What do the Pope, Obama, and Johnny Rotten Have in Common?: Observations on Gender and the Antichrist

by Charity Carney

Thanks to Kelly Baker for suggesting a series on masculinity and religion during Paul's hiatus. Here's the first of my installment.

Americans’ fascination with the Antichrist has only grown over the past decade with an increasing number of pop culture references and politicized rhetoric surrounding the evil symbol of a coming Armageddon. Obama was/is accused by some as being the Antichrist—Obama beginning as relatively unknown politician who rose to power swiftly and won the hearts of many Americans with a message of hope. He made promises that were too good to be true, many said, and some accused him of acting like a messiah to lure unsuspecting Americans into his trap. (Google “Obama and Antichrist” if you haven’t before. It’s amazing what people can do with Photoshop.) The racialized overtones of this depiction of the president cannot be overlooked. Many Americans were terrified of Obama’s candidacy and election because he was an “other” in their worldview and so their fear blossomed into anger and denouncements of the “Yes We Can” Man as evil. Racist motivations aside, Antichrist accusations and personas have power (to scare, to motivate, and to actually empower) and much of that power resides in the masculine meme of the position.

White Women, Rape and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960 as well as cultural works on more recent America like Michelle Alexander’s thought-provoking new book, The New Jim Crow). But beyond the masculine world of racialized sexuality and crime there are other gendered factors that contribute to the current Antichrist discourse.

An alternative view of the Antichrist is that promoted by the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS). Current Republican presidential candidate contender Michelle Bachman once belonged to this group but recently demanded a written statement from the synod about a year ago asserting that she was no longer affiliated with them or their anti-Catholic beliefs. The WELS doctrine regarding the Antichrist states:

“Since Scripture teaches that the Antichrist would be revealed and gives the marks by which the Antichrist is to be recognized, and since this prophecy has been clearly fulfilled in the history and development of the Roman Papacy, it is Scripture which reveals that the Papacy is the Antichrist.”

The Pope is perhaps the most powerful religious figurehead alive in the Western world and by imbuing him with the religious authority of the Antichrist, the WELS has given him even more influence, although that is obviously not their intention (see http://www.theatlantic.com/ for the full story). The Pope and Catholics and many other Christians (including Lutherans) certainly do not view the Papal position as connected to the Antichrist, but the debate alone grants the Papacy more power because it is simply being debated. The Pope and the Catholic leadership, too, have a preponderance of masculine authority despite their sworn celibacy. The Church has maintained its commitment to male authority since its founding and continues to rely on an all-male cast of Pope, Cardinals, and priests, etc., giving nuns duties that reflect a more maternal role (teaching and nursing, for instance). The Pope, I contend, would not be accused of being the Antichrist if it was not necessarily a male occupation and if the Catholic Church did not imbue it with masculine power.

And it is here where I will play “devil’s advocate” (pun, sadly enough, intended): Antichrist imagery can also be used as a hyper-masculine badge of honor. Take, for example, the role that Antichrist played in the punk music scene of the 1970s. The Sex Pistols’ lead singer, Johnny Rotten, even went so far as to declare himself an antichrist in “Anarchy in the UK”:

“I am an anti-christ

I am an anarchist

Don't know what I want but

I know how to get it

I wanna destroy the passerby caus’ I

I wanna BE anarchy!”

The Sex Pistols might have been Nietzsche’s favorite band. In The Antichrist, the nihilist wrote: “What is good?—Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.” Ultimately, the concept of an Antichrist is a positive one to Nietzsche because it empowers man to challenge a blundering God whom impedes science and knowledge. Although Nietzsche is not speaking directly of the biblical Antichrist, he is pressing the notion that anti-Christian, anti-God, anti-religious views are what give men control and intellect. The Antichrist may be the supremely masculine symbol—with power and virility and ferocity representing his most cited characteristics.

The dangers of this discourse, however, are immense. As seen with Obama, declaring a public personality to be the Antichrist only engages widespread animosity and fear, which, when combined, can lead to vehement and violent reactions. So maybe the WELS should reconsider its charged doctrine concerning the Pope as well as those who have labeled the president as the Antichrist.

Rob Bell, Emergence, the Past, and the Future

After news this week of Mark Driscoll's homophobic facebook status, the emergent church again pops into the news cycle. For those of you not in the an emergent hotbed like Knoxville, the term might be unfamiliar. RiAH mentioned the emergent church while pointing to the controversy over Rob Bell's Love Wins back in May, so today's guest post tackles the label "emerging church." Our guest poster, Charlie McCrary, interviewed Bell for his thesis on Bell's evangelical anti-intellectualism. Charlie received his BA in religion from the University of North Dakota in May and begins the MA program in American Religious History at my alma mater Florida State University in the fall. His post reflects on Rob Bell, emergence, and the ambiguity of this very label. Charlie makes an excellent case for why scholars should be paying attention to the emergent church and their appeal as method to understand shifts in American evangelicalism.

Rob Bell, Emergence, the Past, and the Future

Charlie McCrary

The release of Rob Bell’s latest book, Love Wins, and the accompanying evangelical controversy thrust Bell into the broader American consciousness. CNN ran multiple stories about him, and Good Morning America hurried to book him. However, most media outlets, made suddenly aware of Bell, struggled to contextualize him. Most Christian media chose either to condemn or celebrate the book, and thus the “secular” media reported primarily on the theological brouhaha. Measured attempts to understand and analyze Bell and his context were almost completely absent.

Most categorizations of Bell associate him with the “emerging church” (or, sometimes used synonymously, the “postmodern church.”) This term is potentially useful, but it lacks a consistently helpful definition. This is due in part to the fact that many who use the term do so in order to stigmatize certain theological positions and not to analyze evenhandedly. In addition, many figures to whom the label is often applied tend to resist the label. The emerging church movement—or, “conversation,” as many would have it—is necessarily amorphous, as most within it recoil at “dogmatic” epistemological certainties and tend toward apophatic (de)constructions of theology. Also, a main feature of the movement is “cultural relevance,” and thus emerging folks tend to reinvent themselves fluidly.

Granted, it can be difficult to come up with some useful analysis for a group so diverse it includes Bell, Peter Rollins, Mark Driscoll, Brian McLaren, and Scot McKnight. That being said, I think there are two foundational points we should be able to use as our bases for inquiry about the emerging church. First, the word “emerging” itself implies a sort of protest, naturally prompting the question, “emerging from what?” The emerging movement should be seen as a self-conscious reform movement. Most emerging leaders’ books take the form of a response, a correction or expansion of the ideas with which his/her target audience is familiar. This leads to the second point: the emerging church is an evangelical movement. While the term “evangelicalism” is not easily defined and carries a variety of connotations, enough literature and use has been devoted to it that we at least have a sense of what it means. Emerging churches, by and large, function in typically evangelical ways, from the styles of worship music and preaching to the pastors’ book deals with Zondervan. The structure of an emerging church service or the layout of the sanctuary is usually much closer to an average Southern Baptist gathering than a liturgy- and doxology-infused Presbyterian service or a Catholic mass.

Furthermore, the form of Christianity from which emerging folks seek to emerge is usually some version of conservative evangelicalism. Emerging leaders have taken issue with prudish views of sex, a lack of care for the poor, the arrogance of systematic theology, the non-tenability of biblical literalism and young-earth creationism, and more. Given the above description, one might be tempted to characterize the emerging church as simply liberal Protestantism (and some critics have done this.) However, this characterization elevates the theological above all else and ignores the style, the aesthetic, the language, and all the other elements of the evangelical habitus, most of which remain alive and well in emerging churches. In this somewhat paradoxical way, the movement exists as a sort of protest against certain aspects of evangelicalism yet staged by individuals and communities who seek to do so within a steadfastly evangelical context. This is why emergence tends to be popular among college students and in cities with significant young-adult populations; students from evangelical backgrounds go to college and inevitably read Derrida or take a course on biblical literature/history or biology and experience cognitive dissonance. Rather than the two older options, covering one’s ears and claiming that “the world” is out to destroy one’s faith or abandoning religious belief (or at least evangelicalism) altogether, the emerging church represents for many a middle path, so to speak.

So why should scholars care about the emerging church? There are many reasons, but I think the significance of the movement can be summed up with temporal tropes: when we think of the emerging church, we are thinking of a group (or groups) of evangelicals who seek to emerge from the past and shape a new reality for themselves in the present. In turn, this will shape the future of American evangelicalism.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to conduct a mini-interview with Rob Bell via email. In his response to one of the questions he wrote, “People are desperate for narrative — a big story, something large enough to live for. That’s the question right now for millions — is there a story? One we can trust? I say yes. The other stories have failed, which, of course, creates all sorts of new opportunities.” The task for scholars is to identify and analyze what those “other stories” are, why they have failed Bell and his audience, and what “new opportunities” will be seized and what they mean for the future of American evangelicalism.

Mann V Ford Motor Co.

 

Oki Niksokowa – 

I live in what should be a pristine environment of the Adirondack Park in Northern New York! A national park that covers over 6 million acres of wilderness land,  one that on any given weekend is invaded by out of state people from New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts  to the point of overflowing. I have lived here most of my life which is a very long time to endure the incredible lack of freedom and privacy that should be afforded by all this space.  During that time I have come to resent these out of stater's who come here and do to our Adirondack Mountains what they have done to their own states. I mean my God these people make a mess of their own environments to the point of non-livability and have nowhere to go but here and then they have the incredible lack of respect to mess up our home – criticize our laid back lives and impose their wills upon their hosts – something that would not be tolerated by Native People some 300 years ago.

I do realize that they provide a lot of income to the folk here who depend in tourism to make a living and that’s a good thing but to try to impose their unkempt environments and attitudes upon us is intolerable. I have often gone into outrageous tirades about these supposed responsible human beings who think only of themselves – but yet won’t do anything in their own states to make it livable and enjoyable again. I have been to the Pine Bush in central New Jersey and tried to picnic with my children in their parks amongst the garbage and litter that are everywhere and tried to swim in the ocean off Toms River only to come home with some disease from the incredible pollution of the water to the point that my children and my wife and myself all became sick at the same time within two days of that little outing into nature. 

Why the hell does this continue without abatement, where are the Real Human Beings?

So when I saw the following article come out of New Jersey – promulgated by people who very obviously care I have to applaud their efforts and do anything I can to help their quest.  Here is their story…. - Two Feathers

MANN v. FORD CHRONICLES THE EPIC BATTLE OF NEW JERSEYʼS RAMAPOUGH MOUNTAIN INDIANS AND THEIR MASS ACTION LAWSUIT AGAINST THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY WHEN THE DOCUMENTARY DEBUTS JULY 18, EXCLUSIVELY ON HBO

 

The Ramapough Mountain Indianshave lived in the hills and forests of northern New Jersey, less than 40 milesfrom midtown Manhattan, for hundreds of years. In the 1960s, their neighbor in nearbyMahwah, the Ford Motor Company, bought their land and began dumping toxic wastein the woods and abandoned iron mines surrounding their homes.

Ford has acknowledged the dumping.In the 1980s, the Ramapoughʼs homeland was placed on the EnvironmentalProtection Agencyʼs list of federally monitored Superfund sites – and supposedlycleaned up by Ford. However, thousands of tons of toxic waste were left behind. In2006, the residents of Upper Ringwood, after suffering for years from a rangeof mysterious ailments, including deadly cancers, skin rashes and high rates ofmiscarriage, filed a mass action lawsuit seeking millions of dollars from Fordas compensation for their suffering. Ford denied all responsibility for theillnesses devastating the community and claimed its flawed cleanup had fullycomplied with all EPA rules.

MANN v. FORD tells the story of asmall community’s epic battle against two American giants: the Ford MotorCompany and the Environmental Protection Agency, which failed to ensure that Fordcleaned the land of deadly toxins and erroneously MANN v. FORD – 2 declared the communitysafe and clean of toxic waste.

It's mine! (America, that is)

Randall Stephens

The late D. James Kennedy hosted and broadcast his "Reclaim America for Christ" campaign. His efforts won the ire and disgust of commentators across the center and left of the political spectrum. "Reclaim" it from whom? Who would be excluded?

So it's not all that surprising that "Take Back America" crusades and "The Response," Rick Perry's August 6 rally in Houston, which Paul wrote a little about below. Here's the official line from the website for the gathering:

On August 6, the nation will come together at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas for a solemn gathering of prayer and fasting for our country.

We believe that America is in a state of crisis. Not just politically, financially or morally, but because we are a nation that has not honored God in our successes or humbly called on Him in our struggles.

According to the Bible, the answer to a nation in such crisis is to gather in humility and repentance and ask God to intervene. The Response will be a historic gathering of people from across the nation to pray and fast for America.

The first line of the last paragraph probably wouldn't set well with an Anabaptist, liberal Protestant, or just about anyone left of Mike Huckabee. But it does bring up an interesting matter about evangelicals' relationship with their country.

I'd like to see the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life ask a broad sample of citizens some questions related to God-and-country matters. How about: Do you believe that America has a special relationship with God? Does the Constitution describe America as a Christian nation? Does God punish countries for national sins? Has America been chosen by God for a special purpose? (Maybe those are all too rhetorical!)

Back Soon -- Or, It's Just That Demon Life Has Got You In Its Sway

Paul Harvey

Just a brief note to say that I will be a little busy and saddle-sore riding the range here for the next couple of weeks with (as Historiann would say) plenty to do rounding up some stray cattle who have busted out the fences, eliminating some varmint and critters, and generally dealing with boxes, forms, and money in things related to famille Harvey (of course that is pronounced "Hervée"). Once the ranch is all in its usual awesome working order, we'll be back here with a flurry of our usual unsolicited and generally pointless posts.

Until then, posting here from me may be a little sparse around these parts for a week or two anyway, so see you all back at the ranch then. I'm sure my fellow blogging range riders will get the cowpokes organized and rounding up the pokes, and posts. See you back around these parts before you know it.

Jimmy Carter and Conservatism

Blake Renfro

J. Brooks Flippen’s Jimmy Carter, The Politics of the Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right (University of Georgia Press, 2011) provides another interpretation of how conservative Christians became a vocal part of the body politic. Flippen contends that Jimmy Carter’s presidency inadvertently laid the foundation for the rise of the Religious Right under Ronald Reagan. The book focuses on Carter’s 1976 coalition between southern white evangelicals and traditional Democrats. Such an alliance might seem impossible in today’s political environment, and at the time it was a weak partnership. Historians familiar with the era will not be surprised by the contentious issues, including abortion, debates over secular education, feminism, and gay rights. Some studies of modern American conservatism have stressed the role of grassroots organizations in developing a sophisticated and politically charged rebuttal of liberalism, but Flippen focuses on a more powerful force-the American presidency. He demonstrates how the president’s language on social issues influenced broader political and cultural attitudes. Ultimately, Carter’s political balancing “set the stage for its [the Religious Right] movers and shakers.” It was, Flippen suggest, “a top-down movement” led by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and an accompanying cast of familiar characters.

Race is an important issue when examining this dramatic change in American politics, and it seems like a new version is published every week. An emerging group of scholars has broadened the story by addressing gender and economics. State and local histories, including those by Joseph Crespino, Darren Dochuck, and Allen Tullos, use place and region as a metaphor for the nation’s political terrain. Flippen’s appraisal of race is not particularly new. Similar to Billy Graham’s efforts to sooth racial animosity, Carter catered to southern white Democrats with Biblical language and a call to cleanse one’s heart of hatred. But, Flippen subtly traces how evolving language about race eventually led to the Reagan Revolution’s “post racial” tropes. We can only expect more dissertations will continue to dissect the topic.

Flippin is particularly helpful in understanding the battle over gay rights. Historians of conservatism have paid little attention to the conversation between gay rights activists and conservative evangelicals. Prior to the 1969 Stonewall Riots, gay activism was almost unheard of in American politics, but Flippen illustrates how it emerged as a national issue during Carter’s bid for the presidency. For the time Carter was surprisingly progressive on the issue. Though he did not support the so-called “homosexual lifestyle,” Carter clearly abhorred the kind of rhetoric voiced by Jerry Falwell and Anita Bryant. When he denounced the Briggs Initiative, which proposed to ban homosexual teachers from California’s public schools, evangelical leaders called him a traitor. The administration was not pioneering on gay rights, but Flippen has done more than any other scholar to illuminate the origins of this ongoing culture war.

Jimmy Carter, The Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right reminds us how powerful the American Presidency has shaped our political and cultural conversation. As we enter another round of political campaigns, historians will undoubtedly find more ways to demonstrate how the past informs our contemporary political temper.

Motherhood, Morality, and, Ultimately, Madness: My Thoughts on the Casey Anthony Case

by Charity Carney

Will it never end?! Not the Casey Anthony media craze. There’s no hope there. But the complete lack of awareness on the part of the American public of their obsession with motherhood, proper familial relations, and these moral boundaries that so many claim exist but cannot agree on what they are and what they mean. I have to admit, I’ve been watching my fair share of Nancy Grace's commentary lately—the subtle movements in Anthony’s face, the ridiculous analysis of her hairdo (to ponytail or not to ponytail?)—and I keep watching because I have become entranced with the concepts of proper American motherhood AND fatherhood situated so squarely in our television sets. What this case has elicited is more than talk of mob rule and justice for a murdered child. It has revealed how the American mainstream views modern motherhood and family life and how their commitment to those ideals often trumps the mandates of the justice system and Constitution.

Casey Anthony is pretty. She is young. She is white. And all of these are reasons that she has captured the country’s attention for so long. But alongside these factors runs a strain of judgment based on maternal standards that have made themselves extremely clear over the past few months. Dubbed “Tot Mom” by Nancy Grace, Anthony has been criticized for not “acting” like a mother should (a penalty that many have said warrants death in and of itself), for being a liar (the temptress that she is, fooling policemen and her parents alike), and for even living with her parents after the birth of her child (unsure of who the father was and unable to take care of her daughter herself as a 22-year-old single mother). Despite the gruesome facts surrounding the court case, there is something to be learned about American morality when it comes to gendered subjects: even within a “modern” society where many women defy maternal stereotypes, the court of public opinion still retains a very conservative understanding of what moral parents do.

Pitted against Casey Anthony’s “immoral” behavior are the accusations against and defenses of her father, George Anthony, of child abuse and molestation. When Casey’s defense attorney’s brought this accusation to light and used it as a central part of the explanation of “Tot Mom”’s (ugh, it hurts to write it) actions, the media had a field day. The majority of newscasters, analysts, lawyers, and interviewed citizens rejected the idea that any father could do that to his daughter or cover up the death of his granddaughter. Not casting personal blame on any person, I simply observe that our patriarchal system is still firmly in place, you’ll be happy to know. In case anyone was worried, it’s doing just fine. The stark contrast of the moral questions cast upon Casey Anthony’s motherhood and George Anthony’s fatherhood is an indicator of the gendered status of ethical parenting.

Not that we did not realize this already, but I have not seen in recent times a more clear example of gendered judgment of moral/immoral behavior. I do think that the fact that the O.J. Simpson verdict has been held up as a comparison to the Anthony case only encourages this idea but the difference is that the Simpson trial was held up as a race-based incident and the Anthony trial is stuck in American psyches when it comes to any kind of higher gender analysis.

Blessed with a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch's Spiritual Strivings

Paul Harvey

A few days ago I blogged a bit about Reinhold

Niebuhr and Gillian Welch, an unlikely but (in my view) apt combination of theologian and performing artist. In this short essay for Religion Dispatches, I develop my thoughts about her newest recording (and some of her previous recordings) at greater length, focusing especially on her musical relationship to the "hard religion" of the rural South whose music she recreates, rejuvenates, and reinterprets. We here at the blog await word from her publicist about the possibility of an email interview, but suffice to say if that happens (big if there) it will be awesome!!!! Scroll down a bit for a live performance of one of the tunes from the record.

Update! Alec Wilkinson for the New Yorker makes many similar points about the record, in this piece just out for the magazine. Cool, but I wrote mine early last week, so feeling ahead of the curve, even if I do live in a flyover state and famously conservative city!

A brief excerpt from the piece, and then follow the rest at the link:

“It is the best kind of record: one that lures you in and soothes you with harmonies and banjo, only to leave you wondering what the hell just happened.”
—Kitty Empire, review of The Harrow & the Harvest in The Observer, June 26, 2011

That’s a good question to ask of someone who sings of spending seven years with her companion

on the burning shore, with Gatling guns and paint,
working the lowlands door to door, like a Latter-day Saint.

And that’s before she’s turned out at the top of the stairs, by someone who took all the glory,that you just couldn’t share. Welch and her partner David Rawlings sing in haunting union:

I’ve never been so disabused, never been so mad
I’ve never been served anything that tasted so bad.

Listening to this song, “The Way It Will Be,” I too don’t know what the hell just happened, but it’s impossible not to complete the story, to fill in those gaps. We’ve all eaten that bitterness at some point. And that urge to figure out the details in the mysteriously unsettling story comes wrapped here in religiously-tinged narratives and imagery that historically have received their richest expression in the musical culture of the American South.

Welch’s Southern characters, though, emerge not from some imaginary version of God, country, and family, but from the spiritual strivings of folk who have seen plenty of hard times.

Continue . . . .

Here's a clip from one tune, "The Way It Goes," performed recently:

Hannah Adams' Intellectual Grandchildren; Or, Maybe It Was All Liberal Protestantism, After All?

By Michael J. Altman

Robert: I feel that an earlier generation of scholars of religion was willing to consider these questions. The answers may not always have been satisfying–but I think of William James here, or even the early theorists of crowd behavior. There were scholars interested in talking about how we think about these sorts of human events, but I don’t see it anymore.

Richard: James is the perfect example of it–

Robert: But in the end he’s too individualistic for me!

Richard: Very Protestant, maybe?

Robert: Yes. [Laughs]

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like it's a strange time in the field of religious studies. I've been hiding in my dissertation cave for the past few months so maybe that's part of it. Yet, every time I poke my head out I keep noticing things. Little things. Reports of unease in the rooms of that conference in Indianapolis here, a dialogue about "presence" and "abundant events" that seems to run out of vocabulary before it can get off the ground there. To me, these moments signal the slow death of liberal Protestant religious studies and the grasping about for whatever will come next.

Paul already mentioned James Turner's Religion Enters the Academy but I want to come at the book from a different angle.  Paul is right, William James is the hero of the book in the final chapter. But the first two chapters narrate the rise of the comparative and academic study of religion in America among liberal (mostly Unitarian) Protestants. In the first chapter, Turner brings Hannah Adams and Joseph Priestly to the fore as the early comparativists before 1820. Chapter two follows the growth of Unitarian and Transcendentalist interest in world religion from 1820 to 1875. This includes Thomas Wentworth Higginson's The Sympathy of Religions (1871), Lydia Marie Child's Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages (1855), and James Freeman Clarke's  Ten Great Religions (1871). Meanwhile, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton offered comparative religion as part of their ministerial training in the latter quarter of the century. The University of Chicago opened its doors in 1892 and quickly added a department of comparative religion. Then, a year later and in the same town, the World Parliament of Religions attempted to unite "all religion against all irreligion" with the help of many liberal Protestants. The long and the short of it--the history of religious studies is the history of liberal Protestantism.

It's not that early scholars of comparative religion happened to be liberal Protestants. Rather, Turner shows that comparative religion, and later religious studies, was a particularly liberal Protestant project. As he puts it, "Comparative religion during its first academic decades in the United States was thus a historically minded, text-based study, oriented toward articulated religious or ethical propositions. And the discipline's driving motive, stated or unstated, was t understand how non-European religions stacked up against Christianity" (65-66). It was a project by Protestants, for Protestants, using Protestant categories.

Enter our hero, William James. James shifted the categories in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Gone were texts. Gone were institutions. Gone were beliefs, creeds, and doctrines. James went after experience. James also threw out the hierarchy of "world religions" and placed religious experience on a level playing field, drawing on contemporary accounts of religious experience. James got rid of the Protestant categories, and took little interest in comparing Christianity to other religions. Turner ends the book noting that, in the end, William James won. Maybe. James is still taught in "Theory of Religion" courses. I even read Varieties in a graduate seminar a few years back. We don't read James Freeman Clark anymore.

But Robert Orsi's laugh takes all the wind out of Jamesian sails. Even William James is too Protestant--too individual. Religion for James was "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine." I imagine Cotton Mather in his private solitude meditating on the grace of God not a procession in Italian Harlem.

As I read work on Asian religions, mostly Hinduism, the argument against the term religion--and by extension religious studies--seems rather easy. It's a Western term that doesn't fit well with the realities of Indian culture. Fine. We can have the debate if you want. But what if it isn't an East / West problem? What if the unease of religious historians not knowing their Bible or not wanting to admit to it, the back and forth of Bushman and Orsi trying to find a way to account for "abundant events," and the liberal Protestant history of religious studies are all linked? What if religious studies doesn't fit well with the realities of American culture? Maybe the unease in Indy and the search for adequate language to describe religious experience are really the unease of our liberal Protestant history and the search for a way out of it.

The field has been trying to shed its history for a long time now. As a religious studies major in college I took the "Theory of Religion" course. We read Durkheim, Freud,Weber and other European thinkers important to the field. Other than James we didn't read any Americans until we go to the late twentieth century--Eliade, J.Z. Smith, Russell McCutcheon. We ignored the American history of the field and its liberal Protestant baggage--poor James Freeman Clark.

William James won. But is that enough?

I Got More Qualms than the Bible's Got Psalms

Darren Grem

What do you get when you take the head of Sojourners and the director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s ERLC and toss them in a virtual room with one another?

This video throwdown on the federal budget!

Well, maybe "Skyped airing of qualms" is more accurate. In any case, for anyone interested in the rivalry between true believers on the American left and right, this one is ripe for analysis. (Bonus points for anyone keeping track of the number of hiccups in logic and fact made by both sides). Available for watching in 5-6 minute-long segments or 35-minute-long director's cut.

P.S. Good to see all y'all again after the long hiatus.

Disputing Sacred Space in America

Kelly Baker

The newest issue of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief is now available (with a library subscription). For those of unfamiliar with this journal, it is an excellent, interdisciplinary journal that provides cutting edge scholarship on the materiality of religion. Every time the table of contents arrives in my inbox, I stop whatever I am doing to see what the issue holds. The July issue is no different, and it contains a conversation about sacred space in America with Erika Doss, Anthea Butler, Jacob Kinnard, and Edward Linenthal. From outdoor space at the U.S. Air Force Academy for Wiccans and Druids to worship to a disappearing cross in the Mojave to "the shadow of ground zero" to the Enola Gay, ordinary spaces become sacred, contested, desecrated, and defiled.

Doss argues that public debates are both "sweeping--indicative of widespread interests in claiming public spaces and places as an extension of personal values and beliefs--and presentist--driven by the inconstant and fluctuating aims and concerns of particular publics at particular historical moments" (270). What becomes sacred space and who claims its sacrality emerge as crucial components of public debate. The contributors note how questions of space, and whether it is sacred or not, become markers of deep religious intolerance in contemporary America. Contestations over sacred space become contestations over the place of religion in public life, and certain religions garner more legitimacy, cultural capital.

Butler writes about how a cross in a desert emerges in discourse as both a religious and a secular symbol, and the space it inhabits, thus, becomes significant and ambiguous. Its absence even more so. Kinnard emphasizes that the debate over Park51 becomes an"easy synecdoche" to understanding the place of Islam in the nation (275), and the all of America becomes a "ground zero" with any mosque nation-wide, a violation. Linenthal ponders the ease at which sites of mass murder become sacred to Americans and how space becomes sacred, if it can be defiled. Space can emerge as separate from the ordinary because of the "power of events on the land (279). For Linenthal, the Enola Gay, an object and a space that housed and dropped an atomic bomb, functioned both to sacralize and the desecrate, and it could not be easily managed. This space was wrought, like the other examples in this issue, with questions of legitimacy, illegitimacy, redemption, terror, and narrative authority. Who makes a space sacred and what are the costs? The confrontations over sacred space, then, provide a way to understand the place of religion in public discourse and its material presence.

[Cross-posted at kellyjbaker.com]

Rick Perry, Come On Down!

Paul Harvey

Amy Sullivan reports (HT Charles Marsh), in a piece for Time, that Tony Perkins (of the Family Research Council), David Barton (you know who he is), and John Hagee (he's not dead yet, evidently, despite the 2008 debacle) teamed up on a phone call a few weeks ago to express their displeasure with the current crop of Republican primary candidates -- either because they're not conservative enough, or they're not the right kind of religious conservative (i.e. they're Mormon), or they're not "southern enough," or they're just flakes (i.e. Gingrich and self-immolating campaign). Huckabee's not around, so enter their dream candidate, Rick Perry, who fits the bill on all fronts. Read all about it here. And then follow up with some more background information on all this by Sarah Posner here. And there's reporting on Perry's strategic breaks with his fellow Texan George W. Bush here.

Just a bit from Amy Sullivan's piece:

So, come on down, Rick Perry! He may be the favorite by default, but the Texas governor is also a terrific match for the Christian Right. Sarah Posner of Religious Dispatches recently outlined Perry’s social conservative bona fides and they’re impressive:

• **Signed a gay marriage ban into law at a Christian school in Fort Worth with evangelical heavyweights Tony Perkins (Family Research Council), Rod Parsley (Ohio mega-church pastor), and Don Wildmon (American Family Association) in attendance
  
  
• **The Sunday before his 2006 re-election, Perry attended Cornerstone Church and sat by the side of controversial pastor John Hagee (in 2008, John McCain had to reject Hagee’s endorsement after critics pointed out the pastor’s many extreme statements, including calling the Catholic Church “the whore of Babylon”)
  
  
• **Supported and was a primary beneficiary of the Texas Restoration Project, an effort to increase the electoral involvement of conservative pastors
  
  

All of this, however, pales beside Perry’s current project–a Christian all-day prayer event called “The Response” on August 6 in Houston. The governor is sponsoring the event along with the American Family Association, which is footing the estimated $1.5 million tab for the gathering. The Response is intended for Christians only, although one spokesman said that if people of other faiths attend, he hopes they will see the light and “seek out the living Christ” for their lives.

Luckily for us, Historianess will be attending the all-day prayer event on the 6th (hey, it's local, it's free, and it's air conditioned), and giving us live updates. Or not :)

Our Great Pantheist Epic

Paul Harvey

Here's a belated 4th of July post -- little power outage around here cut off my internet access so we're a little behind on posting. Anyway, in honor of the 4th, what better than Bruce Springsteen doing "This Land Is Your Land," the-song-that-should-be-our-national-anthem. "America the Beautiful" would also be a great national anthem, especially since it was inspired by my local landmark Pike's Peak, honors land, and the latter verses hail both "liberty" and "law." Either one of those would be great, and I'd put my hand over heart every time -- just ANYTHING but the unsingable, militaristic, bombast/drinking song we're stuck with presently.

In case you don't know, "This Land Is Your Land" was written as Woody Guthrie's angry response to the treacly patriotism of "God Bless America." Even Carl Lewis, who famously butchered our hideous national anthem, can sing "This Land."

And this one's for you too, Professor Fea. And for our national parks, under significant threats according to a just-released report which also recommends a number of actions to forestall their possible decline.

Beck's Long Goodbye

Kelly Baker



On this past Thursday night, Glenn Beck said goodbye to Fox News and television sets, and hello to GBTV, his internet news channel. Here's a recap of the last show involving Jon Stewart, Hitler, and God. Over at Religion Dispatches, I editorialize about his departure, his legacy of history-making, and his brand of nationalism. Here's a glimpse:

Much of the coverage concludes that Beck is, at best, “bonkers.” Alex Pareene of Salon.com, however, realizes that perhaps this is not “some sort of victory”; that leaving Fox is not the end of Beck, but rather that his legacy might not be as a talking head but as an amateur historian, the creator of Beck University, with a clear, and popular, articulation of nation. The tagline for BU promises, “learn history as it really happened” with David Barton responsible for courses labeled Faith 101, 102, and 103, in which students can (of course) learn about the faith of the Founding Fathers.

Beck’s mantle of telling history like it really “was” is packaged, glossy, and consumed. Yet this mantle, or even legacy, does not solely belong to him. The struggle to reclaim the nation, or “restore honor,” began long before he, the John Birch Society, Joseph McCarthy and the like joined it in the mid-twentieth century. Americans, from the Reconstruction Klan in the 1860s, the Know Nothings of the 1890s to the second Klan of the 1910s and 1920s, to home-grown Christian fascists of the 1930s, sought to protect a nation in peril from any perceived threat, be it Catholic, Jew, African American, or Communist.

Ecumenicists, Evangelicals, and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity: Some Personal Reflections on David Hollinger's OAH Address

by David Stowe

Reading David A. Hollinger's OAH presidential address, "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity" (just published in the new Journal of American History) puts me in mind of a little family history. The dialectic he analyzes, between liberal ecumenically minded Christians played out in my family exactly as he scripts it.

Raised Nazarene in Iowa, my father discovered the life of the mind while attending a tiny college in Nebraska, finished his BA in history at UCLA, went to seminary, served for a time in China, completed a doctorate in theology. He had gravitated to the social-gospelly Congregationalists--later merged into United Church of Christ--for whom he directed overseas missions in the last stage of his career. His younger brother Gene stayed in the Nazarene fold, became a pastor and eventually ascended to the pinnacle of the church hierarchy: General Superintendent.

Our side of the family grew up in the East, became liberal Democrats, stayed with the UCC. My uncle's family stayed in the West, remained mostly rock-ribbed Republicans and Nazarenes. We read Christian Century, they undoubtedly read Christianity Today (and sent us a subscription to Herald of Holiness). Their menfolk hunted for elk in the Rockies; we trapped (and often released) squirrels to keep them out of our attic. The Boomer offspring had little contact; families didn't fly around a lot in those days. Consequently the cousins remained slightly exotic to each other. How could two brother/fathers turn out so differently while remaining committed Christians?

Hollinger lays out the historical context within which their lives diverged. In the middle decades of the last century, ecumenical Protestants dominated the American Establishment. Beginning well before the Sixties, ecumenicals pursued "diversity-accepting, captive-liberating projects" on behalf of people of color, women, and gays and lesbians--movements that allied them with secular intellectuals, mainly of Jewish descent. In the Sixties, self-interrogating ecumenical intellectuals like Wilfred Cantwell Smith, William Stringfellow, John A. T. Robinson, and most famously Harvey Cox eroded the theological foundations and moral complacency of mainline Christianity.

Evangelicals who had earlier red-baited ecumenicals with mixed success began to overtake their liberal rivals, increasing their cultural capital through savvy media use, outbreeding their mainline rivals and doing a better job holding their kids in the churches. “But just as a substantial portion of the missionaries found that the Hindus and Buddhists they encountered abroad were not quite so much in need of Christian conversion as once assumed, thousands of children of the old Protestant establishment found that Christianity was not so indispensable to the advancement of the values most energetically taught to them by their Methodist and Congregationalist tutors."

Hollinger makes a useful point about avoiding Whiggish assumptions in assessing the impact of a movement like ecumenical Protestantism:

To recognize the historic function of ecumenical Protestantism as a halfway house, if not actually a slippery slope to secularism, is in no way invidious unless one approaches history as a Christian survivalist. Religious affiliations, like other solidarities, are contingent entities, generated, sustained, transformed, diminished, and destroyed by the changing circumstances of history. Those circumstances still render ecumenical Protestantism a vibrant and vital home for many persons. A genuinely historicist approach to the history of religion will not teleologically imply that those committed to that faith today are headed for history's dustbin.

That’s a relief. If Hollinger is correct, my uncle's family won the battle for the soul of American Protestantism, but my father's side may...may... have won the war for the nation's heart and mind. Hollinger sees a powerful analogy between ecumenists and the post-1964 Democratic Party:

The evangelicals gained the upper hand in the struggle for control of Protestantism just as the Republicans gained the upper hand in the struggle for political control of the South.... [J]ust as the nation got something in return for the loss of the South to the Republican party, so, too, did the nation obtain something in return for the loss of Protestantism to the evangelicals: the United states got a more widely dispersed and institutionally enacted acceptance of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural diversity.... Those impulses and capacities generated a cascade of liberalizing consequences extending well beyond the diminishing domain of mainstream churches, running through the lives and careers of countless post-Protestant Americans distributed across a wide expanse of secular space [no doubt including many in higher education]. Our narrative of modern American religious history will be deficient so long as we suppose that ecumenical Protestantism declined because it had less to the offer the United states than did its evangelical rival. Much of what ecumenical Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches, and hence we have been slow to see it.

Probably we'll never equal my uncle's kin in elk-hunting prowess, but we can out-squirrel-trap them any time. The (usually) friendly rivalry continues. In lieu of a definitive resolution (mark your calendar for October 21), and given Hollinger's point that American religion has increasingly come to serve as politics by other means, we'll have to await the results of the 2012 elections.