Religion, Literature, and Race

Kelly Baker

H-Amstdy just published two reviews of note for American religious history. Finbarr Curtis reviewed Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption: Religion, The Secular, and American Literature (2007), a book mentioned a time or two on this blog. Curtis examines Fessenden's deft analysis of how the "secular" is deployed and contains religious mooring. He writes:

For many commentaries on American religion and politics, it is an axiom that the line that demarcates the religious from the secular is blurry. Many of these discussions presume that this normative and analytic blurriness comes with the difficulty of attaining neutrality on religious matters. Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption advances a subtle and nuanced set of interpretations of secular tropes in American literature that offers a more complex take on what is at stake in the rhetoric of religious neutrality. In this collection of perceptive and insightful essays on subjects that range from the colonial period to the twentieth century, Fessenden does not propose a new way to clarify the boundaries between religion and the secular. Rather, she considers the institutional and discursive conditions under which it is useful for powerful groups to be able to identify certain beliefs, practices, and forms of identification as religiously neutral. According to Fessenden, the potency of secular rhetoric is that it offers a privileged place from which to affirm public consensus about normative American identity. From this position, "others" may be tolerated, but in such ways as to render their commitments as distinctly religious over and against the neutrality of the mainstream. On this point, Fessenden's work stands within a body of postcolonial scholarship that has taken issue with sociological efforts to measure processes of secularization. From the point of view of postcolonial discursive analysis, the problem with head counts of the religious versus the nonreligious is that line between religiosity and secularity is itself part of the rhetorical game. ... One of the strengths of Fessenden's book is her ability to offer non-reductive interpretations of how secular rhetoric has shaped and been shaped by categories of race, sex, class, and nation. For example, the first two chapters assess the construction of American national identity in light the violent displacement of Native Americans. What interests Fessenden is the Puritan capacity to cast Native Americans as both threatening and irrelevant. The self-evidence of the equation of Puritanism and civilization did not justify violence so much as it made any justification unnecessary. Within a teleological narrative that legitimated Protestant suspicions of decadent religious institutions, middle-class attitudes toward property and work, Anglo-Saxon notions of racial superiority, and child-rearing practices that emphasized discipline and literacy, Puritans wove their religious and cultural ambitions into an American national imaginary.

In later chapters, Fessenden shows how anti-Catholic tropes have shaped American understandings of liberty. This has been especially evident in the way anti-Catholic denunciations of ecclesiastical tyranny have often served as rhetorical models for sexual, racial, and intellectual freedom. On this point, her analysis differs from other genealogies of secularism in that she does not posit an intrinsic secularity to Protestant voluntarism. Rather, Fessenden calls attention to the contested nature of the rhetorical claim that Protestant religiosity provides a neutral standpoint from which to model American liberties. This suggests that Catholic attempts to articulate an American identity were more complex than a simple capitulation to Protestant expectations of religious privacy. According to Fessenden, Catholics were grappling with how to imagine a distinctly Catholic secularity. But as she demonstrates in her chapter on F. Scott Fitzgerald, asserting an alternative secular Catholic identity could be fraught with anxiety and self-contradiction.

Curtis also questions her rendering of the secular and ponders what happens to the definition of the secular as unbelief:
In her conclusion, Fessenden suggests that the logic of secularity informs a post-9/11 American foreign policy in which underdevelopment is defined in terms of deprivatized religion. While I find her arguments generally persuasive, it is possible that her impressive facility with interpretive synthesis might begin to pose its own set of problems. Simply put, her interpretation of the secular runs a whole bunch of stuff together. What is the status of the old-fashioned sense of secularism as unbelief? Is there a meaningful difference between an atheist and a conservative Protestant like George W. Bush? This is particularly pressing if secularity is presented as the discursive logic legitimating contemporary American crusades to democratize the world. I think it is an open question whether an excess of secularity or liberalism is really the best way to describe the sources of the Patriot Act or Guantanamo Bay. After all, to the extent to which Culture and Redemption criticizes current American foreign policy, it does so as an excellent book by a secular liberal for secular liberals. (The entire review is located here.)

Sylvester Johnson reviewed Colin Kidd's The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000. Johnson delves into Kidd's presentation of race and its relationship with scripture as well as Kidd's vindication of the Enlightenment:

After having cleared the ground with this contextualization of modern racial taxonomy, Kidd in the second chapter dives into developing the question that lies at the heart of this book. How was racial discourse related to modern biblical views about human origins? More specifically, did monogenesis, the belief that all humans shared descent from the same ancestors, inhibit or mitigate the acerbic nature of modern racism? Did polygenesis, the mildly popular view that different races derived from different ancestors--promote a more malicious racial consciousness? Forging of Races takes up these questions through a subsequent chronological history of Enlightenment approaches to the Bible.

The third chapter examines ways that European interpretations of Genesis (especially of the Noah legend) were at once narrative templates for making claims about racial ideologies and discursive indicators of European Christian angst over the status of scriptural authority in light of advances in the sciences such as ethnology and early anthropology. Racial categories, Kidd argues, caused Europeans to question the Bible as a reliable and comprehensive source of authoritative knowledge about the empirical world because the Bible did not address the issue of race. With the expansion of European colonialism into the New World, furthermore, early modern writers had to explain why the Bible, which was supposed to be of universal applicability, never mentioned the Americas.

In chapter 4, Kidd defends the Enlightenment against two types of reductionist claims. Against the charge that the Enlightenment was simply racist, Kidd proffers instead that this intellectual movement among Europeans was more complicated, generating racist strategies of representation and also advancing a framework of natural rights whose ethical injunctions pertained innately to all persons. Second, Kidd rejects the secularism thesis, the common conception that the Enlightenment was fundamentally a rejection of religion. It was not; the secularizing strategies derivative of Enlightenment thought were not necessarily opposed to religion but rather enabled non-religious categories for conceiving of and participating in the world of human experience. At times, this might promote religious activity, a pattern that he demonstrates by discussing the growing trend among theologians who drew upon scientific studies of race, when convenient, in order to support the authority of scripture.

Yet, Johnson critiques the author's evaluation to monogenesis and the belief that a narrative of common origins would make people behave more humanely:

Colin Kidd's is an ambitious work. The author promises an assessment of four centuries of discourse about race and scripture. Readers who are looking for a comprehensive history of interpretive strategies, Enlightenment religion, and a rich treatment of primary sources that foregrounds problems of modernity, cosmology, and racial consciousness will be rewarded. The work is not without its problems, however. Critical historians of race and colonialism will find troubling much of Kidd's explanation of the data about biblical interpretation that he so ably catalogues. Ultimately, Kidd's theoretical fluency is strangely inhibited by what at least seems to be a strident commitment to defending the deeply and perversely racist history of Christian monogenesis and the attending monotheism. There can be no honest assessment of monogenesis that concludes it ensures a gentler, milder version of white supremacy vis-� -vis polygenesis.

It is not clear why Kidd thinks that monogenesis necessarily inhibits racism and radical otherness. This is not true for sexism or classism. Why should it hold for racism? Native American and African religions, on the other hand, embraced a worldview comprising polygenesis and polytheism, yet they never produced racial violence on the scale of that by European Christians. Christians who embraced monogenesis, on the other hand, were primary agents in genocidal wars against Africans and Native Americans. The Americas, in fact, were the locus of the largest-scale episode of genocidal human destruction--over 95 percent of American Indians put to death, primarily by explicit execution of colonial and White nation-state policies of slavery, forced removal, and military campaigns of extermination (as opposed to disease, which accounted for a minority of these deaths). Millions of Africans were worked literally to death in the Americas. Where is the empirical basis for arguing that this destruction would have been worse if not for monogenesis? Not once does Forging of Races engage in a serious way the history of genocide that is interstitially instantiated in the history of White Christian colonialism. The closest the book comes to naming this violence is in chapter 3: "Theological orthodoxy and the narratives of sacred history underpinned notions of the family of man and the brotherhood of mankind, however much these notions were disregarded in practice in the imperial rush towards the possession of slaves and the dispossession of indigenous peoples" (p. 78).

It seems that what is decisive for Kidd is the superficial impression that if people believe in common origins, their interactions will be more humane. This assumption ignores the history of encounter between European Christian conquerors in the Americas and their Native and African subjects. It also ignores the analytical studies of scholars such as Itumeleng Mosala, Regina Schwartz, Keith Whitelam, and Jonathan Kirsch, who have demonstrated the linkages between monotheism and violence. What Kidd seems to assume, in other words, is actually a problematic ideal that lacks evidence. One is pressed to ask whether Kidd's theoretical [mis]handling of the history of scripture and race would look different if he had to respond to the material, historical relationship between biblical thinking and physical, psychological, and cultural violence and death that became a necessary part of European Christian colonialism--Itumeleng Mosala has addressed this very problem in his Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa (1989). Would Kidd's explanation of primary sources look the same if he included in his interpretive scope the deeply consequential and empirical religious hatred that defined encounters between monotheistic, monogenist Christian colonizers and their polytheistic victims?

Even the Enlightenment heroes--or, rather, especially these heroes--whom he so earnestly defends (his attempt to prove that David Hume and Thomas Jefferson do not deserve to be identified as racists is disappointing and unconvincing) should further prod him to recognize the extent of massive destruction of non-White peoples that is the context for the history of ideas he examines. Does a passionate defense of these victims' putative humanity ever become an imperative for explaining in critical terms "what happened"? Unfortunately, it does not in Forging of Races. Finally, Kidd joins a host of other writers when he incorrectly assumes that Black religious activists and thinkers only respond to Whites instead of also shaping and influencing the larger world of meanings that inform societal norms. Blacks are essentially unmentioned in his history of ideas until the latter chapter on "Black Counter-Theologies." What distinguishes Kidd's study, nevertheless, is not its problems--unfortunately, these are woefully familiar and plague numerous studies of European history and thought--but its strengths. Historians of race, religion, scriptures, and modernity most certainly cannot afford to miss what Kidd has to say; his meticulous research and generous notes will aid serious researchers for years to come. Furthermore, his clear and cogent explanation of race as a social system and his mapping of international relations of scripture and race will prove immensely valuable for teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses. (The full review is located here. The Journal of Southern Religion also hosted a roundtable review.)

Reviews: Transcendentalism and Religion and African American Novels

Kelly Baker

Two recent H-Amstdy reviews tackle two different issues of interest for our blog, Transcendentalism and religious writing. Tara Robbins Fee reviewed Barbara Packer's The Transcendentalists, which focuses upon the philosophy as well as larger social connections of Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and others. Fee writes:

A graceful storyteller, Packer introduces her audience to major and minor figures through elegant, winsome readings of primary sources and analyses of ideas and actions. Her account is particularly well suited for pedagogical application in its breadth and in the simultaneously fine detail of its purview: it begins with a search through Congregational and Unitarian history for Transcendentalism's point of origin, traces the new movement's major players through their battles with the religious establishment and efforts toward social reform, and closes with their "diaspora" and the diffusion of their ideas into the larger antislavery movement. Providing a comprehensive sense of Transcendentalism's scale and significance, this volume would complement well for classroom use a collection of primary source materials and/or other recent compilations of scholarly essays, such as Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright's Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Context (1999). Capper and Wright's collection beckons toward new readings of the movement; Packer's engages current questions while establishing the significance of its classic treatment.

Packer treats the movement's early years with the energy that suffused the period, writing animatedly of the conflicts between the Transcendentalists and their many opponents. She explains cogently the dominance of Lockean philosophy in New England's institutions of higher education; against this backdrop, the intellectual revolution instantiated through the young Transcendentalists' "appetite for Romantic literature" (p. 21) and critique of Locke is thrown into relief. She also describes Transcendentalism's transatlantic origins and its points of connection with British and Continental thinkers. In this discussion especially, her manner of explication is worth noting, particularly for scholars interested in using the book in the classroom: beyond simply arguing for the significance of the intellectual exchange, she accounts for how personalities and chance occurrences at meetings affected that exchange. (Click here for the rest of the review.)

Carolyn M. Jones explores Tuire Valkeakari's Religious Idiom and the African American Novel, 1952-1998. She writes:

Valkeakari does not want to argue whether African American writers, in thinking about religion, have stayed within denominational boundaries; neither does she want to do "myth criticism" (p. 12). Her task is to examine cultural mixings and the development of hybrid forms to understand a unique and varied African American production.

I was particularly impressed with the work on female ministry. Valkeakari looks at the role of the African American woman as minister in Beloved, The Healing (1999), and Octavia Butler's Parable series. African American women historically have been spiritual leaders in their communities and there is a long tradition of African American women in the evangelical tradition, and Valkeakari shows us the important emphases that Morrison, Jones, and Butler bring forth in their works--the body, the "talking cure," and community. All these function to break the kind of exclusion and exclusiveness that Valkeakari looks at in her final chapter on Morrison's Paradise (1999). Cutting across boundaries opens possibilities of renewal and regeneration. Equally impressive is the discussion of African American Christ figures, like the Invisible Man, Pecola Breedlove, and others. The figure of sacrifice and what that figure contains, represents, and ushers in for person and community is an important strain of thought throughout the work.

Valkeakari's themes come into focus in her final chapter, an examination of the significance of Toni Morrison's Paradise. The tension between paradise and home is a subtheme throughout Valkeakari's work and an element of the religious thematics of the African American novel. The issues of renewal, the scapegoat/Christ figure, and the hybrid forms that African Americans "made" in relation to the Judeo-Christian message they received all focus on the questions of "What kind of future may we hope for?" and "Where is home--now and in the future?" and "How do we preserve our freedom?" Avoiding the exclusionary forces of racism, sexism, ageism, etc. is the promise in African American signifyin(g) on the sacred. (The full review is available here).

Harvey on _Baptists in America_

KELLY BAKER

Our illustrious managing editor, Paul Harvey, reviewed Bill Leonard's Baptists in America for H-Amstdy. For this informative, if encyclopedic work, Harvey has praise for the breadth of coverage, but he turns a critical eye to the small presence of Southern Baptist history. According to Harvey, Leonard aptly presents the tension between "soul liberty" and "church purity." Here's an excerpt from the review:

The opening chapter quickly surveys the basics of Baptist history from its origins in the early seventeenth century and growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a position of cultural dominance in the South in the twentieth century. Subsequent chapters provide summaries of Baptist beliefs and practices in all their bewildering variety, Baptist styles of theology, race and gender in Baptist life and history, and Baptist positions on various sides in the recent culture wars. Curiously underplayed, to my mind, is Southern Baptist history in particular. I say "curiously" given Leonard's preeminence as a cultural interpreter of Southern Baptists. I say "underplayed" given that Baptists reached a predominance in the South, among both whites and blacks, that they did not achieve elsewhere to the same degree. This is an encyclopedic and reference tool sort of book, not a strongly interpretive argument and analysis, but I expected a greater degree of focus on Baptists in the region of the United States where, unarguably, they have played a more significant role than anywhere else.

Baptists appear here as a kind of case study in miniature of some of the broader themes and paradoxes of American Protestant history. Baptist theology is a varied as could possibly be imagined within a generally evangelical framework--ranging from the nearly Universalist "No-Hellers" of Appalachia to the "Hell-for-Just-About-Everyone-ers"of the Primitive and "Two-Seed in the Spirit" varieties, to just about every position on the Calvinist-Arminian spectrum in between for the majority of American Baptists. On questions of social policy, politics, gender, and race, Baptists may be found everywhere on a continuum from, say, proslavery theorist Thornton Stringfellow and racist demagogue Strom Thurmond (misspelled in the book), to social gospel pioneer Walter Rauschenbusch, to civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, to black spiritual earth mother Maya Angelou. What defines Baptist history--and, arguably, all of Protestant history--is the constant tension between "conversionist particularlism and pluralistic libertarianism" (p. 253). Of American thought on ethnicity, the historian David Hollinger once asked, "How wide the circle of we?" Baptists constantly ask the same question and redefine their answers, contingent in part on nearly universal Baptist themes of congregational democracy and soul liberty but also on the threads of associationalism and evangelical standards of sin, redemption, and conversion.

For the full text, click here.

Evans' on Blum's _W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet_

BY KELLY BAKER

Curtis Evans of the University of Chicago Divinity School provides thoughtful analysis of Blum;s book (mentioned quite frequently at this blog). Evans' current work is The Burden of Black Religion: Representing, Vindicating, and Uplifting the Race, which is forthcoming from Oxford , and it "focuses on cultural images and academic interpretations of black religion and their relation to ongoing debates about the place of blacks in the nation." His review pushes the question of how to interpret Du Bois pressing against previous narratives and urging new interpretations that take into account Du Bois's critical reflections on religion as well.


I have posted this H-Amstdy review in entirety for all to enjoy.

Edward J. Blum. _W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet_. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. viii + 273 pp. Notes, index, acknowledgements. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8122-4010-3.

Reviewed for H-Amstdy by Curtis J. Evans, University of Chicago Divinity School

W. E. B. Du Bois: A Spiritual Prophet and Religious Sage?
Edward J. Blum's book is one among many recent books that have sought to restore the towering W. E. B. Bu Bois to his rightful place in American intellectual and cultural history, except that Blum is critical of those works that de-emphasize the religious and spiritual aspects of Du Bois's life and writings.[1] Blum argues that Du Bois was "one of America's most profound religious thinkers" (p. 11). He insists that an "irreligious" Du Bois has been created by historians for the purposes of a secularized academy (a major criticism that Blum merely asserts, but does not demonstrate). Blum defines religion as "an ideological system that explains and orders events, behaviors, and ideas in terms of concepts perceived to be sacred, supernatural, divine, or eternal" (p. 12). By adopting this understanding of religion, he is able to examine Du Bois's writings and reflections within a new framework.

Blum rightly notes that there were "multiple religious selves" warring within Du Bois. One was a religious critic who urged black and white churches to incorporate racial fairness, justice, morality, and a critique of the social and political injustice of society into their religious practices and theology. There was also Du Bois the "apostate" who disregarded traditional religious dogmas and Du Bois the "priest" who authored prayers and hymns for oppressed peoples (p. 12). By paying attention to the performative aspects of Du Bois's autobiographies and writings, Blum is able to avoid traditional biographical questions such as whether or not Du Bois "believed" in God, the psychological and social bases of his belief or unbelief, and how his personal religion changed over time (pp. 15-16).

Blum astutely provides a genre-based approach to Du Bois to highlight what these disclose about him and his religion in various social contexts. Each of his five chapters focuses on a separate topic or corpus of Du Bois's writings: his autobiographies; _The Souls of Black Folk_ (1903); historical and sociological studies; creative poems and fiction; and the turn to Communism and political struggle. Most effective, in my judgment, are Blum's probing analyses of Du Bois's autobiographies and fictional works. He notes that through his "numerous autobiographical acts, Du Bois produced didactic mythologies of self to reveal the many sides of his soul and to speak sacred truths to the world" (pp. 24-25). Drawing on the theories of literary theorist and psychoanalyst Joseph Campbell, Blum presents Du Bois as a folk hero with a "black face" whose personal journeys and struggles acquired a mythical significance in his autobiographies, allowing Du Bois to portray himself as a hero-priest and prophet-teacher who disclosed the divine and black America. According to Blum, Du Bois's personal story was scripted as a way of opening up the spiritual state of African American communities and thereby subversively exposing the false claims of white supremacist mythologies that demonized black people and denied their connection to the divine (pp. 24-26).

In his excellent analysis of Du Bois's religious vision, Blum alerts his readers to manifestations in Du Bois's literary works of black Christs, apocalyptic visions, and retranslations of Jesus' teachings into the American scene. By situating Du Bois's work and thought within a historical tradition of African American autobiographical reflections on the pervasiveness of racism and white imaginings of the divine, Blum convincingly presents Du Bois as an articulate religious critic whose writings evince a persistent struggle with the problem of evil and suffering in black America. Blum provides an unvarnished portrayal of how Du Bois unflinchingly wrestled with the religious meaning of white violence against blacks, even as he reworked and reimagined a black God who was on the side of African Americans. In my view, chapter 4 of Blum's work will no doubt make the greatest contribution, while his painstaking analysis of the black religious imagination through Du Bois's literary works will surprise and enlighten many readers.

Although Blum successfully makes the point that most historians and biographers have been too eager to depict Du Bois as a dogmatic atheist or agnostic, I am not sure that Blum appreciates why Du Bois has been regarded as an atheist or agnostic. Blum's own analysis indicates the persistent criticisms of religion that Du Bois uttered throughout his long life. Although, he accounts for this by making a few remarks about Du Bois's normative or idealized conception of "true Christianity," I do not think this will persuade most specialists that this is the best way to understand Du Bois's animus against religion as it existed during his lifetime (not as "religion" may have been in some idealized ahistorical realm). At one point, Blum comes close to getting at a better description of Du Bois and his religious sentiments when he briefly notes that Du Bois regularly minimized the supernatural in his reimagining of religion and should therefore be seen as a religious modernist (p. 160). I have always felt that this is a much more fitting description of Du Bois in light of his constant criticisms of black churches for their alleged backwardness and puritanical prohibitions, and his scathing critiques of white churches for their failure to treat blacks fairly.[2] Du Bois's emphasis on ethics at the expense of traditional doctrines and theology places him firmly in the religious modernist or Protestant liberal camp.

If Blum had set out to argue that Du Bois was a religious modernist rather than an atheist or agnostic, I think his book would have been richer and this approach would have taken the unnecessary edge off the book in its strong stance against those who reportedly have underappreciated Du Bois's religiosity. Du Bois as the religious modernist also elucidates Blum's own description of Du Bois's positive relationship with white liberal Protestants such as John Haynes Holmes, pastor of Community Church in New York, and John Howard Melish, pastor of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church (pp. 187-189). That Du Bois attended these churches during the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he was most critical of religion and moved leftward politically (until he joined the Communist party), provides the kind of evidence that Blum needs to substantiate his claims about the meaning and importance of religion in Du Bois's life. Attention to Du Bois's literary works, his "religious imagination," and religious sentiments and descriptions expressed by those at his funeral and admirers of his books, while important and enlightening, does not satisfactorily demonstrate that he was a religious prophet (not to mention the problem of gaining any consensus on this ambiguous and highly personal term). After all, religious language and rhetoric are enormously difficult to link to personal behavior and religious practice (as modern-day elections and campaigning clearly indicate).

This is a very important work and it will surely raise a host of questions about scholarly bias and social location as powerful factors in shaping how we represent historical figures and what we deem as important motive forces in their lives. Blum's book is a welcome addition to our expanding knowledge of Du Bois and the cultural study of race and religion in American history.

Notes
[1]. Recent examples would include David Levering Lewis, _W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919_ (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); idem, _W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963_ (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); and Shamoon Zamir, _Dark Voices: W. E. B. Bu Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

[2]. Curtis Evans, "W. E. B. Du Bois: Interpreting Religion and the Problem of the Negro Church," _Journal of the American Academy of Religion_ 75 (June 2007), 268-297.

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Kelly Baker, New Reviews on Religon from H-AMSTDY

New reviews on Religion from H-Amstdy

First up, Seth Perry, a doctoral candidate at University of Chicago, Divinity School, reviewed W. Paul Reeve’s Making Space on the Western Frontier: Mormons, Miners, and Southern Paiutes. The work touches on the relationships between Mormons and the Paiutes, which eventually lead to Paiute conversions to Mormonism. What is intriguing is the author’s understanding of the “hierarchy of Americanism.” Seth writes:

Eschewing simple racial or ethnic categories, Reeve uses the categories of "spiritual" and "worldly" to divide miners from both Paiutes and Mormons, and to plot the groups on a continuum of "Americanness" that, he says, explains how the groups were regarded (regarded _by whom_ is an important question which will be touched on in a moment). "A hierarchy of Americanness emerged that favored the miners as the embodiment of American progress, industry, and quest for wealth. Mormons and Southern Paiutes, however, valued community over individualism and celestial rewards over material gain, ideals that placed them well outside prevailing standards of what it meant to be an American" (pp. 4-6).

For the rest of the review, click here.

Note that progress and wealth, in Reeve’s view, are more “American” than spiritual leanings that emphasize immaterial rewards.

Next, another Seth reviews quite a different book. Seth Feman, a doctoral candidate at the College of William and Mary, explore James Hudnut-Beumler’s In Pursuit of the Almighty Dollar. This book, one I keep meaning to read, explores the place of money in American denominations, which Feman points out is an often contentious point among congregations. His review highlights the importance of understanding the fiscal in the realm of the immaterial. He writes:

To highlight how the shifting economy has inflected theology and denominational development, Hudnut-Beumler considers common but often overlooked fundraising homiletics and tithing advice literature written by ministers and their advocates from the 1750s to the present. This is no easy task. Placing fiscal matters front and center in religious history not only demands a careful revision of traditional narratives. But, since doing so pins the invisible hand to a cross of gold, it also calls for the reassessment of long-held assumptions about the immateriality of faith and the immateriality of finance.

Finally, Elizabeth “Betsy” Barre, a doctoral candidate at Florida State University in the Department of Religion, approaches Zachary Shore’s Breeding Bin Ladens with a critical eye and a sense of grace. She braced herself for a polemic (as books like this tend to be) but found merit in his work. In her review, she notes that Shore uses the term “ambi-Americanism” to describe Muslim reaction to the U.S. as ambivalent rather than full-sale rejection of the national culture. She notes:

Shore argues that the underlying cause of "ambi-Americanism" and "ambi-Europeanism" is "a growing discomfort with mainstream European and American cultural values" (p. 165). He is never entirely clear about what he means by "mainstream" or "values," but he notes that many European Muslims believe that Europe and America are "spiritually empty" (p. 8). As a result, they do their best to resist "American secular values" (p. 127), seeking out products and services that will reflect their own (p. 121).

On a related note, I am always seeking reviewers for H-Amstdy. Currently, I am in dire need of scholars in African American studies, Gender History, History of the West, Catholicism, Religion and Politics, and more generally, American religious history. To be a reviewer, one must be at least ABD. If you are interested or know someone who might be, please send me an email, kellyjbaker (at) gmail (dot) com, with a short CV and a current list of scholarly areas of interest.

Practicing Protestants

Practicing Protestants
Kelly Baker

Emily Wright, a doctoral candidate in Dance at Arizona State University, reviews Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965, edited by Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Schmidt and Mark Valeri for H-Amstdy. I picked up this volume not too long ago, and I was impressed by the attempt on behalf of contributors to understand how Protestantism in America has been practiced by individuals and movements. Wright focuses upon the use of practice theory as an interpretative lens:

In their introduction, editors Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri, describe two central strands of scholarship in the growing field of practice theory. These two strands, often found in opposition to each other, furnish a dialogic spectrum on which each author in _Practicing Protestants_ can be found. The first strand, that of social theorists of practice, draws on Marxist and Foucauldian theories, among others, to highlight "the intricate exercises of power, the procedures of enforcement, the spaces of negotiation, as well as the subtle tactics of resistance" found in various forms of Protestant religious practice (p. 3). The second strand, that of contemporary theologians, such as Dorothy Bass, and philosophical and ethical reconstructionists, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, offer a differing interpretation. Rather than view Christian practices as "generally hegemonic, with resistance being located in small-scale tactics of getting by or making room, Christian theorists view such regulatory structuring as largely humane, enabling, and supportive." As the editors and authors of this volume intended, the application of these opposing interpretive lenses to the examination of Protestant practice offers rich and varied descriptive and analytical scholarship in which the constructs of power, race, colonialism, class, and gender are held in productive tension with the intentional and meaningful conception of the Christian way of life (p. 4).

For the rest of Wright’s review, click here.

For American religious historians, this volume is useful way to move beyond presentations of Protestantism as a textual tradition and embrace that Protestants also embodied their faith as well. (This is not to say that American religious historians ignore Protestant practice, but I think that it is easy to present Protestantism as textual and Catholicism as embodied). From my reading of the text, it became clear that one of the larger goals of the volume was to present the lived religion of Protestants in various historical times and places from Mormon missionaries to Episcopal dancers to Protestant aesthetic sensibilities, and I think this proves to be a useful text as we consider again and again how to present the lived experiences of various religious actors. The press describes the text:

This collection of essays explores the significance of practice in understanding American Protestant life…Profiling practices that range from Puritan devotional writing to twentieth-century prayer, from missionary tactics to African American ritual performance, these essays provide a unique historical perspective on how Protestants have lived their faith within and outside of the church and how practice has formed their identities and beliefs. Each chapter focuses on a different practice within a particular social and cultural context. The essays explore transformations in American religious culture from Puritan to Evangelical and Enlightenment sensibilities in New England, issues of mission, nationalism, and American empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, devotional practices in the flux of modern intellectual predicaments, and the claims of late-twentieth-century liberal Protestant pluralism.

H-AMSTDY Reviews

KELLY BAKER, H-Amstdy and American Religions (or read the reviews from my h-net network)

As a book review editor for H-Amstdy, I thought it might be nice to post snippets of recent reviews in the realm of Religion in American History. This is also a way for me to shamelessly promote our network and highlight our reviewers.

LEADING OFF: Amanda Porterfield on David Holmes, The Faith of the Founders

Porterfield examines Holmes’s attempt to discredit scholarship that suggests the founders were Christian. To do this, Holmes tracks church attendance and membership as indicators of religiosity. While some might find fault with this method, Porterfield strives to understand what this means in this contentious battle over the founding. She writes:

Responding to recent claims about the deep commitment to Christianity among America's Founding Fathers, David L. Holmes sets the record straight in this comprehensive examination of the Founders' religious beliefs and behaviors. The men who conducted the American Revolution, ratified the U.S. Constitution, and served as president during the nation's early years espoused a variety of different beliefs, grouped by Holmes into three main types--non-Christian Deism, Christian Deism, and Christian orthodoxy. Holmes shows that only Samuel Adams, Elias Boudinot, and John Jay anticipated salvation through Christ, embraced the Trinity of the Godhead, and engaged regularly in prayer and Bible devotion. Most of America's early leaders were Deists of one form or the other whose religious beliefs and practices do not match the claims about them advanced by Tim LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other evangelical myth-makers.

NEXT UP: Tracy Neal Leavelle on Todd Kerstetter, God's Country, Uncle Sam's Land: Faith and Conflict in the American West.

Leavelle explores Kerstetter’s work, which relies on three case studies: Mormons, Lakota Ghost Dance, and Branch Davidians. Leavelle aptly renders Kerstetter’s denial of religious tolerance in the West. He writes:

The U.S. government was the primary sponsor of Western settlement and development, but its experiments in the region helped create and reinforce the power of the government through the extension of federal authority and bureaucracy. As for religion in the West, a subject of considerable and unfortunate neglect, Kerstetter contends that tolerance remained a dominant feature of interreligious engagement with a few notable exceptions. A surprisingly brief review of American religious history leads him to conclude that the emergence of a Protestant-dominated "religious mainstream" in the East set limits on Western religious groups like the Mormons and American Indians. The federal government expressed these mainstream religious values in its battle against Mormon polygamy and the Ghost Dance movement in the nineteenth century. Kerstetter asserts that the destruction of the Branch Davidian compound a century later "shows that remarkably little had changed since the 1890s when it came to attitudes about religion" (p. 32). The West may not have been the region of tolerance and openness that has attracted so much support and commentary in American mythology.

And last, but not least, the clean-up hitter: Sylvester Johnson on David Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America.

Johnson deftly analyzes Howard-Pitney’s understanding of the function of jeremiad by African American leaders to call for racial as well as gender equality. The work also highlights contemporary usage of jeremiad by Jesse Jackson and Alan Keyes to demonstrate that this rhetorical form is still alive and well in American culture. Johnson writes:

David Howard-Pitney contributes finely to understanding the cultural history of African American protest and accommodation in his African American Jeremiad. The role of propaganda in strategies of moral suasion is plainly visible in this study of the jeremiad as performed by African Americans. The term "jeremiad," of course, derives from the laments of Jeremiah in early Judaism, urging Judeans to view their God as one who punishes sin and rewards righteousness. Sacvan Bercovitch firmly established the jeremiad as a key category in interpretations of Euro-American religious history in The American Jeremiad (1978). Wilson Moses Jeremiah, in Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms (1982), also developed a rich assessment of this phenomenon among African Americans. Both works inform Howard-Pitney's volume. Howard-Pitney includes in his study the works of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida Barnett-Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. This second edition of Howard-Pitney's text expands upon the first by featuring a concluding chapter that examines the rhetorical styles and representational strategies of Jesse Jackson and Alan Keyes. Keyes, particularly, has garnered considerable acclaim for his renowned conservatism on social and public policy issues, which is viewed as atypical for African Americans.