Sunday, in the Park

Paul Harvey

You wouldn't think it was the 4th of July in the showdown between the KKK and the Westboro Baptist Church at some Memorial Day remembrances at Arlington National Cemetery. You can't make this stuff up, even when you just so happen to have a historical analysis of the 2nd Ku Klux Klan's white Christian nationalism on its way out soon. My co-conspirator Kelly Baker looks at this bizarre confrontation here, in an op-ed piece for History News Network.

Some other pieces catching attention lately in our Sunday roundup:

I just finished reading Jennifer Burns's book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, a completely fascinating biography and analysis of the impact of Rand's works as a historic "gateway drug to the right." The religious metaphors quickly come to mind when looking at how the aggressively proselytizing atheist worked to control her own cult of personality, how heretics from her "Collective" were shunned and exiled, how "The Collective" was sardonically named but eerily apt as a descriptor, and how her novelistic heroes operated as godlike mythical heroes and heroines.

Unlike Hobbits or children residing in Hogwarts, Rand's heroes have proven impossible to transfer to movies or television mini-series, the genius of the market having rejected at the box office movie adaptations of her agitprop novels. Peter Travers writes of this most recent screen adaption of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's monumental 1,168-page, 1957 novel gets the low-budget, no-talent treatment and sits there flapping on screen like a bludgeoned seal. Our local (Colorado) AM agitprop specialist Mike Rosen, of 850 AM radio out of Denver, hosted a special screening and wrote a series of god-awful editorials for the Denver Post attemtping to flog the film. Rosen provided post-screening commentary together with Michael "heck of a job" Brown, lately of FEMA and Katrina fame, and host of the nightly show on same said "blowtorch" of Colorado radio. The rapture is sounding better by the moment.

Author Jennifer Burns also covers how much William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, and others of that pioneering conservative generation hated Rand, and how she returned the favor. Rand also apparently didn't think much of that noted collectivist sympathizer Friedrich Hayek, but then there was almost no one else that she did like. Hayek didn't really have a problem philosophically, for example, with national health insurance, which of course put him in the same camp with the slaves rather than the individualists, in Rand's eyes. All of this has come back in the news now thanks to the Rand-inspired politics of Paul Ryan, a development discussed further over at Mark Silk's Spiritual Politics blog.

(A side note unrelated to this blog but just interesting to read about in this book anyway: In the late 60s/early 70s, Rand opposed the Vietnam War, which further angered many conservatives, while she celebrated in Kennedy-esque language the Apollo space program, which pissed off libertarians who already had sort of broken from her. As for her temper, let's just say that good thing Twitter wasn't around then).

Speaking of money uber alles and the cash nexus, my friend Lerone Martin has a very popular "Open Letter to Creflo Dollar," concerning Dollar's defense of Bishop Eddie Long, here.

In other news:

John Schmalzbauer has an outstandingly interesting review of Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt in the new Evangelical Studies Bulletin. No link for it, but click on the ESB link for quick and very inexpensive addition to the mailing list of this very informative newsletter. The link also gives you access to a number of back issues from 2007-2010, with lengthy and very substantive reviews of important recent works by Barry Hankins, Thomas Kidd, and many others.

In "Roots of Bachmann's Ambition Began at Home," the New York Times goes over some of the same material that the Rolling Stone did in Menckenian excess (except not as funny as Mencken), about the origins of Michele Bachmann's political career in Minnesota, only without the hypervenilation. Of her appearances speaking in church basements early in her career, one attendee remembers, “It felt like we were in a tent, like a revival,” Ms. Cecconi said. “It was obvious Michele was the star."

While Huntsman and Romney split families and compete for the same donor base, Bachmann is competing equally with Romney and trouncing the relatively unknown Huntsman in Iowa. The two candidates Romney and Huntsman have Tea Party trouble alike, while Huntsman moves away from Romney's position on his faith and his politics articulated in 2008; Matt Bowman explores Huntsman's new generational Mormonism here for New Republic. See also Russell Fox's response to Bowman's piece here -- Fox feels that it is not a generational difference between the business Mormonism of Romney and the more renegade style of Huntsman, but rather that "Huntsman doesn’t take his Mormonism quite as seriously as pioneer-stock Romney does." Both pieces are well worth reading.

Civilization Teeters on Brink as Long-Feared Film Version of "Atlas Shrugged" Premieres

Paul Harvey

Just a brief note to recommend David Bentley Hart's hilarious take-down of the new Atlas Shrugged movie (high on my list of film-adaptations-of-novels that the world could best do without). Big HT to Janine.

A brief taste:

The world survived the filming of The Fountainhead (if only by the skin of its teeth), and it may yet survive this. And Ayn Rand always provokes a rather extravagant reaction from me, and probably for purely ideological reasons. For instance, I like the Sermon on the Mount. She regarded its prescriptions as among the vilest ever uttered. I suspect that charity really is the only way to avoid wasting one’s life in a desert of sterile egoism. She regarded Christian morality as a poison that had polluted the will of Western man with its ethos of parasitism and orgiastic self-oblation. And, simply said, I cannot find much common ground with someone who believed that the principal source of human woe over the last twenty centuries has been a tragic shortage of selfishness.

Still, I like to think my detestation of Rand’s novels follows from more than a mere disagreement over differing visions of the universe. What’s a universe here or there, after all? I prefer to think it’s a matter of good taste. For what really puts both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in a class of their own is how sublimely awful they are. I know one shouldn’t expect much from a writer who thought Mickey Spillane a greater artist than Shakespeare. Even so, the cardboard characters, the ludicrous dialogue, the bloated perorations, the predictable plotting, the lunatic repetitiousness and banality, the shockingly syrupy romance—it all goes to create a uniquely nauseating effect: at once mephitic and cloying, at once sulfur and cotton candy . . .

Continue reading here

God v. No God at Notre Dame

Paul Harvey

Our friend Nathan Schneider has a piece up at Religion Dispatches, and a related one at his own blog The Row Boat, about a "God debate" at Notre Dame between enfant terrible Sam Harris and evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig. The intro:

The University of Notre Dame had cause for its anxiety leading up to last week’s big debate between the New Atheist polemicist Sam Harris and the evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig. It’s said that all publicity is good publicity, but one needn’t strain too hard to find an exception—least of all in the history of God debates.

The rest is an interesting and fun account, which you can read here.

Happy Mardi Gras from the Chaplain of Bourbon Street

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

“Mardi Gras is one mighty explosion of sin, stage-managed by the devil. I believe that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, if they could be resurrected and visit New Orleans during Mardi Gras, would by unanimous vote request that they be sent back to hell. I think that Mardi Gras is a time when even the devil is ashamed of his own followers.”

So proclaimed the Rev. Bob Harrington in his 1969 autobiography The Chaplain of Bourbon Street. Born in 1927 and born again in 1958 (both in the town of Sweet Water, Alabama), Harrington first encountered “the dives and strip joints of the [French] Quarter” while a Navy seaman during World War II. He returned in 1960 as a student at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, along with his first wife Joyce and their two daughters. He “was particularly thrilled by the lives of four great evangelists, Jesus, Roger Williams, who founded the first Baptist church on American soil, and those two great modern-day preachers, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham.” It didn’t take long for Harrington “to open a ‘Salvation Shop' in the heart of the French Quarter—the area that Billy Graham, during a visit there, had called ‘the middle of hell’.” Moreover, according to Harrington, “I wanted the sinners to see me coming from blocks away. I wasn’t going to pussyfoot around. To call attention to myself, I adopted the custom of wearing a red tie, red pocket handkerchief and red socks. And I carried with me everywhere a Bible bound in red leather. Those are my trademarks to this day.”

And the rest, as they say, is an In His Steps-esque tip-sheet for soul saving, but with a canned bluster (“No one had invited me—a sin-busting, devil-chasing young preacher—into the hellhole that was the French Quarter of New Orleans”) that came honest to an admirer of Billy Sunday, and with a voyeuristic gaze (“As far as I know, I’m the only man permitted free access to the backstage dressing rooms of the strippers”) that can only be (un)appreciated if you happen upon a copy of The Chaplain of Bourbon Street in your local Christian used bookstore. At the very least, check out his website: www.thechaplain.com

Here's a debate between Harrington and Madalyn Murray O’Hair (founder of American Atheists) on the Phil Donahue Show in 1970.

For our vinyl collectors...

And from the bombastic to the benign, here’s a two-sided card that my daughter caught at a recent Mardi Gras parade in Baton Rouge.

Front:

Back:

The Strange Career of Thomas Paine

I'm pleased today to guest post another contribution from Benjamin Park, a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh who normally blogs at Juvenile Instructor. Ben's post concerns material he had researched for his master's thesis, about reactions/responses to Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason to Christopher Hitchens to the Tea Party Movement. Ben's previous guest post for us may be found here.

Thomas Paine in American Memory
by Benjamin Park

I recently visited the American Philosophical Society’s library in Philadelphia, PA. Besides housing a treasure-trove of early American documents, and being housed in a beautiful building across the street from Independence hall, the APS Library also offers tourist-friendly exhibits in its front lobby. I was excited to see a showcase dedicated to Thomas Paine—the focus of my research trip and center figure of my master’s thesis. Further, I was intrigued to notice that while the display exhibited numerous items—first editions Common Sense, The Crisis, The Rights of Man, and several letters or cartoons exemplifying Paine as a heroic American revolutionary—it did not include the one pamphlet that is the focus of my study: his deistical, anti-institutional religion tract, The Age of Reason. Whether this was a conscious decision or not, it merely continues the long and ambiguous relationship between Thomas Paine and American culture.

The importance of Paine’s writings in influencing the creation of a new American persona in the 1770s would be difficult to overstate: his pamphlets and editorials forged a national identity based in opposition to the British monarchy and as a starting point for a worldwide democratic revolution; “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” he declared in Common Sense. Indeed, Paine became the prototype figure for the young republic as he continued his defense of radical democratic principles, later taking his show on the road to England and, when unsuccessful there, France, just in time for the boiling point of the French Revolution.

But it was his years in France that altered his position in the American pantheon. Not only did he become associated in the public mind as the face of an increasingly unpopular revolution—at least at the federal and elite level—but he had finally gained the gusto to publish on what he felt was the second of a two-part revolution for American society: that the political revolution would “be followed by a revolution in the system of religion.” “All national institutions of churches,” he declared in Age of Reason, “appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” Paine had confidence that, just as the American colonists embraced his message two decades before, the American citizens would now recognize the frailty of Christian logic, reject the oppression of organized religion, and welcome a society based on natural religion and anti-biblical morality.

Of course, Paine’s prediction proved not only to be wrong, but drastically wrong, and his reputation suffered deeply as a result. While the first edition of his Age of Reason sold remarkably well, the backlash against his deistic views were as numerous as they were vehement (and only increased after Paine published a second volume of diatribe). Pamphlets responding to Paine were published from every region of the young nation as well as every denomination of the increasingly competitive religious marketplace; respondents ranged from Congregationalist Timothy Dwight to Unitarian Joseph Priestley, and from Baptist Daniel Humphreys to Universalist Elhanan Winchester. These responses—the focus of my master’s thesis—number over one hundred and offer an important glimpse into 1790s America. However, while each individual text represented a different outlook for the future of America to the extent that they shatter the idea of a homogenous view of American society during the period, they unite in an important way: not only was Paine wrong, they argued, but his views were un-American. Paine, once at the crux of the American identity, was now the antitype for a nation increasingly drawn to morality based on revealed religion, an epistemology based on biblical common sense, and an exceptionalist culture pitted against Paine’s cosmopolitan milieu.

Paine’s reputation would only get worse over the next few decades, especially after a puzzling decision in 1796 to publish an open letter lashing out against then-President George Washington. Even the Jeffersonian Democrats who synthesized with Paine’s radical republican views felt a need to distance themselves from the perceived “atheist” who soon became the bogeyman for the Evangelical culture. Paine’s previous role in the revolution diminished as well: when Mercy Otis Warren wrote the popular history of the American Revolution—a job Thomas Paine was originally assigned to write—Paine’s influence was literally relegated to nothing more than a footnote. When monuments and plaques were raised in honor of the nation’s founders within the next century, anything remembering Paine was conspicuously absent, all because his deistical tracts overshadowed his revolutionary propaganda. “It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read ‘The Age of Reason,’” Mark Twain fittingly wrote toward the end of the following century.

This does not mean that Paine has forever remained in the shadows, however; far from it. The controversial writer has had several resurgences in the twentieth century, from FDR’s use of The Crisis at the start of World War II to Ronald Reagan’s invoking of Paine to prophesy the greatness of America’s future. The largest—and perhaps most ironic—revival, though, has been the use of Paine by the Tea Party movement. Attracted to his views of limited government, Glenn Beck assigned a man identified as Thomas Paine to announce Beck’s 9/12 project last year; then, perceivably inspired by Paine, Beck published his own Common Sense as the manifesto for the right-wing movement, even republishing the entirety of Paine’s same-titled classic within its covers as a way to seemingly validate his message. Paine’s works are perhaps being printed in more editions today than ever before, and his simple yet powerful voice thunders throughout many Tea Party rallies.

Of course, what is absent is any mention of the other half of Paine’s revolutionary argument: the evolution away from Christianity. This is, of course, no surprise given the religious underpinnings of much of the movement. (Also amusingly missing is Paine’s critiques of the US Constitution.) Paine is only useful to today’s pundits for his political commentary, while the religious portion of his message is conveniently swept under the rug. Just as with any historic figure in modern times, though, it’s the pliability of his persona that makes Paine so relevant to today’s world—pliable enough to be used by Glenn Beck to critique big government on the one hand, and by Christopher Hitchens to critique modern-day society and religion on the other.

In the end, Glenn Beck, modern-day Tea Party Protestors, political commentators on both ends of the spectrum, cultural critics arguing from either side of many debates, and even the esteemed American Philosophical Society are only continuing a national tradition of choosing what parts of our history to emphasize and what parts to ignore. In a sense, many echo the resolution a New York Republican Society pronounced two centuries ago: “May [Paine’s] Right’s of Man be handed down to our latest posterity, but may his Age of Reason never live to see the rising generation.” Such is the malleable nature of national memory, especially when religion is predominantly involved. Perhaps, however, Paine would be pleased to receive any acknowledgement in today’s world, no matter how disjointedly it comes.

I Hate Methodism; and G. K. Chesterton vs. H. L. Mencken: Battle of the Monogrammed Dudes. Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, Pt IV

Randall Stephens

I’ve been doing some nonfiction pleasure reading that overlaps with my work. (I try to avoid that sort of thing whenever possible, because it could nerd me out beyond all measure.) I like Herbert Asbury’s punch-punch, bludgeon, stab-stab prose. (Asbury sat at the feet of H. L. Mencken, like so many other talented, and even untalented, writers of his era.) So Asbury’s 1926 memoir about growing up in the stodgy Methodist town of Farmington, Missouri (Farmington, Misery for him) drew my eye when I saw it on a bookstore shelf some months back. As an added bonus Roy Blount, Jr. writes the insightful foreword to the 2003 edition of Up From Methodism: A Memoir of a Man Gone to the Devil. (I got it new from Half Price Books for $3.98! Half Price Books, please send the check to my office for that blurb.)

Farmington was no Manhattan. It was no Baltimore, either. In fact, it made Jefferson City, MO, look like the place to be. Columbia, seat of learning, by that logic, was Paris. Asbury—yes, bearer of that famous Methodist name and lineage—skewers the townsfolk with nary a sense of guilt. Locals are slack-jawed faith monkeys, mountebanks, dunderheads, joyless shrews, and worse. No moonshine swilling thrillbillies in pious Farmington. This hamlet was, in Iggy Pop’s words, “No fun to hang around.” Here’s a prime example of Asbury’s barbed prose (note the awesomely spare American style):

Under no circumstance could we play the fiddle in our house on Sunday, because of all music, that which came from the fiddle was the most sinful. It was the Devil's instrument. No fiddling on Sunday had been a cardinal rule of my father's family since Colonial days in Virginia, and later in Mississippi, and in North Carolina my grandmother had compelled her Negro slaves to put up their musical instruments from Saturday night to Monday morning. Eventually I took lessons from the music teacher in Farmington and learned to call the fiddle a violin, and as I grew older I played when I pleased, although not very successfully. But so long as the instrument remained a fiddle it was played in our house on Sunday on only one occasion. And then the performance was a neighborhood scandal, and only the fact that the instrument had been played by a Preacher saved us from getting into trouble with God and His representatives in Farmington.

Something else I recently came across—also written in the Jazz Age, though basically jazzless—was G. K. Chesterton’s shot across the pond. The rotund, witty defender of the faith and champion of the faithful took aim at H. L. Mencken. Mencken had gone a bit too far in his campaign to exorcise religious mania from the land. And, Chesterton wrote, religion could not be reduced to its most grotesque and wild manifestations. Just because America was thick with sawdust trail preachers spitting out idiotic sermons, it did not follow that all Christianity was as insipid or idiotic as the most simple-minded faith healer or snake juggler. Chesteron also set his sights on the Mercury editor’s high esteem of science. “The popular science, that rages in the American Press,” Chesterton mused, “is simply a dance of lunacy more ghastly than a dance of death.” Mencken is a kind of irreligious maniac. Crazed on the subject of irreligion. Sounds amazingly like current science vs. religion debates, doesn’t it?

G. K. Chesterton, “Mencken and the American Mercury,” Illustrated London News, June 23, 1928.

I have already noted that, if there is such a thing as religious mania, there is also such a thing as irreligious mania. Just recently, perhaps, it has been the commoner of the two. But a very interesting study of the matter comes from a country in which we may say, without injustice, that both are fairly common. I had occasion to remark recently, in this place, that an American paper had accused me of being an anti-American writer; and I commented on the curious irony that the American paper was itself an anti-American paper. Anyhow, most of the writers on it were at least more anti-American than I am. But, though I may be permitted thus to parry a purely personal charge, and a highly preposterous one, I should not like anyone to suppose that I do not both enjoy and value the magazine in question. I am quite well aware that Me. Mencken, the editor of the American Mercury, is really doing his duty as an American citizen in being an anti-American critic. I myself have been regarded often enough as an Anti-English critic, when I regarded myself as a patriot. In short, there are immense internal evils for Mr. Mencken to attack, and he is perfectly right to attack them. All is well so long as the good citizen abuses his own city. The trouble begins when the foreigner abuses it—or, almost as often, when the foreigner admires it.

But the particular point about the two types of madmen arises thus. It is very natural that Mr. Mencken should be mostly occupied with trying to restrain religious mania. To what extravagant lengths that sort of devotional demagogy can go in the Western democracy, it is necessary to study his notes to realise. The methods of Billy Sunday arc somewhat notorious; but compared with some of the religious ranters quoted in the magazine, one could almost mistake Billy Sunday for a rather shy and refined gentleman of the Oxford Movement. When theological problems are presented in the form of "Is God a Papa or a Father?" we all feel that the title is enough to tell us all we want to know about the sermon. When another Evangelist says that the American Radio Commission consists of five, but the one that broadcasted the Psalms only of three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. we are, like Queen Victoria, not amused. When he observes cheerily, "We don't know what soap company broadcast in David's day, or what newspapers had a tic-up with the radio, but you are still tuning in on David's programme" ... we feel we have no strong desire to tune in on his programme. But, anyhow, the chief efforts of the American Mercury have to be directed towards this howling wilderness of sectarian sensationalism. It can hardly turn its attention to many other matters while so much of the dialectic on the other side is the multitudinous chattering of Monkeyville. The editor must face the fact: he must recognise the religious atmosphere of a Sabbath as wild as a Witches' Sabbath; he must sit tight and try to survive Sunday, or at any rate Billy Sunday. He must be grimly patient and wait till the Holy Rollers roll by.

But even here there is any amount of evidence of a quite opposite peril or potential madness. Men may be on what side they like in a controversy between Religion and Science. When both are sane, there is not the slightest difficulty about being on the side of both. But when both are insane, it is certain that Science is more insane than Religion. The popular science, that rages in the American Press and local government, is simply a dance of lunacy more ghastly than a dance of death. And an exceedingly valuable and important protest against it can be found in the same number of the Mercury from which I have picked the examples of theological hysteria. The protest is all the better because it is not the sort of protest that I should write, or that any person of my beliefs would write. The critic is writing entirely in the interests of Science, and is perfectly indifferent to the interests of Religion. He is probably quite as much of a materialist as the mad materialist; only he is not mad. And he enters a virile and telling protest against that science, which is his only religion, being dragged through the mire as a degrading superstition. He insists that most of the psycho-analysis of madness is simply mad psycho-analysis. It is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. Nor are there even learned and concentrated lunatics, like those who sometimes harden their hobbies into lunacies in the shadow of libraries. They seem for the most part, both in England and America, to be exceedingly cheap and superficial lunatics, who stick any random notions in their heads, as the others were supposed to stick straws in their hair. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are.

What about Southern Irreligion?

Art Remillard

As one brilliant (and humble) reviewer summarized, volume one of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture "is comprehensive, relevant, and representative of past and present trends in the field of southern religion." If there is something missing here, chances are Sam Hill's hulking Encyclopedia of Religion in the South would have it.

Yet this morning, while flipping through the entries and indexes of both, I couldn't find a single reference to southern irreligion. No atheism, agnosticism, freethinking, or skepticism. And why would I? As Randall "Emotive Cutting Language" Stephens rightly said, the South is "the prayer capitol of America." But academic historians are in the business of finding new and unexplored topics (and convincing us of how important these topics are). So isn't there someone willing to fill this gap? Well, we might just have somewhere to begin with John Sparks's Kentucky's Most Hated Man: Charles Chilton Moore & The Bluegrass Blade. From the book description:

...born in 1837, [Charles Chilton Moore] was the grandson of religious reformer Barton W. Stone, and was himself a minister in Versailles, Kentucky, before he left the church, passing through deism and agnosticism to eventually declare himself an atheist. Moore founded The Blue Grass Blade newspaper in 1884 in Lexington. He was only able to publish sporadically due to financial and legal problems originating mostly because of the paper's editorial content--attacks on citizens that Moore considered to be bigots (including Bible-thumpers and whiskey distillers) and his advocacy of unpopular positions such as agnosticism and women's suffrage. . . . Moore is considered one of the fathers of American atheism. The Blue Grass Blade was circulated across the country, gaining him notoriety among both the religious and non-religious. . . . His legal trials resulted in landmark Federal judicial decisions which set precedents in the areas of both freedom of religion and
freedom of the press.

Stylistically, the book is similar to Sparks's biography on "Raccoon" John Smith (subtitled, Frontier Kentucky's Most Famous Preacher--I'm seeing a pattern here). In his review, Craig Thompson Friend lamented Sparks's penchant for prolonged digressions, reliance on outdated sources, and lack of attention to the historiography. The same can be said of Kentucky's Most Hated Man. But Sparks is not an academic historian. And he seems rather unconcerned with our insights and criticisms. Still, the book might be conversation starter. Citing Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers, Sparks observes that Moore came along during the "Golden Age of Freethought," and modeled himself after "The Great Agnostic," Robert Green Ingersoll.

So Moore localized a national freethinking trend in Dixie. He also felt the Bible Belt's wrath as a result. The debates that Moore generated found southern evangelicals articulating their beliefs in new ways, fending off the unique challenges put forth by this atheist interlocutor. How many Moores were there in the New South? Who knows. But somewhere, there's an ambitious doctoral student searching for a topic--hopefully that person will be willing to write an encyclopedia entry or two.

Beyond Belief? Secularity and Scholarly Darlings

Paul Harvey

Nathan Schneider, "Beyond Belief: Research in Religion Goes After a New Target, The Secular," takes up a topic we've discussed here some before: the new scholarly research into secularity. We hit this topic before in covering Phil Zuckerman's new book Society Without God, and also in looking at the rise of the "nones" in surveys such as ARIS (that is, those answering "no religion" in surveys about personal religiosity). Recent commentors have noted that most of the growth of the nones took place from 1990 to 2001, and growth has leveled off since then, so the media hype about the recent study has been (surprise) as much hype as substance. Nonetheless, careful studies of un-belief are overdue and welcomed. Schneider surveys a variety of recent studies, the most interesting of which suggest how the boundary between being religious and irreligious is far more permeable than generally assumed:

Phil Zuckerman's study in Scandinavia, in fact, suggests that these distinctions aren't as clear as one might expect. His interviews show the extent to which, even in the absence of traditional supernatural beliefs, the subjects' religious heritage provides them with moral guideposts and cultural habits. Not believing in God doesn't stop most Danes and Swedes from considering themselves Christians.

Religions, we are beginning to learn, can be better understood by paying attention to what irreligion looks like. Probe irreligion, and you encounter not only new insights about how it works in people's lives, but also echoes of the very religions it defines itself against.

Before getting too comfortable with their apparent newfound status, however, the new secularists still have to contend with some fundamental realities, including the (still) remarkably high rates of religiosity in America. In short, other ways of looking at the evidence suggest that we're about as close to being "post-Christian" as we are to being "post-racial." Stephen Prothero addresses this in "Post-Christian: Not Even Close," where he suggests:

What the rise of the "nones" shows us is not how American Christianity is declining but how it is changing. The data tell us that Christians are increasingly likely to describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious, that they are increasingly wary of labels and institutions, and that they identify their faith less and less with "organized religion" and more and more with the personal power of Jesus himself.

What the data do not tell us is that the United States is becoming "post-Christian." If you meet a random American walking down the street, the odds are only one in 62 that he or she will self-identify as atheist or agnostic. . . . Meanwhile, Christianity remains, for good or for ill, a vital political force, not just on the right but also on the left, and the Christian Bible remains the scripture of American politics, invoked thousands of times a year on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

Over the past two decades, I have taught the "Christian America" debate to hundreds of students in my Religious Studies courses. When we finish our discussion, I call the question. My Christian students almost invariably describe the United States as a multicultural nation of religions, but my Jewish students tell me you have to be blind (or Christian) not to see that this is a Christian country. Here Christmas, not Passover, is a national holiday, and the only question about our presidents' religious affiliation seems to be from which Christian denomination they will come.

Prothero and others (including some posts here) have pointed out that the real news of the ARIS survey is the the shift of Catholicism from Northeast to Southwest, and the continuing decline of mainstream Protestantism and rise of evangelical faiths (born-agains now constituting 34% of Americans).

All of which makes me think of the protagonist in my favorite Elvis Costello song "Beyond Belief," from his Imperial Bedroom:

History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues . . .

I've got a feeling
I'm going to get a lot of grief
Once this seemed so appealing,
Now I am beyond belief.

American Religious Identification Survey

Paul Harvey

The ongoing ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) project has just released its latest numbers -- a brief summary story and graphics are here. There are some obvious limitations about surveys such as these, but generally they provide some interesting data for discussion. The biggest news on this one: the rise of the "nones," i.e. no religion -- up to 15%, from a starting point of 8% in the original 1990 survey, and now almost equal with Baptists and just a little under Catholics as the top group in the survey -- more on them here. Generally, almost all denominations have lost ground, according to the survey; the relative decline of non-Catholic Christian groups is graphed here, while the growth of respondents answering "no religion" is graphed here. Other researchers are attempting to tabulate the growth of Islam, which they feel is undercounted in these surveys. Overall, the friendly atheists are happy! Perhaps Obama's deliberate inclusion in his addresses of "those with no faith" and like phrases will appear more frequently in political discourse.

Faith and Skepticism in the New Common-Place

Paul Harvey

Don't miss Christopher Grasso, "Skepticism and Faith: The Early Republic," in the new Common-Place. Earlier we blogged about his piece "Deist Monster: On Religious Common Sense in the Wake of the American Revolution," Journal of American History 95:1 (June 2008): 43-68. The Common-Place piece is a more personal reflection on what forces shape one's historical questions, how they are related to present questions but not bound by them, and indeed often start long before current preoccupations became preoccupations. He writes:

I'm reminded of a colleague who recently published a book on warfare and American history from the colonial period to the late twentieth century. Reviews discussed the study as if it had been inspired by the Iraq war. The author certainly did not claim to live in a cultural vacuum, unaffected by the current state of affairs; still, his project began two decades ago and is based on exhaustive research. Histories, though written in a particular time and place and from a particular point of view, may inspire op-ed pieces but shouldn't be confused with them.

His project came out of exploring the papers of Ezra Stiles (Congregationalist minister and president of Yale College in the late eighteenth century), including Stiles's own very secretive and closeted struggles with doubt and skepticism.

By retracing my steps to my encounter with Ezra Stiles in the library, I don't mean to suggest that the project was incubated entirely in the archives. No research is completely unconnected to personal experience. That doesn't mean religious history, any more than other kinds of history, entails one of those confessional prefaces in which the author discloses his or her personal relationship to the faith tradition being examined. Perry Miller's atheism and George Marsden's evangelicalism no doubt influenced each man's studies of the Protestant theologian Jonathan Edwards, but the evaluation of their books should aim at the cogency of their interpretive arguments in relation to the available evidence rather than at the scholars' biographies. The historian's own religious belief or doubt is one of many factors shaping his or her particular perspective, a point of view that provides moments of both blindness and insight when trying to imagine the past.

Grasso's story focuses on a period usually characterized by the triumph of evangelicalism, moral movements inspired by it, and the demise of the skeptical Enlightened tradition. My own work (and that of many others) questions this story from the "underside of that millennium" [sorry, a little self-quotation], focusing on Native peoples, African Americans, and others. The focus here is different, for Grasso has dug into the archives of white Americans whose skepticism engaged in a constant dialogue with the rise of "America's God." As he explains,

But the story of the relation of skepticism and faith is more than the tale of a few marginalized freethinkers and artificially induced moral panics. Religious skepticism touched—and in some cases transformed—more lives than we might expect in the early American republic.

This is really an affecting, and an effective, piece, both for its history, its historiography, and its personal reflections on how we come to the topics we do, and how we think about those topics within our own personal and institutional contexts.

UPDATE: John Fea and Brad Hart have blogged further on this piece.

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.

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.

God for Dummies, Literally

by Randall Stephens

Here is a debate that rarely, if ever, erupts in the quiet halls historians and religious studies scholars inhabit: Folks who believe in God are not the sharpest tools in the box. Or, God is for dunderheads . . . So, Mencken was right. The Chronicle Review recently brought up the research of Richard Lynn, University of Ulster psychology professor emeritus, who is both raising hackles and stirring up dust.

Richard Lynn . . . . has ignited a fresh dispute. In a forthcoming paper in the journal Intelligence—which was co-written with John Harvey, an independent scholar, and Helmuth Nyborg, a professor of psychology at the University of Aarhus, in Denmark— Lynn argues that there is a strong correlation between high levels of intelligence and disbelief in God.

What would it look like if a historian of American religion bought this argument? (Might that amount to professional suicide, or, at least, maiming?) Would he or she dust off ye olde secularization thesis?: “Since the 1960s, believers have been dumb and dumberer.” Would the model work for 19th or early 20th century history?: “Pentecostals—intense believers—were thicker than a block of wood. They may or may not have been dispossessed, but they certainly were stupid.” Sounds like the old mainline chestnuts from the 1950s.

Lynn’s previous arguments concerning race, gender, and intelligence are damning enough. And the comments the Chronicle has culled from newspapers and blogs are telling. It seems that few academics and commentators, regardless of their own take on the matter, want to jump in Lynn's boat.

Doc Watch and Secularism in America

BY RANDALL STEPHENS

I've gotta confess. I'm a documentary junky. Youtube's staple of obscure clips and Netflix's ever-expanding catalog have only fed my habit. (I enjoyed reading about the Jewish Americans doc here on the blog and caught most of one episode last week.)

Two films recently came to my attention. Though, I have seen neither of them. The first was a big hit at the 2007 Sundance Festival. The second should be in theaters this spring.

For the Bible Tells Me So:

Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival, Dan Karslake's provocative, entertaining documentary brilliantly reconciles homosexuality and Biblical scripture, and in the process reveals that Church-sanctioned anti-gay bias is based almost solely upon a significant (and often malicious) misinterpretation of the Bible.

Praying With My Legs The Radically Amazing Life and Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel:

Filmmaker Steven Brand and Rabbi David Lieber, President Emeritus of the University of Judaism, will view 30 minutes of the proposed 90-minute documentary. “Praying With My legs” is about the life, times, and teachings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who counted the UJ’s esteemed Dr. Lieber among his students.

(Several weeks ago Paul wrote an entry on Heschel here.)

Another fairly recent item of interest: Wilfred McClay's Pew-sponsored lecture in December 2007 on religion and secularism:

Religion and Secularism: The American Experience:

Some of the nation's leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in December 2007, for the Pew Forum's biannual conference on religion, politics and public life. Given the recent popularity of several high-profile books on atheism, the Pew Forum invited Wilfred McClay, a distinguished professor of intellectual history, to speak on the historical relationship between religion and secularism in America.

Framed

PAUL HARVEY

Here's a fairly new but high-powered blog to check out: The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere. Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, Leigh Schmidt, my former Young Scholar compatriot Winny Sullivan, my graduate school buddy John Torpey, and other eminent sociologists, philosophers, and religious studies folk contribute. See, for example, Leigh Eric Schmidt's "That Weird, Strange Thing," which takes on Charles Taylor, and Robert Bellah's "Is a Global Civil Religion Possible," in which he writes:

One thing I learned from the complex discussion of the 1967 essay is that for many, particularly religious believers but also secularists, the idea of “a civil religion” is viewed as a threat, one religion competing with and threatening to displace other religions, even being established. All my Durkheimian arguments that any really existing social group necessarily has a religious dimension never quelled the opposition, to the point where, by about 1980, I stopped using the term civil religion and talked about the same issues using other language, language that did not involve me in endless, futile, discussions of definition. So if American civil religion is a bad idea, a global civil religion can only be worse, and I can answer the question of my title, which itself was meant to provoke as much as to describe, in the negative: no, a global civil religion is not possible.

But for the creation of a viable and coherent world order a world civil society is surely an essential precondition, and, dare I say it, any actual civil society will have a religious dimension, will need not only a legal and an ethical framework, but some notion that it conforms to the nature of ultimate reality. The biggest immediate problem is the strengthening of global civil society. As I will elaborate in my next post, I would suggest that perhaps the religious communities of the world may have something to contribute to that global civil society, and, indeed, that their participation may be essential for its success.

On the Road to Atheism -- Again

Atheism Again
Kelly Baker

Speaking of Faith has a podcast on entitled Beyond the Religion-Atheism Divide, in which Krista Tippett interviews Harvey Cox, Jr., a Harvard Divinity School Professor, on the current fad in books on atheism (see my previous post) as well as reflection on his work on secularism. The conversation highlights the problem between dividing the religious and non-religious so sharply. The podcast is described:

In 1965, a young Harvard professor became the best-selling voice of secularism in America with his book The Secular City. He sees the old thinking in the "new atheism" of figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The either/or debates between religion and atheism, he says, obscure the truly interesting interplay between faith and other forms of knowledge that is unfolding today.

One of the main critiques of these recent works in “new atheism” is the occlusion of nuanced ways that religion impacts our world in a myriad of ways rather than just being the root of violence or hatred as some authors suggest. Additionally, Tracy Fessenden’s new book, Culture and Redemption provides a stunning look at the foundations of secularism and how the religious impacts the process of secularization. (Fessenden’s book is highlighted in this post).

Kelly Baker, Lived Irreligion

Is Atheism Hip? or Lived Irreligion in America
Kelly Baker

An interesting trend has been presenting itself in American news magazines in recent months: attention to atheism in America. Most of this can be attributed to books written by the so-called “New Atheists.” These “new” atheists, for the most part, include at least one “old” atheist Richard Dawkins, whose new book The God Delusion much lives up to its title. The rest of the gang include Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell). This books have caused a little bit of a sensation and have left many wondering “how many atheists are there in a nation know for its religiosity?” Nation contributor Ronald Aronson wrote a piece, entitled “The New Atheists”, pondering this very question. He writes:

We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don't believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91 percent do. In fact, this is not true. How many unbelievers are there? The question is difficult to assess accurately because of the challenges of constructing survey questions that do not tap into the prevailing biases about religion. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed more than 50,000 people, more than 29 million adults--one in seven Americans--declare themselves to be without religion. The more recent Baylor Religion Survey ("American Piety in the 21st Century") of more than 1,700 people, which bills itself as "the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted," calls for adjusting this number downward to exclude those who believe in a God but do not belong to a religion. Fair enough. But Baylor's own Gallup survey is a bit shaky for at least two reasons. It counts anyone who believes in a "higher power" but not God as believing in God--casting a vast net over adherents of everything from spirit to history to love. Yet the study allows unbelievers only one option: to not believe in "anything beyond the physical world," leaving no space for those who regard themselves as agnostics or skeptics, secularists or humanists. Contrast this with a more recent and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed belief in God or a supreme being.

Aronson notes that part of the problem with determining numerically how many atheists are present in America is the “social desirability effect,” which means that folks generally want to give a popular rather than unpopular answer when polled. If America is known for her religiosity, who really wants to be described as “non-religious”? Interestingly, Aronson believes that the non-believing population is being to become unhappy with their marginalization and protest their treatment, which is why these “New Atheists” are so popular.

Additionally, Newsweek highlighted a new parenting book for atheist parents, who are not quite comfortable using “higher power” justifications for why the goldfish has to be flushed. Parenting Beyond Belief strives to provide guidance to parents, who consider themselves “free thinkers” on a variety of moral and ethical questions. In March of this year, Rep. Stark, a Democrat from California, declared his belief in no higher power, much to the pleasure of American Humanist Association. Atheism might appear to be in vogue.

Yet Joseph Gerteis, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, published a paper with Penny Edgell and Doug Hartmann in the American Sociological Review called "Atheists As ‘Other': Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society," which has provoked some controversy. In "Atheism, Morality and Belonging in American Life," he writes that atheists received a larger portion of rejection from the general public than any other group he researched. Gerteis attributes this to a common understanding that morality is tied to a belief in God, and that atheists, with an avowed disbelief, are judged to be immoral. The term has also become a catch-all that includes other “unsavory” types from Communists to homosexuals (again, for the general public). Gerteis, of course, asserts that atheists can be and often are moral individuals in spite of the assumption (with parenting books to guide one on the subject). What I find fascinating is that atheists are seen as an anomaly because of America’s fervent religiosity. The question becomes how do atheists, then, fit into larger tropes of patriotism and nationalism without a belief in a higher power. The better question, I think, is how do individual atheists understand their place in American culture. A study into the lived irreligion of atheists could highlight how religion and nationalism are melded together in American life, and it would provide insight into how the non-religious negotiate a supposed society of believers. Is anyone out there working on such questions?