post7100798039167382518..comments2024-03-26T11:33:59.219-06:00Comments on Religion in American History: Where Are the Histories of American Irreligion?Paul Harveyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13881964303772343114noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-92109411172062333332013-06-15T08:32:25.897-06:002013-06-15T08:32:25.897-06:00CUActivists,
Thanks for the detailed comment, and...CUActivists,<br /><br />Thanks for the detailed comment, and I'm glad to hear about your work.<br /><br />Your thoughts on the best term are helpful. My own preference is to use as specific a term, preferably a self-identified term, when talking about individuals or groups. The problem for me is mostly the umbrella term.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06130738672087808415noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-9011409610475861272013-06-14T07:16:50.675-06:002013-06-14T07:16:50.675-06:00Thanks for the great post. Your point is a good on...Thanks for the great post. Your point is a good one; there's definitely a dearth of quality historical scholarship on American nonbelievers. Dusty's list of additions is excellent, with Post and Warren being essential texts that are bizarrely missing from Jacoby's references in Freethinkers. And thank you to Dusty for the Stow Persons reference, which I hadn't seen before. I'd also second the importance of Susan Budd and Edward Royle, though they do focus on Britain, because their studies are models for potential American work. Colin Campbell's Toward a Sociology of Irreligion also addresses some historical questions.<br /><br />I agree completely with your point about thinking of deconversions as conversions, since they require adopting a worldview with positive characteristics (starting with a materialist cosmology, which itself has a history and set of canonical texts, which Stephen Greenblatt has demonstrated so well in The Swerve). In the case of organized nonbelievers, you're right that there's a strong, continuous, self-referential tradition, as well as a contemporary national community that is increasingly self-aware.<br /><br />My dissertation is an ethnography of the leadership of the national nonbeliever organizations, so I'm trying to find ways to delimit that culture and demonstrate its characteristics, social imaginary, tradition, canon, etc. I'm only a couple of chapters in right now, but it's going pretty well. 65 in-depth interviews and loads of participant-observation at my back, so now it's a question of writing writing writing. I rely on quite a bit of oral history to fill in the gaps post-WWII; wasn't sure how else to proceed.<br /><br />I've settled on nonbelievers and unbelief, though these terms have their problems. As religious humanists like to tell me, they're believers, not nonbelievers, so someone always seems excluded when you pick a term. I floated "secular" for a little while among those I interviewed, but neither the religious nor the secular humanists were crazy about that one.<br /><br />In my collaborative work with Alfredo Garcia, we're using nonbelief rather than unbelief, and I may go back and make the switch in my dissertation, as well. I like nonbelievers because it's capacious and because it hasn't been debated over much within the atheist/humanist/freethought community, so it's relatively free of baggage. Irreligion has struck me as being available for both non-religion and anti-religion, but I think it more strongly connotes the latter. It also poses more of a problem for describing religious humanists, who are non-theistic, than calling them nonbelievers (though as I said, they're not crazy about the latter term, either). I find irreligion especially difficult for describing free religion, the close ally of 19th century freethought and really the paradigm of organizational nonbelief in that period because those organizations included plenty of spiritualists, pantheists, Unitarians, and all manner of political dissenters, often with heterodox but certainly not atheistic religious beliefs.<br /><br />If you'll be at AAR in Baltimore in the fall, Alf and I will be presenting our work in separate papers on a panel on the "nones," organized through the new secularism and secularity program unit that Per Smith and I got going this past year. (Huge credit to Per, really, since it was his idea, and he was the engine behind last year's exploratory session.) It'd be lovely if some of us could get together and continue this conversation in person.Joe Blankholmhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04703431061866989651noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-11559863266377101212013-06-03T09:20:01.782-06:002013-06-03T09:20:01.782-06:00Janine---I do remember your work. Would many of th...Janine---I do remember your work. Would many of the people in your dissertation have described themselves as irreligious, or were they mostly accused of irreligion? I mostly remember your chapter on the workers' churches.<br /><br />Dusty---What an detailed list. Thanks so much! You must be working on this topic yourself. What is your work about?<br /><br />Carol---Thanks for the link; I especially like documentaries for the classroom.<br /><br />Chris---That's a great question. My own instinct is to include people like Owen in the database and leave the theorizing till after I've collected some empirical evidence. It does seem to me that deconversion is comparable to, if not exactly the same thing as, conversion. John D. Barbour has offered a justification of this in <i>Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith</i>. Here are a few inchoate thoughts about what would have to go into a theory of deconversion.<br /><br />First, people tend to wax and wane in piety and religious fervor over the course of their lives. Early childhood, late adolescence, marriage and childbirth, old age, and death are particular inflection points. This kind of change is different from conversion or deconversion, though of course conversions often come at those turning points.<br /><br />Second, generational drift is different from conversion. It's well known that in an intermarriage, say between a Jew and Christian, the children will likely be raised in Christianity, or perhaps not particularly well educated in any religion, and so the religious change happens between the generations.<br /><br />(By the way, I think I'd like my second project to be a history of children's religion; something like the inverse of what I'm working on now.)<br /><br />Third, it seems to me that there is more justification for thinking of deconversions to atheism, agnosticism, free thought, etc. as being parallel to religious conversions than there is for thinking of drift into being a "none" as parallel. The distinction is that for atheists religion is a decisive category in shaping their worldview, whereas for "nones" it's not a meaningful category at all.<br /><br />Fourth, on a purely practical level, people who leave a religion for a reason are more likely to generate sources explaining why, whereas people who drift away from a religion are likely not to produce any sources at all. As is so often the case, we're like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect" rel="nofollow">drunk who lost his keys</a>, looking where the light is best.<br /><br />Your title is much better---I've never been any good at titles! Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06130738672087808415noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-53229336155924062802013-06-02T14:25:53.397-06:002013-06-02T14:25:53.397-06:00Great post, Lincoln. It's got me thinking abou...Great post, Lincoln. It's got me thinking about your other work, too. Specifically, would someone like Owen's journey to skepticism fit within the American Converts Database? Is a falling away from institutional/established religion a kind of (de)conversion? How one answer would like help to answer the question of just what field the history of ir/a/nonreligion belongs to. <br /><br />Also, given your post's opening vignette, you missed a golden opportunity to title it "Would the Real Irreligionists Please Stand Up." Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10762487595483265718noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-16095038354711480722013-06-02T13:53:48.307-06:002013-06-02T13:53:48.307-06:00Thanks for this post! You may be interested in thi...Thanks for this post! You may be interested in this documentary on American Freethought by Roderick Bradford (my comment involves some self-promotion, as it features an interview with me as well as some other historians):<br /><br />http://americanfreethought.tv/<br /><br />Carol Faulknerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00319958735077361375noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-47761042143199642852013-06-02T13:15:03.959-06:002013-06-02T13:15:03.959-06:00This is an incredibly important project and a very...This is an incredibly important project and a very useful post! Thank you! <br /><br />Here are some other titles that may help you in cobbling together a history of American irreligion.<br /><br />Henry May's The Enlightenment in America (1978) is good background material. Or more broadly still: Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: A History (2004).<br /><br />Martin Marty also has an entry in the Encyclopedia of American Religious Experience on "Free Thought and Ethical Movements" (1988).<br /><br />Other histories include Albert Post's Popular Freethought in America, 1825-1850 (1943) and Sidney Warren's American Freethought, 1860-1914 (1966). See also Stow Persons' Free Religion: An American Faith (1947).<br /><br />Henry Clay Sheldon's Unbelief in the Nineteenth Century (1907) mostly covers Europe and England, but also touches on America. And G. Adolf Koch's Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason (1933) can also be useful. <br /><br />Elisabeth Hurth's Between Faith and Unbelief: American Transcendentalists and the Challenge of Atheism (2007) looks at German atheistic influences on American liberal religion.<br /><br />For a good look at gender and atheism, see Evelyn Kirkley's Rational Mothers and Infidel Gentlemen: Gender and American Atheism, 1865-1915 (2000).<br /><br />Several scholars are looking at African American humanism and atheism, such as Michael Lackey's African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Sociocultural Dynamics of Faith (2007), as well as works by Norm Allen and Anthony Pinn.<br /><br />Peter Rinaldo's Atheists, Agnostics, and Deists in America: A Brief History (2000) is not a strong work of scholarship but a helpful quick read.<br /><br />In line with the "denominational histories" you cite, S. T. Joshi has compiled anthologies of atheists and agnostics (separately) and published The Unbelievers: The Evolution of Modern Atheism (2011). See also Kerry Walters' Revolutionary Deists: Early America’s Rational Infidels (2010) and Fred Whitehead and Verle Muhrer's edited collection Freethought on the American Frontier (1992).<br /><br />It sounds like the literature on secularization isn't your primary interest, but perhaps these titles could help in producing a history of American irreligion: John Lardas Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America (2011); Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption: Religion, The Secular, and American Literature (2006); Charles Mathewes and Christopher McKnight Nichols' Prophecies of Godlessness: Predictions of America’s Immanent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day (2008).<br /><br />There are many more works on the growth of atheism and irreligion in England, and those could be useful for a trans-Atlantic perspective. Cf. Christopher Lane, David Berman, Susan Budd, S. J. D. Green, James Herrick, Timothy Larsen, Bernard Lightman, Edward Royle, Callum Brown, etc. <br /><br />For a work on irreligion in Canada, see David Marshall's Secularizing the Faith: Canadian Protestant Clergy and the Crisis of Belief, 1850-1940 (1992).<br /><br />Hope this helps!Dustyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05531474794030705389noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-796890553624007872013-06-01T19:57:10.126-06:002013-06-01T19:57:10.126-06:00Lincoln, what a great post!!!
As you know, I also...Lincoln, what a great post!!!<br /><br />As you know, I also did research on what is considered irreligion--atheistic socialism/ Christian socialism/ freethinkers/ New Thought/ secularism. Such a great topic! I look forward to reading your work and that of Charles Richter above!<br />Janine Giordano Drakehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15743145462085629472noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37589721331585843.post-49137859290660982572013-06-01T14:07:17.490-06:002013-06-01T14:07:17.490-06:00I am in the research phase of my dissertation on t...I am in the research phase of my dissertation on the idea of irreligion in the American imagination during the 20th century. My project is not a history of irreligion as such, but rather explores how irreligion as a concept affected American thought. The history of American freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, etc. is indeed rather slim, but that doesn't seem to have been a hindrance to the broader culture using irreligion as a motivating force. What I find is that irreligion gets linked to various "alien" ideologies and "isms" that served as bogeymen--anarchism, fascism, communism, etc. Anti-atheism is then expressed as a form of nativism which conceives of the nation as an inherently religious entity, primarily Protestant, of course, but tolerant of religious diversity as long as some belief is held.<br /><br />I chose this approach in part because historically the response to irreligion has had more significant effect than irreligion itself, plus it's just more interesting to me. Charles Richterhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01735024099543650437noreply@blogger.com