"The change is not in itself, but in them"

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

“Look out at that ocean, that sky, the fish, the birds, wild and wicked out in the chaos. Is there a god that can deliver us from the chaos of nature?”

--Reverend Carlton in the film Glory at Sea

This is an appropriate question to ask on a day when the Army Corps of Engineers opens a floodway that will displace at least 2,500 people, devastate thousands of acres of farmland, and destroy hundreds of homes and businesses in order to avoid the same tragedy in more populated areas like Baton Rouge (my home) and New Orleans.

Morganza Floodway (under normal conditions)

Morganza Floodway (1973)

Glory at Sea, according to its creators, is a 30-minute film about "a group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades [who] build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea."

Glory At Sea! from Court 13 on Vimeo.

From my perspective, Glory at Sea is a film about religion. It is about living in a broken world, seeking order in chaos, and finding meaning in suffering. It is about a people in exile, a people lost at sea, a people without a home. Recently, students in my “Religion in Louisiana” course watched the film and wrote an essay relating its themes to several other books about life in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta, including Brenda Marie Osbey's collection of poems All Saints, Tennessee Williams’ play Vieux Carré, and William Alexander Percy’s autobiography Lanterns on the Levee. They hated me for it. But they also got it.

What we’re watching along the Mississippi River is indeed about the chaos of nature, but it’s the kind that comes when we engineer nature in order to delivery us from chaos. William Alexander Percy knew a little something about the Mississippi River when he wrote, “The gods on their thrones are shaken and changed, but it abides, aloof and unappeasable, with no heart except for its own task, under the unbroken and immense arch of the lighted sky where the sun, too, goes a lonely journey. As a thing used by men it has changed: the change is not in itself, but in them.”

What to Do With God in America

Paul Harvey

While we're in catch-up blogging mode, I meant to link to this piece earlier, "What to Do with God in America," over at A Lively Experiment, David McConeghy's blog. McConeghy summarizes and provides links to various of the summaries/reviews/academic critiques of the PBS series, and then proposes an elaborate classroom exercise over a period of week in which students would examine the narrative of the film on their own, and get involved in making a proposed film of their own.

With all the discussion about PBS’ God in America series, it occurred to me that it might be possible to use the series as the basis for a course that privileges deconstruction of the (maligned) narrative that PBS built and therefore employ remixes as a way for students to create counter-narratives that explicitly engage the primary source. Perhaps the documentary would provide a shortcut allowing us to manage both content and technical mastery.

We had some discussion here earlier about the pros/cons of blogging, especially for younger scholars and graduate students. This kind of post certainly fits in the "pro" category, as it provides the kind of reflection on teaching and innovative proposal on classroom work that should be impressive to any search committee.

From the Underside of the Millennium: My Take on God in America

Paul Harvey

Today's Religion Dispatches features a few of my thoughts on the God in America series which premiered last week: "The Brutality of the American Eden: From the Underside of the Millennium." As the post makes clear, I enjoyed and appreciated the series, but wanted to raise some questions about freedom and authority in American history:

But I do want to ask what this series would look like if we also understand American religious history to be about coercion and authority? Most of God in America is about the white Protestant majority in American history. In a series on religion and public life, that is fair enough; they have dominated religion and public life. But what if we make coercion,establishment, and repression as central to our narrative as freedom, disestablishment, and expression? What if this is a show in which Americans’ self-understanding as derived from Exodus is more critically examined than celebrated?

Read the full post here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts either at Religion Dispatches or here.

Oh, and while you're at it, catch Matt Sutton's take on the series here, also at Religion Dispatches. Matt defends the series against professorial carping, praises its success in reaching a broader public, and points out how much we all engage in our own forms of condensation and simplifying to get across a few basic points.

How Faith Transformed America: Blum on God in America

Paul Harvey

Your final reminder for God in America, to be shown starting tonight on your local PBS station. I've posted a few early press reviews of it in recent posts here. But for the most substantive review and critique to date, check out Ed Blum's take on the series over at Patheos. Ed summarizes some of the major themes, characters, and scholarly trends represented in the series, and then imagines what a series of this sort would look like if done ten or twenty years from now -- in other words, what scholarly work is emerging that will find its way into synthetic narratives meant for a more general audience. He finds three in particular:

1) The West will be more of a primary site in the narrative (as in, the western regions of the United States)

2) race will not be relegated as much to the Civil War and Civil rights eras

3 "the body and bodies will become an important place of telling and examining religion in America" -- in other words, "the body" as a site of religious expression will be more central.

While you're enjoying the series, make sure to go over and check out Ed's extensive post.

God in America: Pre-Premiere Reviews and NPR Forum Network

Paul Harvey

A couple of nice reviews of the PBS series God in America to be shown next week, Oct. 11 - 13: this one, from Variety, and this one, from the Boston Phoenix. I'll have more to say on the show both here and at Religion Dispatches, by early next week.

In the meantime, here's a press release from WGBH (where the show originated) on a series of lectures and other events associated with the show:

October 5th, 2010

Press Contact:

Stacy Buchanan617.300.2458

Boston, MA – The PBS|NPR Forum Network has recently added a new series of curated

talks around the upcoming PBS broadcast God In America.

Examine the complex interactions between religion and democracy though the

God In America series, which contains over 100 lectures and talks by the world's biggest

religious experts, scholars, philosophers, and journalists, and features some of the

largest religious debates in the United States.

Journalists and scholars explore the changing landscape of American faith. Other

talks to discover include: Rutgers University political science professor W. Carey

McWilliams discusses the future of Catholicism in America. Stephen Goldsmith, former

special advisor for President Bush, talks about the role of religion in American cities, and

history's greatest minds wrestle with reconciling science and religion.

These are just a few of the many talks that can be found in the God In America

series, all free and respected resources to help the American population better

understand the history, diversity, and freedom behind religion in the United States. You

can join the conversation at: http://forum-network.org/series/god-america-series. The

Forum Network lecture series God In America has been created as a compliment to the

upcoming PBS broadcast, God In America.

God In America, a presentation of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and FRONTLINE,

will explore the historical role of religion in the public life of the United States. The six-

hour series, which interweaves documentary footage, historical dramatization and

interviews with religious historians, will air over three consecutive nights on PBS

beginning Monday, October 11th. Please check with your local PBS station for times.

God in America and the New York Times

Paul Harvey

In today's New York Times, Samuel Freedman does a nice overview of the making of "God in America," to be shown on PBS Oct. 11-13. A brief excerpt:

Having always considered Jefferson “cerebral and slightly allergic to religion,” she recently recalled, [show producer Marilyn] Mellowes was instantly intrigued. The story of the Jefferson Bible, as the refashioned scripture became known, did not fit into Ms. Mellowes’s documentary about nascent Christianity. But it stuck in her memory. And the paradoxical idea that the man credited with creating the metaphor of a wall between church and state cared and studied so deeply about Christianity helped to inspire a documentary about the history and influence of religion in American public life. The result, a six-hour series titled “God in America,” will be broadcast on PBS for three nights starting Oct. 11.

More on this show as we get closer to the premiere!

God in America, Coming to Your TV Soon!

Paul Harvey

Here's the press release for the much-anticipated PBS "American Experience" production for the fall, "God in America," to be premiered Oct. 11 - Oct. 13. Program summaries are available here.

Coming This Fall to PBS: God in America
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and FRONTLINE present six-hour documentary series

Monday, Oct. 11, 2010 - Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010, 9-11 p.m. ET

Boston, MA [April 14, 2010] -- How has religious belief shaped American history? What role have religious ideas and spiritual experience played in shaping the social, political, and cultural life of what has become the world's most religiously diverse nation?

For the first time on television, God in America, a presentation of AMERICAN EXPERIENCE and FRONTLINE, will explore the historical role of religion in the public life of the United States. The six-hour series, which interweaves documentary footage, historical dramatization and interviews with religious historians, will air over three consecutive nights on PBS beginning Oct. 11, 2010.

God in America examines the potent and complex interaction between religion and democracy, the origins of the American concept of religious liberty, and the controversial evolution of that ideal in the nation's courts and political arena. The series considers the role religious ideas and institutions have played in social reform movements from abolition to civil rights, examining the impact of religious faith on conflicts from the American Revolution to the Cold War, and how guarantees of religious freedom created a competitive American religious marketplace. It also explores the intersection of political struggle and spiritual experience in the lives of key American historical figures including Franciscan Friars and the Pueblo leader Po'pay, Puritan leader John Winthrop and dissident Anne Hutchinson, Catholic Bishop John Hughes, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, Reform Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, Scopes trial combatants William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, evangelist Billy Graham, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell.

"The American story cannot be fully understood without understanding the country's religious history," says series executive producer Michael Sullivan. "By examining that history, God in America will offer viewers a fresh, revealing and challenging portrait of the country."

To extend the reach of the series beyond the television screen, God in America has formed strategic partnerships with The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center, the Fetzer Institute, Sacred Space International and other organizations. An integrated multimedia campaign set to launch six months prior to broadcast will include community engagement activities, media events and an interactive God in America Web site. The campaign will deepen public understanding of religion and spiritual experience in the life of the nation by encouraging the public to explore the history of their own religious communities and their individual spiritual journeys.

"Americans are awash in a sea of faith, but their knowledge about religious faiths and religious history often runs as shallow as their commitment to religion runs deep," notes Stephen Prothero, chief editorial consultant for God in America, professor of religion at Boston University, and author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- And Doesn't. "A series like God in America can help correct that imbalance and provide the basis for a common understanding of the role religion has played in American public life."

God in America is an AMERICAN EXPERIENCE/FRONTLINE co-production, headed by series executive producer Michael Sullivan, series producer Marilyn Mellowes, series director David Belton, and producer/directors Greg Barker andSarah Colt. The executive producer for FRONTLINE is David Fanning. The executive producer for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE is Mark Samels.

Wading Back in the Troubled Waters

Paul Harvey

A few notes on Katrina, religion, and the weird trifecta coincidence of Katrina, MLK’s speech in 1963, and Glenn Beck’s picnic on the mall.

First, the NYT has an interesting piece on the Katrina and black churches in New Orleans, focusing specifically on the Lower 9th. Of some 75 churches there before the storm, a great number have closed down, many likely for good. About a dozen struggle to remain, their tenuous hold a symbol for the tenuous hold of the recovery outside the touristed zones. Amid the more chipper pieces the paper ran on various pieces of good news about the recovery, this gives a piece of reality on the other side. The article chronicles the efforts of one pastor who is trying to fire up his congregation again, an uphill battle for sure. This article makes a nice accompaniment to the special issue of the Journal of Southern Religion, on religion through the storm. The issue includes (among many other goodies) Tulane professor Randy Sparks’s piece on religion and recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans. And it gave me a nice reminder about perhaps the single most compelling video production I’ve seen on Katrina, Trouble the Waters, which we’ve blogged about here before. And I mean no disrespect to Spike Lee’s outstanding efforts there in When the Levees Broke and, more recently, his revisit to New Orleans, timed for the Saints to march in and BP to spill its guts out. When the Levees Broke is a great film, but for total immersion viewing it’s hard to beat Trouble the Waters (plus it’s giving me the title for a book I hope to start to work on next year).

On Katrina, politics, and religion, my thunder has been stolen by Tenured Radical’s post today Five Years After Hurricane Katrina, What Would Jesus Do?, which comes with the added bonus of a Johnny Cash clip from YouTube (always a good thing). “Looking back over the last five years,” she concludes, “we need less God and more politics: by that I mean not less faith, and all the forms of ethical community that faith can provide, but we need to end the lie that you can substitute faith for politics.” This and much else at the post is so much better than what I was struggling to come up with that I’ll just point you there. To her post, I would only add the point that the most effective use of religious rhetoric in twentieth-century America has been to provide the spiritual inspiration necessary to move recalcitrant political institutions (hence the connection between the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Bill; or social Catholicism and the New Deal). But presumably that is what she means by “all the forms of ethical community that faith can provide.”

I was thinking along these lines today as I’m in the midst of reading Alison Greene’s excellent dissertation “No Depression in Heaven” (recently completed at Yale, under Glenda Gilmore), a searching history of religion and politics in Memphis and the Delta through the Depression years. The hapless rhetoric of evangelicals through that era was especially resonant given the same vapid speechifying at the Glenn Beck picnic this weekend. Also fascinating in her work is to see the churches basically cede authority to NGO’s (the Red Cross in particular) and, as the New Deal progressed, governmental agencies. The evangelicals basically said 1) the Depression just shows that we need a revival – that the nation needs to “turn back to God”; 2) in the meantime, don’t look to us for relief, because we ain’t got any; if you need food, go someplace else, because there’s too many of you to serve; 3) only God, not politics, can save us; 4) but Jesus is coming soon anyway. Obviously this applies to only part of the diverse religious formations through that time period, not (for example) to the religious left, and actually not to some of the premillennialist Pentecostals who had another agenda going on. But at the very least, these evangelicals implicitly understood that, for all their rhetoric about turning back to God, ultimately governing authorities might have answers, not to mention indispensable resources, that they just didn’t have. Perhaps they might have even given an ear to Tenured Radical’s conclusion:

What would Jesus do? Throw Glenn Beck and every money changer like him out of the temple, that's what, and get back to what government is supposed to do: help people take care of themselves, make politics a vehicle for loving one's neighbor (not blaming him, or seeing if she needs to be deported) and protecting Americans from those who prey on the simple, the weak and the vulnerable. Until we do, the waters will keep on rising.

PBS's God in America Series

Randall Stephens

In fall 2010 PBS will broadcast what looks to be an epic 6-part historical documentary on the American religious experience. Called God in America the program will feature religious studies scholars and historians alongside dramatizations and loads of prints, photographs, and illustrations. Subjects include: Franciscan Friars and the Pueblo leader Po'pay, Puritan leader John Winthrop and dissident Anne Hutchinson, Catholic Bishop John Hughes, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, reform Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, Scopes trial combatants William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, evangelist Billy Graham, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell. (See the trailer and read more on the official site. Series producer Marilyn Mellowes also worked on critically acclaimed From Jesus to the Christ: The First Christians.) The companion website promises to be a useful resource for the casual viewer and student of religious history alike.

Best of all for cash-strapped libraries, church-mouse poor scholars, and pockets-turned-inside-out departments, the full 6 hours will be available on-line.

The creators summarize the project as follows:

How has religious belief shaped American history? What role have religious ideas and spiritual experience played in shaping the social, political, and cultural life of what has become the world's most religiously diverse nation?

For the first time on television, God in America, a presentation of American Experience and FRONTLINE, will explore the historical role of religion in the public life of the United States. The six-hour series, which interweaves documentary footage, historical dramatization, and interviews with religious historians, will air over three consecutive nights on PBS beginning Oct. 11, 2010. >>>

Religion in American History Television: Shake It Like a Shaker in Enfield, NH

Randall Stephens

I like Ken Burns’s documentaries. I’m not one of those Burns haters, who accuses him of mawkish American exceptionalism. Nope, not me. Two of his films from the 1980s don’t get the kind of attention or airplay that they deserve. Thomas Hart Benton (1988) profiles the diminutive, scrappy regionalist painter who shared his name with “Old Bullion,” his great uncle, the tall, pugnacious senator from Missouri. Among other things, Benton taught Jackson Pollock how to drink. He taught him too well, obviously. The other film, a pole away, is The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (1984), an elegiac, wistful tour of an American original. Narrated by the avuncular David McCullough, the film wonderfully weaves together interviews, dramatic readings, and ancient daguerreotypes. (True, in this regard it is like all the other Burns movies.)

Yep, I first learned what little I know about the Shakers from that film. Burns’s documentary made me intensely curious about this fading (nearly faded) religious movement that swept across the country in the 19th century. (In 2006 there were only four Shakers left, all living in southern Maine.)

What would posses Americans from Maine to Mississippi to leave kin, embrace celibacy, shun war and private property, and live in a utopian community? Who would join the ranks of such a diehard, committed few? (Good question for an American religious history class, eh?)

Beth and I got a glimpse into this fascinating world when we toured the Enfield Shaker Village and Museum in Enfield, NH, one morning in late February. The village sits in the valley between Mt. Assurance and Mascoma Lake. Founded in 1793, the community claimed several families of Shakers at its peak in the mid-19th century. The Shakers closed the village in 1923 after a long period of decline.

Leaving family and home for religious reasons was probably more difficult in the 19th century than it is now. (See Christopher Jones's interesting, related post from last week.) Who knows what kind of sorrow and anxiety men and women suffered as a result. What may be one small glimpse of this appears in a brief piece from an 1882 issue of the Shaker Manifesto, a 19th-century Shaker periodical:

CHARLES MINER, a well known member of the North Family Shakers, Enfield, N. H. committed suicide sometime during Monday night, on May 1st, shooting himself through the head with a small rifle, in his room, at Shaker Village. He was about 62 years of age. This Spring he had charge of the sugar camp and to the many who visited him there, [he] seemed to be social and happy, but at other times he has shown signs of being a little "out." Lately he talked of leaving the Shakers, and only the P.M. before he shot himself, he was over in the village at North Enfield, endeavoring to obtain employ. His dead body was discovered in his room, on Tuesday morning, the rifle by his side.

Our excellent

tour guide at Enfield, Arthur Gagnon (interviewed in the Youtube clip embedded here), told us about some of the trials and tribulations of the Shaker community. We spent much of our time roaming around this hollowed ground not far from Dartmouth College. We viewed the gathering room, where Shaker worshippers performed their increasingly formalized, wheel-within-a-wheel dances. We saw the handicrafts made by the elders and elderesses of the commune. And we also got to know a little more about the people who once lived, worked, prayed, and sometimes squabbled with their neighbors here.

The lake and surrounding countryside are lovely. I can only imagine how beautiful the site is at the peak of summer.

The Scripture of Nature, Part 2

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Last fall, Paul offered an insightful post (and others chimed in with equally thoughtful comments) on the ways that religion intersected with the first episode of Ken Burns' latest documentary on national parks.

For those who missed it the first time around (like me), or for those without an extra $100 to purchase the series (like me), the series begins (re)airing tonight.

Did anyone incorporate the first episode into religion or history classes last fall? This spring? I have not done so yet, but did use a short clip about the relationship between John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt.