What Catholic Reform Looks Like

Paul Harvey

Recently we put up a guest post from Julie Ingersoll reviewing Colleen McDannell's new work The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America. This work, part family memoir and part religious history, was recently published by Basic Books.

There's a nice interview with Colleen about the book, up now here. Below, a little excerpt, which I hope will interest you in reading the rest:

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) was perhaps the most important event in twentieth-century religious history. While there are many fine books about Vatican II, they focus either on the session debates or on the ideas contained in the Council documents. What I wondered about was how Vatican II influenced the lives of average American Catholics. What was parish life like before and after the Council? Did Vatican II really change anything?

It really is impossible to speak of “the American Catholic,” because of the ethnic, class, and regional differences. So, I decided to use my mother as the narrative thread to look at how certain Catholics negotiated the changes of the past century. I wanted to shift the discussion to girls, women, nuns, and parish life because the sex abuse scandals had yet again reduced Catholicism to a story of boys, men, priests, and bishops. I also thought that it was about time that religious historians take seriously mobile, middle-class life in the suburbs, especially in the western United States.

Secularization, Pluralism, and Moral Minimalism: David Sehat Responds to his Respondents

Paul Harvey

Some time ago I posted a very substantive two-part interview with David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom. In the interim, over at David's group blog U.S. Intellectual History, several of his fellows (and some others, including Dan Williams, whose book on the religious right, God's Own Party, has received extensive attention here) have responded to and critiqued David's book. More specifically, the blog has posted responses and critiques from Daniel K. Williams, Andrew Hartman, Ray Haberski, and Christopher Hickman.

That forum has now been completed, with David's response to his critics. Taking the responses, and David's reply, all together, is a great intellectual treat, so I wanted to make sure and provide the links to it here for those of you who don't customarily cruise over to their blog. This is pretty hefty intellectual history, so I wouldn't advise it for beach reading, but for those who complain that U.S. historians are excessively specialized and never take on the big picture or grand narrative anymore, here's your answer (or at least one answer) to that.

I also call attention to this because in his response David provides some of the intellectual/theoretical underpinning behind the structuring of his book -- so this is sort of his short "discourse on method," if you will, or a kind of theoretical appendix. He also uses his response to emphasize a point sometimes lost in discussions of his book, which is how much of the book is actually about religious dissenters who stood outside the moral establishment, poked holes in it, and (to my mind) showed that American religious freedom ultimately was not a myth after all.

Sehat divides his responses up into issues of 1) secularization; 2) pluralism; and 3) moral minimalism. Here's a brief excerpt from the first part, about his understanding of the term "secularization":

Those who have read The Myth of American Religious Freedom will know that the issue of religious authority is a major theme of the book. Religious partisans have long argued that their religion provides the morals to be enforced in law. Another way of saying it is that religious partisans made their religious authority determinative in law and government, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so. The success of religious partisans in imposing their religious authority on law resulted in a moral establishment, a proxy religious establishment that provided religious authority with the coercive powers of law.

My book focuses on the role of dissenters to the moral establishment—those who objected to the reach of religious authority into law and government. Dissenters were central to the decline of the moral establishment and the secularization of American public life, a secularization that, I must add, is tenuous and seems, in the last several decades, to be moving into reverse. And it is this understanding of secularization that apparently did not come across as clearly as I wished. Williams, for example, thinks that I depict religious liberals as people “who quickly realized that their arguments did not depend upon religious faith and who therefore embraced secular language in advancing human rights.”

But this is not quite what I say, or at least what I intended to say. I sought to say something at once more specific and also stronger: Religious liberals, precisely because of their religious beliefs, were agents of secularization, a secularization that involved the expansion of rights because it meant the decline of religious authority outside the sphere of religious institutions.

Just a short addendum. IN the middle of his response, after a lengthy explanation of how exactly he is using the term secularization (basically, to mean a decline in the public authority of religious institutions, not to mean a decline in individual religiosity), Sehat says that this secularization is "tenuous and seems, in the last several decades, to be moving into reverse.." Just after initially posting this, I came across this piece about Governor Rick Perry (R, Texas) and his call for and imminent leadership in an August 6 "day of prayer and fasting on behalf of our troubled nation." The event is sponsored by (among other groups) the American Family Association -- of which much could be said, but which most recently linked homosexuality to "increasing ungodliness and depravity assaulting our nation" (you know, like all those political sex scandals, Ensign, Weiner, et all -- oh wait, they weren't gay scandals, never mind). Perry described the event, which will be held in a stadium in Houston, as an "apolitical Christian prayer service" which will provide "spiritual solutions to the many challenges we face in our communities, states and nation."

This blog expects Historianess to be there and live-blogging this latest gathering of the erstwhile moral establishment.

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, Redux: Part II of Darren Dochuk Interview

Paul Harvey

Below I'm reposting part II of my interview with Darren Dochuk, author of From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism. Part I of the interview is here. Part II was posted last week, but Mr. Monster-Blogger program ate it, so let's try this again. Hey, Mr. Blogger Man, play this post for me, I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.

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PH: You begin the book with one of the most famous tropes of American religious history -- the errand in the wilderness -- and use it to situate the plain folk from the South/Southwest that you are going to follow through the book. You write: "these white southern evangelicals envisioned themselves as pilgrims carrying out their own errand into the wilderness." Can you describe briefly how they saw that "errand," and more about what kind of world they hoped to create in that "wilderness"?

DD: While reading church newspapers like the California Southern Baptist and the Assemblies of God’s Informant I was struck by the way southern evangelicals approached their new home as if on a mission; pastors, editors, and denominational leaders all spoke of being on an “errand.” This isn’t uncommon among migrant groups, since uprooted-ness tends to encourage notions of exceptionalism, but I thought it was suggestive that southern evangelical migrants approached their move this way. Considering their impressive numbers, southern evangelicalism’s built-in entrepreneurialism, and the freedoms of Los Angeles’ hinterland, it seemed significant that southern evangelicals encountered their new home with a confidence that could affect change. Able to move from the small town south to self-contained suburbs, these sojourners didn’t feel the jarring effects of migration that we see in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, in which Old Testament motifs of banishment (“exodus” and “exile”) are stressed. This isn’t to discount Steinbeck, or historians like James Gregory, who rightly and beautifully describes the hardships southern migrants faced in California. Still, I think the errand motif is a helpful qualifier, because it stresses the empowerment southern evangelical migrants felt (and were told to feel) when resettling on the West Coast.

And to be honest, I also found it intriguing that these sojourners did what they set out to do—impose their will on their wilderness in order to awaken their people back home. Meant to give hope to an uprooted people, the “errand” motif (as exaggerated or skewed as it may have been) in fact became a blueprint of sorts that these sojourners followed to a tee. In the immediate, they used it as justification to carve out strong, independent churches, ministries, schools, and communities in which they could codify principles of individualism, local autonomy, laissez-faire economics, and family values. In the long-term, they used it to help fashion this amalgam of beliefs into a coherent political strategy—the GOP’s Sunbelt strategy—that would win the hearts and votes of the people they left behind in Oklahoma and Texas, and ultimately win them access to Washington’s halls of power. So, although a neat rhetorical device (another reason why I used it), the errand motif also points us to a real, lived experience that few historians have fully appreciated in the context of post-war religious and political change.

PH: As you know, the role of race within the "silent majority" is a major controversy of the historiography of twentieth-century conservatism. How did the people you write about conceptualize race in their worldview, and to what degree could they be seen as wanting to build communities, consciously or not, that preserved the privileges of whiteness?

Part of the challenge in writing a character driven narrative, as I tried to do, is that it’s tricky to delineate between subtle but important shades of racial views and measure structural forces of exclusion alongside attitudinal ones. It’s difficult to unpack this entire complex; others, like Paul Harvey, David Chappell, Joe Crespino, and Ed Blum, have done a more thorough job of it. That said, my book tries to offer a basic insight or two.

First, I think the racial “backlash” storyline is too simplistic. Other historians have stressed this point, but the sense that evangelical conservatives have acted (and continue to act) out of some sort of race rage remains strong. In terms of attitudes, the southerners I study came west with assumed notions of white privilege, and throughout the 1940s and 1950s they built churches and communities that sought (consciously or not) to protect this privilege. Southern California’s decentralized suburbs made this easy. But there was room within this worldview for preachers and parishioners to reconsider their views in light of California’s multicultural landscape; during the 1960s and 1970s many did, some didn’t, at least initially, and a few took it upon themselves to ensure that their neighborhoods remained white only. What is important, though, is the degree to which California evangelicalism’s moderates rose to the forefront and, through increasingly interracial ministries and interracial alliances (with black Baptist and Latino Pentecostals, for example), forged a post-racial, “color-blind” conservatism that celebrated the virtues of free markets and family values beyond white-nonwhite divided. Part savvy, part sincere, California’s color-blind conservatism certainly had its internal contradictions and limitations, but the point is that it allowed evangelicals and conservatives generally to turn their political attention to other pressing matters, like gender, women’s rights, and sexuality, and form a more centrist Right that could win the nation.

Again, this isn’t to diminish or write race out of the story as much as it is to complicate it a bit. Certainly, in terms of structural forces, my subjects contributed to a much larger system of racial exclusion, one in which their conservatism (either in its Jim Crow form or in its color-blind dispensation) was ill equipped to provide systematic answers. But then again, few Californians, liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican, could locate or agree on answers at the time. Southern evangelicals didn’t have to teach Southern Californian’s how to be racist, in other words, nor did they alone make Los Angeles the most segregated American city; systemic economic inequities created these divides, and whites of all class and partisan persuasion perpetuated them. To pin too much on evangelical conservatives is to miss a master narrative of prejudice in which everyone is implicated. At the same time, to downplay or lose sight of race and racism in evangelical conservatism’s history is equally dangerous. However explicitly or not, however innocently or not, the people I study made decisions based on a range of social, economic, theological, and political motivations that had lasting, negative consequences for race relations in California and the country, and that legacy is still with us today.

PH: Talk briefly about how much influence the John Birch Society and like minded groups played for the coming together of evangelicalism and conservatism which you trace in the book? Would you agree with Lisa McGirr that, while the Birchers eventually of course got pushed out of mainstream conservatism by politicians such as Reagan when he was governor, that the Birchers nonetheless were central for a certain time in galvanizing people at the grassroots?

Lisa McGirr rightly emphasizes the John Birch Society’s key role in Southern California’s Right. The JBS certainly nurtured a sharper-edged, fundamentalist conservatism that responded well to the “extremism…is no vice” side of Goldwater’s GOP. But what I found so remarkable, when tracking this group, was how “normal” it seemed as a type of social club for average suburbanites. Political ideas mattered to JBS members, and they acted on them with strong conviction, but the society also functioned as a gathering space in which businessmen, engineers, and housewives could debate free market principles and talk about neighborhood issues and current events.

This was just as true (if not more so) among transplanted southerners who worshipped in fundamentalist Baptist churches associated with J. Frank Norris and the Baptist Bible Fellowship—out of which John Birch emerged as a missionary during World War II. Whether they joined the JBS or not, members of BBF churches held John Birch in high regard, and viewed the JBS with respect as a front-line organization fighting the good fight for all patriotic Christians. Such steadfast commitment to the JBS cause, in fact, made JBS leaders nervous. Churches like Tim LaHaye’s in San Diego were so welcoming of JBS members and ideology that they made the JBS redundant; who needed a JBS cell group when megachurches offered the same teachings in a livelier setting? JBS leaders tried to steer their members away from LaHaye and other Baptist churches, but to no avail.

The larger point, though, is that the JBS was critical to California conservatism’s pre-1966 history. Even after Reagan purged JBS members from the GOP—a key step in conservatism’s move from the Goldwater margins to the Reagan center—Southern California’s independent Baptists would remain fiercely loyal to the JBS message. And in a way, their pulpits and pews would become even more important conveyances of this message after the JBS was forced underground.

PH: Your book traces the triumph of your subjects in reorienting the politics and culture of a nation, yet the book's epilogue ends with some of your key characters (such as Oklahoma migrant Jean Vandruff, whose entire life trajectory your follow as emblematic of the broader processes you discuss in the book) wondering about their "community's moral fabric and political future." Do you think the main subjects of your book perceive their "errand in the wilderness" from the New Deal to the present day to have been a successful one?

I begin and end the book with Jean Vandruff because he’s the man who got the project rolling—I started thinking about the southern migration angle soon after interviewing him. It was striking to hear Jean talk about his community’s life story in a rise and fall pattern—as if the errand was achieved by 1980 then lost again. On one hand, this isn’t that unusual—generational change is easily couched in these terms.

But on the other, I thought it was quite suggestive of how evangelicals saw their movement after 1980. When talking to others, I got the sense that the Cold War era was really good for evangelicalism, and that this prosperity crested in the 1970s, but then declined. And it’s true—this decade did see California evangelicalism emerge as a national trendsetter. As I point out in the book, the “born again” phenomenon that swept America was, in many ways, a California creation. And things in Southern California did change dramatically after 1980—the loss of defense contracts and tax bases meant local economies struggled (leaving some communities, like Orange County, bankrupt, and churches struggling to stay afloat), and shifting migration patterns meant that California’s Cold War evangelicalism was no longer primed for the future.

Of course, it’s easy to stress this too much. Evangelicalism has always thrived on the declension narrative—the first generation’s tribulation is always viewed by the next as opportunity calling, and in evangelical circles the “errand” is never done; this, after all, is evangelicalism’s life source. So it’s dangerous to overplay this rise and fall pattern. Moreover, as a religious movement, evangelicalism did adjust its vision—its “errand”—and find new frontiers after the 1970s, in newer suburbs built between Anaheim and San Diego, west towards Riverside, and north towards the Central Valley. By the 1990s it would also find its way back into the city as a movement that new immigrant groups and more diverse communities could revitalize according to their own emphases. As a political movement, evangelicalism continued to extend its grassroots influence into the 1990s and 2000s as an arm of the GOP. It would do so, however, amid the rising influence of other conservative constituents (Catholic and Mormon), and an empowered liberal Democratic opposition.

So, by adopting the language of an errand won then lost, perhaps my book contributes to a slightly skewed outlook. Overstated or not, however, I think Jean Vandruff’s assessment isn’t far from the truth: that the Reagan years (1966-1974) were California evangelicalism’s golden years.

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: An Interview with Darren Dochuk

Editor's Note: I'm delighted today to post the first of a two-part interview (the rest will come tomorrow) with Darren Dochuk, author of the recent and much-noted book From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, published last year by Norton. The dissertation version of this work won the Allan Nevins Prize, and now in published form I predict the work will be a top contender for some of the big forthcoming prizes. Here's a brief rundown on the work, from the book's website:

From Bible Belt to Sun Belt tells the dramatic and largely unknown story of "plain-folk" religious migrants: hardworking men and women from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas who fled the Depression and came to California for military jobs during World War II. Investigating this fiercely pious community at a grassroots level, Darren Dochuk uses the stories of religious leaders, including Billy Graham, as well as many colorful, lesser-known figures to explain how evangelicals organized a powerful political machine. This machine made its mark with Barry Goldwater, inspired Richard Nixon's "Southern Solution," and achieved its greatest triumph with the victories of Ronald Reagan. Based on entirely new research, the manuscript has already won the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. The judges wrote, "Dochuk offers a rich and multidimensional perspective on the origins of one of the most far-ranging developments of the second half of the twentieth century: the rise of the New Right and modern conservatism.

Of course, an endorsement of this work from a justly obscure historian such as myself means jack, so let's look at what some of the premiere historians of our time (Kevin Starr, Michael Kazin, and Sean Wilentz) have to say about it:

The nation is today color-coded into red and blue. In this tour de force of research, narrative, and analysis, a brilliant young historian chronicles how Southern California served as the matrix for this enduring bifurcation. Beneath the sunshine and the palm trees, uprooted evangelicals experienced a Great Awakening that transformed American politics in our era.” — Kevin Starr, University of Southern California

“With narrative authority and sparkling insight, Darren Dochuk explains how and why Southern California became the crucible of the Christian Right. Anyone who wants to understand the history of modern American conservatism should read this book.” — Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan

“Darren Dochuk's fortunate readers are in for some surprises as well as for enlightenment. The story of the Dust Bowl and the migration to southern California during the Great Depression, usually told through the left-wing tale of Tom Joad, turns out to be prologue to the rise of a vital segment of the modern Christian Right. From Bible Belt to Sunbelt is an essential contribution to our growing understanding of the origins and development of contemporary American conservatism.” — Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy

Just as a final note, I used this work this semester in conjunction with Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart (which we've featured extensively on the blog before, and is also reviewed, somewhat more critically, here) and Jefferson Cowie's fascinating new book Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (reviewed at length by Rick Perlstein here). Taking the three together -- with Dochuk and Moreton centrally featuring religious themes and characters, and Cowie scarcely mentioning religion as his interests/subjects lie elsewhere -- made for a fascinating comparison and contrast of recent history, especially the 1970s. In truth, by very different routes, the authors end up in some similar places, but perhaps the routes are more interesting than the final destination. For more extensive discussion of the emerging historiography of the 1970s, see the fine discussion over at U.S. Intellectual History.

Without further adieu, it's question time for Darren.

Update: Part II of the interview is here.
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PH: Darren, how does a volleyball star like you from the Great Plains of Socialist Canada end up studying and writing this massive book about conservative southern evangelicals in twentieth-century California? Take us through some of your professional trajectory that got you to this book.

DD: The Great Plains, Socialist Canada, and volleyball may have had something to do with my obsessions. As a kid growing up in Alberta, I had a warped fascination with all things American; I read more about George Washington than John A. Macdonald, I loved U.S. college football, and my family’s annual vacation usually took us south (Edmontonians don’t drive north unless ice fishing or moose hunting are in order). South meant Southern California, a place where we could escape the Great Plains tundra for beaches and Disneyland. It wasn’t uncommon for us to use some of the 30 hours of driving time to debate why Americans hate government so much and Canadians don’t think it’s so bad. Then, while playing university volleyball, I had the chance to compete against California programs I followed as a high schooler. I had the best match of my career against the Pepperdine Waves, despite being heckled by some brutally tough fans. So perhaps the book can be boiled down to catharsis—some subconscious attempt to reclaim (or maybe purge) a familiar past…but I’ll leave that up to my sister psychologist to figure out.

The “professional trajectory” can be summed up more simply. While struggling to find a Ph.D. dissertation topic, I read (and loved) Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors and thought more could be done to explain Southern California conservatism, so I set out to do it. My goal was to write a book that embedded evangelicalism in the larger story of post-1930s politics by teasing out its connections to suburbanization, political economy, race relations, and the politics of labor, education, housing, and business. I wanted to thread evangelicalism into mainstream narratives of U.S. political history, which still tend to paint evangelicalism as a sideshow.

PH: I read somewhere, on another online interview I think it was, that in part this book is a response (and historical critique) of the "What's the Matter with Kansas" thesis, which of course holds that a fair number of Americans have been effectively snookered into voting against the own material economic interests by forces which have sold them on a falsely cultural populism. Am I right in seeing this book in part as a response, and if so, how so?

DD: I didn’t set out to address Frank’s thesis, but my book touches on a few of its themes. At the least, it tries to add a layer of complexity to Frank’s notion that Main Street populists have been “duped” by Wall Street corporate types into voting against their economic interests. First of all, the “duped” motif has its limitations. Some of the Wall Street types I include in my story could be classified as evangelical populists themselves whose own politics covered a range of issues beyond their pocketbooks; economic interest wasn’t their sole interest. And many of the Main Street types I talk about continually measured their economic interests against the “culture wars” agenda they’ve purportedly been spoon-fed from above, so to say they were snookered into doing something against their wellbeing shortchanges their own capacity as rational political actors.

Along this same line, I think Frank’s provocative critique also downplays the processes of negotiation that have taken place between Wall Street and Main Street over the past half-century. The people I talk about were embroiled in a struggle against liberalism that started much earlier than the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s, and the alliances they forged to fight their battles were not static, uncontested, or permanent. The Main Street evangelicals I write about were never perfectly or entirely or always willing to do Wall Street’s dirty work in the trenches, and the evangelical businessmen I talk about sometimes acted on behalf of their rank-and-file brethren in ways that defied fiscal logic.

And ultimately, I’m hesitant to say someone is voting or acting against their best interests, as if I have some deep wisdom they don’t; I can’t even figure out what my own best interests are, let alone someone else’s, so I’m not that eager to pass judgment.

PH: The people you study didn't wait around for Rand Paul or the contemporary Tea Party to develop a pretty deep-rooted antipathy towards the New Deal and the expanded state that came out of the New Deal. Ironies abound here, of course, since the processes set in motion by the New Deal brought many of them to California in the first place. When did the subjects you study come to distrust the New Deal state, and how did they get to that point given their origins as poorer folk who were supposed to be one bulwark of the New Deal coalition? What role did religion play in that critique?

DD: I don’t think the people I study ever truly trusted the New Deal state. They certainly relied on it during times of trouble and they believed it was their right as white American citizens to do so; however contradictory or not, they thought that the federal government had a responsibility to provide short-term aid in exceptionally bad circumstances, and be the last resort in times of need. Roosevelt came through for these citizens, and they returned the favor by supporting him. But their first choice was always a limited state; as soon as times got better, Washington, they believed wholeheartedly, was to move aside.

When government didn’t move aside, they got angry. Their anger was politicized right after World War II, during the labor wars that erupted in the defense plants and neighborhoods that had lured them west.

Amid post-war adjustments, when California’s Social Democrats pressed for an active government that would support industrial unionism and race reform—for an expanded New Deal, in other words—southern evangelicals attempted to protect their interests as white workers and homeowners through a movement called Ham and Eggs, which combined calls for Christian revival and morality with a championing of the independent producer. This was William Jennings Bryan’s (and Huey Long’s) Populism reborn, and it scared Social Democrats, who believed that Ham and Eggs was irrational and racist. Ham and Eggs failed, leaving liberals in charge of California’s Democratic Party and evangelicals convinced that a coordinated assault on “big labor” and “big government” was in order. It’s in this moment that they began recasting Roosevelt and the New Deal as twin evils that had allowed socialism to creep in to American society.

It’s also in this moment that they began shifting their party affiliation to Independent and Republican. Evangelical businessmen, who at the time were helping form an anti-statist/free market movement, urged their fellow churchgoers along in this thinking. These sides would unite in the 1950s thanks, in large part, to Right-to-Work campaigns, which sought to rollback the power of unions in the workplace (sound familiar?).

PH: It's rather amazing to me that in reading your book alongside Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and WalMart, two previously obscure tiny colleges in Arkansas - John Brown University and Harding University -- have suddenly become central to the narrative of twentieth-century religion and conservatism, and hence to the entire narrative of twentieth-century American politics (I should add here that my cousin's son, who grew up in California, attends John Brown U.). As far as California higher educational institutions go, only Pepperdine plays as central a role in your book. Tell us something briefly about those two institutions, and what role they play in your book

Funny thing is, Bethany and I met in the one-room archive of John Brown University, tucked away in the foothills of the Ozarks. We were told that no researcher had visited in quite some time…yet there we were, two dissertators from “up north” eagerly flipping through files and splitting time at the photocopier.

The reason we were there is because we recognized that evangelical institutions have rich stories to tell. Historians often focus on preachers and the pews when tracking the evangelical Right. But a much thicker history of this phenomenon emerges when we follow the money trails that link evangelical schools to their patrons (highly politicized businessmen), or read between the lines to see how a college’s pedagogy endorses certain political expressions.

So, for instance, John Brown University and Harding University wrapped their pedagogy in a curriculum (“Head, Heart, and Hand”) that stressed practical education in the trades and business, full immersion in boots-strap entrepreneurialism, and staunch defense of traditional family values. These schools’ founders saw that this curriculum as a counter to the liberal elitism of the Ivy League, and the only answer to society’s “socialist” drift. Like countless other southern colleges, these two schools were near financial collapse in the 1930s. To save themselves—and preserve their independence—they approached the nation’s most powerful (and often evangelical) corporate leaders for support and got it, with the promise that they would train the next generation of evangelicals in a corporate-friendly environment. During the Cold War, as public education expanded and private schools faltered, John Brown, Harding, and their peer institutions stepped up their search for corporate help, by hosting annual “Freedom Forums,” for instance, which gathered CEOs, educators, and activists from around the country. In reaching out in this way, at such a formative moment in American political development, these schools essentially became the conservative movement’s first “think tanks” and marshaling zones.

I think a second benefit of studying these schools is the way they account for regional change in the post-Depression era. One of my book’s goals was to track the emergence of a Sunbelt axis of power—of the kind Kevin Phillips and Kirkpatrick Sale first designated in the 1970s as spanning from California to the Carolinas. Scholars have debated the strengths of the Sunbelt thesis, with detractors often stressing important differences in Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles’ metropolitan politics, or the disjuncture between notions of citizenship in Oxnard, California and Oxford Mississippi as reasons to jettison the concept. I think the Sunbelt concept is useful, and one way I saw it play out was in the realm of evangelical higher education. The more I dug the more I became fascinated with the way these schools (as well as west-coast ones like Pepperdine) linked the futures of the South and West through institutional channels, laying the groundwork for a broader, Sunbelt powerbase. Critics of the Sunbelt thesis claim that their research on urban development doesn’t bare the burden of this concept, but perhaps they should look to simpler data for evidence—bank statements for Christian colleges, which demonstrate Californian, Texan, and Floridians’ shared investment in places like John Brown University, or school enrollment books that track the flow of teens from Tulsa to Los Angeles, Orange County to the Ozarks—teens with last names like “Harvey."

Update: Part II of the interview is here.

Interview with Jennifer Graber

Randall Stephens

[I crosspost here a selection from a short interview with Jenn Graber. The full interview is at the HS blog.]

"Americans incarcerate," writes Jennifer Graber in her new engaging book The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). "Though the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population," she writes, "it has almost a quarter of its prisoners." Such facts make the long history of American prisons and their maintenance all the more interesting. Graber, an assistant professor in the department of religious studies at the College of Wooster, analyzes the "intersection of Christianity and politics in the American penitentiary system."* Her interesting account also looks at the religious dimensions of discipline and the ideas that undergirded punishment from the 1790s to the 1950s.

Randall Stephens: You write that antebellum Americans disagreed on much when it came to prisons, but most “affirmed religion's central importance” to prisons and reform. How was criminal justice “religious” in this era?

Jennifer Graber: If you were concerned about criminal punishment in the early republic, there were lots of things to fight about. Once the states began to build prisons, the big debate was between a discipline out of Pennsylvania that featured total solitary confinement and one out of New York that combined labor in workshops during the day with solitary confinement at night. Partisans for these two systems called the other side un-American and un-Christian. Beyond the rival disciplines, people debated the best way to reform inmates. They argued about what was more important: a good Sunday School teacher in Sing Sing or clean water and decent food in Sing Sing? Without fail, everyone interested in the debate claimed that “religion”—and they used the word “religion” even though they meant variations of evangelical Protestantism—was central to inmate reformation and the overall health of American prisons as strong institutions. What they didn't realize is that their common evocation of “religion” masked significant differences. For instance, they all thought that prison chaplains were necessary, but disagreed—sometimes violently—over the role these ministers should play inside institutions. Or, they all assumed that God ordained the civil authorities to punish lawbreakers, but varied on the question of that punishment’s severity.

Stephens: What kinds of problems did evangelicals target in the prison system? What can we learn about them by the sort of reforms they pursued?

Graber: Their first target was colonial-era punishments, whether it was steep fines, corporal punishments such as whipping or branding, or the gallows. They joined a trans-Atlantic movement to reform punishment and were active in the construction and administration of the first prisons. Protestant evangelicals—and I include many Quakers in this group, which might ruffle some historians’ feathers—envisioned the prison as an ideal site for prompting criminals’ conversion and reformation.>>>

Oprah: Gospel of an Icon

Paul Harvey

Another day, another author interview -- I was hoping to do this myself somewhere down the road, but no longer necessary as Immanent Frame's "Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life" has done it for me.

Kathryn Lofton's new book Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, is just out -- and just out in time for Oprah's new network, in what must surely be a divine coincidence. Check out the interview about the book here, where the author speaks with her usual panache. A little excerpt:

NS: What is it about how American religious history is studied now that has left Oprah not well-enough understood?

KL: I would say that the “how” of what we study is less problematic than the way we cordon our topics, which is very much an inheritance of our role as seminary church historians. I want to see more books written about objects that seem unlikely for religious studies, such as those seemingly in the purview of pop culture, but also those from economic and political arenas. Moreover, I think our disposition toward our subjects is often too tender for our own good. If on the one side we’ve been formed by our seminarian genealogies, on the other we inherit an abused mentality, one that flinches constantly at the possibility that elsewhere in the humanist ranks we’re being mocked for proximity to the religious subject. And so we appear, I think, often too defensive of our topics, believing they need caretaking before exposure to the imagined Marxist menace. So, if there is a critical edge to the book, it is to goad us to be less worried about explaining our subjects to their cultured despisers, and instead pursuing the mediations of their belief systems, the multiple functions of their ritual reiterations, and the social systems to which they reply and in which they participate

Read more about the book here, and more on the author here.

Myth of American Religious Freedom: Part II

Paul Harvey

Today we continue our interview with David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom.

PH: A good portion of your book is taken up with dissenters -- the abolitionists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mormons, freethinkers, and progressive intellectuals in the twentieth century. Time after time, they get beaten down by the moral establishment, yet in the end they more or less triumphed in crafting a new definition of religious freedom. Can you give us briefly one example of how you use dissenters in your book, and how they confronted and, over time, whittled away at the foundations of the moral establishment?

DS: Of all the people I talk about, my favorite is Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As most of your readers know, Stanton was a radical women’s rights activist who argued that the subservient place of women in law grew out of a Christian patriarchy. To make way for the emancipation of women, Stanton was relentless in her criticism of the connection of Christianity to law. According to her opponents, women’s liberation would entail societal degradation, because treating a woman as an individual before the law would undermine the institution of the family, the mechanism for inculcating morals in society. As a result, Christian proponents of the moral establishment placed the obligations of society over the desires of individual women such as Stanton. By contrast, Stanton placed the individual above society. She argued that laws too often required that the individual—especially the female individual—to be “sacrificed to the highest good of society,” which was the fundamental error of the moral establishment. She claimed instead that a society could not suppress the individual and still uphold the highest social good. Only when individuals possessed full freedom would the possibilities of a society be realized.

Stanton laid out the basic question in the debate, which was: which is most basic, the society or the individual? This claim about the importance of the individual and of individual rights in a liberal, democratic society circulated among the many dissenters to the moral establishment in the nineteenth century. But the notion did not finally triumph until the twentieth century, through progressive intellectuals, such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, and liberal legal theorists, such as Louis Brandeis, who used the Court to enforce individual rights.

PH: You hit liberal justices pretty hard for misusing history, particularly in claiming a strict separationist position on the First Amendment that basically never really existed. In other words, since the "wall of separation" is basically a historical myth, it is a bad idea to use that myth in reasoning in legal cases. How do you think those on the center/left of the spectrum should view your history of the moral establishment in making arguments favorable to their position? Is this akin to Brown v. Board –acknowledge crimes against freedom committed in the past, including by the Court, and just say we need a completely different model than that?

DS: Yes, that’s exactly right. Using bad history does not help public debate and it does not make stable law. Liberals should acknowledge that the past did not feature a harmonious arrangement of freedom that sprang from the minds of Jefferson and Madison. By reframing their arguments away from that bad history, I actually think liberals would strengthen their own position because the most powerful argument for liberal jurisprudence is historical. It goes something like this: Once upon a time, the individual was subject to religious oppression that used the apparatus of the state. But then the Supreme Court realized that the Bill of Rights, which defines the rights of American citizens, should apply to the states because the states were infringing upon the rights of the individual guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. As the Supreme Court began applying the Bill of Rights to the states, it made a host of questionable historical arguments. But it did so for a still legitimate purpose that is now under attack by religious partisans in the present. The Court sought to free the individual from oppression in order to make the United States into a liberal democracy. We can uphold those rulings while not repeating the same bad history, because acknowledging past Protestant power helps to show why the liberal jurisprudence is necessary.

PH: The latter portion of the book deals with some more contemporary controversies and decisions, and you suggest very strongly that the Roberts Court, when it has the chance, will "continue to aid political conservatives and religious activists in rehabilitating the moral establishment." This is a different argument than I have seen from some other legal scholars, who have suggested that recently the Supreme Court has moved more towards a position of shying away from big religion decisions, because First Amendment law as to what is or is not a "religion" has just become a huge mess of contradictory decisions (as in the one a few years ago allowing for the use of a religious symbol in a public place in one state, but disallowing it in another state). In what ways do you foresee a possibly more activist court under Roberts, and why would it be interested in rehabilitating a moral establishment that has led to so much dissent and conflict over two centuries, as you trace in your book?

DS: It depends upon what you mean by “big religion decisions.” I agree that the Court seems chastened by the daunting (if not impossible) theoretical task of defining religion in a way that is fair and stable and does not violate the establishment clause. But I don’t think that this strongly conservative Court is going to calmly accept past liberal jurisprudence. Part of my argument is precisely that a case doesn’t have to be about “religion” per se to uphold religious power.

Consider two cases. The Court currently has a case before it that involves an Arizona law which funnels money to private religious schools through a complicated tax credit system. I find this an instructive case. In the nineteenth century, Protestants controlled the schools but they lost that control in the mid-twentieth century as the Supreme Court forbade prayer and Bible-reading in schools. When the Supreme Court dismantled religious control over schools, religious conservatives began to advocate the use of public money in private schools. The Arizona law is in that tradition of seeking an end-run around mid-twentieth-century legal decisions. The state claims that the money given to private, often sectarian schools is not public money because an individual donates the money to a school and is then reimbursed by the state through a tax credit (not a tax deduction) on a matching basis up to a certain amount. As a result, Arizona claims, it cannot be considered a violation of the establishment clause. This sounds like money laundering to me, and I would like to think that the Court would strike it down. But the last thirty years has seen the Court ever more comfortable in providing public money to private schools, even private sectarian schools. If the Court upholds the Arizona law, it would be in keeping with the general jurisprudential trend of rehabilitating Christian schools through the use of public money.

The second case that bears watching is the California gay marriage case, which is going to wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has been amenable in the recent past to the notion that the law cannot be used to advance private moral norms. In Lawrence v. Texas in 2002, Justice Kennedy used that argument to strike down all anti-sodomy laws in the United States. Moreover, in 1967 when the Court struck down miscegenation laws, it ruled, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the most vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” Putting these two opinions together might suggest that the Court will uphold gay marriage, but it is not at all clear. As usual, the decision seems likely to boil down to Kennedy’s position. He wrote the opinion striking down sodomy law but did not give any indication of his stance on gay marriage. If I had to read the tea leaves (always a dangerous practice), I’m not optimistic that the Court will rule in favor of gay rights because I don’t think it likely that Kennedy will use the same kind of argument that he made in Lawrence. I hope I’m wrong, but should the Court strike down gay marriage, the ruling would, once again, serve as an extension of religious power.

PH: Getting to the bottom line: in 3 or 4 sentences, can you tell us what is the single most important takeaway point you want people to get from your book?

DS: I think it is time that we stopped celebrating ourselves. And by “we” I mean both liberals and conservatives. This nationalist self-celebration has generated a debate on religion in public life whose most notable feature is a pervading sense of falsity. By looking squarely at the religious coercions of the past and the multiple limits of religious freedom, I’m hoping that we can have a new conversation—both a more honest conversation and a more productive one—on a better historical foundation.

Thanks for the stimulating questions, Paul, and thanks again for reading the book.

The Myth of American Religious Freedom: Interview with David Sehat

Paul Harvey

In the tradition of this blog of posting author interviews from recently published important works in our field (when we're not thinking about zombies, or finding paeans to Sarah Palin on YouTube), I'm pleased today and tomorrow to post a two-part interview with David Sehat, author of the new book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, just out with Oxford.

We've blogged about the book in pre-release before, and I made some false promises to put up a post about Sehat's book together with Sally Gordon's The Spirit of the Law. Sadly, that post will have to wait until the tsunami of the semester calms down a bit, but I believe putting those two books together provides a most stimulating narrative (complementary on some points, contrasting on others) of the intellectual (Sehat) and social (Gordon) history of the concept of religious freedom. In the meantime, here is part one of our interview with David Sehat. You may follow more of his thoughts from his book over at U.S. Intellectual History, where he is a contributor and has recently posted great stuff based on the book, and also check out his recent entry at the Huffington Post, which contains an extensive summary of some of the major themes of the book.

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Interview with David Sehat, Part I

Paul Harvey (PH): David, the central phrase in your book is "moral establishment," and you argue that for much of American history we have had a "moral establishment that connected religion and the state." Can you briefly define what you mean by this term for our readers, and why you have chosen to make it central to your book?

David Sehat (DS): Paul, thanks for reading the book and for interviewing me.

When I began researching this book, I was reading the letters and writings of a nineteenth-century agnostic named Robert Ingersoll. My intention was to write a book about American freethought or American agnosticism as a way of showing the informal power of Protestant Christianity. But as I read Ingersoll’s papers, I came across a case (he was a lawyer) that puzzled me. In 1886, he unsuccessfully defended a man named Charles B. Reynolds, who was being tried on two counts of blasphemy. I was stumped: How could a man be convicted of blasphemy nearly one hundred years after the passage of the First Amendment? As I went deeper into the case, my confusion grew. I discovered that blasphemy law existed for much of the nineteenth century, even if its enforcement was erratic. According to its proponents, criticizing Christianity or any elements of Christianity undermined the public foundation for morals. I also discovered that blasphemy was similar to many other kinds of law in that Protestant Christian ideas received the formal protection of law, which was a surprise to me. In other words, the judgments in this case, and many others, only made sense if Christianity was something like an official religion that relied upon the protection of the law.

To make sense of what was going on, I borrowed the idea of a “moral establishment” from the legal scholar John Witte Jr. Taking Witte’s concept further than he might have intended (and probably not in a way that he would agree with), I claim that the moral establishment involves the use of law to perpetuate Christian morals in society. The more I researched, the more I saw that this moral establishment was one of the chief mechanisms throughout American history by which Protestant Christian partisans maintained religious power over society in often illiberal ways.

PH: You spend a good amount of time criticizing positions on the left and on the right of our current politics, in terms of how they employ religious history to make their favored points about religion/state issues (and moral issues generally). What do you think each side gets basically wrong about history, and if you were anointed Historical King, what would you tell your subjects about how to use history properly in framing arguments about present-day concerns?

DS: I see both the Left and the Right as misguided in their understanding of the past. Both regard American religious history as a history of freedom that is threatened by the policies of the other side. But I don’t see U.S. history as a history of religious freedom. Instead, I see U.S. history as predominantly one in which Protestant Christians used law and politics to maintain religious power. That is evident in the case of blasphemy laws, but also in a host of other laws and practices that survived for much of U.S. history. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that the Supreme Court began dismantling this connection between religion and the state in order to mitigate religious power and to protect the individual. The Court’s actions caused religious conservatives to mobilize for the restoration of their past power, thus beginning the culture wars of the last fifty years.

So my problem with much of the political debate over the role of religion in public life, especially when that debate invokes history, is that the various parties are simply enacting the culture wars rather than using history to frame their arguments in a meaningful way. As a result, the history is bad on all sides. Liberals are too tendentious when they claim a separation of church and state in the past. To them, I say that Christianity was so thoroughly entwined with law and government that Protestant Christianity had significant power through its connection with the state. And I have to say that when conservatives claim that the United States was a Christian nation in the past, in a certain sense they are right. But I also have a problem with religious conservatives, because the past was not the Christian utopia that some of them claim. Christians relied upon law to protect their religion. And what law involves, above all else, is the coercive capacities of the state. So if we say that the United States was a Christian nation in the past, we must also say that it was a coercively Christian nation.

At bottom, I think all discussions about religion in public life have to acknowledge this past of religious coercion so that, while addressing present day concerns, we can be sure that we do not go back to that coercive past.

PH: I have often used the phrase "de facto establishment," or "de facto Protestant establishment," in classes, to suggest something of the informal Protestant establishment of the 19th century (the phrase you use in the book is "informal religious establishment," which you then go on to critique as wrong). In effect, your book suggests that my phrasing is wrong, because it fails to capture the legally coercive nature of the moral establishment. So, can you tell me how, in classroom setting, I should explain to students how and why we had effectively a legal establishment even after the First Amendment said we couldn't have one?

DS: Perhaps we can introduce more concepts than just “legal establishment.” First, we have to explain to students that the religion clauses of the First Amendment did not apply to the states until 1940. The Bill of Rights, for much of American history, applied only to the federal government: at the time when the First Amendment was ratified, six states still paid churches out of the public treasury and continued to be free to do so under the Frist Amendment. To put it most clearly: students need to understand that the First Amendment is really beside the point when we are talking about religious establishments and religious power prior to 1940.

Second, we can explain to students what exactly we mean by an “establishment.” As I mentioned earlier, I rely on John Witte Jr., who argues that there are three components of the American religious establishment: institutional, ceremonial, and moral. Institutional establishment is when states pay churches with public funds. Ceremonial establishment is when states incorporate an homage to God as part of their public ritual ceremonies (like swearing on a Bible or saying “So Help Me God” in the oath of office). And moral establishment is when states draw upon the moral ideas of Christianity (or Protestant Christianity) to craft their laws. When states finally decided to stop paying churches—in other words, when they did away with institutional establishment—there were still two other components of the American religious establishment in place.

I think the moral establishment is the most important because it enabled Protestant Christians to use the idea of morality to establish a special place for their religion in law. As a result, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and freethinkers, along with a host of others who purportedly failed to demonstrate proper moral norms, faced an active and state-sponsored discrimination that grew out of Protestant legal control.

PH: The American Missionary Association (AMA) was one of the primary institutional expressions in the nineteenth century of what you call the "moral establishment." Yet its vision for southern blacks after the Civil War, "education for citizenship," eventually gave way to what you call the "white Southern vision of the moral establishment . . . in which maintaining moral order, in this case with a decidedly racial cast, overcame the black argument for individual and equal rights." Do you see this as a case where the center of the moral establishment could not hold? Or I'll put the question another way, paraphrasing Randolph Bourne's famous question to John Dewey about the support of progressive liberals for World War I: if the moral establishment was so dominant, and so (as you frequently suggest) coercive, then how was it so weak as to not be able to prevent the coming of the Civil War, or do anything about the horrific carnage of the Civil War (except to give it religious meaning)?

DS: This is a great question, thanks for asking it. I don’t want to claim that the moral establishment was all-powerful or even powerful enough to stop the Civil War. I want to make the opposite case: the issue of slavery split the moral establishment, with southern proponents claiming that slavery was an institution for the perpetuation of Christian society and northern proponents seeing slavery as a state-sponsored concession to evil and, therefore, not within the moral establishment. This split allowed for a host of dissenters, mainly radical abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and women’s rights proponents such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to challenge the moral establishment by rejecting the idea that religious sensibilities should have a central place in public policy debates.

My narrative here tries to answer the same question that many other writers have sought to answer: why did this moment of liberalism and individual rights during Reconstruction prove so evanescent? I suggest that this liberal moment came into being through the division of the moral establishment over the issue of slavery, a division that gave proponents of individual rights the upper hand. The AMA, the dominant organization of the northern moral establishment after the Civil War, did in certain respects favor individual rights but, ultimately, its low view of black racial capacity meshed with that of the southern moral establishment. The moral establishment came back together after the Civil War around their desire for denominational harmony and their suspicion of black rights—in other words, around a shared distrust of individual rights. This allowed establishment proponents to again maintain their collective (and, in this case, racist) moral norms and undermined the Reconstruction moment of liberal individualism.

[2nd half of interview will be posted tomorrow; stay tuned!]

Research on Religion

by Matt Sutton

Normally I would not recommend anything associated with the University of Washington. However, they have an excellent political scientist who is moonlighting in the virtual world at Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. Anthony Gill has begun a wonderful new podcast series entitled Research on Religion, which features in-depth discussions about religion with both practitioners and academics. Past episodes include Philip Jenkins and the ubiquitous Thomas Kidd, and this month Tony interviewed me about my work on Aimee Semple McPherson. Go Cougs!

The American Abolitionist Civilizing Mission to Jamaica: An Interview with Gale Kenny

by Luke Harlow

I am excited to bring Religion in American History an interview with Gale Kenny, author of a fascinating new book, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834–1866 (University of Georgia Press, 2010).

The book compellingly analyzes the work of American abolitionist missionaries to Jamaica in the middle of the nineteenth century and should remain of lasting significance to scholars of religion, race, gender, abolitionism, and transnational history. In short, there is much in Kenny’s work that should pique the interest of RiAH readers. In the interview, Kenny introduces us to many of the key figures in the book and expounds upon several of the important interventions she makes with this project.

Kenny is currently ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the Religion Department at Barnard College, and has previously held appointments at Rice University and Sam Houston State University. Contentious Liberties is an expansion of her 2008 Rice University doctoral dissertation in history (where I am proud to say we overlapped as colleagues).

Historians of the United States are aware of the role of Oberlin College and the American Missionary Association in the mid nineteenth–century United States abolitionist movement. Less familiar is their mission to post-emancipation Jamaica. What did abolitionists hope to accomplish there?

When the missionaries left the United States, they were idealistic young people who wanted to play a part in the process of emancipation and history, and in that sense, part of their reason for establishing the mission was to practice their abolitionist beliefs. I think that they read accounts of West Indian emancipation, and it moved and inspired them to take action. For the first generation (who moved to Jamaica in the late 1830s) the West Indies served as a substitute for the South, where they could not safely proselytize their abolitionist Christianity. They also had more obvious missionary goals, and like later northern volunteers in the South after the Civil War, the missionaries wanted to educate ex-slaves and instruct them in “civilized” habits. I would distinguish the Jamaica missionaries a bit from the Reconstruction-era missionaries because the Jamaica Mission had a more utopian design. In Jamaica, they were committed to building something like their alma mater, Oberlin College—interracial Christian communities centered on piety and church discipline, a strong work ethic, and charitable giving. Yet as with most Protestant missionaries of the era, the Oberlin missionaries paid no attention to the fact that black Jamaicans might be attached to their own culture and religious beliefs.

In addition to these primary goals, the missionaries hoped their mission would impact debates about Protestant missionary work more generally, and their political and religious commitment to abolitionism informed their ideas about how missions should be run. As fierce defenders of “independent manhood,” Oberlinites disapproved of “dependent” missions that required perpetual funding from home, and they believed that a self-sufficient Jamaica Mission in which Jamaican church members paid the salaries of the Oberlin ministers would be a model for other American Protestant missions to follow. (It should be noted that the mission never became financially independent.) The Oberlin ministers also saw the Jamaica Mission as a direct challenge to the largest missionary organization of the day, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. While most of the American Board’s leaders opposed slavery, their reliance on donations from southern churches and their mission among the slaveholding Cherokee meant that they did not openly condemn slavery as a sin. When the newly organized AMA (est. 1846) adopted the mission in 1847, it shared many of the same goals as the original Oberlin ministers, yet it also expanded the symbolic importance of the Jamaica Mission as an example of what might happen in an emancipated South.

Initially, the radical abolitionist founders of the Jamaica mission hoped for an “interracial utopia,” but those goals changed over time. What role did race—and particularly gendered notions of race—play in altering their vision?

The missionaries’ ideas of race and gender—and I would also add religious orthodoxy—were inseparable. The AMA missionaries (who were all white) had been forced to confront the explosive issues of interracial socializing, coeducation and women’s rights long before they left the United States. Most had attended Oberlin College, where professors and the administration tried to hold off anti-abolitionist mobs by enforcing strict religious discipline to balance out the school’s radical inclusiveness. These rules, combined with the religious doctrine of Christian perfectionism, became the ideological basis for the Jamaica Mission. Before leaving the United States, evangelical abolitionists tied true Christian piety to certain gendered behaviors (chastity, modest dress, breadwinning fathers and domestically inclined mothers), but not to race. After all, at Oberlin and in other abolitionist-friendly towns in the North, they would have frequently encountered African-American men and women who fit their definition of Christian piety while slaveholding whites or anti-abolitionist whites were considered sinners.

In Jamaica, however, a very different gender ideology prevailed among freed people, many of whom called themselves Christians. For example, in contrast to the AMA missionaries’ condemnation of premarital sex, young people who were economically dependent on their families frequently cohabited and had children before marrying later in life. Further, rather than abiding by the common law doctrine of coverture, Jamaican parents passed down land to all of their children so that a married woman might own and work a patch of land with her siblings instead of the land owned by her husband. The mere fact that married women did agricultural work also proved troubling to the Americans who saw this as evidence of black men’s failure to care for their families, and consequently, their moral failings.

For the white missionaries, the question was whether these “sinful” gender practices were an unchangeable product of Jamaicans’ blackness or if they were cultural holdovers from slavery that could be reformed. One of the main arguments in the book explores how changing ideas of race and gender in the United States and among the missionaries in Jamaica influenced the answer to this question. The ministers who established the mission in the late 1830s largely ignored race and focused instead on structural problems (a lack of public schools, low wages, racism) as the cause of Jamaica’s supposed gender and religious disorder. Thus the civilizing mission’s paternalist ethos was always counterbalanced with the missionaries’ stated goal for black Jamaicans to become “independent” and “manly” landowners. For their part, black Jamaicans worked with the Americans to purchase land for ex-slaves, but most had no interest in abandoning all of their customs for the Americans’ notions of church discipline and separate-spheres ideology. When it became clear that the act of landownership and the mission’s schools were not transforming black Jamaicans as the Americans had anticipated, the ministers returned to their original question: was it race or culture that prevented black Jamaicans from becoming just like the white missionaries?

By the mid-1850s, the older ministers answered the question by fluctuating between their original commitment to racial equality and occasional despair that racial difference might be the real reason for the mission’s failures. Meanwhile, the arrival of a younger generation of missionaries reinforced the mission’s paternalist ethos while diminishing the mission’s emphasis on independent black manhood. The younger missionaries had come of age in the 1850s amid the explosion of domesticity, sentimental literature, and romantic ideas of racial difference. Rather than criticizing Jamaica’s racism and classism as their elders had done, or strongly supporting black men’s independence, the younger missionaries and teachers treated black Jamaicans (adults and children) as perpetual dependents in need of white supervision. This created conflict between the older and younger missionaries, but it also granted married and single women a greater role to play in the mission’s work. The mission households became centers of a kind of imperial domesticity in which missionary wives and schoolteachers attempting to reach their Jamaican servants’ hearts—instead of models of the patriarchal household that they had once been.

What was the Richmond Industrial School? What did its founder and supervisor Seth Wolcott hope to achieve through the school?

Seth Wolcott, with the help from American investors, purchased Richmond, a defunct sugar estate, in 1854. He intended to sell of plots of land to church members (a plan that never fully worked) and to build a manual-labor boarding school to educate any willing Jamaican child. For historians, Richmond can be understood as a bridge between the mostly white manual-labor schools in the North in the 1820s and 1830s and the post-Civil War industrial schools for southern blacks. Incidentally, a similar industrial school also existed in the American Board’s Hawaiian mission, and probably in other places as well. Richmond combined the rules and ideals of schools like the Oneida Institute and Oberlin that aimed to train both middle-class and poor young men (and women, at Oberlin) with the AMA missionaries’ desire to isolate young Jamaicans from the surrounding culture.

In the mission’s history, Richmond also reflected the transition from the first part of the mission to the second and more paternalist era. The mission’s schoolteachers and ministers shifted their focus to young Jamaicans—the rising generation—and they came up with the idea of a boarding school that would (at least in theory) separate young people from their families and the surrounding culture while making them a part of a new “civilized” and orthodox mission family. The school educated both boys and girls, many of whom had lived for a time with the American missionary families before attending Richmond. Wolcott required the students to perform several hours of gender-appropriate work each day, and they were expected to be upstanding members of the “Richmond family.” Just as at Oberlin, even chaste relationships between students were forbidden, and Wolcott took disciplinary action against any students who did not attend church, who stole or failed to do work, and who were caught drinking rum (the ministers found it very inspiring that Richmond’s rum distillery had become the schoolroom). With a student body that hovered around 30-40, the school did educate many of the mission’s Jamaican schoolteachers who took over the mission’s schools when the AMA stopped funding the mission in the 1860s. Wolcott, and after his death, his son, and then grandson grew sugar and, later, bananas, at Richmond, and in the 1940s, Wolcott’s great-granddaughter (a poet) lost the estate through bankruptcy. Her wish that the school become a “baby Tuskegee” to honor her great-grandfather’s work was not realized.

What was the relationship between the American “civilizing mission” and British imperial and missionary endeavor?

By the time the Americans arrived in Jamaica, British emancipation had happened, and many British missionaries were dealing with a decline in support from home. In contrast, during the 1840s and 1850s, both proslavery and antislavery Americans became increasingly interested in relating West Indian emancipation to American slavery. (These trajectories are both shown in Catherine Hall and Ed Rugemer’s work.)

In terms of ideology, the American mission’s driving desire to transform dependent slaves into independent men ran counter to notions of colonial dependency, and the American missionaries frequently criticized their British counterparts. As post-colonials themselves, only a couple of generations removed from the American Revolution, the American missionaries saw their civilizing mission as superior to and distinctive from other efforts to aid Jamaican freed people. The Americans denounced Anglicans for drinking alcohol, attacked almost all other churches for lacking proper church discipline, and they accused white Jamaican politicians and landowners as being racist and anti-democratic. The Americans also complained about the island’s class system, and they reserved a special loathing for what they saw as the British custom of lazy aristocrats (black and colored) who looked down on laborers.

The AMA missionaries’ antagonism toward colonialism became more complicated after the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1866. The uprising terrified some missionaries who then strongly supported Britain’s decision to make Jamaican into a dependent crown colony (a decision that dissolved the island’s elected assembly and self-rule). Others in the American mission, including many of the older missionaries who had grown up in the radicalism of the 1830s, saw Morant Bay as a symptom of colonialism. They argued that black Jamaicans would be better off if the United States annexed the island and granted Jamaica statehood so that American Reconstruction laws and amendments could go into effect. To invoke Catherine Hall’s argument about British missionaries: the American missionaries were in some ways similar to her Baptists in that the Americans’ commitment to racial equality lessened as their “civilizing” efforts failed. The Americans did begin to justify a long-term need for white supervision over black Jamaicans. In spite of this overarching trend, a discernable undercurrent of American nationalism and anti-British and anti-colonial sentiments persisted in the mission through its end in the early 1870s.

Contentious Liberties is part of a growing literature that shows the importance of understanding abolitionism as a transnational movement. How does your work revise our understanding of the movement? More broadly, how does it modify our understanding of American evangelicalism?

One of my goals in Contentious Liberties was to show the interaction between the missionary movement and the abolitionist movement in the nineteenth century, and to explore how abolitionist missionaries and their experiences abroad offer up new questions that can then be applied to the fields of abolitionist and evangelical history more generally. For me, this is one of the most fruitful aspects of transnational scholarship—it allows us to rethink concepts, events, and people that we already know. While the missionaries in my book will be quite familiar to anyone who has studied evangelicalism or abolitionism in this period, they were changed by Jamaica as they had to interrogate their Christian and abolitionist beliefs. The AMA missionaries open up all kinds of questions about how nineteenth-century Americans understood the relationship between religion, race, and gender, nationalism, the consequences of colonialism, etc. I hope that historians of abolition and American evangelicalism will pay closer attention to missionaries as a way to think through the complex interaction between race and religion at home and race and religion abroad.

Another contribution I hoped to make was to shed light on an understudied segment of the abolitionist movement: evangelical abolitionists who were not particularly famous as orators or writers—I like to think of them as the “B-list” abolitionists. While they may not have travelled to London for the World’s Antislavery Convention, the Jamaica missionaries and their supporters in the United States still engaged in abolitionism as a transnational movement. The AMA’s newspaper regularly printed missionary accounts from the field, allowing ordinary rank-and-file abolitionists to imagine themselves a part of a worldwide campaign. I found it interesting that both abolitionist and Protestant missionary efforts cultivated a sense of international humanitarianism, however flawed, that appealed to regular Americans who might have never traveled abroad themselves. This topic is something that I am just beginning to research now.

Twenty-first century readers often tend to think of categories like gender or race as inflexible, macro-level social constructions that are very difficult to change. Yet you show a significant amount of change over time in the gendered and racial visions of missionaries to Jamaica. What key events brought those changes?

This question gets to the part of the research that I most enjoyed. As I read missionary letters and wrote about them, I sometimes felt as though I were composing a group biography. As human beings, the missionaries naturally changed over time, and because of their particularly reflective and self-aware letters, they often commented on how their own views had changed. They were also quite a gossipy group, and their letters also allowed me to see each missionary through his or her colleagues’ eyes.

As to what factors led to these changes: everyday encounters with black Jamaicans, or conversations would cause the missionaries to rethink or evaluate their assumptions. For example, one minister questioned the idea that his notion of “civilized” behavior and Christianity went hand-in-hand when he saw two of his most devout church members (a man and a woman) working a field while wearing minimal clothing. Much more dramatically, a yearlong crisis in 1850 almost led to the mission’s collapse. One of the missionaries (a carpenter, not a minister) teamed up with one of the single schoolteachers and several of the missionary couples to challenge the entire basis for the civilizing mission. He argued that God resided within every person, and the missionaries had no authority to question black Jamaicans’ beliefs or practices. He and the missionaries who supported him shut down their schools and churches, and his attack on authority eventually resulted in a sex scandal—he declared himself “spiritually married” to another missionary’s wife and encouraged others to do the same. While the errant missionaries were eventually dismissed from the mission, the incident led to an enormous amount of discussion about how black Jamaicans were having to chastise white missionaries for their gender disorder—a point that turned the civilizing mission’s basic assumption on its head. Less dramatically, many of the single women schoolteachers in the mission developed a taste for women’s rights during their time in Jamaica. For example, one woman, Mary Dean, disavowed the nascent women’s rights movement in the U.S. even as she complained about how her male colleagues treated her unfairly—she had no vote in mission matters, she earned less, and she was under more scrutiny than the male teachers in the mission. Dean and several other schoolteachers became dissenters against the ministers’ paternalism toward themselves even as they remained committed to the racial paternalism underlying the civilizing mission.