Jewish World in Transformation: An Interview with Dana Evan Kaplan

Paul Harvey

A while back, we posted an extensive interview with Dana Evan Kaplan, author of what was then the brand new book Contemporary American Judaism: Transformation and Renewal. In the interview, he said that

Individualized spirituality threatens institutional religion because if people can find spiritual meaning on their own, then they don't need organized religion. American Judaism is particularly vulnerable because Judaism is so interconnected with Jewish peoplehood and also because Judaism is such a small religious group in terms of numbers. If every American Jew went on their spiritual search without regard to ancestral tradition or community influence, that would mark the end of organized Jewish religion in the United States. But that has not happened.

Just a quick update: Religion Dispatches has a new interview just up with the author, whose book has just been released in paperback, reflecting again on the book: see "Tattoos, Cremation, Personal Spirituality: The Jewish World In Transformation." A brief excerpt:

I am trying to write a reasonably comprehensive current history of contemporary Judaism. But there are so many things happening so it is clearly impossible to cover everything. I am also making a series of arguments, particularly relating to the impact that the concept of personal spirituality has had on organized American Judaism. Americans today feel much freer to explore ceremonial and ritual practices that intrigue them regardless of what their community thinks of those particular ideas. This has allowed Jews to move in a number of different directions, including seemingly contradictory ones.

I found some of these contradictory impulses fascinating. For example, there have been a lot more young Jewish people getting tattoos, including many who choose Jewish symbols or Hebrew letters. Now of course the halacha prohibits getting a tattoo, and in earlier generations, a Jew who got a tattoo was in open rebellion against the tradition. That is not so obviously the case anymore.

Another such example that I write about in my book was of a woman in northern California who asks to be cremated after her body is ritually purified and most of the traditional Hebrew prayers have been recited. Again, this is behavior that would have been inexplicable to a traditional Jew from a previous generation. I am hoping that my readers will find these internal contradictions as fascinating as I did and want to explore the changing contours of American Judaism through my book. I do like to be controversial, as long as my criticisms are based on a solid footing.

Oprah: Spirituality, Mediation, and Consumption

Paul Harvey

Recently we posted a bit to point to you an interview with our favorite professor from Yale, Kathryn Lofton, on her new book Oprah: Gospel of an Icon.

Time for some more reading/discussion on the work, courtesy of two deeply probing pieces on the book posted at Immanent frame. First, David Morgan's "Spirituality, Mediation, and Consumption" notes that Kathryn Lofton’s fascinating study demonstrates that Oprah is not aping religion as a way of selling her product but conducting a practice of self-culture that appeals to many precisely because they believe it lifts them above their circumstances to reveal possibilities they had not imagined. Oprah’s genious is for achieving a coincidence of self-care, commoditization, mass-mediation, and entertainment. If that’s not modern religion, I don’t know what is.

Then you can move on to Deirdre English, "Will Oprah Winfrey Save Us All,"

There should be more to come in this series of posts.

Update: Salon has posted an interview with K. Lofton in which the author expresses some of the main ideas of her book in very accessible answers, and connects Oprah to a tradition of female preachers with ambiguous lives. Here's a little taste:

"I connect her to two figures -- George Whitefield, a prominent 18th century minister, and Charles Finney, a 19th century minister -- who weren't merely interested in spreading the gospel but also eliciting conversion. There's an idea that a gospel is true if the purveyor is willing to talk about how it's made. Oprah does that every time she does a show about "Oprah without makeup" or a confession about her weight gain -- this is her showing the strings of her own construction."

"The other tradition I connect her to is the emergence of women as evangelical preachers, who always had to be conscious that they were being somewhat insurrectionist to the Word by even being out in the public. Oprah tries to appeal to an audience that wants to see a successful and capable woman without being too perfect. She can't be too obnoxious in the face of the conservative domestic idea that we still have for women. So Oprah isn't married nor does she have children because if she had those things and was also trying to be Oprah, her audience would be uncomfortable. That she is free to minister only to them and is not responsible to a domestic life actually puts her in a long line of preachers with similarly ambiguous lives."

New Metaphysicals: Online Symposium

Paul Harvey

Every time I post about Glenn Beck or some other late-breaking news from the idiocracy, I feel the need to take a shower by pointing you to something that is actually worthy of your time and energy. So here's the latest in that series of mea culpa posts.

As many of you may know, Courtney Bender's hot-off-the-press book The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination has been getting a lot of attention. Here's a brief summary from the book's website:

American spirituality—with its focus on individual meaning, experience, and exploration—is usually thought to be a product of the postmodern era. But, as The New Metaphysicals makes clear, contemporary American spirituality has historic roots in the nineteenth century and a great deal in common with traditional religious movements. To explore this world, Courtney Bender combines research into the history of the movement with fieldwork in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a key site of alternative religious inquiry from Emerson and William James to today. Through her ethnographic analysis, Bender discovers that a focus on the new, on progress, and on the way spiritual beliefs intersect with science obscures the historical roots of spirituality from its practitioners and those who study it alike—and shape an enduring set of modern religious possibilities in the process.

Immanent Frame is hosting a sort of online symposium on the work; click here for it. Nathan Schneider interviews the author here. Here's one particularly interesting Q and A from the interview, relevant to our historical discussions here:

NS: How do you do scholarship—and, in so doing, take account of history—about a community that denies its own historicity? I was struck by your claim that “the puzzle of spirituality in America cannot be solved by locating it in a history it refuses.”

CB: It is important to talk about and investigate the various historical links and pasts of contemporary spirituality. History is extremely important, and its elision is an ongoing problem with so much of the popular discourse about spirituality, which tends to suggest that it is a condition rather than a tradition. Sociologists and scholars of American religion need to have a better understanding of the complex religious and cultural pasts that form our present. There are lots more things to be written on these subjects, and while I was writing this book I was able to draw on a number of exceptional new volumes that focus on aspects of these ungainly histories. I’m thinking of work by Christopher White, Leigh Schmidt, Catherine Albanese, Molly McGarry, Alex Owen, Ann Taves, John Lardas Modern, and the list goes on.

But what is puzzling about spirituality is that, even as the number of monographs on the topic grows, these histories don’t seem to resonate with contemporary people who call themselves spiritual, or with most scholars who look at its present manifestations. One reason for this is that the living practices of spirituality allow people to cultivate ways of being in time that are future-focused, or that situate practitioners in perennial time. All religious practices place people in time and in space. In this case, the spiritual practices that I trace do interesting things to the kind of narrative history that most historians write, so paying attention to these practices, and chronicling how they unravel and decouple from most recognizable historical narratives, is just as important. That’s what I have tried to do.

For you Robert Orsi fans, here is his typically engaged and challenging response to the book.

Christianity, Crashes, and Special Experiences

Paul Harvey

Good stuff over at Immanent Frame:

First, a little follow-up on Darren's post from yesterday: "Christianity and the Crash," collects a number of scholarly responses to Hanna Rosin's article "Did Christianity Cause the Crash," from the December 2009 Atlantic. Our friends Anthea Butler and Jon Walton weigh in, along with Mark Taylor, Harvey Cox, and several others. Most point to the longevity and durability of the "prosperity gospel," and explore the issue in deeper ways than is possible in a magazine piece. I like Jon Walton's take:

To assert the relationship as causal, as several articles have, grants way too much credit to a motley crew of preachers while shifting our attention away from destructive governmental deregulatory policies and the pernicious speculatory financial practices of Wall Street. The financial sophistication of most of the prosperity preachers still remains at the level of how to collect more crumbled dollar bills in the bucket on Sunday. And, like most Americans, I am pretty sure Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar have little understanding of a derivative bubble or the implications of repealing the Glass Steagall Act. . . . . It seems there is plenty of blame to go around here. And I would prefer to start at the top and not the bottom.

The Study of Special Experiences: An Interview with Ann Taves, Nathan Schneider's interview with AAR President Ann Taves, explores the intersections in Taves's work between "religion" and "experience," and more broadly between the humanistic study of religion and the biological study of human experience. A brief excerpt:

NS: Why do you begin with the category of experience?

AT: For much of the twentieth century, scholars of religion considered “religious experience” central to the study of religion. In the last 20 years or so that approach came in for sharp criticism. Many scholars wanted to get away from it because it seemed to suggest an experiential essence of religion and turned instead to analyzing discourses about experience. But I don’t think we can afford to throw experience out, because embodied experience is where culture and biology meet.

NS: How can experience be resuscitated?

AT: I argue for a few basic moves. First of all, we have to take religious experience apart, to disaggregate it. Rather than “religious experience,” we can talk about “experiences deemed religious.” This better takes into account the process of how we make sense of experience—as religious or not—at many different levels, not all of them conscious. Next, I locate experience under the broader heading of consciousness studies, ranging from highly reflective, self-aware meta-consciousness to unconscious processes. Once we can put experience in that kind of framework, it is possible to look at the interpretive processes, or what I call attributional processes, to understand how certain kinds of experiences in certain kinds of contexts come to be understood as religious. I also explore what it means to ascribe or attribute religiousness to an experience across cultures and times, even in contexts where people aren’t using the word “religion” or some obviously related term to describe their experience.

Defining and Engaging Transcendental Religion

Yesterday's post about the series on the national parks implicitly engaged transcendental religion in the 19th century, which went into forming the religion of nature that informed the response to places like Yosemite and Yellowstone. Today's post follows up on that a bit. Our guest post today comes from Benjamin Park, a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh and a blogger at Juvenile Instructor. Ben's post reflects on the scholarly study of Transcendentalism.

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Defining and Engaging Transcendental Religion
Benjamin Park

American Transcendentalism has long been acknowledged as one of the first intellectual movements of early American republic. However, because of modern scholarship’s characterization of the movement as being primarily literary in nature (likely due to the dominance of literary critics in the field), its influence on—and indeed, its birth as a reaction to—American religious life has been largely relegated as merely consequential. And yet, Transcendentalism is clearly inseparable from the religious controversies that not only produced but also defined it. Indeed, not only were many members of the movement at one point Unitarian ministers, but the earliest texts and manifestos stemming from these voices were largely religious and spiritual in both scope and vision.

Ever since Perry Miller famously labeled the Transcendentalist movement as a “religious demonstration” half a century ago, most Transcendentalists scholars have been forced to admit that religiosity was at the center of the movement. Even in Philip Gura’s recent survey—where characterizations like “eclectic,” “multi-faceted,” and “interdisciplinary” reign supreme—he acknowledges that at least their origins were primarily religious. Charles Capper, however, has noted that historians’ inability to define “the character, parameters, and sources of [Transcendental] religion” has led to this important aspect of the intellectual movement unclear and, therefore, unable to situate among its larger context of nineteenth century liberal religion. Beyond Catherine Albanese’s fascinating Corresponding Motion (which, despite being an significantly important contribution to the field, is both dated and methodologically limited), the nature and significance of Transcendentalist views of religion have largely remained shrouded in uncertainty.[1]

This is unfortunate, for I believe that figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, and Henry Hedge, among others, play an important role in shaping American antebellum religious thought specifically, and the movement in general had vast implications on mapping nineteenth century generally. Beyond merely being identified as frontrunners America’s developing liberal religion, these thinkers challenged and even shifted at least three significant fields: what it required to be labeled a Christian; how spirituality might be maintained in an increasingly rational environment; and finally, what sources of knowledge—and, indeed, what ideologies in general—could be accepted and engaged within the American religious scene.[2]

The first of these three possibilities is an important study in boundary maintenance, for it forced competing religions, especially those within the Unitarian faith, to draw boundaries that they originally felt were unnecessary. Unitarianism, already thought by many Protestants to be a halfway house to infidelity, were now required to prove that they were willing to draw the theological line somewhere. Even though some Transcendentalists, most notably Emerson, publically left the fold and could thus be easily dismissed as outside the Christian faith, others like Theodore Parker refused to relinquish the title of “Christian” and instead fought to redefine what Christianity meant. Refuting the many ministers defined Parker’s theology as “nothing more or less than Deism,” Parker responded by insisting that he “object[ed] to the names deism and infidelity” because they contradict “the general philosophy which is presupposed in all I teach”—namely, immediate inspiration to the individual and divine intervention in the individual’s life, not to mention the belief that the Christian tradition contained more truth than any other traditional philosophy. And, given the enormous success of Parker’s preaching, it is evident that many others agreed with his theology. Thus, these specific theological debates that birthed Transcendentalism also gave rise to foundational questions for Christianity in general.[3]

A recent focus in religious scholarship has been to see the Transcendentalists as the beginning point of American spiritualism, or the seeking for spirituality outside of traditional religion. Though “mysticism” was seen as a pejorative during the 1800s, the following century gave rise a growing number of spiritualists who, according to Leigh Eric Schmidt, “emancipated souls” from the shackles of classical organized religion, and urged them to look inward for spiritual truth. When theologian John W. Chadwick, writing near the turn of the twentieth century, tried to trace the development of American “spirituality,” he chose Emerson and Parker. This framework has been especially popular for the current generation, for it gives roots to the predominance of the current “spiritual, not religious” culture, most recently exemplified in the forty page “sermon” found in the end of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol.[4]

Finally, Transcendentalism—and more specifically, the intellectual sources Transcendentalism introduced—challenged the way American understood knowledge and truth. When Andrews Norton, the Unitarian minister most often in conflict with the Transcendentalists, summarized Emerson, Parker, and Ripley’s “heresies,” he pointed specifically to their ideology’s origin: “Infidelity has but assumed another form,” he accused,”and especially in Germany, has made its way among a very large portion of nominally Christian theologians.” German theology, he continued, “was most hostile to all that characterizes our faith” and in the end is merely disguised atheism. Indeed, much of the surrounding debate revolved around a symbolic geography that pitted the traditionally American intellectual roots, British epistemology, against the growing threat of German idealism. In the young American republic, Lockean empiricism—even if it was tempered by Scottish Common Sensism—reigned unchallenged, and thus this crisis was not only religious in nature, but also ideological in scope. The Transcendentalists offered an alternative form of religious epistemology and ontology, challenging intellectual as well as religious boundaries. This, understandably, had profound implications on perceptions of God and man, as well as the relationship between the two.[5]

Obviously, these three frameworks of study are closely related and probably impossible to separate, yet they offer not only what I believe are some of the important implications Transcendentalists pose to American religious history, but also fresh perspectives that have, until the last decade or so, not been engaged. I am interested in how others have not only characterized Transcendental religion, but have situated it within the larger context of American religious and liberal theology.

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[1] Charles Capper, “‘A Little Beyond’: The Problem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History.” The Journal of American History 85 (Sep. 1998): 532-533. Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 8. Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), 13. Catherine L. Albanese, Corresponding Motion: Transcendental Religion and the New America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977). For an argument that the focus on religion and theology diminishes the Transcendentalist movement’s usefulness, see Albert J. Von Frank, “On Transcendentalism: Its History and Uses,” Modern Intellectual History 6 (Winter, 2009): 195-196.

[2] For Transcendentalists as the forerunners for liberal religion, see Gary J. Dorrien, The making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805-1900, 58-110.

[3] On the irony of boundary formation within Unitarianism, see Perry Miller, “Apostasy Within Liberalism,” The Harvard Theological Review 54 (Oct. 1961): 275-295. “Nothing more or less than Deism” comes from Noah Porter, “Theodore Parker,” New Englander 2, no. 3 (July 1844): 371-372. “Object” comes from Theodore Parker to Noah Porter, 1 October 1844, Theodore Parker Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. For a representative pamphlet for refuting Parkerism and establishing Unitarian boundaries, see Samuel K. Lothrop, The Christian Name and Christian Liberty: A Sermon Preached at the Church in Brattle Square (Boston: John H. Eastburn, 1843). For Parker’s success, see Joel Myerson, “On the Importance of Theodore Parker,” The New England Quarterly 76 (Sep., 2003): 466-476.

[4] Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, from Emerson to Oprah (San Francisco: HarperOne Press, 2005), 11. For the argument that the Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, were the roots of America’s separation of Christ from Christianity, see Harold Bloom, The American Religion:The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1993); Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).

[5] “Infidelity” comes from Andrews Norton, A Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity (Cambridge: John Owen, 1839), 9-10. This intellectual shift was how E. Brooks Holifield situated Transcendentalist theology in his Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

Temples, Archives, and Apostates

John G. Turner

I've been meaning to blog about our nearly three months in Provo, Utah, and environs. For anyone writing Mormon History, a trip to the former Deseret means entering archival heaven (well, at least the Terrestrial portion). It's also both somewhat bizarre and exhilarating to emerge from academic isolation and suddenly meet scores of people who share research interests.

Hopefully without too much self-indulgence, here are several of my not-too-coherent summertime thoughts on Mormonism and Mormon History:

▪ Temples are important. That sounds obvious, but in general, historians of Mormonism (like historians of American religion more broadly) still do not pay nearly enough attention to religious practice (as opposed to the politics, economics, and theological / ecclesial development of the church). Granted, the sacred nature of Mormon temple ritual poses particular challenges. But it occurred to me that one gets a very limited sense of Mormon spirituality from, say, visiting sacrament meetings or watching church conferences. Serendipitously, the recently dedicated Oquirrh Mountain Temple had its months-long open house during our summer stay. We accompanied a Mormon friend and his family through the open house, saw the baptismal font, the changing rooms, the sealing room, and the endowment room. The contrast (paraphrasing another Utah friend) between the remarkably low-church sacrament meeting and the liturgical nature of the temple is striking. That contrast has certainly existed since the Nauvoo period of the church. Visiting the temple rammed home the lesson that there is an entire side of Mormon spirituality and practice that I'll never understand, but it's nevertheless good to keep in mind that it's there. If you teach or study American religion and there's ever a temple open house in your vicinity, don't miss it.

▪ The new Church History Library is a much-improved facility for research. The edifice itself testifies to the significance of the church's history for the Latter-day Saint faith. Can you imagine any other religious group in the United States unveiling a new library / archive like this in the midst of an economic downturn? You can find a thorough discussion of its virtues and shortcomings here. Biggest improvements: more light (much easier to stay awake), better technology, and evening / weekend hours. On the downside, you now have to walk across the street to obtain the cheap and tax-free LDS cafeteria lunch, but it's still worth it. The nearest coffee I could find was in a basement McDonald's just south of Temple Square. I tried to wean myself because of enforced abstinence while at BYU but gave up. The flesh is weak.

▪ We were based in Provo, the only place I've lived where the grocery featured Emergency Food Preparedness sales (my wife is taking her cues from the Saints and is stocking up in the midst of hurricane season on the Gulf Coast) and storytime for children. Strangely, though, we attended a Pioneer Day event at Pioneer Park in Provo and never heard or saw anything pertaining to Mormonism. Those weren't just any old pioneers, you know. Maybe I missed something.

▪ In terms of Mormon History publications, you can't blink without missing significant books. After a near-decade book-ended by two major books on the Mountain Meadows Massacre and centered around Richard Bushman's magisterial biography of Joseph Smith, I'm trying to figure out what's coming next. This year appears to be the year of apostasy (historiographically), with books on the subject by Polly Aird and Edward Leo Lyman. I haven't read either book yet, but I'm curious to learn more about why and how people left the church. To return to the first point above, I do think we'll see more books that foreground Mormon religious practice. For an example of innovative and diligent research on the subject, see the article on Mormon ritual healing by Jonathan Stapley and Kristine Wright in the current Journal of Mormon History (link to Table of Contents only).

This is Your Brain on Rev. Ike's Religion, and why Green Isn't the Only Color that Matters

Paul Harvey

A couple of NPR stories explore the neuroscience of religious belief; I'll link to them here for those interested: "To the Brain, God is Just Another Guy," from a few months ago, and a really interesting compilation of stories, including text, visuals, and some videos presenting contrasting views: "Is This Your Brain on God?"

It would have been interesting to test the temporal

lobe (the locus, evidently, of chemical reactions and sensations during mystical experience) of Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter, aka Rev. Ike, who was (to quote our friend Jon Walton) part evangelist, part revivalist, and part Johnny Mathis. Jonathan Walton's more extended take on the legacy of the Rev. Ike may be found here. A brief excerpt:

Though Rev. Ike was a self-proclaimed “Green Preacher” (he professed to have ceased being a black preacher after earning his first few millions of dollars), it was evident that he remained consumed by the indignities suffered under the weight of white supremacy and segregation. This often made for a complicated and contradictory personal narrative, as he used money to situate himself above the veil of race and perceived African American cultural dysfunction. In short, Rev. Ike was post-racial and ascribed to pathology discourse way before it became en vogue. Unfortunately, Rev. Ike’s professed post-blackness belied his own aesthetic brilliance and stylistic genius. Rev. Ike was the quintessential American preacher who pieced together his message of divine health and wealth from multiple sources and varying religious traditions .. . . . his sermons represented a spoonful of Norman Vincent Peale marinated in the healing revivalism of the postwar era.

Holy Mavericks, Batman

Holy Mavericks, Batman

by Ed Blum

Regardless of what recent survey results like the ARIS show, the quest to commune with God seems just as present in American society today as it has at any other time. Board any American airplane and you’ll probably see at least one white, middle-aged, slightly overweight evangelical reading William Young’s The Shack. In it, God reveals herself in a host of racialized forms to teach the protagonist new lessons of faith amid horrible life circumstances. And the main character’s life was pretty awful. His daughter had been murdered, the evidence left in some random shack, and God called him to converse at that location. The entire narrative is wrenching for the main character, from God’s racial manifestation, to the profane and sacred geography, to the loss of his daughter.

We can hear similar spiritual strivings if we listen closely to the sonic vibrations from the I-pod of the agnostic, freethinking, thin, and tattooed college student next to that evangelical. See her lips mouth the words, “I met God / on the corner of first and Amistad. / Where the west / Was all but won.” She is singing with the soulful beats of The Fray’s “You Found Me.” The song is asad one, where human misery once again forces the search for God. This God has no racial features, but He sits alone, “smoking His last cigarette.” God encourages the pained singer to “Ask anything.” A torrent of questions and accusations are flung at God. “Where were you, When everything was falling apart?” Why did You never call? Why did You never send letters? The end of the song shifts the location of holy finding. After the singer had lobbied everything he had at God, he now feels that God is the one who found him. “Why’d you have to wait? / To find me, to find me.”

Americans continue to search for a God to find them, to hear them, and to offer answers amid their pains and their tragedies. And for hundreds of thousands of American Protestants, five individuals provide the avenues to God: T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Paula White, and Brian McLaren.

In an amazing new book that had me feeling like I was sitting in the various congregations, hearing the sermons and being transformed by them, feeling the rhythm of the music, unconsciously absorbing the various means of media, sociologist Shayne Lee and historian Phillip Sinitiere show how these evangelical innovators recast traditional Protestantism for contemporary Americans who still want to find God (or be found by God). Holy Mavericks is a quick read and each chapter sparkles with close analysis of the main ideas and innovations of these pastors. It’s fantastic scholarship that runs from the sexualized presence of Paula White (who presents herself as vulnerable to speak to those with pain in their backgrounds) to the creepy smile of Joel Osteen (who has updated the power of positive thinking with amazing business and media acumen), from the stomping of T. D. Jakes (who has played both sides of the “gospel of prosperity” coin) to the goofy jokes of Rick Warren

(whose use of the internet is pretty savvy for a guy who wears plaid shirts reminiscent of the fictional character Al on Home Improvement). Holy Mavericks is a book not only for those who want to understand why these individuals have scored so well in the American marketplace of religion, but also for those who want to understand that marketplace.

I don’t want to bore readers here with a recitation of the theoretical underpinnings of Holy Mavericks (they have an excellent conclusion on the sociological theory that informs their analyses). And I don’t want to offer criticisms just for the sake of criticizing (an aspect of academic book reviewing I find as hackneyed as the “makes a significant contribution to INSERT FIELDS HERE” phrase that concludes almost every review). Oh shucks, maybe I do have one criticism in the form of a query. Why did Lee and Sinitiere compare the most politically liberal of the pastors and movements – Brian McLaren and the Emergent Church – to Al Qaeda, while Paula White is compared to Martin Luther, T. D. Jakes is understood through an analogy to jazz, and Osteen is likened to the “boy-next-door”? Perhaps this is just me being persnickety because when I had read McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian I thought it was nonfiction and searched for the fate of Neo. Alas, I’m off subject, but I would encourage readers to attend to the myriad analogies used in Holy Mavericks to see how Lee and Sinitiere make their case.

I do want to encourage the readers of this blog to get their hands on Holy Mavericks, enjoy a journey with the leaders of the evangelical masses, then return to “You Found Me” or to The Shack, and finally to ask whether the statistical data in the ARIS study is even worth studying. It may have you exclaiming, as I did, “Holy Mavericks, Batman, that survey data is as fishy as the Penguin.”

The Exorcist

John G. Turner

While watching Bobby Jindal's Republican response to the unofficial State of the Union address tonight, I was reflecting on the joys that many of us might have writing about his religiosity during the 2012 campaign (having just started to recover from Jeremiah Wright and Sarah Palin). Fortunately, it's a long way off. However, today I stumbled upon an evidently somewhat well-known piece about Jindal's early years as a Catholic convert. Since it was new to me, it might be new to you as well. It's an excerpt of an essay Jindal published in the 1994 New Oxford Review. Evidently, the entire article is only available for a small fee; however, CBN's David Brody published an extended excerpt.

In the essay, Jindal describes a prayer session for a cancer-stricken friend, Susan, who has been behaving oddly. The prayer session occurs at a meeting of University Christian Fellowship at Brown University. Here is an excerpt of the excerpt:

A senior in UCF (University Christian Fellowship) and a leader of my Bible study group had once asked me if I believed in angels, spirits, and other such apparitions ... After I related my doubts, the se­nior proceeded to describe recent incidents involv­ing mutual acquaintances -- e.g., a woman who claimed demons inflicted physical scars on her arms. I remained polite, but incredulous. The issue of spirits did not affect me, and I was thus content to leave its resolution to others. I had no opinions or feelings on the subject ...

After a period of group prayer, a student made a movement to end the meeting. Suddenly, Susan emitted some strange guttural sounds and fell to the floor. She started thrashing about, as if in some sort of seizure. Susan's sister must have recognized what was happening, for she ordered us to gather around and place our hands on Susan's prostrate body. I re­fused to budge from my position and froze in hor­ror. I will never forget the first comprehensible sound that came from Susan; she screamed my name with such an urgency that the chill still travels down my spine whenever I recall this moment.

Maybe she sensed our weariness; whether by plan or coincidence, Susan chose the perfect opportunity to attempt an escape. She suddenly leapt up and ran for the door, despite the many hands holding her down. This burst of action served to revive the tired group of students and they soon had her restrained once again, this time half kneeling and half standing. Alice, a student leader in Campus Crusade for Christ, entered the room for the first time, brandishing a crucifix ... Surely Crusade's experienced leader would be able to rescue us and reaffirm our faith in Christ, the Bible, and everything good ...

While Alice and Louise held Susan, her sister continued holding the Bible to her face. Almost taunting the evil spirit that had almost beaten us minutes before, the students dared Susan to read biblical passages. She choked on certain passages and could not finish the sentence "Jesus is Lord." Over and over, she repeated "Jesus is L..L..LL," often ending in profanities. In between her futile attempts, Susan pleaded with us to continue trying and often smiled between the grimaces that accompanied her readings of Scripture. Just as suddenly as she went into the trance, Susan suddenly reappeared and claimed "Jesus is Lord."

With an almost comical smile, Susan then looked up as if awakening from a deep sleep and asked, "Has something happened?" She did not re­member any of the past few hours and was startled to find her friends breaking out in cheers and laugh­ter, overwhelmed by sudden joy and relief...

I left that classroom with a powerful belief in Mary's intercessions and with many questions about spiritual warfare; I also learned a lasting lesson in hu­mility and the limits of human understanding. Was the purpose of that night served when so many indi­viduals were inducted into the Church? Did I witness spiritual warfare? I do not have the answers, but I do believe in the reality of spirits, angels, and other re­lated phenomena that I can neither touch nor see.

Wish I had gotten this into my Campus Crusade book, though my sense is that only a minority of Crusade leaders go about combating demons with crucifix in hand. [They usually brandish the Four Spiritual Laws]. I know the good folks at Daily Kos and Huffington Post would enjoy analyzing this sort of material during a 2012 Jindal campaign. However, I also reckon that a healthy percentage of Americans would affirm Jindal's final sentence.

We Have a Religion, But We Don't Have Religious Freedom

Paul Harvey

Another triumph for one of the prolific authors in my "class" of the Young Scholars in American Religion program: in the next couple of months, Tisa Wenger's work We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom will be available, hardback and paper, from University of North Carolina Press. The work covers one of the more fascinating episodes of how American culture has defined and delimited the term "religion," thus defining and delimiting who has religious freedom, and who doesn't. More on the book below from the work's webpage.

We Have a Religion
The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom

By Tisa Wenger

For Native Americans, religious freedom has been an elusive goal. From nineteenth-century bans on indigenous ceremonial practices to twenty-first-century legal battles over sacred lands, peyote use, and hunting practices, the U.S. government has often acted as if Indian traditions were somehow not truly religious and therefore not eligible for the constitutional protections of the First Amendment. In this book, Tisa Wenger shows that cultural notions about what constitutes "religion" are crucial to public debates over religious freedom.

In the 1920s, Pueblo Indian leaders in New Mexico and a sympathetic coalition of non-Indian reformers successfully challenged government and missionary attempts to suppress Indian dances by convincing a skeptical public that these ceremonies counted as religion. This struggle for religious freedom forced the Pueblos to employ Euro-American notions of religion, a conceptual shift with complex consequences within Pueblo life. Long after the dance controversy, Wenger demonstrates, dominant concepts of religion and religious freedom have continued to marginalize indigenous traditions within the United States.

About the Author
Tisa Wenger is assistant professor of religious studies at Arizona State University in Tempe.
Reviews

"Although the debate is not well remembered today, the Pueblo Dances affair is one of the most important legal and political conflicts over religious freedom in American history. In this well-researched study, Tisa Wenger does a fine job of describing the affair and vividly highlights the cast of activists on both sides."--Philip Jenkins, author of Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality

"Wenger's book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the strange career of 'religion' by doing a superb and unmatchable job of recovering the full complexity of how that idea related to the Puebloan dance controversy."--Joel Martin, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Ghosts of Futures Past

Paul Harvey

Spiritualism continues to haunt and invigorate American religious history and studies. Despite excellent works by Anne Braude, Brett Carroll, and several others, there's much more yet to say about the far-reaching implications of the practice in the nineteenth century and beyond. Here's a new, innovative, dense and difficult, but rewarding new work for your interest (especially for you American studies types): Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (University of California Press).

From the book's description:

Ghosts of Futures Past guides readers through the uncanny world of nineteenth-century American spiritualism. More than an occult parlor game, this was a new religion, which channeled the voices of the dead, linked present with past, and conjured new worldly and otherworldly futures. Tracing the persistence of magic in an emergent culture of secularism, Molly McGarry brings a once marginalized practice to the center of American cultural history. Spiritualism provided an alchemical combination of science and magic that called into question the very categories of male and female, material and immaterial, self and other, living and dead. Dissolving the boundaries between them opened Spiritualist practitioners to other voices and, in turn, allowed them to imagine new social worlds and forge diverse political affinities.

Nineteenth-century Spiritualists were the “other within,” McGarry suggests, in this cultural studies reading of Spiritualism: the widely popular practice of conjuring up spirits and ancestors of the past, often through the “mediumship” of younger women who could embody the voices of the disembodied. Mostly white and middle-class Americans, Spiritualists “claimed mysticism for white America, creating a spiritual practice out of a communion with difference.” They were harbingers of America’s first “New Age,” and practitioners of what Catherine Albanese has termed the tradition of “metaphysical religion.” Spiritualists identified with the other – men with women, whites with Indians, straights with “queers”; in this way, Spiritualists practiced transgressive politics, spiritualities, and sexualities, earning them the ire of Anthony Comstock and all those who searched for obscenity in every piece of mail.

This is a difficult but effective work; the combination of both is suggested by the chapter titles, which puzzle but tantalize:

1. Mourning, Media, and the Cultural Politics of Conjuring the Dead
2. Indian Guides: Haunted Subjects and the Politics of Vanishing
3. Spectral Sexualities: Free Love, Moral Panic, and the Making of U.S. Obscenity Law
4. Mediomania: The Spirit of Science in a Culture of Belief and Doubt
5. Secular Spirits: A Queer Genealogy of Untimely Sexualities

McGarry is at her best in the last chapter, in which she takes on reigning academic theories of secularity and new sexual categories (including that of the “homosexual”), and explores the relationship of religion and sexuality. Her subjects used “spiritual theories of embodiment and forms of memorialization” to find “transfigurative affiliation, consolation, and connection.”

Spirituality, Smirituality

Below I posted a portion of a rather unsuccessfully snippy review of Deborah Applegate's biography of Henry Ward Beecher. Here is, to my mind, a much better example of a tough-minded review: Kathryn Lofton on Gregory C. Stanczak's Engaged Spirituality: Social Change and American Religion. This is from H-AMSTDY and was crossposted on H-AMREL, but it doesn't appear to be up yet on the H-AMSTDY reviews page -- presumably it will be sometime. At any rate, anyone understanding of but by now impatient with spirituality talk will appreciate Lofton's skeptical take. I'll post the link to the full review when it's up -- or send a link to me if it's up somewhere.

Disengaging Spirituality

It is perhaps time to declare a scholarly moratorium on "spirituality." This is not to say that we should cease its analysis: no matter what an elite cadre argues, seekers will continue to deploy "spiritual" and"spirituality" with self-diagnostic glee, and it remains our task to catalogue and assess such talk for its cultural and epistemic content. However, it may be time to give up the descriptive seduction of this category; it may be time to relinquish our spiritual pursuit of spirituality. If our primary labor is one of comparison and classification, then it seems increasingly apparent that whatever"spirituality" may offer, it rarely produces anything generative to humanist inquiry, instead reducing the analytic observer to a dreamy-eyed gaze.

Students of religion must expect more of themselves than the mere portraiture of best practice. It should also demand the deconstruction of a subject's (and an author's) own "spiritual"self-impressions. I write this after the conclusion of a carefully narrated and often quite moving work, _Engaged Spirituality: Social Change and AmericanReligion_, written by Gregory C. Stanczak. _Engaged Spirituality_ is the product of considerable research through the Center for Religion and Civic Culture atthe University of Southern California. From there, Stanczak conducted seventy-six interviews with "exemplary individuals who articulated aconnection between spiritual practice and a commitment to social justice"(p. xiv). Although the majority of his conversation partners were based in southern California, Stanczak added interviewees from New York and Washington, D.C., introducing the reader to a sectarian sampler of spiritual laborers, cultural preservationists, and managers of social ministries.

The driving inquiry of his work was aspirant: What sustains ongoing social action? Quickly Stanczak decides that the most interesting answers to him might be found in religion "and more specifically the subjective elements of spirituality" (p. ix). Later,Stanczak restates his inquiry in more specifically religious terms: "Once the pilgrim returns from Hajj or after the vivid vision evaporates or the sense of clarity and connection recedes into the day-to-day pressures of life, how are these newfound perspectives on the world implemented or turned into strategies for effecting meaningful change?"(p. 50). For Stanczak, then, then, spirituality is a "social resource" (p. xx). It is the "spark" culled from religious ritual, the frisson which presses men and women to labor against odds for betterment (p. 18). [snip] . . . .

An evidentiary force in the erosion of spirituality as a mystical force will be Leigh Eric Schmidt's _Restless Souls: The Making of AmericanSpirituality_ (2005). Unfortunately for Stanczak, the nearness of their publication dates prohibited his usage of Schmidt's meaty historical profile of "spirituality," one which masterfully demonstrates the ways in which spirituality has always been a discursive term by leading political agents. To this end, _Restless Souls_ includes no small amount of scholarly pleasure at the liberal politics of spirituality's most robust American progenitors. However, for every biographical or topical endorsement, Schmidt offers a tough categorical anatomy, pointing out the habitual rituals and organizational mantras deployed by those believing themselves to be escaping the religious through talk of the spiritual. Schmidt reveals the "mixed blessings" of such identity markers, suggesting in his own conclusion that if a "Spiritual Left" is to produce "democratic freedom and cosmopolitan progressivism," it must resuscitate the communitarian, religious habitude that served as its intellectual and practical point of origin for American spirituality.[1]

The engaged spirituality so celebrated by Stanczak and his subjects will only be made purposeful with consciousness of a social presence, moderated by common, occasionally disciplinary tactics. However, students of religion in American culture frequently obscure such structures of religious power in favor of the self-celebrating terminological lacquer used by believers to situate themselves in a dizzying religious landscape. The gauntlet of religious research is to resist these propagandistic titillations of spirituality talk. Until we are able to turn against the sirens of spiritual selfhood, until we are able to resist the ambivalent chat of spirituality, we might be better off leaving such talk to those who do it best, who use it best: the seekers themselves. Otherwise, our texts will begin to read more as manuals to such seeking, rather than critical guides to a complex cultural topography. . . .

New Mexican Spirituality

There’s something “spiritual” about this place
Kelly Baker

As a newly implanted New Mexican, I discovered early on that when I told any one (on a plane, at a conference, or in my office) that I was moving to the Land of Enchantment that she/he would close her/his eyes and whisper, “It is so spiritual there.” I am not sure if it is the incredible blue skies or the seemingly harsh red and brown landscape, but New Mexico seems to mark tourists as an intensely spiritual place to be. Maybe it’s the stark contrast from anywhere that is green (especially from my native Florida) or possibly the view of mountains over the city. I must admit that my skepticism often gets the better of me, and when looking at awestruck companions, I have to withhold the urge to roll my eyes. I usually allow them to have their moment, but it is intriguing that this landscape, for some, seems to be spiritual in an ambiguous way that one cannot put their finger on.

Religion & Ethics Newsweekly explored this claim in a recent report on the ‘Religions of New Mexico” in particular those movements that are drawn to the Valley of the Shining Stone. New Mexico contains Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics, the Pueblo, and various Protestant denominations. Some find the landscape to harsh, but others have been inspired by the natural beauty. Lucky Severson, the anchor of this particular program, noted:

There's a feeling among many people of faith that certain geographic places have
about them a spiritual power. Sometimes it's their natural beauty or simplicity.
They are sometimes called "thin" places, where the barrier between the material
and spiritual worlds seems porous.

Landscapes become sacred spaces in which religious people hope to connect with the divine, and New Mexico inspires hope for those who often claim the “spiritual not religious” mantle. In American Sacred Space, David Chidester and Edward Linenthal note that sacred space is space that can be defiled, so perhaps the spiritual landscape represents a certain purity that appears untouched by human hands. The high desert appears unmolested (except for the occasional casino in the middle of nowhere), wild, and slightly dangerous. Possibly, the appeal lies in lack of present humanity that suggests something more ultimate. The terrain, which still strikes me as alien no matter how many times I drive past it, is desolate while simultaneously inspiring awe. Why exactly does this landscape lead to these reactions and emotions?

This claimed spirituality of landscape is a bit disconcerting to this native Floridian because no one ever visits Florida and returns with a sense of the spiritual (maybe if Disney World is a pilgrimage for you, but that is all together a different sort of post). This landscape inspires, and I am curious if other regions of the Southwest are approached in such a way. Do tourists, or inhabitants, find west Texas or Arizona soul-stirring? What about other regions of the US? Are Oregon or North Carolina also spiritual states? Is New Mexico really that unique because of its high desert vistas? The program, “Religions of New Mexico,” might prove interesting to any one working on issues of sacred space or who has an intense fascination with this state anyway.