Palin and the Pastors

by Matt Sutton

For those of you who missed it, Sarah Palin has (in my mind) done the unthinkable. She has resurrected the Jeremiah Wright debate, telling Bill Kristol (in this morning's New York Times):

“To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association [Obama-Wright] isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

I did not think that it was fair to critique Palin (or Obama) for past associations. But if she is going to go after Obama over Wright, let the games begin. I suspect that things are about to get pretty ugly.

Comrade Paul

Randall J. Stephens

[Nota bene: I don't mean our Paul (Harvey), but, rather, the Saint. Not that Harvey isn't both a saint and a comrade.]

The latest NYRB includes a wonderful essay on the apostle Paul. Columbia's Mark Lilla reviews books by Garry Wills, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Éric Marty, and Slavoj Zizek. Though he’s still widely criticized in some circles as misogynistic, a Hellenizer, a gnostic, a prude, and a tool of the state, others now find him to be a venerable revolutionary. Looks like he has some new, unlikely friends on the left. Lilla has written a very funny piece, which reminds me of Tom Wolfe's famous savaging of the antediluvian lit-crit crowd in Harper's. Lilla takes on muddle-headed Mandarins and Rococo post-Marxists with flair. There are some terrific passages:

Oddly, there is a lot of thought being given to Paul these days by inhabitants of the foggy academic archipelago encompassing critical theory, deconstruction, post-modernism, postcolonial studies, and the like. When the wretched of the faculty club gathered twenty-five years ago, conversation would naturally drift to Michel Foucault's views on corporal punishment; today you are more likely to hear a debate on the Epistle to the Romans as it bears on globalization and the war on terror. . . .

The worst [of the new books on Paul], for my money, is Giorgio Agamben's The Time That Remains. Agamben is the very model of the baffling postmodernist: obscure, pretentious, humorless. He is capable of writing that "the messianic pleroma of the law is an Aufhebung of the state of exception, an absolutizing of the katargesis " and of littering nearly every page with passages quoted in the original German, French, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish, Provençal, even (I'm not kidding) Hopi. Ezra Pound had nothing on Professor Agamben.

The essay on the web is for subscribers only. Yet it is available through many college, university, and public libraries.

Society Without God: Pretty Hobbesian, or Pretty Cool?

Paul Harvey

Here's a post on a new book of interest: Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment.

A description of the work, from the press webpage:

Before he began his recent travels, it seemed to Phil Zuckerman as if humans all over the globe were “getting religion” — praising deities, performing holy rites, and soberly defending the world from sin. But most residents of Denmark and Sweden, he found, don’t worship any god at all, don’t pray, and don’t give much credence to religious dogma of any kind. Instead of being bastions of sin and corruption, however, as the Christian Right has suggested a godless society would be, these countries are filled with residents who score at the very top of the “happiness index” and enjoy their healthy societies, which boast some of the lowest rates of violent crime in the world (along with some of the lowest levels of corruption), excellent educational systems, strong economies, well-supported arts, free health care, egalitarian social policies, outstanding bike paths, and great beer.

Zuckerman formally interviewed nearly 150 Danes and Swedes of all ages and educational backgrounds over the course of fourteen months, beginning in 2005. He was particularly interested in the worldviews of people who live their lives without religious orientation. How do they think about and cope with death? Are they worried about an afterlife? What he found is that nearly all of his interviewees live their lives without much fear of the Grim Reaper or worries about the hereafter. This led him to wonder how and why it is that certain societies are nonreligious in a world that seems to be marked by increasing religiosity. Drawing on prominent sociological theories and his own extensive research, Zuckerman ventures some interesting answers.

This fascinating approach directly counters the claims of outspoken, conservative American Christians who argue that a society without God would be hell on earth. It is crucial, Zuckerman believes, for Americans to know that “society without God is not only possible, but it can be quite civil and pleasant.”

I haven't seen this book, so will offer no particular opinion here; rather, just a couple of thoughts. First, I'm definitely in favor of great bike paths and quality beer. Second, there would not appear to be any evidence locally, here in Colorado Springs, that religiosity leads to any particular virtue, personal or societal (just the opposite, I'd say, based on how our local politicans operate in the state legislature and in Congress), so to that extent I could be favorable to this argument. Evangelical fervor didn't stop southerners from lynching thousands of people; indeed, it may even have encouraged it.

On the other hand, whether a "society without God" is civil and pleasant, or hell on earth, may be unrelated to whether God is there or not, but to a host of other factors. Atheism didn't prevent Mao from creating policies that led to the greatest famine in twentieth century history. And, I'm guessing Denmark and Sweden would still be perfectly nice places even if a lot of folks still found their way to the Lutheran church. Also, I wonder whether the "cultural capital" derived (in part) from the religious heritage of these places has operated like principal that has produced interest that people can draw down on now. In other words, what is it that produces the cultural capital of work, delay of self-gratification (something I could use a little more of), and a communal concern for our neighbors? What are the cultural origins of virtues that make for better societies? There are, of course, socio-evolutionary explanations for this, as well as religious and other ones. And, this also returns us to the debates on the Weber thesis, and the meanings of the transformation of the "Protestant ethic" into the "work ethic" that Daniel Rogers traced in his book on that subject.

Anyway, this appeared to be an intriguing title that would interest some of you. Zuckerman is also the editor of DuBois on Religion, a volume of DuBois's writings on religion put out a few years ago by Rowman & Littlefield.

Is the Mortgage Crisis a Spiritual One?

Kelly Baker

Time has an interesting article today on how the Prosperity Gospel has led some followers into the subprime mortgage mess. Jonathon Walter (University of California at Riverside) and Anthea Butler weigh in on how this theological focus on prosperity led many to believe that religious reasons were paramount in the approval of their risky mortgages. God, it seems, wanted them to have these homes despite their individual economic situations. The reaction from churches that promote the Prosperity Gospel will prove interesting as the financial tumult continues. Here's an excerpt:

Has the so-called Prosperity Gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis? That's what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California Riverside, he realized that Prosperity's central promise — that God would "make a way" for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, toxic expression during sub-prime boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe "God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house." The results, he says, "were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers."

Others think he may be right. Says Anthea Butler, an expert in pentecostalism at the University of Rochester in New York state, "The pastor's not gonna say 'go down to Wachovia and get a loan' but I have heard, 'even if you have a poor credit rating God can still bless you — if you put some faith out there [that is, make a big donation to the church], you'll get that house, or that car or that apartment.'" Adds J. Lee Grady, editor of the magazine Charisma, "It definitely goes on, that a preacher might say, 'if you give this offering, God will give you a house. And if they did get the house, people did think that it was an answer to prayer, when in fact it was really bad banking policy." If so, the situation offers a look at how an native-born faith built partially on American econoic optimism entered into a toxic symbiosis with a pathological market. ...

But Walton suggests that a decade's worth of ever-easier credit acted like drug in Prosperity's bloodstream. "The economic boom 90's and financial over-extensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the prosperity message," he wrote recently. And not positively. "Narratives of how 'God blessed me with my first house despite my credit' were common. Sermons declaring 'it's your season to overflow' supplanted messages of economic sobriety," and "little attention was paid to.. the dangers of using one's home equity as an ATM to subsidize cars, clothes and vacations."

With the bubble burst, Walton and Butler assume that prosperity congregants have taken a disproportionate hit, and are curious as to how their churches will respond. Butler thinks that some of the flashier ministries will shrink along with their congregants' fortunes. Says Walton, "You would think that the current economic conditions would undercut their theology." But he predicts they will persevere [sic], since God's earthly largess [sic] is just as attractive when one is behind the economic eight ball.

"Left" Out: Faith and Politics

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere



In July 2007 Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy famously wrote about the Democratic Party and religion, and religion scholars in recent years have started to tell us about the history of the religious left.

So, to use the title of the Gibbs and Duffy article, have Democrats "got religion"? And who are the "party faithful"? Here are some answers.

The award-winning radio program Speaking of Faith aired a show yesterday on the "faith history" of the political left. It is the first in a series on religion and the major political parties during election season. The SOF website states:

This program is the first of a two-part conversation on politics and religion below the surface of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. The religious right has gotten a fair amount of coverage in recent years, while the political left has rarely been represented with a religious sensibility.


This show is a good conversation piece (pardon the pun) for a number of recent books that examine religion and the Democratic Party and/or political progressives, including Amy Sullivan's book The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap (interviewed on the show), E.J. Dionne's , Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right, and David Gushee's The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center, among others.

(Paul Harvey also posted on some of these books early this year).

Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Paul Harvey

As some of you know, I'm giving the Lamar Lectures in Southern History at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, next month. The lectures will later be published by the University of Georgia Press. Many thanks to my friend Sarah Gardner for inviting me to be part of this series.

(Note to self, if you're actually going to give these lectures you better sit your butt down and write like a maniac!!)

At some point in the near future I hope to post some kind of better publicity material, but in the meantime, here are the lecture titles and the schedule. Hope some of ya'll in the great state of Georgia might be able to mozy down for one of the lectures. The lectures will have fun movie clips, music, and art interspersed, so it won't all be boring monologue from me.

Series Title: Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Lecture I: Jesus of the South - Monday, November 3, 10:00 AM

Lecure II: Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the Trickster: Southern Evangelical Culture in History and Literature - Monday, November 3, 7:30 PM

Lecture III: Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom - Tuesday, November 4, 7:30 PM

_____________________________________________________

Here's a list of the last several Lamar Lectures, which should give you some idea of why I'm excited to be part of this tradition.

2000: Adam Fairclough (University of East Anglia) – Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow

2001: Edward Ayers (UVA), Thadious M. Davis (Vanderbilt), Linda Wagner-Martin (UNC), Joel Williamson (UNC) – South To the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-first Century

2002: Theda Purdue (UNC) – “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South

2003: Peter H. Wood (Duke) – Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream

2004: Michael O’Brien (Cambridge) – Henry Adams and the Southern Question

2005: James C. Cobb (UGA) – Before and After Brown: Jim Crow, the Brown Decision, and the Changing Face of Southern Identity

2006: Barbara J. Fields (Columbia) – Teach About the South (unpublished)

2007: Richard Gray (Essex) – A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature

Prophesies of Godlessness

Paul Harvey

My friend Kevin Schultz has a chapter in an intriguing-looking new book from Oxford University Press: Prophesies of Godlessness: Prediction of America's Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day, edited by Charles Mathewes (the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion) and Christopher McKnight Nichols.

The book traces the idea that American thinkers have always predicted the imminent secularization of America, from the jeremiad tradition to Thomas Jefferson to Robert Ingersoll to Clarence Darrow to the Fundamentalists to modernization theorists to Pat Robertson. Each chapter focuses on a different era and different thinkers. Kevin's chapter is on the Monkey Scopes trial and the rise of liberal Protestantism in the 1920s. The chapters all are connected by focusing on the various repetitive scripts that predict the imminent death of god in America (either gleefully or woefully). Of the book, Mark Noll writes, The authors reveal much about secularization, but much more about why predictions about the effacement of religion have been so central in American national life.

In a graduate class last night, I rediscovered the problem of having students historicize issues/problems that resonate in contemporary politics; usually what happens is that the students want to discuss the contemporary politics of something, rather than the historical roots of how the issue has come to be conceptualized in the first place (this in reference to a discussion of Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects, a book covering immigration and the creation of the concept of "illegal alien" from 1924 - 1965; inevitably, if somewhat irritatingly, the discussion quickly landed on contemporary immigration controversies, and once there never landed back again on the actual subject of the book). The result can be class discussions that resemble "Crossfire" rather than a graduate seminar. In a number of religious history classes, I've encountered this as well when discussing the kinds of themes discussed in this book. That is to say, concepts of the religiosity or the "declension" of America usually lead students immediately into espousing opinions about whether "we" (whoever that is) are "more" or "less" religious than "we" were at some undefined point in the past. Anyway, I look forward to using this book in some future class, as another experiment in trying to induce historical thinking against the strong undercurrents of presentism.