Religion Enters the Academy, Looks for Emergency Exit

Paul Harvey

And I don't know if I can do it,
Oh no, I've said too much, I haven't said enough.
REM, "Losing My Religion"

"Jason Kidd is . . . savant-like."
Rick Carlisle, Coach, Dallas Mavericks, on ESPN

My previously promised post reflecting further on one particular session of the 2^nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture isn’t going to happen today (tonight) as planned. Besides, Curtis Evans’s comment on yesterday’s post concisely summarized most of what I was going to say anyway.

But briefly, the discussion at the conference about interpreting supernatural events/experiences/”abundant events”/whatever you want to call them brought my mind to one of the classics of the field, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. And that was coincidental, because on the plane to the conference I just read a slender and very entertaining new volume by James Turner, Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America. And let me say, next time you have a 2 or 3 hour plane ride to a conference, bring along this volume. It’s substantive and meaty enough to make you feel like you’ve earned a scholarly pat on the back, but it’s also funny and entertaining enough to distract you from the 3 year old in the seat behind you screaming his/her brains out and kicking the back of your chair for the entirety of the route from, oh, say, Denver to Indianapolis. Just saying.

This work is the published form of some recent lectures Turner gave at Stetson University in 2010. Unlike my experience with the Lamar lectures, which I gave in 2008 and then spent the next 2 1/2 years piddling around with, Turner was prompt in turning in his manuscript and getting it right out there for publication.

I’m going to take the lazy way out and plagiarize from the book’s website to give you a brief summary, one which captures the argument if not the dry wit and entertaining prose of the book:

Religious studies—also known as comparative religion or history of religions—emerged as a field of study in colleges and universities on both sides of the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century. In Europe, as previous historians have demonstrated, the discipline grew from long established traditions of university-based philological scholarship. But in the United States, James Turner argues, religious studies developed outside the academy.

Until about 1820, Turner contends, even learned Americans showed little interest in non-European religions—a subject that had fascinated their counterparts in Europe since the end of the seventeenth century. Growing concerns about the status of Christianity generated American interest in comparing it to other great religions, and the resulting writings eventually produced the academic discipline of religious studies in U.S. universities. Fostered especially by learned Protestant ministers, this new discipline focused on canonical texts—the “bibles”—of other great world religions. This rather narrow approach provoked the philosopher and psychologist William James to challenge academic religious studies in 1902 with his celebrated and groundbreaking Varieties of Religious Experience.

Turner concludes by writing, “Long recognized as a classic, Varieties now became something of a model. To be sure, the great majority of scholars of religion today study religions in ways far different from James, but many religious-studies experts do follow a Jamesian path to understanding religious experience.” He then goes on to cite a number of works, including Ann Taves’s Fits, Trances, and Visions, as examples of how James “stretched the map of religious studies in America" -- all the way from Boston to the experiments of the 60s to the pluralistic vocabulary of describing brilliantly "in the zone" point guards as savant-like -- an instance of neither saying too much, or not saying enough.

Then, late last week, I was talking to an academic editor for Bedford Books, and we were discussing some of the volumes in the wonderfully classroom-usable Bedford Series in History and Culture. I asked him what else was forthcoming in that series, and guess what he told me: Robert Abzug of the University of Texas is putting out a Bedford edition of a trimmed-down, annotated, sizable excerpt of Varieties of Religious Experience.

Will wonders never cease? This particular editor was a little skeptical of the project, but one of the series editors, the historian David Blight, apparently told one of the Bedford people that James's book had "changed my life,” and for that and other reasons the founder and head of Bedford Books became a major champion of the volume. So, apparently it is on the way.

True confession: I first read James in college, hated it, and gave up about halfway through. Of course, at that age my tastes in a number of things (excruciatingly rancid 3.2 beer, Herman Hesse, Quadrophenia, and those blobs of nothing that passed for "tofu" in the 1970s/early 80s) were very questionable, so it’s no wonder it took me some time and mentoring to understand James and some other classics of that sort. If the Bedford series volume succeeds, it will be the kind of introduction to the text that I didn’t have but needed. Here’s hoping.

In his discussion with Richard Bushman, which Chris Jones wrote about on our blog here, Robert Orsi discusses how we need a new language to interpret religious experience in a way that is neither overtly confessional or crudely reductionist. Bushman suggests that James provides one model, to which Orsi replies that that’s still too individualist (read: Protestant) a model, a point he elaborated on at the conference by noting how the understood subject of religious studies is the “autonomous subject.” Reading Turner’s history of the discipline, it’s easy to see how this became the case, and given the obstacles to its development (cultural, intellectual, political, etc.), it’s a wonder that “comparative religion” ever developed as a discipline in America at all. But it did, and now it's everywhere, in everyday vocabulary, hence Rick Carlisle's brilliantly offhanded description of Jason Kidd's mastery over the psychology of his team, and his mastery over the more talented Heat.

More on this as the week progresses, I hope, but as someone who has spent some time studying folks whose "abundant events" are less than politically neutral or benign, it makes me wonder how Orsi's attractive theories and wonderful discussion with Bushman affect work on religious intolerance and violence in America. Just a quick example comes to mind: sitting in the Southern Historical Collection archives in Chapel Hill years ago, I came across the letters of a white southern Spiritualist, who was writing correspondence to her deceased son in the way that nineteenth-century Spiritualists did.

The Spiritualists in Ann Braude's classic book Radical Spirits are, in a sense, easy to root for: they are women finding their voices, arguing for abolitionism and women's rights during their trances, and so forth. But this particular woman (who initially interested me because Spiritualism was almost totally a Northern thing in the antebellum era, so I was trying to figure out how it made its way South) was writing about a son who was involved in the massively repressive violence that was overturning Reconstruction in Mississippi -- specifically, her son, whom she now saw addressing her from the interplanetary realms in her own rationally inexplicable but emotionally/spiritually powerful event, was a white Redemptionist who was killed trying to deny the vote to black men in Clinton, Mississippi, in 1875, one of the "autumnal outbreaks" that President Grant famously grew weary of as the experiment of Reconstruction ran its course and the fateful federal compromise with southern white supremacy took hold.

This woman's experience clearly was real and powerful "to her," and I don't mean "to her, and she was crazy." I'm no Spiritualist, for sure, but can recognize culturally sanctioned forms of mourning as part of religious experience. But her experience was of hearing the voice of her deceased son who also happened to be a violent white supremacist.

I don't know what to make of all of it, but the fascinating discussion at the first session of the conference and continued online elsewhere just made me recall that reaction to that particular document in the archives.

Religion and America's Heartland from Guest Contributor Barton Price

Little did Paul Harvey know when he signed up one contributor (or editor) from Florida State University, that a deluge would follow! Today, our guest contributor is Barton Price, a PhD candidate in American religious history from my alma mater (I feel like I have said this already this week). His post describes his wrangling with Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and the politics of defining the American "heartland" geographically as well as ideologically. Please welcome Barton and discuss this thoughtful post.

Religion and America’s “Heartland”: An Invitation for Discussion

By Barton Price

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, gave an address to the American Historical Association during the Columbian Exposition. Turner’s essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” set the tone for how historians of America would interpret the nation’s past. The frontier thesis established a new set of concepts and hermeneutics about America’s past with which historians would have to contend.

For Turner, as with other historians called Turnerians, the frontier was both a space and a process. It was the space at which the progress of Euro-American civilization met the “savagery” of the North American interior. In the course of that progress, there was also the process of cultivating the wilderness into landscapes usable to the Euro-Americans who encroached on those lands. It was also a process in which Euro-American settlers sloughed off the accoutrements of their European-ness and became Americans. That process included the advance of democracy. The frontier, Turner stated, had fostered individualism, a fundamental element to Turner’s definition of democracy. Free land gave pioneers an appreciation for private property, which led to a greater sense of self. Individuality, therefore, made an American who he or she was and gave that person a voice in the democratic process.

Turner and the Turnerians have not been without their opponents. Some object to the Progressivist tone in this frontier thesis. Others object to the idea that the frontier was a space of rugged individualism.

In the study of religion in America, the frontier thesis has had its own set of applications and challenges. Historians of American religion in the early twentieth century, such as Peter Mode or the indomitable William Warren Sweet addressed the western progress of Protestant Christianity into the American frontier. Of course, there have also been those who have challenged the frontier thesis. T. Scott Miyakawa’sProtestants and Pioneers (1964) and Dickson Bruce’s And They All Sang Hallelujah (1974) focused on frontier religious communities as collective groups who relied on each other more than on individuality. Yet the frontier motif persists. Some, following in the wake of post-colonial historiography and theory and in the “contact points” image presented by Andrew R. L. Cayton, view the frontier as the space between two cultures. Looking at missionary activities, these historians attempt to uncover the ways Euro-Americans and Native Americans accommodated to the contact between one another. Consider, for example, the popularity of Rachel Wheeler’s new book, To Live Upon Hope (2008), which explores missionary contact with Native Americans in frontier Massachusetts and New York. The frontier motif is also persistent in how it orients historians to understand the conditions to which missionaries had to adapt. John Dichtl’s Frontiers of Faith (2008) and Mike Pasquier’s Fathers on the Frontier (2010) take up this theme as they look at Catholic priests on the frontier. While many no longer agree with Turner’s frontier thesis, the motif is far from dead.

But what intrigues me about Turner’s “Significance of the Frontier in American History,” is not so much its thesis as it is the essay’s impetus. The opening line of Turner’s address points to a historic moment in American society: the U.S. Census Bureau declared that the frontier was closed. It was this momentous proclamation that prompted Turner to understand the age in which he lived, an age in which the frontier no longer existed. Grappling to understand the roots of his present situation and searching for a way to come to terms with the nation’s future, Turner did what any historian would do. He looked to the past and interpreted it. Thus, Turner simultaneously stood in the three phases of time—past, present, and future—to lift up the frontier as the penultimate symbol of America’s democratic identity.

We are in a similarly important moment in American history when data from the U.S. Census Bureau have caused some to consider a great change in American society is happening. The findings of the 2010 Census show that the Mean Population Center of the United States is shifting westward. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, The Mean Population Center is “the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United States would balance if weights of identical value were placed on it so that each weight represented the location of one person.” With the exception of the 1880 Census—when the Population Center was in Boone County, Kentucky—the Population Center has remained in a Midwestern state since 1860. For a list of Population Centers to 1990, click here. While the Population Center remains in Missouri—a state largely assumed to belong to the Midwest—the shift is most pronounced because it has relocated southwestwardly from Phelps County, Missouri, to Texas County, Missouri. The cause of this move is that the population of Southwest is growing due to the continued emigration to the Sun Belt and the immigration of Latinos into the region. For articles on this data, go to Fox News and to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Let us consider for a moment three dramatically different people in American religious history who represent how the American Midwest came to represent the national heartland. The first two people were sons of New England, but they both conceived of the Midwest as the future center of an American empire. And they imbued that capital with religious qualities. First, Lyman Beecher was a proponent of depicting the Mississippi Valley as the future heartland. In his Plea for the West, he stated, "It is equally plain that the religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in the West." Concerned that the nation’s future held in the balance, he advocated missionaries and teachers flooding into the valley to provide the religious and moral instruction necessary to preserve the moral fiber of the nation. At the same time that Beecher was conceiving of the West as the center of America’s Protestant Empire, founder of the Latter-Day Saints Joseph Smith wrote his revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants that the new Jerusalem would be in Independence, Missouri. Finally, there is Billy Sunday, a native of Iowa who became a national symbol of conservative evangelicalism. Yet he also came to symbolize the simplicity of the Midwest while he also championed his causes. Mixing old time religion with down home values, Sunday evinced that the Midwest was where both remained in harmony. Such a composite has garnered him the title by one biographer “Hero of the Heartland.”

Whereas Beecher and Smith pointed to the Midwest as America’s future heartland, Sunday represents the point at which the region has assumed that role.

In conclusion, we must wrestle with this image of the American heartland and its location in the Midwest or elsewhere. We must also ask ourselves how this depiction has a religious quality to it and how the conflation of religion and heartland are part of an enterprise of laying claim to what America really is. The authors in the Midwest volume of the Religion and Public Life in Americaseries threw up their hands when it came to nailing down the Midwest’s regional distinction in part because the region dodges distinction in favor of being universally and quintessentially American. Yet the region’s religious quality is just as much a definition of outsiders as it is insiders. (Note that increase of the southwestern population has ethnic and religious connotations). The Midwest is a place of great religious diversity, and yet its image as heartland implies evangelical Protestantism, particularly of the Anglo-Saxon stripe.

For nearly five years, I have wrestled with these questions. As I near the completion of my dissertation on this topic, I am looking forward to engaging in this discussion more with colleagues.

God in the Secular City

Paul Harvey

Over at Immanent Frame, Nathan Schneider has a fascinating interview with the recently retired Harvey Cox, late of Harvard Divinity School. Recommended reading. Here's a little snippet, about his 1965 book The Secular City, whose title in many ways contradicts its contents. I had noted that a long time ago, but this interview partially explains that:

I was never part of the death of God movement. In fact, I tangled with those guys quite a bit. Bill Hamilton and Tom Altizer were friends of mine, but we clearly disagreed with each other. The original title of The Secular City, actually, was “God in the Secular City.” Nobody knows that because the publisher said to me, “No, let’s just call it ‘The Secular City,’” which is what we did. Some people have misread that. They look at the title and they think they know what the book is about. But I was arguing, from a biblical, theological perspective, that God is present in a range of institutions—in family, culture, and politics, as well as in nature—and not just in the religious sector. The relative decline of the institutional power of religion that we were seeing fifty years ago didn’t have to be a cause for panic, because God is present in the secular as well. That isn’t an idea that started with me. It is embedded in the Bible’s God of history, a God to be discerned and responded to in the world.

Spiritual Machines

Paul Harvey

Immanent Frame has just put up an excellent interview with John Modern, author of an article we've blogged about here briefly before, "Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan,"Church History, December 2008, and also author of Haunted Modernity: The Metaphysics of Secularism, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press. The interview provides a quick user-friendly guide to some of his basic ideas and approaches. A brief excerpt:

JLM: I see the threatening nature of my work sometimes in my students. I’m sure many religious studies professors will say that. We are historicizing religion and that can pose a challenge to students about the newness or integrity of their own piety. But more often, I’m attempting to threaten existing scholarship in American religion about the ways we tell the grand narrative of the past two or three centuries. Evangelicalism, liberal Protestantism, Catholicism, and so forth, are often seen as threads of a larger picture, but threads that are nevertheless distinct. What I’m really interested in doing is asking whether they have more in common with one another than not.

Defining and Engaging Transcendental Religion

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

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Defining and Engaging Transcendental Religion
Benjamin Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining and Expanding the Field of American Religion

Today we feature our third post from the Religion and American Culture Conference just concluded in Indianapolis. Today's missive comes from Seth Dowland, our newest contributing editor here at Religion in American History! Seth is a lecturing fellow and associate director of the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 2007. He is working on a book called Family Values, which examines the emergence and evolution of the Christian right in the 1970s and 1980s. Some more of Seth's work, an analysis of recent works on Billy Graham, is featured here, and here is his review of Michael Lienesch's In The Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the AntiEvolution Movement.
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DEFINING & EXPANDING THE FIELD OF AMERICAN RELIGION: A REPORT FROM THE RELIGION & AMERICAN CULTURE CONFERENCE IN INDIANAPOLIS

Thanks to both Gerardo Marti and Linford Fisher for their excellent recaps of the recent Religion & American Culture conference in Indianapolis. Since both of them have covered the conference so well, what follows here is a selective account of the most interesting conversations from my perspective, along with some questions to generate further discussion.

The conference began with a panel discussion about the connections and differences among the main disciplines comprising the “field” of religion in America: sociology (represented by Jay Demareth), religious studies (represented by Paula Kane), and history (represented by Jon Butler). There are, of course, scholars in other departments who study religion in America, but the overwhelming majority of attendees fell in one of these three disciplines. I put “field” in quotation marks because Butler suggested that no such field exists. American religion, he argued, does not have a canon or even a common set of questions in same manner as, say, American political history. Robert Orsi challenged Butler on this point, suggesting that a discernible field had developed over the last 25 years. I side with Orsi here, though I also know that I usually refer to my field of study as “American religious history,” a designation that might exclude sociologists. I wonder if my belief that there is a discernible field emerges from my training in a department of religion. In graduate school I grew accustomed to differentiating myself from theologians and biblical scholars, whereas my colleagues in history and sociology probably learned to draw different boundaries. Or, to put it more crassly, perhaps I’m inclined to see “American religious history” as a field because I earned a Ph.D. in that field! I wonder if I’d find Butler’s argument more compelling if I earned a Ph.D. in “post-1945 American history.” Do those of you trained in history or sociology recognize American religion as a field? If so, what defines it?

I think these questions are important because, as Jerry Park suggested later on the first day, universities reward scholars based on their contributions within disciplines. Those of us looking for tenure-track jobs or seeking tenure do so (for the most part) within departments. While a host of interdisciplinary programs dot the academic landscape, they typically hold less power than departments in the governance of universities. Given our need to win and maintain employment, it’s a rational decision for pre-tenure scholars to write within our disciplines. And lest I sound entirely cynical: it’s also rewarding. I find the archival research and narrative writing of religious history thrilling and important. But at what price do we cloister ourselves in disciplinary homes?

The final session of the conference allowed Jim Lewis and Amanda Porterfield to weigh in on the question, “where do we go from here?” Lewis pointed out the increasing financial difficulties facing publishers and universities and said that if ever we enjoyed the privilege of ivy tower seclusion, that era is over. We must speak to public audiences; given Lewis’s position as director of the seminary-based institute, he suggested that at least some of our scholarship must speak to religious leaders and practitioners. This requires a different type of writing in different venues than the ones we’re accustomed to. Here again, I wondered if university governance works against the desire to broaden our audience. We’re rewarded for writing journal articles and monographs, but increasingly, our work reaches the public through online sources like this blog and other sites. That’s not to say that blog posts and NPR appearances should “count” as much as a refereed article, nor is it to argue against the need for monographs (an argument that, like Linford, I was happy to bypass last week). But I do think one of the challenges facing us involves a careful consideration of how institutional structures can either hinder or foster the expansion of our audience.

There were plenty of other conversations during the sessions and, as Linford and Gerardo have noted, a delightful banquet marked the end of the conference and celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture. I was delighted to take part in the event and came away with a fresh set of questions, acquaintance with new colleagues, a longer reading list than I’ll ever have time for, and a renewed appreciation for the richness and depth of scholarship examining religion in American life. Kudos to Phil Goff, Becky Vasko, and everyone else associated with the Center for putting on such a wonderful conference.

Thoughts on the 1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference

Welcome to our newest contributing editor, Linford Fisher, who starting this fall will be Assistant Professor of History at Brown University (moving on from Indiana University, South Bend). Lin completed his Ph.D. from Harvard University a few years back, and works on early American religious history. His first post as a contributing editor concerns the just-completed Religion and American Culture Conference, hosted by my long-time compatriot and partner in crime, Philip Goff, who heads the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI. Thanks to Lin for this report on the "state of the art" in the field.

Any other attendees at this conference who want to post your thoughts here, please send along whatever thoughts you have and I'll post them here.

Thoughts on the 1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference

Linford D. Fisher

Saturday, June 6, 2009. 10:37 PM. I just passed a Jesus truck. Literally. I am speeding north onRt. 31, the lonely and very straight highway that runs between Indianapolis and South Bend, Indiana. Sitting at a red light somewhere north of Kokomo, I could not help but notice a huge

Mac truck and trailer with “JESUS” painted in massive, red-block letters on the one side of the trailer, parked in a truck stop but facing the highway to make its message unavoidable. As I momentarily reflect on the cultural origins, meanings, and ambiguities of the trailer, somehow this feels like a fitting ending to a two-day conference on religion and American culture (in Indiana, no less—a state in which “In God We Trust” is emblazoned onto most license plates).

The past few days, June 4 – 6, marked the 1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference in Indianapolis, hosted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI and funded in part by the Lily Endowment and Indiana University. Although it would be impossible to adequately capture all the details and nuances of the rich presentations and the discussions that transpired among the one hundred and ten registered participants seated in a large circle around a central presenter table, what follows are perhaps some of the more salient recurring themes.

WHAT IS THE FIELD?

First and foremost was the issue of what the field of the study of religion in America actually is. Jon Butler, the very first presenter, predictably (and enjoyably) played the contrarian by proposing that American religion or American religious history is not even a field at all, and that it is, at best, perhaps a shared set of questions, or merely a literature. Although Butler’s comment on the non-field-ness of the field was immediately challenged in the discussion that followed by Robert Orsi and others, it did trigger a bit of self-reflection over the ensuing sessions regarding the shape of field. Clearly most people who spoke considered it to be a viable, distinguishable field, but no satisfactory answers were offered about its precise shape other than that the field is held together by a loose interest in religion in American life, past and present, more than particular questions or methodologies.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY: PROMISES AND PERILS

Secondly, and relatedly, was the unavoidable and recurring theme of interdisciplinarity, particularly as it relates to the methodological practices of the study of American religion and culture. The conference exhibited simultaneous disciplinary diversity and homogeneity. On the one hand, the program lineup featured a pleasant mix of scholars with appointments in religious studies, sociology, and history, with the full spread of institutions represented, from schools of theology to tier one research universities. However, when asked during the first session, the clear majority of the 100 or so people present identified themselves as historians; the second largest group was those who self-identified as religionists; the third largest group was the
sociologists. Relatively absent were the self-professed anthropologists (one, two at most), political scientists, and theologians (although not by design, according to organizer Philip Goff).

The conference seemed to foster an interdisciplinary dialog, but at times forthright discussion of disciplinary boundaries and methods only seemed to reinscribe these same differences. As one participant quipped, the Thursday session on sociology probably only further alienated the historians who were present (even as another participant joked about the sociologists sleeping during the more historically-oriented sessions). And both days, surprisingly, a vigorous defense of “disciplinarity” emerged, since, as Jay Demerath argued, disciplines make their greatest contribution when they are true to themselves. Nonetheless, I for one walked away with a long list of possible books to read that I might have not otherwise considered, which I think is a good thing.

POWER: MORE THAN JUST A TIRED TROPE

Another recurring theme was the importance of ongoing attention to the dynamics of power. Paula Kane reminded the group that power was central to the cultural turn thirty years ago, especially as framed by critical theorists who used to be standard reading for graduate students; too many students now are interested in the local and ethnography and are ill-equipped to answer larger questions that might help trace the production and uses of power. In a later session, Rudy Busto once again brought power to the fore in his lamenting of the confusion between ethnicity and race. Ethnicity—by far the more acceptable and benign of the two in terms of public and academic discourse—tends to obscure the inner workings of power. Talking about race keeps power in our sights, as Amanda Porterfield reminded us in the last session.

GRAND NARRATIVES / SYNTHESIS

In a related yet different vein, the problematic of the grand narrative always seemed to be lurking in the background. Although one would think that in this group of scholars grand narratives would be a dead-end topic, in fact the opposite seemed to be true. During the discussion at the end of the session on “Competing and Complementary Approaches in American Religious History,” a somewhat spirited debate over the value of grand narratives ended with—perhaps to the sociologists’ great delight—an impromptu poll of those who had decisively abandoned a grand narrative in their own teaching of the field. Astonishingly, only two people self-identified in this way. The rest of us either admitted that we de facto teach a narrative of some sort or else still saw some value in an idealized “self-correcting” grand narrative that is continually subject to revision (largely through ongoing, specialized and localized studies). David Hall, in his comments on Saturday morning, proposed that “THE” grand narrative of American religious history (historiographically speaking) has been that of showing the relevance of religion to the development of the nation state, particularly during moments of crises (Revolutionary War, election of 1800, the start of the Civil War, etc.), á la Sidney Mead and historians of the 1950s. It is a testament to the staying power of magisterial syntheses that Daniel Walker Howe—whose 2008 Oxford book, What God Hath Wrought, won a Pulitzer—was the keynote speaker at the closing dinner on Saturday evening.

A TAYLORIAN CRISIS OF THE ACADEMY?

A final recurring theme—that also doubled, rather uneasily, as a form of comedic relief—was Mark C. Taylor’s now infamous April 26 Op-Ed in the New York Times, “End the University as We Know It,” in which he calls graduate education the “Detroit of higher learning” and wonders if graduate programs are cultivating skills for which there is no market. Although few scholars present agreed with Taylor’s dour estimation of the university and its future, his editorial prompted recurring reflection on larger concerns regarding the future of the field, the job market, disciplinary positioning, publishing, tenure, and funding sources.

The conference ended on Saturday evening with a scrumptious dinner and a series of reflections on the history of the Center (on its twentieth anniversary) from Jan Shipps, Edward Linenthal, and Conrad Cherry, followed by a keynote address from Daniel Walker Howe on ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­“The Importance of Understanding Religion in American Society.”

Overall, the conference was delightful, and I am encouraged that it seems there will indeed be a second such conference in two years, according to the R&AC Center director, Philip Goff. As a historian of early America, however, I was surprised that the conversation gravitated so much towards topics, methodologies, and issues that related to the twentieth-century and contemporary study of religion in America rather than the earlier and—arguably—equally important eras of American history. Has early American religious history ceased to be a relevant part of this discussion? Additionally, with regard to methodology and theoretical frameworks, the vibrant presence of sociologists and the stark absence of anthropologists combined with the strong preference for the present made me wonder what the relationship is between one’s chronological focus and the methodologies one chooses to engage and appropriate (early American historians, for example, tend to draw on anthropological models, not sociological ones, although I’m still unsure why this is the case). The two days also passed with scant reference to Native Americans and questions of sexuality and religion (although the absences of both were briefly noted), and only passing reference to issues of transnational religion, international religious contexts, and globalization. And somehow, inescapably, I couldn’t help but feel like the conference slightly resembled the “Jesus” trailer I saw on Rt. 31 with its subtle but powerful assumptions about the ongoing centrality of Christianity (and even Protestantism?) in American religious life. I look forward to picking up these and other additional topics in two years, if not before. In the meantime, kudos to Philip and his staff for an excellent conference.

A Tribute to Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion

Paul Harvey

Some years ago, several folks helped to organize a tribute to Donald Mathews's classic work Religion in the Old South at the 2002 SHA, on the 25th anniversary of its publication. My friend Lauren Winner and others organized this wonderful event.

I had the same warm feeling today at the session for the 30th anniversary of Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South. Of course, anyone who knows this field will recognize that this is one of the seminal works in all of American religious history, its influence reaching down through (by now) generations of scholars.

The Hilton Hotel provided us a malfunctioning microphone and a room about as unfriendly to dialogue as possible. Nonetheless, everyone present made it a great event, and I was thankful to be present and a participant. 5 panelists (including myself) were privileged to be able to reflect on the life and influence of Raboteau's classic work. Younger, middle-aged (that would be me), and older scholars were represented. Professor Raboteau responded, characteristically thoughtfully and incisively, at the end, and the audience provided excellent questions and commentary. In all, it was a great day in Chicago, and we all have Phil Goff to thank for putting the session together.

For anyone's interest, I'm pasting in my commentary below. As mentioned, there were five responses today to Raboteau's work. Each presenter had a distinctly different set of comments. My comments below briefly mention the influence of newer work on the African diaspora, foreshadowed in Raboteau's work; Jalane Schmidt of the University of Virginia spoke at length about this. Mark Noll (Notre Dame) and Dennis Dickerson (Vanderbilt) discussed theological issues in Raboteau's work. Curtis Evans drew from his significant work on the history of the concept of "black religion" and gave a religious studies perspective on Raboteau's book. I discussed historical issues remaining for further exploration, further detailed below. Anyone who was there and has read this post, feel free to comment. Mostly, we all owe a debt of gratitude to Prof. Raboteau for creating this work of enduring significance, and for his subsequent career in exploring avenues of African American religious history.

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ALBERT RABOTEAU'S SLAVE RELIGION: A 30TH ANNIVERSARY RETROSPECTIVE

When I was in graduate school, I hung out a lot at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, on a beautiful spot overlooking the Bay Area. When I was there “back in the day,” I checked out a lot of books on African American religious history, which I was just then starting to study with my mentor Leon Litwack. Time after time while there in the pre-historic pre-computer library days, I wrote my name in the little check out cards. Time after time, when I did that, I wrote my name under another name, the last person to have checked out these often rather obscure books, mostly about nineteenth-century African American religious history: Albert Raboteau. I spent those years wondering whether I could ever write such a work as Slave Religion. A ghost was haunting me: the specter of Albert Raboteau. I’m still trying to write such a book, and that specter still looms before me - - today, in person!

So I started my career following in Albert Raboteau’s footsteps. And I’ve continued my career in those footsteps since. Re-reading SLAVE RELIGION reminded me of that. It reminds me of recently re-reading Winthrop Jordan’s WHITE OVER BLACK, parts of which I had assigned for a class. Re-reading it reminded me of how much Jordan had anticipated decades of scholarship to come. Jordan didn’t use the word “whiteness,” but he was exploring that concept long before most scholars (aside from DuBois, of course), were using the word. Likewise, re-reading SLAVE RELIGION for this session reminded me of how much Raboteau had not only shaped, but also anticipated, the state of the field then and to come.

In the initial section of his book, Raboteau depicts the “death of the gods,” meaning the inevitable demise of African religions in any systemic form. There were “retentions” and “survivals,” fragments of surviving African religious customs (as Melville Herskovits had documented in his older classic Myth of the Negro Past), but the brutal passage to the New World meant that African religions would not survive intact. Nonetheless, while African religions died, from their remnants African-American Christianity took its characteristic cultural forms. In Raboteau’s account, enslaved Christians might have attended white-sanctioned and supervised services, sung Anglo-American hymns, and listened to southern ministers instruct them in the virtues of obedience, patience, and humility. But they also created their own covert religious culture, one with its own distinctive theology and rituals. In services held in slave cabins, in the woods at night, and in "hush arbors," enslaved African Americans developed a religious culture that brought together elements of their African past and their American evangelical training. Before the war, when independent institutions were impossible, black religious life emerged most clearly in religious rituals such as ring shouts, spirituals, and chanted sermons.

Raboteau’s book surveys the field in a way that is still unexcelled, and still sets the standard for all other work in the field. If Raboteau still defines the field as it exists, what of the field as it is to come? We don’t have any new overall synthesis that encapsulates seemingly everything, such as Raboteau accomplished thirty years ago. But we do have trends, new books and articles, and interesting forthcoming work that suggests what such a synthesis would look like in the future.

I’ll suggest what it will look like in three areas. First, African American religious history is now about the diaspora, rather than North America per se. Raboteau anticipated this, but it’s now come full bloom. Second, as Raboteau acknowledges in his new afterword, traditions outside of Christianity per se, or evangelicalism of the Protestant variety, are in need of much further exploration. That, too, is now well underway, especially in the earlier history of African American Islam. Finally, the period from the early seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth remains terrain in need of further exploration.

I want to dwell for a moment on the last point: the earlier story of African American religious history. We have a lot of work to do to correct an evangelical Protestant teleology that still implicitly tends to write our American religious history. Examining the earlier periods of African American religious history brings a few thoughts to mind.

First, if we import the concept of lived religion into the study of African American religious history, what would we find? I think we would discover what archaeologists are increasingly finding as they unearth the artifacts of early slave plantations: the remnants of everyday religious practice. Scholars such as Lauren Winner are examining the quotidian religious practices of eighteenth-century Americans, in her case elite Anglicans, in a manner much like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has done for the now-famous midwife Martha Ballard. We’ll never be able to reconstruct the world of early African Americans in the same way. AT this point, for example, we’re not even very sure anymore where such a well-known figure as Olaudah Equiano was even born, and the degree to which he might have invented his own tradition as a child of the African motherland. Nonetheless, even before the evangelical awakenings, African American religious life must have been practiced in myriad everyday ways.

Secondly, it now seems clearer than it was at the time Raboteau wrote that Anglicanism and Catholicism exerted far more influence in early African American religious history than has heretofore been understood. This doesn’t mean that Anglicans, or Catholics, effected mass or large-scale conversions as did the evangelicals later. It does mean that the idea that boring Anglicans presented a message with no appeal at all to slaves in Virginia, for example, no longer holds.

This is clear from a recently rediscovered document published in the William and Mary Quarterly. This document is a letter from 1723 in which a group of mixed-race slaves are writing to the newly appointed Anglican bishop, asking for their freedom based on their grounding in the Christian faith. They were, they wrote, “Baptised and brouaht up in a way of the Christian faith and followes the wayes and Rulles of the chrch of England.” They complained about the law “which keeps and makes them and there seed Slaves forever.” The hardness of their masters, they said, kept them from following the Sabbath: “wee doo hardly know when [Sabbath] comes,” they wrote, “for our task mastrs are as hard with us as the Egyptians was with the Chilldann of Issarall.” Their letter concluded with an explanation of why they did not sign their names, “for freare of our masters for if they knew that wee have Sent home to your honour wee Should goo neare to Swing upon the Gallass tree.”

These slaves retained an older, more radical view of Christian conversion: their religious status gave them rights to freedom and respect, for which they were willing to fight – in court rooms, in letters to imperial officials, and, as a last resort, in rebellions. Here, our language of Christian Englishmen and non-Christian Africans interacting in the Chesapeake fails completely, for what we see instead are Christianized Afro-Virginians utilizing the levers of power to try to leverage Christianity into freedom. They knew the language of power, and they spoke it eloquently and at great risk to themselves. John Thornton’s work on the timing of the Stono Rebellion of 1739, which fit with a Catholic Kongolese calendar, also shows the ways in which religious sensibilties informed early slave life in America.

Younger scholars examining the history of Louisiana and the Mississippi Valley, moreover, as well as those studying the diasporic connections of Africans in various parts of the Americas, are rewriting early African American religious history as well. To me, this is one of the most exciting frontiers of research and analysis, precisely because it suggests the diversity, complexity, and multiplicity of early American history. Again, once we no longer assume Protestant evangelicals are the winners by default, then all those Catholic missionaries loom much larger than they typically have in American religious history. Michael Pasquier’s forthcoming work on French missionary priests will tell us an awful lot about early Catholic history and the relationship of Catholics with slavery, as has my former student Sue Ann Marasco's just-completed dissertation.

Finally, I want to speak to the issue raised by the story of Charles Colcock Jones, that Raboteau tells in his work. Jones was a Presbyterian planter and minister in the lowcountry of Georgia who scorned slavery when younger but eventually created the enterprise of the “mission to the slaves.” Preaching before a slave congregation in 1833, Jones delivered a message about order and obedience from the book of Philemon. “When I insisted upon fidelity and obedience as Christian virtues in servants and upon the authority of Paul,” he later wrote, and “condemned the practice of running away, one half of my audience deliberately rose up and walked off with themselves, and those that remained looked anything but satisfied, either with the preacher or his doctrine. After dismission, there was no small stir among them; some solemnly declared ‘that there as no such thing an Epistle in the Bible’ others, ‘that they did not care if they ever heardme prech again!’ . . . Some objected to him as preacher “because I was a master.” (Raboteau, 294).

Charles Colcock Jones’s experience suggests one of the deep paradoxes of American religious history: the explosion of democratic evangelicalism together with the rise of a repressive form of Protestantism that at first implicitly, and later explicitly, racialized the divine.

In southern history, one sees this paradox played out in particularly powerful ways. Therefore, in writing a social history of religious freedom, there is no better place to start than the South. Such an exploration will show the ways in which freedom depended on un-freedom, and how evangelical democracy sprang up at the same time as the explosive spread of racial slavery. Religious democracy, racial slavery, and social repression grew up together. What exactly was their connection? That, to me, is a question of fundamental importance worth revisiting; and when we revisit the question, the specter of Albert Raboteau will loom over us again.

Raboteau's Slave Religion -- 30th Anniversary Session at AAR

Here's a big event at this year's AAR that I hope you all going to the meeting or in the Chicago area may be able to attend:

North American Religions Section and Afro-American Religious History Group

Theme: Albert Raboteau's No-Longer-"Invisible Institution": An Anniversary Retrospective

Saturday - 9:00 am-11:30 am, CHT-International Ballroom South (that's in the Hilton International Towers, S. Michigan Ave in Chicago, near to the ARt Institute)

Philip K. Goff, Indiana University and Purdue University, Indianapolis, Presiding

Theme: Albert Raboteau's No-Longer-"Invisible Institution": An Anniversary Retrospective

Thirty years ago Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion appeared to great critical praise. Employing such sources as slave narratives, folklore, autobiographies, missionary accounts, and diaries of whites, Raboteau both broadened and deepened our understanding of black antebellum religion. Engaged in the debates surrounding the extent of Africanisms, group formation and behavior, and the relationship between conjure and Christianity, the book’s influence extended into many fields of inquiry and methods of study. In this session, several generations of scholars will assess the influence of Slave Religion and use the opportunity to consider the directions of the study of African American religions in the coming years. Ample time will be dedicated to audience participation as we critically reflect on the significance, influence, and promise of this work thirty years into its life.

Panelists:

Dennis C. Dickerson, Vanderbilt University
Mark Noll, University of Notre Dame
Jalane D. Schmidt, University of Virginia
Curtis Evans, University of Chicago
Paul W. Harvey, University of Colorado

Responding:
Albert J. Raboteau, Princeton University

Business Meeting:
Philip K. Goff, Indiana University and Purdue University, Indianapolis
Kathleen Flake, Vanderbilt University

Intellectual Confessions and the Book of Mormon

BY ED BLUM

If you’re like me (and I hope you aren’t, because that would mean double or triple or quadruple the insanity I already bring to the world), you are an American religious historian who has some intellectual confessing to do. You may have never read Bob Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street; you may secretly like revival meetings; you may think that “women’s history” is not “religious history” (or vice versa). For me, the first of my confessions is that I have never read The Book of Mormon. I teach about the Church of Latter-Day Saints all the time; heck, I even have friends who consider themselves part of the tradition. But I’ve avoided the Angel Moroni; I’ve steered clear of Alma and of Nephi.

This will all change now. Penguin Classics just released a beautiful new edition of The Book of Mormon with an introduction from one of the finest American religious historians of the past twenty years: Laurie Maffly-Kipp. The cover is gorgeous and the introduction drew me not only in the world of early 19th century America, but also into the tradition of a truly “American” faith (or is it profoundly unAmerican? ... I’ll let the historiographical slugfest continue with perhaps a twist to that question: if “women’s history is religious history,” as Ann Braude claims, then how does the history of Mormonism fit into American women’s religious history?).

Eyes Wide Shut

Paul Harvey

Recently I mentioned my deep admiration for Erskine Clarke's Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (which I've just recently, and very belatedly, gotten around to reading), and promised to blog some more on this richly humane and deeply affecting work (and, to repeat what I said earlier, Kelly Baker has blogged here about the work). It's the story of the lowcountry world of Charles Colcock Jones, the "apostle to the slaves," and his extended family, together with a parallel history of the slaves his family owned. That flat description scarcely captures the richness and pathos of this tale.

Before getting back to blogging on the book, I corresponded with a historian I admire: Beth Barton Schweiger of the University of Arkansas. Purely coincidentally, Beth sent me a review she had previously prepared of this work, but which did not as it turns out appear in print. So with her permission, I'm running her review here, which says pretty much (and much more eloquently) what I was going to blog more informally.

As a preview, here's my favorite paragraph, which provides me with this entry's title, "eyes wide shut":

Charles Colcock Jones died in the turbulent spring of 1863, lying on his bed at Montevideo fully dressed in black with a “pure white cravat.” Only his wife and daughter-in-law were with him at his death, but many of the slaves whom he thought he knew watched as the coffin, built by the carpenter Porter, was covered over with earth. Firm in the conviction of his sin and of his Savior, Jones died still closed to the full wisdom offered by his theology. Yet it was not that he saw the truth and chose to resist it. Instead, he grasped only a part of the truth even while he was convinced he had it all. “You can know a thing to death and for all purposes be completely ignorant of it,” a character in a recent novel opined. Erskine Clarke’s history warns us how little we can see, even when we would swear that our eyes are wide open.

Here's the full review.
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Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. Yale University Press, 2005. Reviewed by Beth Barton Schweiger.

In the late winter of 1796, a Georgia planter sent instructions to his wife about a slave he had leased to a neighbor some years earlier. “Make Old Jupiter go to Mr. Dowses and bring old Silvey home and set her to work,” John Jones wrote. Silvey was Jupiter’s wife. After years of doing everything in his power to get her returned, Jupiter rejoiced when his master finally relented. After the couple was reunited, Jones wrote again. “Tell [Jupiter] that as he has now got his wife back I shall expect he will do his best for me,” he told his wife. (3)
The twisted paternalism of American slavery is on full view in these two lines. Two couples, one enslaved to the other, knew one another intimately in life and in death. The mistress bathed the fevered back of the sick slave, the slave delivered and suckled the woman’s child. Master and slave, men and women, sang hymns together, prayed together, and wept together over their dead. Yet they did not know each other at all. Slave and master were bound together in a relationship so complex and ambivalent, Eugene Genovese famously wrote, “that neither could express the simplest human feelings without relation to the other.”[i] Indeed, John Jones needed his slave’s gratitude when he restored the precious thing he had so carelessly broken. And Jupiter felt the bitter edge of his joy, which laid bare his powerlessness to protect his family. Slave and master lived separate lives in a single place, unable to breach the terrible chasm opened when one human being claims complete power over another. John’s son Charles would later observe that masters “live and die in the midst of Negroes and know comparatively little of their real character.” (26)

In his Bancroft prize-winning book, Erskine Clarke shows over and over how the same event—a visit, a death, a birth, a purchase of property, a church service, a trip to town—meant one thing for the slave and another for the master. Leasing a slave was both a careless decision to bring in some extra cash and a wrenching end to marital intimacy. Clarke shows as no historian has done before that the history of American slavery should be written as a single narrative of “two histories of one place and one time.” (ix)

By far the more difficult of the two histories to write is that of the slaves. Clarke used an extraordinary collection of papers left behind by the family of the Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, scattered in archives from New Orleans to North Carolina. The family, one of the wealthiest families in one of the wealthiest slave societies in the world, meticulously recorded the births, deaths, sales, and movements of their slaves and many details of the material circumstances of their lives. In this, we are indebted to the paternalism that prompted such record-keeping. The voices of the slaves themselves are nearly always silent in these records, so Clarke draws on an anthropological model pioneered by the historian Rhys Isaac to reconstruct their experiences.[ii]

Accordingly, the book is filled with people moving across the landscape of coastal Georgia, which itself becomes a character in the story. There are carefully imagined meetings, conversations, and surreptitious gatherings by slaves on any one of seventeen plantations in the region. Most of these events are known to us only through accounts left by their masters, but Clarke richly reimagines them from the perspective of the slaves. One can only marvel at the exhaustive research and years of thought required to support such readings.

It is a cliché to say that a brief review cannot do justice to a book. Clarke’s beautifully-detailed history is as densely peopled and intricately plotted as a Russian novel, stuffed with magnificent detail. In these pages, we learn and relearn the epic of American slavery. Clarke writes unapologetically of a particular people in a particular place. We see the view across the marshes from the broad piazza of the big house at Montevideo and the view from the fires that burned in front of the cabins in the settlement at Carlawter. We watch as a Presbyterian session bowed to the absolute power of the master by declaring that Major, a church member, could marry again after his wife was sold away, as she was as good as dead to him. We see the only white man singing and praying with several hundred mourners at the slave preacher Sharper’s funeral, and watch as the ox cart bears the coffin down a dusty moon-lit road to the burial ground in the settlement. We see how the story of slavery moved towards bondage for the master and towards freedom for the slave, and how both master and slave were diminished.

The kind of slavery practiced on the Jones family plantations was not the only kind of American slavery. As Ira Berlin has emphasized, slavery changed dramatically in North America from generation to generation and region to region.[iii] The free people of Liberty County, Georgia thrived off the labor of their slaves for more than a century and a half before Federal troops invaded during the Civil War. The stability and prosperity brought by the labor-intensive rice cultivation meant that slaves in the region were able, more than many American slaves, to live in relatively stable families, to negotiate the task system of work with their masters, and to create a rich Gullah culture out of remembered African traditions. Yet these relatively stable slave settlements were under constant threat in the early nineteenth century, along with the rest of the seaboard South, from a new kind of slavery practiced in the lower Mississippi valley. The massive migration of more than a million slaves to till the rich soils of the interior, named by Berlin the “Second Middle Passage,” put constant pressure on plantations in the older seaboard states. Long before the thundering of Federal guns threatened to end plantation slavery as it was practiced in the Low Country, it was being threatened from inside the South.

Charles Jones was a sincere Christian man, and by any meaningful measure, a benevolent master. He had agonized over slavery in his youth, particularly during his years of study at Andover and Princeton, at one time declaring it unqualifiedly against the laws of God. He eventually silenced his own fears by devoting his life to “the religious instruction of the slaves.” If slavery must continue, Jones reasoned, then it must be reformed and brought under the supervision of Christian people. Accordingly, Jones devoted most of his working life to evangelizing slaves on his own and neighboring plantations. His optimism about the possibilities of moral reform to wrench society into the shape he thought best matched the fervor of any northern moral reformer of his day. North and South, all Americans seemed convinced of their power over history. And yet, even the relatively benign and deeply Christian paternalism of Jones and his wife Mary could never completely dull the sharp assertion of power by owners over what was owned. “They are traitors who may pilot an enemy into your bedchamber!” Jones exclaimed of his slaves in late 1863 as Yankee gunboats sailed up a nearby river, prompting the boldest of them to take flight. (415) And as her life lay in ruins after the war, the widow Mary demonstrated how easily pious pity for the slave hardened into racial hatred for freedmen and women. “With their emancipation must come their extermination,” she bluntly declared. “They perish when brought into conflict with the intellectual superiority of the Caucasian race.” (444)

Clarke is not the first to use the rich papers left behind by the Jones family. Nor is it the first time a study based on them has won national acclaim. In 1972, the literary scholar Robert Manson Myers published an 1,800-page colossus, The Children of Pride, which featured a selection of Jones family letters written between 1854 and 1868.[iv] The book was hailed by many critics and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 over some loud objections. One Georgia historian scorned the book’s warm reception by the “literate few in the fading Daughters of the Confederacy” and decried its “Gone With the Wind” southern apologetics, complete with “shadowy whites, invisible negroes, slavemasters of unbelieveable Christian rectitude, and flowers of chivalry.”[v]

Clarke’s achievement in Dwelling Place is to tell two histories where Myers told only one. The striking difference is apparent on every page of the book, but it is most starkly on display in the appendices. Children of Pride included almost 300 pages of a densely-printed “Who’s Who” of nearly all of the people mentioned in the Jones letters. Not a single slave appears in the hundreds listed there (although they do earn an index of their own by first name only.) By contrast, Clarke includes eight family trees of slaves owned by the Jones family. His painstaking work demonstrates visually what is made clear on every page of his book: that the slaves had their own family histories, that their low country settlements were composed “not simply of a mass of slaves, but of distinct men and women, people with names, with diverse personalities and personal histories.” (189)

Clarke’s contribution in this book extends beyond writing slaves like Jupiter, Sharper, Silvey, and Major and their masters into a single narrative. His book also reflects on the meaning of American Christian slavery and how best to write its history. Is the best history one informed by moral outrage? How much do we have a right to expect of the dead? Shall we use them only to measure our own progress? Historians of American slavery have long wrestled with such questions. Many who have claimed no interest in defending Christianity have been able to explain people like Charles Jones only by denying that they were Christians at all.

Clarke offers a different answer. He has expressed exasperation with those who deny that “Southern evangelicalism could be a part of an intellectual tradition worth exploring,” and like Donald G. Mathews, he takes for granted that “the slaveholding ethic was as natural an extension of Evangelicalism as was abolitionism.” [vi] In this, he offers a sharp rebuke to any who might claim that the Church is a culture. Charles Jones was very possibly the best Christian master that the system of American chattel slavery might have created, and yet it is nearly impossible to claim him as one of our own. Clarke refuses to make excuses for Jones’s sincere and ultimately misguided piety, or to claim that he was merely a rank hypocrite. He takes the costlier path of trying to understand him, wisely acknowledging that we have much to learn from staring down Christian slavery for what it was. Clarke is hardly an apologist for the South. But as a seminary professor with deep roots in the Low Country and in Jones’ beloved Presbyterian tradition, it is not possible for Clarke to stand outside of Jones’s world and point a finger at this preacher’s folly. Instead, he chose the more difficult task of standing with him. And it is only in standing with him that Clarke can tell us what he sees—a blind, visionary, noble, arrogant, thoughtless, wise, brave, cowardly, heartless, loving, and mortal Christian man.

Charles Colcock Jones died in the turbulent spring of 1863, lying on his bed at Montevideo fully dressed in black with a “pure white cravat.” Only his wife and daughter-in-law were with him at his death, but many of the slaves whom he thought he knew watched as the coffin, built by the carpenter Porter, was covered over with earth. Firm in the conviction of his sin and of his Savior, Jones died still closed to the full wisdom offered by his theology. Yet it was not that he saw the truth and chose to resist it. Instead, he grasped only a part of the truth even while he was convinced he had it all. “You can know a thing to death and for all purposes be completely ignorant of it,” a character in a recent novel opined.[vii] Erskine Clarke’s history warns us how little we can see, even when we would swear that our eyes are wide open.

[i] Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, (New York: Random House, 1974; Vintage Books, 1976), 3.
[ii] The Transformation of Virginia: Community, Religion, Authority, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
[iii] Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).
[iv] Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). Myers also published a book on Jones’s experience at Princeton and wrote a play based on the papers. Myers, A Georgian at Princeton, (New York: Harcourt, 1976) and Quintet: A Five Play Cycle Drawn from The Children of Pride (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
[v] Charles Crowe, “Historians and ‘Benign Neglect’: Conservative Trends in Southern History and Black Studies,” Reviews in American History 2 (June, 1974): 163-173.
[vi] Review of Heyrman, “Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt,” Theology Today 55 (July, 1998): 283-5; Religion in the Old South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xv.
[vii] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2004), 7.