Is it Religious Belief or Charlatanism?

by John L. Crow

Wednesday evening the ARH graduate students at FSU had its monthly colloquium and during the lively discussion, the issue of fraud and charlatanism came up. In particular, how do we address the beliefs and practices of the historical actors we study? What about claims of healing and medicinal products? When a religious leader sells a product, such as a patent medicine or an herbal remedy, which they claim cures diseases, do we assume they believe in the product, or can we question whether their beliefs are true, raising the possibility of fraud? What if they claim they can heal by the laying on of hands, or from afar? Should we mention this possibility of fraud when there is no direct evidence?

Yesterday afternoon, in a seminar discussing the Sehat and Sullivan volumes Emily Clark blogged about, we discussed the relationship between the courts, religious intolerance, term definition, and the precarious position courts are in when they have to make judgment calls regarding religious belief and practice. While having this discussion, the previous question about charlatanism came to mind and putting these two issues together, I remembered the 1944 Supreme Court case of United States v. Ballard. While this case was not mentioned in Sehat, it would have fit his narrative well, especially in the chapter where he discusses the Supreme Court’s “radical” shift in the 1940s when “the court entered an entirely different world…[b]y acting as a guarantor of rights” (226).

Guy and Edna Ballard, along with their son Donald, were the heads of the “I AM” movement founded in 1930. According to Guy Ballard, while he was hiking on Mt. Shasta in California, he encountered the ascendant master Saint Germain. With roots in Theosophy, Ballard claimed that Beloved Saint Germain, the current master overseeing the Earth, chose Ballard and his family to be the mouth piece for the “I AM” movement. Through the Ballards, the masters, including Jesus, dictated new teachings which would grant immortality to those who accepted the teachings. The masters also claimed their wisdom would save the United States from destruction. Most importantly, because of his special position as the spokesperson of the masters, Ballard had attained a supernatural state of immortality. This enabled him to heal disease and conquer death and old age. He claimed he could do these things for others both in person and from afar if the followers sent the Saint Germain Foundation love offerings via mail. Ballard made these claims in printed literature created by the Saint Germain Press, on radio shows, which had a broad audience, and through correspondence courses.

Ballard unexpectedly died in 1939 causing a crisis within the movement. His death obviously refuted his claims of immortality. A number of his former adherents and students used this opportunity to challenge the movement and complained to the federal government about Ballard’s statements. In 1941, the United States filed a lawsuit against Edna and Donald Ballard, claiming that they were guilty of mail fraud, accepting money for products and services which they knew were fraudulent. Eighteen counts were brought against the Ballards. These claims of the Ballards included:

• That the Ballards had attained a supernatural state of self-immortality, which enabled them to be entirely free from ailments common to man and to conquer disease, death, old age, poverty and misery, and that they could and would transmit that supernatural state to others willing to pay therefor.

• That the Ballards had, by reason of supernatural attainments, the power to heal persons of ailments, diseases and injuries and the power to cure persons of diseases normally classified as curable and of diseases normally classified as incurable, and had in fact cured hundreds of persons.

• That the Ballards had a divine and supernatural ability to bring forth from a supernatural state money, riches and other things necessary to mankind and could transmit that ability to others willing to pay therefor.

At the end of the case, both Edna and Donald Ballard were found guilty of twelve counts of fraud. The significant thing about the case, though, is that the district court judge gave certain instructions to the jury to not consider the religious claims made by the Ballards. The language of the judge is so specific I quote the passage in full:

Now, gentlemen, here is the issue in this case: First, the defendants in this case made certain representations of belief in a divinity and in a supernatural power. Some of the teachings of the defendants, representations, might seem extremely improbable to a great many people. For instance, the appearance of Jesus to dictate some of the works that we have had introduced in evidence or shaking hands with Jesus. To some people that might seem highly improbable. I point that out as one of the many statements. Whether that is true or not is not the concern of this court and is not the concern of the jury. As far as this court sees the issue, it is immaterial what these defendants preached or wrote or taught in their classes. They [the jury] are not going to be permitted to speculate on the actuality of the happening of those incidents. The issue is: Did these defendants honestly and in good faith believe those things? If they did, they should be acquitted. If these defendants did not believe those things, [if] they did not believe that Jesus came down and dictated, or that Saint Germain came down and dictated, did not believe the things that they wrote, the things that they preached, but used the mail for the purpose of getting money, the jury should find them guilty.

When the case was appealed (Ballard et. al. v. United States, 138 F.2d 540, (C.A. 9 1943)), the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the ruling, claiming that the judge should not have excluded the issue of religious belief. The majority wrote, regarding the claims of meeting the masters and the powers of healing, “Whether such representations were false or true was a question which should have been submitted to the jury.” The case was appealed to the Supreme Court which sided with the district court and overturned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The significant point is that this opinion established the precedent that the United States government is not in the business of deciding which religious claims were true and which were false. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion states:

The Fathers of the Constitution were not unaware of the varied and extreme views of religious sects, of the violence of disagreement among them, and of the lack of any one religious creed on which all men would agree. They fashioned a charter of government which envisaged the widest possible toleration of conflicting views. Man's relation to his God was made no concern of the state. He was granted the right to worship as he pleased and to answer to no man for the verity of his religious views. The religious views espoused by respondents might seem incredible, if not preposterous, to most people. But if those doctrines are subject to trial before a jury charged with finding their truth or falsity,then the same can be done with the religious beliefs of any sect. When the triers of fact undertake that task, they enter a forbidden domain. The First Amendment does not select any one group or any one type of religion for preferred treatment. It puts them all in that position.

With the Supreme Court’s decision, the Ballards were retried. This new case also went to the Supreme Court (Ballard v. United States, 329 U. S. 187 (1946)) and was vacated because in the second trial women were illegally excluded from the jury. The end result was that Edna and Donald Ballard were never convicted of fraud.


In looking at the case of the Ballards, one might wonder how nineteenth century religious figures such as Andrew Jackson Davis would fair. After Davis was visited by Swedenborg and Galen while in a mesmeric trance and given his staff of healing, he then claimed to be a trance medium and that he could heal people. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy also made claims related to curing disease. Healing is a significant aspect of various Christian movements, including Pentecostalism and Primitive Baptistism, to name just a couple. As scholars of religion, how do we engage the issue of fraud? Is it fraud only when remuneration is involved? Or is it only a problem when the alleged cure fails to work? Many say that as historians of religion we should adopt the stance of the Supreme Court and assert we are not in the business adjudicating any religious claims regarding belief and practice.

The United States v. Ballard set a precedent that, as Winnifred Fallers Sullivan points out, is impossible for the United States courts to follow. In a detailed study of Warner v. Boca Raton (1999), Sullivan shows that the court is routinely placed in the position of deciding what is a religion and thus protected belief and practice under the establishment clause in the Constitution. She notes, “legal protection for ‘religion’ anywhere demands a definition of religion” (151). I think we, as scholars of religion, are more aware than most about the difficulty of defining religion, and all the implicit and explicit baggage that comes with definition. But this, then, brings me back to my first question, how do we address the beliefs and practices of the historical actors we study? Of course there is no one answer and scholars must decide based on the data and claims of the historical actors. But what these books and court cases demonstrate is that our discipline is not alone in the struggle to answer these questions.

Christianity and Scholarship in the Public Square, the Guild, and the Church

Paul Harvey

My blog contributors John Fea, Gerardo Marti, and Michael Utzinger joined me last weekend at a really wonderful event, the 20th anniversary conference and celebration of the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University. John, Mike, and I were postdoctoral fellows there (1993-95 for me, 99-00 for Mike, 2000-02 for John), and Gerardo was there giving a keynote address this weekend to an assembled group of representatives from various church-related colleges and institutions across the country. I was able to catch up with some old friends, meet some new ones (including some rising younger stars in American religious history), and enjoy hearing a variety of papers in Humanities and the Arts around the theme of "Finding One's Place." John Fea has blogged more about the program here. Graduate students who read this blog, make sure and check out the opportunities provided by this 2-year postdoctoral fellowship by clicking here.

Below is some more on a book of reflections on "Christianity in the Public Square" of higher education, based on talks given at the last Lilly Fellows reunion conference in 2007. I'm pasting the below in from John Fea's Way of Improvement Leads Home blog (hope you don't mind, John) -- it includes information on the short book as well as authors, titles, and descriptions of the contents:

_____________________________________

This weekend I just received my copy of For the Whole of Creation: Christianity and Scholarship in the Public Square, the Guild, and the Church, ed. John Steven Paul and James Paul Old (Valparaiso University Press, 2010).

If you are interested in church-related higher education this may be a book worth reading. (I am not sure how to order a copy. Perhaps the best way to obtain one is to contact the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University--www.lillyfellows.org).

The book includes sections on "The Christian Academic and the Public Square," "The Christian Academic and the Academic Guild," and the "Christian Academic and the Church."

Here is the table of contents:

Foreword: Joe Creech

Tal Howard, "On Plausability, Post-Secularism, and Evangelicalism."

Jeffrey Zalar, "The Roots of Public Virtue in Christian Intellectual Practice."

Colleen Seguin, "Classrooms as Public Spaces."

Paul Harvey, "Exile from Valpo: On Being a Religious Scholar in the Historical Guild at the Public University Amidst a Charged Atmosphere of Religion, Politics, and War."

Maria LaMonaca: "My Teaching Load is None of Your Business, and Don't Steal My Desk: Seeking an Identity Among Academic Guilds."

Heath White: "The Profession is the World: Some Thoughts on Being in the Guild But Not of It."

J. Michael Utzinger, "Faith That Kills?: Reflections on Religion after 9/11."

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, "Have Women Souls?: The Council of Macon and the Dilemma of a Catholic Feminist Scholar."

Martha Greene Eads, "The Professor in the Parish: Beyong Gourmet Coffee and High-Quality Handouts."

John Fea, "Worshipping with 'Christian America': A Historian's Search for a Spiritual Home in Mainstream Evangelicalism."

Scott Huelin: "Dual Citizenship: The Politics of Belonging to Church and Academy."

Disestablishments

Chris Beneke

I just finished Steven K. Green's The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford 2010). My hunch is that the book will end up on the shelves of Supreme Court justices and their clerks, not to mention religious historians (who will probably use the library's copy) and constitutional law scholars (who can probably afford to buy their own). We needed a comprehensive account of the relationship between civil government and religion from the founding period through the early twentieth century. Now we have it.

The Second Disestablishment's title and subtitle are misleading. The first quarter of this thick volume is devoted to late eighteenth-century America, the era of what Green calls the “First Disestablishment.” It lasted from 1775 through 1833, though most of the critical work was accomplished by 1790. (Massachusetts, with its town-centered system of church support, was the chief laggard, stretching the national story of constitutional disestablishment out until 1833.)

Green takes the interpretive fight directly to those (generally called "Accommodationists") who maintain that the early federal system was designed to preserve existing, nonpreferential state establishments of religion. He makes a persuasive case that instead of buttressing publicly supported religion in the states, the Constitution and the religious clauses of the First Amendment actually sustained the states' momentum toward disestablishment.

Historians use the term "disestablishment" to describe the end of state support for churches and state-enforced religious doctrine. Green has a broader conception (a forthcoming book by David Sehat may take a comparably broad view). For Green, disestablishment also included the de-Christianization of the common law and the secularizaton of educational policy. The story is generally progressive: there was more evidence of disestablishment at the end of the nineteenth century than there had been in the late eighteenth or mid-nineteenth century. Still, what he calls "legal" and "cultural" disestablishment--the Second Disestablishment--followed a less direct trajectory than the First, constitutional disestablishment. In fact, the notion that Christianity was integral to the common law did not reach its apex until the antebellum period. As a consequence, anti-Christian remarks were still prosecuted and non-Christians still barred from serving as witnesses through the Civil War era.

A major turning point occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century when judges began to demand that prosecutions for blasphemy, Sabbath violations, and profane swearing be shown to constitute a discernible public “nuisance." For their part, Sabbath laws themselves were increasingly treated as contributions to public health and welfare, rather than divine injunctions. (When else would laborers rest, and how else were you going to keep them out of the pubs on Sunday?) At the same time, Bible reading in the schools was given secular justifications (Where else would children be taught morality?) and gradually abandoned. Law and culture were both de-sanctified.

The Second Disestablishment is judicious in its use of evidence, with only a few excursions into polemics. The argument flows easily from Green's detailed study of legal opinion and court decisions (more than 400 cases apparently). Along the way, he takes aim at another distinguished legal historian, Philip Hamburger, whose Separation of Church and State should be read in conjunction with this one. The debate over the history of church and state in America won't end with this book. But it just might be more interesting, and better informed.

The Naked Public Square, Revisited

by Steven P. Miller

Research for my next book has led me to read or view several evangelical classics “again, for the first time.” To be honest, despite my modest panel cred as a scholar of modern evangelical history, in some cases it’s just been for the first time. Perhaps there is no shame in confessing to never before having watched Whatever Happened to the Human Race? or the documentary version of The Late Great Planet Earth (the latter of which is less Orwellian than Orwellesian, Orson Welles being the host for this extended shuttle run between Jesus Movement apocalypticism and Seventies anti-growth liberalism). I’m a little more sheepish, though, about waiting until last week to read Richard John Neuhaus’ The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America cover to cover.

The significance of The Naked Public Square perhaps goes without saying, and I had heard the gist of its thesis a thousand times: The artificial divorce of religion from American public life imperils American democracy, not to mention millions of American believers. Conservative columnist George Will called it “the book from which further debate about church-state relations should begin.” Will seems to have received his wish.

My research interests lie in the major impetus for Neuhaus’ jeremiad—the arrival of what he called “the religious new right.” For Neuhaus, that phenomenon had “kicked a tripwire alerting us to a pervasive contradiction in our culture and politics. We insist that we are a democratic society, yet we have in recent decades systematically excluded from policy consideration the operative values of the American people, values that are overwhelmingly grounded in religious belief” (37). Note the use of “us” and “we,” an interesting slip since elsewhere in the book Neuhaus chides mainline Protestants for their reflexive use of the royal (that is, the custodial) “we” when denouncing the rest of American society. Neuhaus clearly wanted to tame what he, in the mid-1980s at least, saw as the potential for excess among those “evangelicals and fundamentalists who have lately come in from the cold of their sixty-year exile” (260).

Neuhaus thus positioned himself as a hostile critic of the new class left and a friendly critic of the religious right. In retrospect, his was an impossible balancing act. Even in the book, friendly criticism often morphs into legitimization (albeit somewhat condescendingly so). This is why I feel comfortable calling this book an evangelical classic. This also might be why Time magazine included the Lutheran-turned-Catholic on its 2005 list of "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America.” Charles Colson, who also made the cut, once likened The Naked Public Square to Augustine’s The City of God. A more sober comparison might be with Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center.

As I read his book, Neuhaus wanted to create a kind of vital religious center, even though he criticized Schlesinger-style liberalism for presuming a secularized brand of American democracy. As I read the remainder of Neuhaus’ career, though, what he helped to create was a more vital religious right, which during the next two decades set the tone for how Americans discussed religion and society. One reason, no doubt, was that mainline Protestants either did not heed Neuhaus’ call or did not offer a salable alternative to it. But surely another reason was, quite simply, that Neuhaus positioned himself as a political conservative. Neuhaus could still paint himself as an unaffiliated soul in the mid-1980s, yet he made several moves pointing toward an enduring home on the right: downplaying economic justice issues (as if to leave that sector of the public square to the economists’ decidedly secular curves), suggesting that “pluralism” really was just a synonym for “secularism,” and likening opposition to abortion to support for civil rights.

Nowhere was Neuhaus’ reach more evident than in the subtitle R. Marie Griffith and Melani McAlister chose for their introduction to the American Quarterly’s powerhouse September 2007 issue on religion: “Is the Public Square Still Naked?” Griffith and McAlister note how Neuhaus’ thesis eventually resonated even in liberal political circles (most influentially, within the Obama campaign). “We will not be rescued by religion,” Neuhaus warned toward the end of his book, yet the watered down version of the other 263 pages often has amounted to an assumption that religious-folks-are-good-and-therefore-good-for-public-life (260). This formulation resembles Martin Marty’s famous (and pithier) “religion-in-general.” Neuhaus’ book, however, suggests why generic “religion” arguably now has a more evangelical feel that it did in postwar America. “How strange is this historical moment,” Neuhaus declared, “in which talk about the public role of religion is thought to be conservative” (156). As it were, he helped to make the strange seem normal.

Lapham's Quarterly on Religion

Randall Stephens

Mark Twain was fond of the sharp barb, the straight shot, the cutting colloquial witticism, the carefully turned phrase. He liked to contrast trim American prose with the tangle of Teutonic verbiage. Whoever invented German, he quipped in "The Awful German Language" (1880), "seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way he could think of."

Twain also had strong opinions about God and organized religion. (Had his wife died earlier he might have made his views more public.) He confided to his notebook in 1904: "God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New—the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance."

Lewis Lapham seems to follow Twain’s lead in the intro to the new Lapham’s Quarterly. The issue he says, "doesn’t trade in divine revelation, engage in theological dispute, or doubt the existence of God." True to form—besides Lapham’s own opinions laid bare in the intro—this LQ culls bits and pieces from the world’s leading religions, along with the words of saints, martyrs, remote observers, apostates, and what have you.

Brought up in a secular home, Lapham "missed the explanation as to why the stories about Moses and Jesus were to be taken as true while those about Apollo and Rumpelstiltskin were not." He brought a similar critical eye (or is it heart?) to New Haven as an undergrad in the 1950s. So while William Buckley fretted over "whether Yale fortifies or shatters the average student's respect for Christianity," Lapham wanted the grizzly details of God’s autopsy report. How and when did the deity expire? "[D]isemboweled by Machiavelli in sixteenth-century Florence, assassinated in eighteenth-century Paris by agents of the French Enlightenment, lost at sea in 1835 while on a voyage with Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands, garroted by Friedrich Nietzsche on a Swiss Alp in the autumn of 1882, disappeared into the nuclear cloud ascending from Hiroshima on August 6, 1945."

News of God’s demise turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Even observers in Manhattan, Cambridge, and New Haven couldn’t deny the surge in religious zeal, from Jesus People to Jihadists. Notes Lapham: "Together with the rising of militant religious fervor in the United States during the last thirty years, devout and literal-minded readings of the Qur’an have brought forth war in Iraq and Afghanistan, massacre in Africa and the Balkans, suicide bombing in Israel, Pakistan, India, and Palestine, heavy security encircling the presence of President Barack Obama, elected to the White House in his persona as a Messiah come not to govern the country but to redeem it." (Curious. I don’t quite get why Lapham broadly paints religion as a Dionysian freak show or a shell game huckstering. Snake handlers and Elmer Gantrys all.)

Purple prose of the editorial aside, this issue of LQ is tremendous. Beautiful full-color photos and paintings appear alongside selections from all manner of writers, prophets, poets, skeptics, luminaries, and lunatics. For example: Émile Zola Observes an Exorcism: c. 1870 / Brittany; Among Scorpions: 1520 / Wittenberg; The Gospel According to Jorge Luis Borges: 1928 / Argentina; Flannery O'Connor Presents a Prophet: 1949 / Tennessee; Marilynne Robinson Raises an Objection: 1997 / Iowa City; Fire and Smoke: c. 1100 / Constantinople; Church and State: 1779 / Monticello; Deification: 332 BC / Egypt; John Updike Hears a Point of Confession: 1960 / Mt. Judge. The scope well fits Lapham’s sprawling vision of arts and letters. Or, like some wag said of Greil Marcus, "everything reminds him of everything."

I can easily see how this handsome volume could be used as a text in a religion survey. There’s much of value here. The final three sections are most rewarding. The first features essays by contemporary authors on a variety of topics—original sin, church and state, and secularism. The penultimate bit, titled "Conversations," is brilliant: Søren Kierkegaard & Bertrand Russell: Define "Faith"; John Milton & Reinhold Neibuhr: In His Image; Ralph Waldo Emerson & G. K. Chesteron: What Would Jesus Do? The volume is rounded out by Terry Eagleton’s essay on Dostoevsky’s "The Grand Inquisitor."