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?

Catholic Looks at American Culture in the Antebellum Era and the Mid-Twentieth Century: Two New Books

Paul Harvey Just a brief note on two new books that will be of interest to some readers here, both important pieces of scholarship on the Catholic relationship with American politics and culture. First, a review from Choice, just below, on Catholics and slavery: Wallace, W. Jason. Catholics, slaveholders, and the dilemma of American evangelicalism, 1835-1860. Notre Dame, 2010. 200p index afp ISBN 026804421x pbk, $30.00; ISBN9780268044213 pbk, $30.00. Reviewed in 2011jul CHOICE.

Over the past 40 years, scholars have produced a cornucopia of quality scholarship detailing the importance of religion in the antebellum era and how particular religious ideas shaped competing visions of the American Republic, creating the context for and animating the Civil War. Wallace's fine volume elucidates the challenge Catholicism brought to that discourse. Its traditional theology challenged the individualism in the hermeneutics of northern and southern Protestants. Increasing German and Irish Catholic immigration threatened the English domination of the US. In five crisp chapters, Wallace (history, Samford Univ.) outlines how Catholicism debated the hegemonic discourse of Protestant-based acquisitive capitalism, articulated a traditional accommodation to slavery as a product of human sin, and asserted its own historic and ongoing contribution to the discussion of social morality and the proper sources of the Christian life. In their attempts to explain, Catholic leaders offered a powerful critique of nationalism and religion rooted solely in the authority of individual believers under the Constitution and Scripture, an intellectual impeachment given credence by the outbreak of Civil War. Catholicism offered an alternative vision rooted in tradition, realism, and theology. Summing Up:Recommended. All levels/libraries. -- E. R. Crowther, Adams State College Next up, a book just received which appears to be a landmark study: Anthony Burke Smith, The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, hot off the press from the University Press of Kansas. I've only had the chance to skim through parts, but it looks fascinating, and later this summer Emily will give us a more substantive discussion of the book up here. A brief bit from the book's webpage:

For much of American history, Catholics’ perceived allegiance to an international church centered in Rome excluded them from full membership in society. Now Anthony Burke Smith shows how the intersection of the mass media and the visually rich culture of Catholicism changed that Protestant perception and, in the process, changed American culture.

Smith examines depictions of and by Catholics in American popular culture during the critical period between the Great Depression and the height of the Cold War. He surveys the popular films, television, and photojournalism of the era that reimagined Catholicism as an important, even attractive, element of American life to reveal the deeply political and social meanings of the Catholic presence in popular culture.

Smith shows that Hollywood played a big part in this midcentury Catholicization of the American imagination. Leo McCarey’s Oscar-winning film Going My Way, starring the soothing (and Catholic) Bing Crosby, turned the Catholic parish into a vehicle for American dreams, while Pat O’Brien and Spencer Tracy portrayed heroic priests who championed the underclass in some of the era’s biggest hits. And even while a filmmaker like John Ford rarely focused on clerics and the Church, Smith reveals how his films gave a distinctly ethnic Catholic accent to his cinematic depictions of American community.

Smith also looks at the efforts of Henry Luce’s influential Life magazine to harness Catholicism to a postwar vision of middle-class prosperity and cultural consensus. And he considers the unexpected success of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s prime-time television show Life is Worth Living in the 1950s, which offered a Catholic message that spoke to the anxieties of Cold War audiences.

Revealing images of orthodox belief whose sharpest edges had been softened to suggest tolerance and goodwill, Smith shows how such representations overturned stereotypes of Catholics as un-American. Spanning a time when hot and cold wars challenged Americans’ traditional assumptions about national identity and purpose, his book conveys the visual style, moral confidence, and international character of Catholicism that gave it the cultural authority to represent America.

In short, the book appears to be a cultural history accompaniment to Kevin Schultz's Tri-Faith America, reviewed at the blog here previously by Chris Beneke. The book features extensive discussions of Catholic representations in the movies, going far beyond the usual "Legion of Decency" emphasis that most books about Catholics and the movies cover. There are also chapters on Catholics in Life magazine, on Fulton Sheen and Catholics in television, and on "John Ford's Irish American Century."

The Future of American Religious History Monographs

by Edward J. Blum

If you take a quick glance at Paul Harvey’s vita, you’ll see that he plans to dominate the publishing world of the next 12-24 months (from my sociological skills, I count that he has 4 books that will probably be published in that window).

But there are other books that look pretty exciting too – both of which I’ve checked out in dissertation form. As mentioned a few times on this blog, Kelly Baker’s Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 should be available in September. David Morgan – by far one of my favorite historians, writes of it: “An original and sobering work. In the present age, when we may no longer pretend that the lines between violent fanaticism and religious fervor are clearly discernible, this book makes a timely and urgent intervention. Hatred may have more to do with religion than we care to acknowledge.”

Her title alone reminds me of a little section in Matt Sutton’s book on Sister Aimee where on a church survey form, one congregant wrote down for occupation: “Chief Klansman.” Way to go, Kelly, and what a striking cover!

Then Art Remillard’s Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era should be out by December. Not only a blogger, Art is an editor at the terrific online Journal of Southern Religion. Doyen of southern religious history Charles Reagan Wilson claims of Art’s book, “anyone wanting to understand how a variety of people in the South have understood its spiritual and moral meanings will like this book.” I think he’s right, and my guess is that reviewers will read it in comparison with Paul Gaston’s New South Creed and John David Smith’s terrific Old Creed for the New South. Art’s book may also be read as a kind of prequel to Andrew Manis’s Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars (2002).

Speaking of J. D. Smith … he’s blurbed another forthcoming book that looks fascinating: W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (out in October). Smith writes, "Poole brings to life American horror stories by framing them within folk belief, religion, and popular culture, broadly unraveling the idea of the monster. Thanks to Poole's insights we see the ubiquity of the monster lurking in and around us." Scott is one of my favorite historians of religion and culture – whether we’re talking South Carolina during Reconstruction or Satan in comic books. This is sure to be another path-breaking book.

And look out early Americanists. Amanda Porterfield’s study of religion and politics in the early Republic – Doubt – should be published soon too, and I think given her work and David Sehat’s Myth of American Religious Freedom we’re going to have to rethink Nathan Hatch’s democratization thesis pretty seriously.

Congratulations to Kelly, Art, Scott, and Amanda.

Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity

Paul Harvey

It's a slow news week at the blog -- no Rapture, no David Barton sightings, politics as usual in Washington, the religious left arguing about Jim Wallis, etc. -- and some of you know what that means. Yes, it's time for the time-honored self-promotional post here at RiAH.

Later this summer, August I hope but by September for sure, my new book Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity, will be out with Rowman & Littlefield. It's part of the "African American History" series put out by Rowman & Littlefield. And it's out just in time for your fall course text assignment!

I'm proud to have it standing there with very recent books by some tremendous historians in the same series, including Chris Waldrep's African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era, my old friend Burton Peretti's Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music, and Edward Countryman's forthcoming Enjoy the Same Liberty: African Americans and the Revolutionary Era.

I'm also posting this now because some of you -- and you know who you are! -- are (if you're like me) now facing up to the fact that you've put off your fall book selections (which were due a month or two ago, remember that) long enough, and it's time to pick your texts for the fall. And for a select number of you, maybe this one will be right for you.

The text is short, about 140 pp., and written with the "general reader" and undergraduate reader in mind. I start with the diversity of religious expressions in West and Central Africa in the 14th/15th century, and end with Mama Lola and Kanye West, if that is a far enough chronological reach for you. And trust me, when drafts of this book failed to meet the aim of reaching the general audience and undergraduate reader, the tireless editors for this series, Jacqueline Moore and Nina Mkjagkij, were ever-ready with fierce and sometimes sarcastic pencils, rumbling through my prose like Sherman rumbled through Georgia, leaving a lot of detritus lying around but cleaning up the landscape considerably. Only, unlike Sherman, they rumbled through my landscape four times, Sherman as you recall having only moved through once. Kidding aside, it was a great experience to have a manuscript put through its paces so many times. I'm sure my other books would have been better with a similar full frontal attack on flabby prose.

In addition, the book comes with a "documents" section, about 60 pages, ranging from Virginia laws on baptism and freedom from the 1660s, to an account of the Stono Rebellion in 1739, to Daniel Payne's famous tour attempting to stamp out "ring shouts" in the 1870s, to Mahalia Jackson's reminiscences of growing up in New Orleans, to John Lewis reflecting on the meaning of non-violence, to Vincent Harding's great essay on the white Christ and Black Power, to Kanye West's "Jesus Walks." There is also a bibliographic essay, broken up by chapter, a Glossary, a Chronology section, and a timeline and some brief footnotes (brief enough not to scare off any freshman reader).

If any of ya'll want to preview it for possible purchase or course use, I'd by happy to send pdfs of the page proofs, or a sample chapter or something if you just want to briefly survey. Just email me, and I'll be there.

Table of contents and more info. below. And now after this brief commercial interruption, back to our usual programming. We'll have some blog posts up soon reflecting on the good times coming up at the Religion and American Culture Conference in Indianapolis starting tomorrow evening; I look forward to many great conversations there! Also, my co-blogmeisters Kelly Baker and the ubiquitous Randall Stephens have books coming out very soon, so we'll have some posts up about those soon.

And we won't even mention yet Phillip Luke Sinitiere's work on Joel Osteen, due up next year with NYU Press, and Linford Fisher's astonishing feat of research and analysis, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of New England Indian Cultures in Early America, out I believe next year with Oxford Univ. Press, and sure to shape the study of colonial American religious encounters for the next generation to come. Of course, all these works will be featured here at RiAH in days and months to come.

But, enough about you, let's talk about me -- more on my book below.

_____________________________________

Book description (from book website):

Paul Harvey illustrates how black Christian traditions provided theological, institutional, and personal strategies for cultural survival during bondage and into an era of partial freedom. At the same time, he covers the ongoing tug-of-war between themes of "respectability" versus practices derived from an African heritage; the adoption of Christianity by the majority; and the critique of the adoption of the "white man's religion" from the eighteenth century to the present. The book also covers internal cultural, gendered, and class divisions in churches that attracted congregants of widely disparate educational levels, incomes, and worship styles.

Through the Storm, Through the Night provides a lively overview to the history of African American religion, beginning with the birth of African Christianity amidst the Transatlantic slave trade, and tracing the story through its growth in America. Paul Harvey successfully uses the history of African American religion to portray the complexity and humanity of the African American experience.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Themes in African American Religious History
• Middle Passage for the Gods: African and African American Religions from the Middle Passage to the Great Awakening
• The Birth of Afro-Christianity in the Slave Quarters and the Urban North, 1740-1831
• Through the Night: African Amerian Religion in the Antebellum Era
• Day of Jubilee: Black Churches from Emancipation to the Era of Jim Crow
• Jesus on the Mainline: Black Christianity from the Great Migration through World War II
• Freedom's Main Line: Black Christianity, Civil Rights, and Religious Pluralism
• Epilogue: Righteous Anger and Visionary Dreams: Contemporary Black Politics, Religion, and Culture
  
• Documents Section
• Glossary
• Bibliographic Essay

Advance reviews:

"If you teach, study, practice, or care about African American religion, then this is the book for you. Paul Harvey provides an indispensable overview of black Christianity from the age of slavery to the ascendance of Obama. With it, Harvey offers a bevy of fascinating primary documents that range from Nat Turner's righteous rage to Mahalia Jackson's soulful songs. Through the Storm, Through the Night does it all with such clarity that even the most complex concepts make sense."—Edward J. Blum, Author, W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet

"Harvey provides an elegant and engaging introduction to the history of African American Christianity that charts the diversity of experience and expression among black Christians and illuminates the complex relationship between religion and race in American life."—Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

Heaven is a place...

Michael J. Altman

So, with rapture week and its pet preparations behind us, what's next? It seems to me that we were all so worked up about the end that we forgot about what comes after the end: Heaven. In his new book Heaven in the American Imagination Gary Scott Smith outlines (mostly Protestant) American ideas about heaven from the Puritans to Michael Jackson's memorial. In the process, Smith effectively gives a narrative account of American Christian history by following heaven. By tracing the changing images of heaven in American minds, Smith narrates changes in American Christianity and culture.

Two questions about heaven recur again and again as Smith moves through American history and become the themes that tie the book together.

How do we get in?
Americans have had two major responses to this question. First, some have said that good people or people who do good things will make it to the place where "the streets have no name."  For others, only acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior will grant one entry through the pearly gates. While it is easy to cast liberal Christians or non-Christians on the good works side and evangelicals or conservatives on the other, Smith's account offers a bit more nuanced view. He notes that the Cotton and Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, and Charles Finney all lamented the number of Christians who thought they could rely on their good works for heavenly admittance in the life to come. The split, then, was not between liberals and conservatives or Arminians and Calvinists, but rather, it was between the pulpit and the pew. American preachers from Edwards to Billy Graham kept preaching salvation by faith in Jesus was the only airline to heaven because Americans consistently believed they could reach heaven by being good.

Scott also presents other beliefs about qualifications for celestial citizenship that didn't require Jesus. For example, many slaves believed that their suffering in this world was enough for admittance to heaven in the next. Also, during the Civil War both sides proclaimed that death in battle would send one to heaven. In the 20th century, according to Smith, the "be good" theory of heaven triumphed in American popular culture and, at the same time, the idea of hell lost most of its influence. Perhaps that's why everyone was so excited and self-assured in the past week--we all thought we were good enough to get into heaven and no one really considered the other option.

What's it like up there?
Through the first three chapters of Smith's chronological narrative heaven remains fairly stable. With some variations of emphasis, clergy and theologians from the Puritans through the early national period all thought of heaven theocentrically. That is, heaven centered around the Triune God. The saints would worship the father, enjoy communion with Jesus, and experience the joy of the Holy Spirit. Jonathan Edwards emphasized God's heavenly love while Charles Finney focused on heavenly rewards, but until the Victorian era American clergy agreed that heaven was about humans being with God.

American Christians had always looked forward to meeting biblical heroes like Abraham and the Apostle Paul in heaven, but they soon began to look forward to meeting each other. As the American home became more important through the emergence of the cult of domesticity and the cult of True Womanhood, heaven became less about eternity spent with God and more about eternity spent with loved ones. Heaven became the perfect peaceful and loving Victorian home where all the family would be together again and the home became a place where one could experience heavenly love in this world. As American's lost sons, brothers, and husbands in the Civil War this notion of heaven gained in power.

As Americans became busier their ideas of heaven shifted again. A place of eternal dwelling with the presence of God seemed boring. It seemed like a place where nothing ever happens. Smith narrates how the rise of industrialization, the reforming furry of the Progressive age, and the fast pace of the 20th century prompted Americans to imagine heaven as place of activity.  For Christians in the Gilded Age heaven was a place of joyful work. For Progressives it was a place of service and ministry. By the twentieth century various groups imagined heaven as a place of worship, work, growth, or play. And by the twenty first century it was "the ultimate playground" of celestial bliss. Americans continually remade heaven in the image of the desires of their earthly lives.

Smith does an admirable job of covering a lot of ground in the book--as the breadth of material shows. However, his narrative of American understandings of heaven is embedded within a larger narrative of American religious history that is a bit too Puritan. We start with the Mathers and proceed through the usual cast of white male clergy (Edwards, Whitefield, Finney...). Indeed, mainstream Protestant clergy and theologians are the central subjects of the book. There's little mention of laity or of outsider groups like the Shakers or even the Ghost Dance (which would add much to the discussion of heaven as a place of family reunion.) Furthermore, there is an underlying back-and-forth between "liberals" and "conservatives" in the narrative where the liberals are most often "assaulting" orthodoxy. Nevertheless, the book provides a remarkable example of how one can tell a history of religion in America by picking one theme and tracing it out over the centuries. The shifts from theocentric, to domestic, to workaholic heavens reveals larger shifts in American culture and values. Also, the moments where Smith is able to bring in views of heaven that depart from the mainstream, such as the New Age or his analysis of Michael Jackson's memorial service, are fascinating and provocative. It is an accessible book that would be worth experimenting with in the classroom, perhaps as a parallel reading (or even a replacement) for the usual survey text in the "Religion in America" survey course.

Malcolm X: Minister, Trickster, Black America, and Person

Emily Clark
I apologize for the length, but the book took two decades and is 500 pages – not something quickly summarized!

Manning Marable died of health complications just days before the release of his magnum opus Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. I posted about it during the few days between his death and the book’s release, but getting around to reading the book had to wait until the spring semester wrapped up. Marable’s task is clear from the title of the prologue; he sought to discover the “life beyond the legend.” With a particular focus to Malcolm’s religious and political evolution over his short 39 year life, Marable found that reinvention best describes Malcolm’s life. No single stage in Malcolm’s life “ever captured him fully.” Arguing that Malcolm’s personal story “is a brilliant series of reinventions” at first may seem a simple claim. After all, don’t all people undergo changes throughout their lives? The strength of Marable’s book comes from his painstaking contextualization of each reinvention, the main reason why the book runs 487 pages prologue to epilogue. These multiple layers obscure the historical Malcolm, but Marable demonstrates how each reinvention emerged from the previous one and this narrative is able to make sense of all these Malcolms. Malcolm Little, Jack Carlton, Detroit Red, Malik Shabazz, Omowale, Malcolm X – none of these alone can describe Malcolm’s life. The reinventions don’t emerge as abrupt but rather the culmination and intersection of multiple factors – be them economic, familial, racial, religious, political, or often all these at once.

In Marable’s telling, the transitions in Malcolm’s perspective from strict racial separatism to a more humanistic worldview are presented in context with the rest of his life story and the environment around him. His Garveyite parents, the poverty of his childhood, his self-education in prison, his admiration for and later criticism of Elijah Muhammad, his hajj, his respect for Ghana, etc. all shape his reinventions. Marable identifies and explores the increasing instances in Malcolm’s speeches and writings where he becomes more interested in human rights and global unity than radical black separation. His departure with the Nation of Islam does not come as a surprise in Marable’s telling. More than just his hajj experiences praying with Muslims of different races and the resulting epiphany and more than just the possible jealousy Elijah had of his famed minister, Malcolm’s schism with the Nation of Islam fits with his developing political and religious philosophy. Despite their talk about militancy, the Nation of Islam continually failed to act in Malcolm’s view; Malcolm wanted to engage the system around them. Fellow black Americans needed action, and he wanted to be a part of it. His pan-Africanism and pan-Islam perspective and his humanism all develop as his way to respond to the needs of black Americans. While Dr. King wanted America to become blind to race, Malcolm wanted to end all racism.

Along the way, Marable discredits some of the popularly accepted knowledge about Malcolm. Marable calls into question the accuracy of the famous Autobiography. In Marable’s estimation, this book was hardly an autobiography and the “as told to” author Alex Haley took a very active role in its creation. Haley disagreed with Malcolm on many political issues, and their goals for the book differed. According to Marable, Malcolm severely exaggerated his criminal past because this would help present his life as “a tale of moral uplift” – a gangster lifted from his ghetto past by Elijah Muhammad, while Haley wanted to illuminate “the tragedies produced by racial segregation.” In addition to his appraisal of the Autobiography, other provocative elements in Marable’s book involve Malcolm’s sexuality and his death. Marable suggests that Malcolm had a homosexual encounter in his earlier years and that the story about Rudy in the Autobiography was really about Malcolm and wealthy white William Paul Lennon. Adding to this, Marable’s depiction of Betty and Malcolm’s marriage is that of a tenuous one. Malcolm feels obligated as a minister to get married, and he is largely absent from his family’s lives, leaving town shortly after the birth of each child. Marable also believes that the assassination was not only horribly investigated (a cleaning staff mopped up some of Malcolm’s blood four hours after the shooting to prepare for the ballroom’s next reservation), but that most of the assassination conspirators and shooters remain uncharged for their role. He names these Newark Mosque members and attempts to recreate their planning and execution of Malcolm’s murder.

Marable’s book has received largely positive reviews, and I think they are deserved. Marable makes Malcolm human – he isn’t a saint or a demagogue, but a flawed, complex, at times beautiful, and at times troubled human being. Beyond the larger than life image, the powerful speeches, and the political action was a person, and in Marable’s book, you get a sense of that person, his trials, and his triumphs. Marable spent much time reflecting upon and wrestling with his own personal opinion of Malcolm. One can read both disagreement with and admiration for Malcolm in Marable’s biography, and despite his flaws, Marable saw Malcolm as “a representative for hope and human dignity.” But Marable may have stumbled at times with his objectivity in regards to Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad. There is a sense of disappointment laced in Marable’s assessment of Malcolm’s brief 1961 meeting with the KKK – “Malcolm’s uncritical adoption of Elijah Muhammad’s conservative, black separatist polices led him to an ugly dead end” – it is Elijah’s dogma that is the source of Malcolm’s bad choice.

Some reviewers call Marable’s prose bland and at times uninspired and find his depiction of international politics vague. These are fair criticisms, and though some may find Marable’s prose “bland,” it also flows smoothly and hardly seems 500 pages. Most of the negative feedback to Marable’s book focuses on the brief mention of Malcolm’s possible homosexual encounter and his allegations against Malcolm’s uncharged “murderers.” One particular negative review comes from Karl Evanzz, whose review “Paper Tiger: Manning Marable’s poison pen” was rejected by TheRoot.com. Later published on Evanzz’s blog, he calls the book “an abomination” and “a cavalcade of innuendo and logical fallacy, and is largely ‘reinvented’ from previous works on the subject.” Evanzz was most upset with Marable’s speculation on Malcolm’s life – claims he bluntly called “lies.” I am grateful for and I am intrigued by his investigation into Marable’s speculations, but I think Evanzz perhaps downplays Marable’s main point. According to his review, “Marable has two primary arguments: (1) the intelligence community and the New York Police Department deliberately ignored serious threats against Malcolm’s X life, and (2) there is overwhelming evidence that the five assassins came from the Nation of Islam’s Newark mosque. That’s it.” At the risk of sounding like a Marable apologist, I don’t think these were the primary goals or arguments of Marable’s book. Though Marable certainly wants to draw attention to the assassination and its investigation, the point of his book was to identify, contextualize, and explore the reinventions of Malcolm’s life and how they illuminate his developing political and religious views. To focus on just Marable’s depiction of Malcolm’s sexuality and/or the assassination conspiracy misses what this book offers. Zeroing in on these claims would be like only focusing on just brief flashes of Malcolm’s life; both miss the big picture.

Marable calls Malcolm “the embodiment of two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister.” Furthermore, Malcolm “embodied the spirit, vitality, and political mood of an entire population – black urban mid-twentieth-century America.” And answering how Malcolm can embody so much can certainly be found in the pages of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

A Cheerful and Comfortable Study of Colonial Material Religion

Paul Harvey

Since yesterday I mentioned Lauren Winner's essay in the Sunday Times book review, which reflected on Rob Bell and American conceptions of hell (and heaven), seems like a good time to showcase this review of her new book A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, recently published by Yale -- the review is from Choice.

Winner, Lauren F. A cheerful and comfortable faith: Anglican religious practice in the elite households of eighteenth-century Virginia. Yale, 2010. 272p bibl index afp ISBN 0-300-12469-4, $45.00; ISBN 9780300124699, $45.00. Reviewed in 2011may CHOICE.

This study by Winner (Duke Divinity School) of the domestic religious life of elite families in Colonial Virginia both builds upon and modifies earlier work, including Dell Upton's Holy Things and Profane (1986). As Upton did, Winner focuses primarily on material objects as evidence; however, she deals not with public, male-dominated church buildings but rather with articles found in and around the home: needlework, baptismal bowls, prayer books, articles related to food preparation and consumption, and garments and rings worn in times of mourning. Winner's argues that although their roles were circumscribed, Anglican women nevertheless carved out a sphere in which they subtly contested the authority over religious matters claimed by clergy and male relatives and that their religious life, though not as dramatic as that of their Puritan counterparts, was an authentic appropriation of Anglican tradition in a Colonial setting. Winner's work is thoroughly and imaginatively researched, informed but not overwhelmed by theory, adequately illustrated, and accessibly written. This book is an important contribution to Anglican, elite, Colonial, material, and gendered dimensions of American religious life. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty. -- P. W. Williams, Miami University

Tri-Faith America

Paul Harvey

Very happy to announce that blog friend and occasional guest contributor Kevin Schultz's book is now out, with Oxford Univ. Press: Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise. A bit down the road we'll have a fuller exposition on the book and also an interview with the author; in the meantime, Kevin has a very short summary of some of his points, in "The Return of 'Christian America,'" up at the Huffington Post.

For a more substantively lengthy discussion of the material in his book, though, I would recommend also Kevin's article in the Journal of American History: "Religion as Identity in Postwar America: The Story of the Last SErious Attempt to Put a Question on Religion in the U.S. Census," Journal of American History(September 2006): 359-84. And, as blog readers may remember, Kevin and I had an article surveying the "state of the field" of American religious history, in last year's Journal of the American Academy of Religion, which I blogged about here. In the meantime, Kevin's short piece on "The Return of 'Christian America'" looks at the history of that idea, and in particular the ways Jews and Catholics interacted with that idea in the course of inserting themselves into the postwar tri-faith America.

Coming Out in the Jesus Movement

Paul Harvey

Recently we've blogged about David Stowe's new book No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Rock Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism, a history of the rise of Christian rock and pop that will interest many of you. David has a a new piece up (well, a couple of weeks old, sorry it took me a while to get to it) that tells us more about his subjects. On the UNC Press blog he has posted "Coming Out of the Jesus Movement: A Conversation with Marsha Stevens-Pino," about one particularly controversial musician he covers in the book. A brief taste:

Larry Norman, whom I wrote about last month, could aptly be called the Bad Boy of Christian Rock, Marsha Stevens might be deemed the Problem Child—even “evangelical Christianity’s worst nightmare.” Yet it would be hard to find a figure who better reflects the continuities and contradictions of the Jesus Movement. Stevens cut her born-again teeth at age sixteen on the beaches of Orange County just when Calvary Chapel was attracting hordes of young people (and more than a few reporters). Like thousands of teenagers from across Southern California she was baptized in the Pacific at Corona del Mar.

Marsha, her sister Wendy, and their significant others formed Children of the Day, a classic Jesus music group that played gentle, folksy songs of faith. One of her songs, “For Those Tears I Died,” became a movement classic. Children of the Day created perhaps the first albums of what’s come to be called praise music, those easy-to-sing, sometimes-maligned anthems that have crowded traditional hymns out of a majority of American evangelical churches, mega- or otherwise.

Over the course of the Seventies, Marsha went from an icon of the Jesus Movement to a pariah. The constant demands of touring and recording took a toll on the Stevens’s marriage. Then she announced she was in love – with a woman. Divorce carried enough stigma in evangelical circles, but leaving one’s husband to take up with another woman—a different order of scandal altogether.

Continue reading here < < < <

Columbia Guide to Religion in American History Book Cover

Paul Harvey

As you longtime blog readers know, we are very slow and reluctant to engage in any form of self-promotion here at RiAH, but every once in a blue moon will give in to the temptation to feature a book, out or forthcoming, from one of our contributors, or heck, even myself and a contributor.

Last year we celebrated the completion of the manuscript for the Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, and now it's into production and we have the launch of the book cover. This is going to be one of those very expensive reference works that are meant for libraries, so I hope some of you can alert your librarians at the appropriate time. Of course, if you feel like shelling out $75 or whatever it is for the book, go right ahead, but if you don't, I'll understand. Just make your univ. library do so.

Also, quite a few contributors to and longtime readers of this blog wrote pieces for this book (Lin Fisher, for example, opens the volume with a great piece on "Colonial Encounters," and Jane Smith of Harvard Divinity School, whom I interviewed previously on the blog, closes the main portion of the book with an essay on Islam in America), and I'm especially proud of a very lengthy and substantive introduction that Ed Blum and I produced for the volume, which features an exploration of ten major paradoxes of American religious history. The book also features some excellent bibliographic work produced by co-blogmeister Randall Stephens, including a filmography, discography, and list of electronic resources, as well as an extensive A-Z glossary of Am. religious history.

Manning Marable, Dies at 60, Before His Time and Before His New Book

Emily Clark

Friday evening, I read the saddening news that Columbia professor Manning Marable passed away in Manhattan. His new biography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a project he began in 1987, is set to hit the shelves tomorrow. Marable's new biography will contest many parts of Alex Haley's collaborative work The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and this is one of the main reasons I have been looking forward to his book. Marable questions the accuracy of The Autobiography after uncovering details on the Haley-Malcolm collaboration and never published "missing chapters" from the final Haley text. Marable also consulted with archival sources not yet tapped by other historians of Malcolm X, including a selection of personal letters, transcriptions of certain speeches, and FBI files. Clicking around the website for his Columbia based Malcolm X Project is a great homework assignment for undergrads - not to mention a wonderful resource for anyone interested in Malcolm X. The project's site has government documents, interviews with Marable about his book, footage from some of Malcolm's speeches, and interviews with former acquaintances of Malcolm's. Marable was deeply invested in this project, and it is sad that he won't see the reception of this book.

Particularly since reading Marable's essay, "Rediscovering Malcolm's Life: A Historian's Adventures in Living History," in his recent 2009 co-edited volume Black Routes to Islam, in which Marable discusses the new biography project, I have been excited about this book. The essay discusses the "Americanization of Malcolm X," beginning with the 1965 printing of The Autobiography, which made Malcolm's story the "quintessential story about the ordeal of being black in America." Another significant moment in this "Americanization" process was Spike Lee's 1992 film with Malcolm X doppelganger/actor Denzel Washington. After this film, "X" was everywhere - even on President Clinton's jogging hat. As Marable so well put it, "One of America's sharpest and most unrelenting critics was now being praised and honored by the same government that had once carried out illegal harassment and surveillance against him." Malcolm had become a kind of specter, able to be appropriated by many. This ambiguity about the meaning of Malcolm and unknowns about his own life allow him to become malleable to popular culture. Marable's project aimed to find answers to the unanswered questions about Malcolm's life, his work, his theology, his politics, his appeal, and his death.

Malcolm's "Americanization" and appropriations by various groups and persons is one of the reasons why he is so fascinating to me. In his book Lives of Indian Images, Richard Davis tells the afterlives of various Indian images as they move from site of darsan in a Hindu temple to status symbol in an English colonial home to educational artifact in an American museum. For Davis, the identities and meanings of the images are not fixed, but are rather "repeatedly made and remade through interactions with humans." Malcolm's identity is like these former temple images - something than changes due to its environment and "ownership." His identity is something that has a biography of its own after his death (check out Igor Kopytoff's essay "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process" for more). Malcolm is not alone in this camp. Tecumseh, Shawnee leader and brother to prophet Tenskwatawa, has held different meanings for different groups at different times. He has been a source of pride and often exalted, and the Shawnee, Creek, and Cherokee all claim him as their own.

Complex leaders like Tecumseh and Malcolm X in socially unstable times can take on new, dynamic identities after their death. They can become more like myth than human, which is where scholars like Marable come in. Once the semester is over, I look forward to reading Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention on the Florida beach.

Black Mecca: African Muslims in Harlem

Paul Harvey

This book has been on my shelf for a little while, and I was hoping to get to it/blog about it early this summer. But in the meantime, Choice has a nice review of Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem (Oxford 2010). Since we're just today on the subject of mapping religious life in New York boroughs and neighborhoods, now's a good time to repost this review, for those interested.

Abdullah, Zain. Black Mecca: the African Muslims of Harlem. Oxford, 2010. 294p bibl index afp ISBN 0-19-531425-5, $35.00; ISBN 9780195314250, $35.00. Review

How do West African Muslim immigrants fit into the fabric of Harlem, and how have they challenged established notions of Islam, race, and cultural difference in one of the centers of black culture, thought, and politics? Abdullah (Temple Univ.) offers theoretically sophisticated and evocative answers to these questions in his ethnographic study of West African Muslims in Harlem. Combining descriptions of ethnographic encounters and personal narratives with insight from existing literature, chapters address West African immigrants' expectations of America before their migration, encounters between black and African identities, the challenges of mastering language(s), negotiating religious and cultural practices, and the changing notions of family and sexuality. Abdullah weaves these topics into a dense, vivid portrait of what he describes as new "Blues people" immersed in narratives of suffering, survival, and hope. He skillfully avoids one-sided representations and allows himself to consider different angles for each encounter he describes. Situated at the intersection of race studies, anthropology, and Islamic studies, this book is significant beyond its role as a study of American Muslims in advancing readers' understanding of migration, religious identities, and globalization through the lives of people in this particular community. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. -- J. Hammer, George Mason Universityed in 2011apr CHOICE.

Also, there is a longer, more extensive review of the book here; it emphasizes the economic struggles of these black immigrants. A brief excerpt: The mosques of Harlem are where immigrants go to maintain their bonds with each other and to find meaning in their struggles in America. What is significant in Professor Abdullah’s observations is the recasting of one’s economic plight as divine providence. Although many West African Muslims are not able to find the lucrative jobs they imagined, many set up their own shops or drive taxis in order to maintain the flexibility they need to adhere to their Islamic faith and values. In a sense, their work on the streets as an effort to inform people about and to maintain their deen is viewed as amal saalih or blessed work. The recasting of the Western immigrant plight in this manner connects immigrants back to their families and provides justification and hopefor an improved condition. A bit more about the book, from the Oxford U. Press website: The changes to U.S. immigration law that were instituted in 1965 have led to an influx of West African immigrants to New York, creating an enclave Harlem residents now call ''Little Africa.'' These immigrants are immediately recognizable as African in their wide-sleeved robes and tasseled hats, but most native-born members of the community are unaware of the crucial role Islam plays in immigrants' lives. Zain Abdullah takes us inside the lives of these new immigrants and shows how they deal with being a double minority in a country where both blacks and Muslims are stigmatized. Dealing with this dual identity, Abdullah discovers, is extraordinarily complex. Some longtime residents embrace these immigrants and see their arrival as an opportunity to reclaim their African heritage, while others see the immigrants as scornful invaders. In turn, African immigrants often take a particularly harsh view of their new neighbors, buying into the worst stereotypes about American-born blacks being lazy and incorrigible. And while there has long been a large Muslim presence in Harlem, and residents often see Islam as a force for social good, African-born Muslims see their Islamic identity disregarded by most of their neighbors. Abdullah weaves together the stories of these African Muslims to paint a fascinating portrait of a community's efforts to carve out space for itself in a new country.

A Nation of Outsiders

Paul Harvey

Sometimes I like to take note of books here which don’t fall into the category of American religious history in some formal sense, but which address religious/cultural themes in ways that are fresh and innovative. Today we have such a text, just published with Oxford: Grace Hale’s A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America. Kaye Hymowitz reviews it here for the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post discusses it here.

The author has been at work on this book a long time, and it’s worth the wait (I read a previous rough draft of the book manuscript a couple of years ago and am going off that; I think nothing drastically changed between then and its publication this year). I admit I preferred the original title of this manuscript before it got changed for the book. Originally it was titled Rebel, Rebel: Outsiders in Twentieth Century America. I loved the multiple signifiers of Rebel there. Oh well, it looks like the publishers wanted one of those “how” subtitles that so many books have now.

More important are the wide-ranging connections Grace Hale draws between romanticism, a sense of alienation and outsiderism, and cultural politics through the twentieth century. The “New Left” and the “New Right” (both very old now) both receive extensive attention, as do writers ranging from Norman Mailer and Elizabeth Bishop to Bob Dylan to William F. Buckley. Hale writes compellingly of the central role musical desires for “authenticity” played in shaping 1960s culture. “Romanticism and a sense of social justice were inseparable,” Hale says, and that romanticism came not just from some sense of alienation from conformist 1950s America, but from much older roots in the Romantic period. As Hymowitz writes in the review:

The new rebels looked to the country's outsiders to clarify their own feelings of alienation. In this respect, postwar rebellion had roots in 19-century romanticism. In their "Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth and Coleridge had tried to locate hidden human truths in the experience of "people on the margins," Ms. Hale argues—children, peddlers, miners, even the insane. Kerouac wrote in the same vein though with less literary art: "The only people for me are the mad ones," announces the hero of "On the Road," "the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk . . . desirous of everything at the same time." Other rebels, including folk singers like Pete Seeger and, soon enough, back-to-the-land hippies, believed that they spied in rural America the rootedness and authenticity that was being devoured by suburbia and mass culture.

Of great relevance for this blog are the last two chapters, one on the Christian right generally (with a broad conceptual map of what constitutes Christian right there, including William F. Buckley, Jerry Falwell, Jesus People, and others from all over the spectrum), and another more specifically on Operation Rescue.

Book description from Oxford:

At mid-century, Americans increasingly fell in love with characters like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye and Marlon Brando's Johnny in The Wild One , musicians like Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, and activists like the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These emotions enabled some middle-class whites to cut free of their own histories and identify with those who, while lacking economic, political, or social privilege, seemed to possess instead vital cultural resources and a depth of feeling not found in "grey flannel" America.

In this wide-ranging and vividly written cultural history, Grace Elizabeth Hale sheds light on why so many white middle-class Americans chose to re-imagine themselves as outsiders in the second half of the twentieth century and explains how this unprecedented shift changed American culture and society. Love for outsiders launched the politics of both the New Left and the New Right. From the mid-sixties through the eighties, it flourished in the hippie counterculture, the back-to-the-land movement, the Jesus People movement, and among fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christians working to position their traditional isolation and separatism as strengths. It changed the very meaning of "authenticity" and "community."

Ultimately, the romance of the outsider provided a creative resolution to an intractable mid-century cultural and political conflict-the struggle between the desire for self-determination and autonomy and the desire for a morally meaningful and authentic life.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Outsiders and Rebels
Part I: Learning to Love Outsiders
Chapter 1: Lost Children of Plenty: Growing Up as Rebellion
Chapter 2: Rebel Music: Minstrelsy, Rock and Roll, and Beat Writing
Chapter 3: Black as Folk: The Folk Music Revival, the Civil Rights Movement, and Bob Dylan
Chapter 4: Rebels on the Right: Conservatives as Outsiders in Liberal America
Part II: Romance in Action
Chapter 5: The New White Negroes in Action: Students for a Democratic Society, the Economic Research and Action Project, and Freedom Summer
Chapter 6: Too Much Love: Black Power and the Search for Other Outsiders
Chapter 7: The Making of Christian Countercultures: God's Outsiders from the Jesus People to Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority
Chapter 8: Rescue: Christian Outsiders in Action in the Pro-Life Movement
Conclusion: The Cost of Rebellion

Creolization and Kreolization

Emily Clark

Academic talk of Native American-European cultural hybridity and cultural conflict immediately take my mind to the Caribbean world and major port cities like New Orleans or Santo Domingo. When authors write about “creolization,” I think of cultural intersections between French, Spanish, Native American, and African traditions in the American South. I don’t immediately think of Alaska. However, a new book I recently reviewed for Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction has widened the geographic spread I associate with creolization, or rather kreolization.

In the 1980s and 1990s, theorizing of the Atlantic World by historians such as Bernard Bailyn and later David Armitage placed the colonial Americas within a more nuanced, engaging, and dynamic framework. The Pacific World and its impact on the colonial Americas has yet to be as thoroughly explored as the Atlantic, but works such as historian Gwenn A. Miller’s Kodiak Kreol: Communities of Empire in Early Russian America demonstrate the importance of expanding the view of colonial American encounters. With the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska in 1784, the Russian empire continued its eastward movement setting up its own business-oriented, colonial enterprise in the “new world.”

Together, the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church and the education imparted by the fur-trading Russian-American Company offered government and trade officials a method to “civilize” the Alutiiq population and thus extend Russia’s imperial border. Miller’s micro-history of interactions between indigenous Alaskans, Russian fur traders, and missionaries on Kodiak Island elucidates how “a distinct Kreol colonial society” developed that “was neither wholly Russian nor wholly Alutiiq.” In a world of mutual dependence, intimate encounters between Russian fur traders and Alutiiq women led to a new Kreol generation of colonial subjects to be defined, controlled, and integrated into the imperial Russian enterprise. In their attempts to convert, Christianize, and “civilize” the Alutiiq people, the Russian missionaries demonstrate how interactions between Native Americans and their colonizers were fraught with complications on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. The British praying towns, the French Canadian seaways, and the American southwest were not alone. Though the situation in Alaska was less physically violent, it wasn’t necessary less culturally complex.

For a long-time, the gaze of American historians was that of the covered-wagon pioneers - westward. Miller is certainly not the first or only scholar to change the frame of reference. In her contribution to Thomas Tweed’s 1997 Retelling US Religious History, Laurie Maffly-Kipp elucidates how a narrative based in the Pacific Rim further illuminates typical historical account. Daniel Richter’s often cited Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America encourages historians to think about their narratives from the shoes – or moccasins – of “the other.” Miller’s book offers a colonial narrative far from the cities of Boston, New York, or Charleston that is both similar and different from the stereotypical westward European expansion model. For those of us interested in syncretism, cultural mixing, hybridity, colonial intersections, creolization, or whatever you want to call it, Kodiak Kreol provides another vantage point from which to theorize.