The Roots of Contemporary American Political and Religious Conflict

Randall Stephens

[Cross-posted from the THS blog]

Last year I used Rick Perlstein’s lively, entertaining, and insightful Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America for a course I teach on America in the 1960s. The students loved it. Perlstein’s dramatic narrative pulled us in.

At the outset Perlstein observes that by 1972 a sharp division existed between "'people who identified with what Richard Nixon stood for' and 'people who despised what Richard Nixon stood for' . . . Richard Nixon, now, is long dead. But these sides have hardly changed. We now call them 'red' or 'blue' America, and whether one or the other wins the temporary allegiances of 50 percent plus one of the electorate--or 40 percent of the electorate, or 60 percent of the electorate--has been the narrative of every election since." The book is compelling on a number of levels. Yet it lacks an appreciation for ways that America had been deeply divided in other eras.

Is the culture war that feeds our current political debates all that new? Hasn't America been split between warring factions for eons? Enter Barry Hankins. His new book Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties, and Today's Culture Wars, spans over that rowdy decade and offers insight into ongoing political and religious conflicts.

The era from the 1930s to the 1980s, an era of relative religious stability, Hankins suggests, may have been the aberration. The pitched battles over immigration, alcohol, Darwinian evolution, obscenity laws, and public morality that riled Americans in the 20s "were a prologue to our own age," says Hankins. Like our era that period was "a time when religion was culturally central, participating fully in politics, media, stardom, social life, and scandal." Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, Daddy Grace, and Father Divine elbowed Charlie Chaplin, Al Joslon, and Clara Bow for newspaper headline space. (BTW, Matt Sutton gives it a great blurb.)

Hankins leads off with Warren Harding’s moral failings, "more repulsive than evil" in the words of a biographer. "There is a sense in which Harding’s story is the story of America during the Roaring Twenties," he remarks. The baptist president's religious life was thin, to put it mildly. His administration’s contempt for law, its moral degeneration, and the scandal that swirled around it defined the nation as well. Hankins similar treatment of moral crusades, scandalous religious leaders, and heated contests between liberals and conservatives has a contemporary ring to it.

History written through the eyes of the present, I’ve noticed, draws students in to the debates. Hankins does this well throughout Jesus and Gin. Hence, he notes that Edward J. Larson’s account of the Scopes Trial, "Summer for the Gods could not have been written between 1930 and 1980 for in that period the Scopes legend was taken for granted." In many ways the book is a comparative history that moves with ease between the Christian Right of the Reagan years and the late-Victorian moralizers of the 20s. (Though Hankins does note that there is no simple liberal-conservative split in the age of flappers and speakeasies.)

Hankins fittingly ends his with a rumination on "How the Roaring Twenties Set the Stage for the Culture Wars of Our Own Time." The major struggles of our era have roots that go back decades.

Like Perlstein’s sweeping history, Hankin’s book draws attention to the deeper political and religious clashes that shape current debates. Both are great reads and both would work well in the classroom.

MLK on Science and Religion, Economic Justice, and Community

Paul Harvey

A little "off the beaten track" MLK day blogging from the Inverse Square Blog, featuring King's thoughts on science and religion (which sound a lot like Stephen Jay Gould's), and King's thoughts on war, peace, justice, community, civil rights, and religion, which sound not at all like a lot of those who quote him today but opposed him then (or would have if they were alive or old enough). The struggle to reclaim King's legacy from those who would distort his "content of their character" quotation, and those who fundamentally forget his drive for economic justice (rather than just "civil rights"), continues. Aside from Thomas Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty (the link takes you to my review), the best reading I've done on this lately is Nancy MacLean's Freedom is Not Enough, which is not about King per se, nor about "civil rights," but about the struggle for equal opportunity and pay in the workplace, which she places at the center of the struggle in the 1960s. She traces the enormously important consequences of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- the passage of which was, of course, one of the motivating factors behind the 1963 March and the "Dream" speech.

Meanwhile, Mary Dudziak's Legal History Blog provides lots of links for further reading:

The "foot soldiers" of the civil rights movement are remembered today in the Atlanta Journal's coverage of Martin Luther King Day. Time covers the history of the holiday. Meanwhile, Congressman John Lewis and other civil rights leaders reflect on the movement, and what Barack Obama's presidency means to them. The MLK Day of Service website has links to volunteer opportunities.For researchers, historical materials on King are spread around. The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research & Education Institute, home of the King Papers Project, is at Stanford. There are many great resources in the website, including an annotated copy of King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, and a video of King's "I have a Dream" speech.
Important papers are also housed at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Archive at Boston University. The Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center has just digitalized an important collection of King papers. Volumes of the published MLK papers are here, here and elsewhere.

Religion, Culture, and Politics Redux

Paul Harvey

While we're still on the subject of religion, culture, and politics, here's a nice text that should be useful for many in the classroom: Mark Hulsether, Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States (Columbia University Press, 2008).

The book is explicitly meant as a classroom text, and throughout, Hulsether uses the concept of mapping and touring as student-friendly ways to suggest how to think about religion in more complexly textured ways than students usually bring to the subject.

The work begins with some reflections on religion, culture, and hegemony, which he defines here as achieving consent without coercion, and establishing a “common sense” for a culture such that socially produced norms and structures come to be seen as natural and inevitable. In this fashion, Hulsether gently guides readers, including undergraduates, into considering thicker descriptions and deeper analyses of religious belief and practice than normally come into the classroom. After a relatively lengthy introductory chapter providing a quick overview of religion in America to the twentieth century, Hulsether provides parallel chapters on “religion and social conflict” and “cultural aspects of religion” first for the earlier twentieth century, and then for the later twentieth century. The conclusion considers “consensus” models for religion in America (largely conservative normative visions of a Christian America) and pluralist models obviously favored by liberals. Implicitly rejecting both, Hulsether proposes his own model: to “analyze cases where religion, culture, and politics come together in terms of the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic goals that are in play.” Again, the scary academic words there immediately come in view with concrete cases and thoughtful questions: “Would it be better – especially for minorities but also for majorities – to live in a land where a live-and-let-live approach is hegemonic? Conversely, does a society that valorizes postmodern pluralism reflect the hegemony of consumerism and dog-eat-dog corporate values?” (238). Rather than beginning with “building consensus or celebrating diversity,” Hulsether suggests that his own model fosters the task of learning to “think wisely – in concrete cases – about both harmonious pluralism and intractable conflict, both diversity and power imbalance” (240).

Hulsether also provides numerous clear-headed analyses of numerous particular subjects. For example, Hulsether provides a nice summary of William Jennings Bryan’s role in the Scopes episode, showing how he worried more about how “evolutionary theory eroded democracy . . . strengthened militarism and Social Darwinism” as he did about defending the stories of Genesis; as well, he also “saw himself upholding the rights of local communities to set their own educational goals” (135). Again, this story has become familiar to scholars through the works of Edward Larson and others, but these understandings scarcely have reached a broader or student audience. In another useful section, Hulsether shows how Reinhold Nieburhian thought in practice “carried forward the tradition of religious support for U.S. foreign policy, as well as optimism about the US as the standard-bearer for progress in the world” (105), effectively puncturing those who would deify the Protestant theoretician of power. Finally, Hulsether nicely parses the overly hyped numbers of religious immigration, showing that the pluralist reveries of some recent commentators exaggerate the numerical impact of non-Christian immigrant religions, which collectively number about the percentage of the population that Jews did a century ago.

Scholars of U.S. religion will find this book a most useful and engaging survey text for their field, and one eminently adoptable for the classroom.

John Turner's Crusade

by Paul Harvey

Hope everyone has had a chance to follow the excellent discussion in the comments section, in Jon Pahl's post below, between Ed Blum, John Turner, and others.

This provides a perfect opportunity to take appropriate note of our contributing editor John Turner's first book, which is due out in a month or so: Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America. Here's hoping it attracts the attention it deserves in this season of discussion about evangelicalism, culture, and politics.

A description of the work, from the UNC Press website:

Founded as a local college ministry in 1951, Campus Crusade for Christ has become one of the world's largest evangelical organizations, today boasting an annual budget of more than $500 million. Nondenominational organizations like Campus Crusade account for much of modern evangelicalism's dynamism and adaptation to mainstream American culture. Despite the importance of these "parachurch" organizations, says John Turner, historians have largely ignored them.

Turner offers an accessible and colorful history of Campus Crusade and its founder, Bill Bright, whose marketing and fund-raising acumen transformed the organization into an international evangelical empire. Drawing on archival materials and more than one hundred interviews, Turner challenges the dominant narrative of the secularization of higher education, demonstrating how Campus Crusade helped reestablish evangelical Christianity as a visible subculture on American campuses. Beyond the campus, Bright expanded evangelicalism's influence in the worlds of business and politics. As Turner demonstrates, the story of Campus Crusade reflects the halting movement of evangelicalism into mainstream American society: its awkward marriage with conservative politics, its hesitancy over gender roles and sexuality, and its growing affluence.

Here's a brief review of the work, posted on amazon, from Publisher's Weekly:

A familiar presence at universities, Campus Crusade for Christ exemplifies for historian Turner the type of nondenominational parachurch organization that has contributed to the surge of evangelicals' political and social influence since the mid-1970s. Bill Bright founded Campus Crusade, focused chiefly on evangelism, at UCLA in 1951; in his 50 years as president he turned it into a worldwide organization. Turner, a professor of American history at the University of South Alabama, uses Bright's story to dig into the early postwar roots of evangelicalism, including its ties to conservatives, anticommunism, use of sales techniques, painful split from fundamentalism, ambivalence towardcharismatic Christians and unresolved tensions with mainstream American culture. Most interesting are the influence of Henrietta Mears, director of Christian education at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, on Bright's generation of evangelicals, and Campus Crusade's counteractivism at Berkeley in the 1960s.

Visions of Progress

PAUL HARVEY

I recently returned from a Humanities Symposium in Boulder, where (among others), Wendy Brown, the Berkeley political theorist and contributor to the blog Immanent Frame, gave a brilliant analysis of Marx and religion, and the profaning nature of market culture, which is still buzzing in my head. Along the way, she discussed the religious iconography of the "Obama phenomenon." The gist of her paper can be found in her blog entry on Charles Taylor's new book on secularism, here (as she puts the discussion with Taylor there: He [Taylor] wants to think about who a secularist is and what secularism achieves and sacrifices in relation to belief, and I want to think about the subtle violences of the forces that we might call secularizing.

We've entertained considerable speculation on the blog about the fate of the so-called religious center/left, its possible (or mythical) resurgence, where Catholics fit in, etc.

Now for some excellent historical grounding for these speculations: The historian Doug Rossinow, author of The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (Columbia, 1998), which we've blogged about here before in our conversations with John Wilson about the historiography of the 1960s, is featured on HNN's "Outstanding Young Historians" page.

His new book may not get noticed by religious historians, but should be: Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America. He writes the following, of this new work:

I'm an historian of American politics. I never expected to be an historian of religion.

Actually, I never really did become an historian of religion, in any conventional sense. But I did acquire a lasting interest in the intersection of religion and political dissent-a connection I might have expected to encounter if I had undertaken a study of political radicalism in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century America, but one I did not anticipate exploring so deeply while investigating the political left in post-1945 America. Eventually I managed to compress about one-hundred pages on Christian existentialism down to a single chapter. I decided that was about what the topic deserved in the context of a study of white youth radicalism in Austin, Texas, which eventually took the form of a book, The Politics of Authenticity.

However, religion is something that pops up in unexpected places when studying American history. I have continued to explore what I call the prophetic dimension of American political radicalism in twentieth-century America-radical politics typically directed toward very nonreligious ends. And I still teach a course on religion and politics in American history.
In my new book, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America, I've moved (for now) away from monographic research and toward a synthetic perspective. One of the things I learned in researching my first book is that radical and reform politics in U.S. history have sometimes had more in common than is usually recalled. The left and liberalism are neither mutually exclusive categories nor (as a Fox News viewer might think) identical categories; they are overlapping categories.

I emphasize that American radicals, between 1880 and the present, frequently have done the work of liberalism, trying to realize the liberal ideals of constitutional government, natural rights, and other things, while, during at least some of that period, plenty of liberal reformers took a more critical stance toward American capitalism than recent history would lead us to believe. The prophetic stance is visible, too, but in ironic fashion: consciously religious social criticism was pervasive within American reform as well as among radicals in the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and even later; but it became the more exclusive province of radicals during the cold war and after, even though recent American radicals have usually been ardently secular people. Go figure.

I recently got a message from a student at a seminary in Austin, saying that some folks there are interested in establishing an intentional religious study community. He had read about another such community in the 1950s in The Politics of Authenticity, and wondered if I could send him some documents I had cited in my book. Now I'm glad I held onto those dissertation research files.

A Rabbinic Christmas Eve

PAUL HARVEY

Here's a little Abraham Joshua Heschel for you, in time for your holiday season: Edward Rothstein, "A Rabbi of His Time, with a Charisma that Transcends It," in today's New York Times. The article references the second volume of Edward Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 (Yale).

Here's a story, from the life of Heschel, retold in the piece and in the biography:

In 1965, after walking in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil-rights march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was at the Montgomery, Ala., airport, trying to find something to eat. A surly woman behind the snack-bar counter glared at Heschel — his yarmulke and white beard making him look like an ancient Hebrew prophet — and mockingly proclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.” She told Heschel that there was no food to be had.

In response, according to a new biography, . . . Heschel simply smiled. He gently asked, “Is it possible that in the kitchen there might be some water?” Yes, she acknowledged. “Is it possible that in the refrigerator you might find a couple of eggs?” Perhaps, she admitted. Well, then, Heschel said, if you boiled the eggs in the water, “that would be just fine.”

She shot back, “And why should I?” “Why should you?” Heschel said. “Well, after all, I did you a favor.” “What favor did you ever do me?”

“I proved,” he said, “there was a Santa Claus.”

And after the woman’s burst of laughter, food was quickly served.

Where the Southern Cross the Blawg

Just back from the Southern Historical Association. Serving as Chair of the Membership Committee of the SHA, it’s my duty to command you to join now! Seriously, if you know of folks working on topics related to the history of the South, they need to be members – and for you graduate students, it’s just $10 for the year – in other words, for less than the cost of a couple of venti soy-pumpkin lattes, you can support this excellent professional organization. You graduate students reading this blog – just join now, and make a point of getting to the annual meeting, which next year will be in New Orleans (Oct. 9-12, 2008).

This year, my panel time was limited, as I was serving on the Program Committee, planning the 2008 meeting. Since this consumed 9 to 5 on Friday, I missed what looked to me the highlight of the meeting – a panel on Sunbelt Evangelicalism, featuring Steven Miller of Webster Univ., Darren Dochuk of Purdue (recent recipient of the Allan Nevins Prize), and Daniel Williams of West Georgia. Each up-and-coming younger scholar presented a tantalizing appetizer of their forthcoming works on Billy Graham, the rise of Sunbelt Religion and the “Southernization of Southern California,” and Republican Faith: The Rise of the Christian Right respectively – to be published by U. Penn Press (Miller), Norton (Dochuk), and Oxford (Williams). I really, really wanted to play hooky from the Program Committee just for this.

One could hardly ask for a better preview of the future of the field of recent American history and religion/politics. Nancy MacLean of Northwestern and Donald Critchlow commented – apparently they are working together on a volume on contrasting essays debating the history of the recent conservative movement, modeled after the widely used volume by Steven Lawson and Charles Payne Debating the Civil Rights Movement. Anybody who is reading this who was there, please feel free to add your comments and observations.

I keep trying to get back to the discussion John Wilson and I were having about religion and the 1960s, but just haven’t gotten to it yet. So keep staying tuned, I’m rereading portions of Suburban Warriors to respond specifically to his criticism of that book.

But here’s an opportunity to plug work that is suggestive of what I wrote about previously in my response to Wilson. It seems to me that scholarship in the field has moved in precisely the ways he was calling for, and suggestions that academia is somehow hostile to this are unwarranted. The papers above, previewing the forthcoming books by these younger authors, are exactly what I had in mind when suggesting originally that the “canonical narratives” are not as closed to a richer reading of religion and recent American history as Wilson seemed originally to suggest – and I might add that Williams was a student of James Patterson at Brown, whose volume Grand Expectations came in for some sharp and deserved criticism (for one rather simplistic paragraph on evangelical religion) in Wilson’s previous post. Again, though, the work of Williams and many others suggests that religion does not have to be, and is not in fact, relegated to the “margins of high academe,” and that works in the pipeline now will quickly find their way into, and alter, the canonical narratives.

Did I mention that you need to join the SHA? Just kidding – not.

Start Breakin' Down

John Wilson has continued our dialogue on religion, scholarship, and the 60s -- click here for his latest post. I'll respond more in due time -- too many good things to post this week!