Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010: Your Top 10 List

Welcome back to our contributor to Everett Hamner, who's been goofing around doing research and teaching at Western Illinois instead of spending time on the all-important business of blogging. Below are his thoughts on ten recent pieces of American literature, of all genres, which show the vitality of religion in American literary culture. Feel free to add your own suggestions for a top ten list in the comments section.

Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010
by Everett Hamner

As one of the literary types haunting this blog, and in small recompense for all I learned about American religious history from my just-graduated Young Scholars in American Religion cohort, I thought some of you might appreciate these recommendations of 21^st-century novels and graphic narratives to teach, reference, or just enjoy. Beyond their individual quality, my only criteria for inclusion was that they significantly engage religious questions and that they had not been discussed before at Religion in American History. The resulting list is neither exhaustive nor even my own “top ten.” But it is relevant and eclectic, featuring postmodern doorstoppers and plot-driven page-turners, science fiction and realism, with main characters ranging from African American Protestants to a Catholic-Islamic-Hindu syncretist. I hope many of you discover something intriguing.

1) E. L. Doctorow, City of God (2000). The back cover promises “a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a Lower East Side church only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue.” That just scratches the surface. This postmodern collage of literary forms, including emails, jazz lyrics, free verse, and prayers, is definitely about something missing, but not so much the cross as the God presumed to have hung upon it. Yet this is not merely another expression of Dover Beachian despair. Featuring dark matter and quantum physics, the Holocaust and the atom bomb, Tillichian theology and “Evolutionary Judaism,” and early Christianity and modern filmmaking, the novel is worthy of its namesake. As an early passage has it, “That the universe, including our consciousness of it, would come into being by some fluke happenstance, that this dark universe of incalculable magnitude has been accidentally self-generated … is even more absurd than the idea of a Creator.” A.

2. Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001). Martel’s novel is one of only a couple on this list that is neither by an American writer nor about American religion. Instead its settings are India, Mexico, Canada, and most of all, the Pacific Ocean. At one level, this is a fairly simple adolescent adventure story, a tale of shipwreck and survival. The twist is that the ship in question was carrying a zoo, so Pi’s lifeboat companions include an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger. Too fantastic, you say? Then let me assure you that this half-comedic narrative is framed so as to render the entire novel a study in epistemology and an inquiry into the nature of fiction, allegory, and metaphor. Oh, and because the main character believes that “religion is about our dignity, not our depravity,” he assumes that a loving God won’t mind if a growing boy is simultaneously a pious Catholic, Muslim, and Hindu … even if he doesn’t tell his priest, imam, or pandit. Pluralism, anyone? A-.

3) Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra, and José Marzán, Jr. Y: The Last Man (2002-08).

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative is thriving in the new millennium, and I don’t just mean Left Behind. Now collected in book form, this widely-acclaimed comic series will turn off some with its graphic violence and sexuality, but those who tackle it will be rewarded with much more to ponder than the average superhero tale. Utilizing a premise going back to Mary Shelley, this globetrotting narrative interrogates potential mutations of feminism, homophobia, racism, genetic engineering, US nationalism, global terrorism, and religious fundamentalism. True to the genre, there is plenty of hyperbole, special effects, and tongue-in-cheek humor, but these lush panels are as consistently evocative as the plot is relevant. Surgeon General Warning: strangely addictive. B+.

4) Joe Sacco, Palestine (2002). And now for something intensely historical, just to counterbalance the colorful future of that last entry. Joe Sacco does in-depth reporting through immersing himself in the world’s least stable environs. Rather than a feature in The New York Times Magazine, however, the result is graphic narrative. This account of two months in the Occupied Territories in 1991-92 is an effort to uncover the personal dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. There are certainly references to larger-scale political maneuvering, but the core of this work is its on-the-ground tales, which come from both sides of the fences. The wounds of rock-flinging juvenile operatives, the devastation of a neighborhood’s olive trees (and thus some residents’ primary sources of income), the torture of political prisoners, women’s feelings about the hijab, and the obliviousness of Western tourists … material religion, indeed. B+.

5) Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (2003). Richard Powers is best known for his mastery of scientific detail and his insights about human responses to new technologies. Like his stellar National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker (2005), this novel foregrounds evolution,but here the transformations are primarily of music, race, and religion. Spanning the second half of the twentieth century, particularly the civil rights movement and its legacy, this is not only a 600+ page meditation on jazz, opera, and classical music, but a compelling argument about America’s need to embrace racial hybridity, confront class divisions, and search deeper than religious labels. With a Jewish immigrant father and an African American mother, the brothers who are the novel’s main characters face the same sort of dilemmas observed by their father decades earlier. Among them: “If I want to get ahead, I must become a Christian. But if I use Christianity to get ahead, I lose my soul!” A-.

6) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). “Faulkner without the pretension,” I thought upon reading Gilead’s last sentence. The Pulitzer selection committee must have felt similarly, and among these recommendations, Robinson’s interwoven novels are the most certain to appear on future American literature syllabi. But greatness is only one element of their appeal. If you need antidotes to megachurch spectacles or clergy sex scandals, these quiet works consider far more mundane matters. Very little occurs plot-wise, and even some of the major events take place offstage. What we do get is immense theological depth, attention to ordinary beauties and graces easily overlooked. We find main characters who are largely admirable andindeed wise rural Iowan pastors. Seriously, this is possible. Need more? Well, race plays a major role. And in covering the same events from the two old men’s perspectives, the novels become a single, very successful narrative experiment. They are also full of understated humor, as in this description of a home health care book: “It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more particular than Leviticus.” Taken as a whole, what Gilead’s narrator says of a verse in the gospels may be what even the most informed readers feel about American Protestantism after finishing these masterpieces: “You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completelyignorant of it.” A+.

7) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2007). I debated listing this novel, as I’m not sure it says anything explicit about religion, at least not if defined narrowly. But a single scene from its sparing journey through a barely recognizable, post-apocalyptic American wilderness should be enough to convey the work’s significance. Having walked for days with little to eat, a father and his small son find an underground emergency bunker in the yard of an abandoned home. If the reader has not already accompanied this pair through the bleakness of the preceding hundred pages, the sensory impact of the moment is impossible to fully convey, but suffice it to say that I will never look at a tin of canned fruit the same way. “He turned and looked at the boy crouched above him blinking in the smoke rising up from the lamp and then he descended to the lower steps and sat and held the lamp out. Oh my God, he whispered. Oh my God. What is it Papa? Come down. Oh my God. Come down. Crate upon crate of canned goods. Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. […] He held his forehead in his hand. Oh my God, he said. He looked back at the boy. It’s all right, he said. Come down. Papa? Come down. Come down and see.” A-.

8) Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2010). Speaking of food, here is one of the best science fiction novels of the decade, and the problem here is calories. Imagining a twenty-third century in which international oil obsessions have given way to scarcities of food production, the setting and artificial beings involved are remindful of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, but the setting is Thailand. As in Life of Pi, the religion here is syncretistic, but the strange combinations in play—Buddhists overlapping with Grahamites, with stories about “Noah Bodhisattva, who saved all the animals and trees and flowers on his great bamboo raft and helped them cross the waters”—are taken for granted. This is a compelling contribution to the cyberpunk tradition that invites readers to extrapolate from current religious, ethnic, and global economic tensions and then to reinvest in that future’s history. B+.

9) Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting … (2010). Ralph Ellison worked for more than forty years on his follow-up to Invisible Man, but never could bring himself to finish. The reasons were legion, and have recently been thoroughly explored in Adam Bradley’s Ralph Ellison in Progress and Arnold Rampersad’s biography. Scholars of race and American literature are well aware of this struggle, but as I will likely argue in a future essay, those who study American religion should be, too. This 1100-page volume contains a wealth of archival material painstakingly organized and introduced by Bradley and John F. Callahan, including the most coherent 300+ pages of the second novel (which were originally published in 1999 as Juneteenth). Such an unfinished monstrosity may prove too massive for some to engage, but be not afraid: it includes many bite-sized excerpts that deal powerfully with civil religion, African American Protestantism, and the increasingly hybrid religious realities evident at the turn of the millennium. See especially the eight excerpts published by Ellison during his lifetime that appear at the volume’s conclusion. A-.

10) Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010). I’m cheating with this one, as I just discovered it myself and am only a hundred pages in. Given the praise garnered elsewhere, though, that’s enough to recommend it. With the 36 chapters receiving such titles as “The Argument from the Improbable Self” and “The Argument from the Irrepressible Past,” philosophers and theoretically-oriented historians of religion and science may be most immediately attracted, but this is compelling reading for anyone in the humanities whose afternoons are commonly devoted to faculty meetings and university lectures. Although several main characters are unapologetically brilliant, Goldstein holds nothing back in critiquing the posturing and petty divisions that characterize too much of academic life. Meanwhile, the novel’s equally serious and humorous reflections on the relationship of faith and knowledge and on modern dynamics of religion and secularism suggest an ear very close to the ground. A-, so far.

Rereading Creation: Teaching About The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder

Rereading Creation

Everett Hamner

A good deal of my work has to do with questions of origins. I teach a liberal arts and sciences gateway course on evolution; I am writing a book about how science and religion have interacted in the last century’s fiction. But as a scholar of contemporary American fiction, one course I didn’t imagine teaching was Literature of the Bible. The first time I offered it resulted from a schedule fluke, but it impacted the students so deeply that this fall I’ll be teaching it for the third time. This canon still matters a great deal to students who self-identify both as religious and irreligious.

A key element of the course’s popularity, I think, is that it takes on modern controversies about the Bible and Christianity very directly. We discuss feminism, homosexuality, immigration, terrorism, stem cell research, and other topics alongside the biblical texts most frequently cited when Americans make normative claims. Using documentary films like Craig Detweiler and John Marks’s courageous Purple State of Mind and Daniel Karslake’s poignant For the Bible Tells Me So, I pursue an atmosphere in which students can rethink many of their foundational assumptions in relative safety. In our dominantly white, homogeneous, lower-to-middle-class, Midwestern context, the complicated wisdom that emerges can be life-altering.

I thought about this course while reading a new book Paul Harvey sent along recently by Columbia Theological Seminary Professor of Old Testament William P. Brown. I haven’t read a lot of biblical criticism since my own seminary days, but The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (Oxford, 2010) is a refreshing reminder of what such studies can provide. The book isn’t perfect—there are moments when its alliances of biblical and scientific metaphors feel forced—but it effectively opens what remains a crucial discussion of genre. In approaching intersections of eschatology and cosmology, of predestination and physics, it provides a thoughtful inspection of our hermeneutical lenses.

In past versions of Literature of the Bible, the primary text I have used to get at questions of genre and interpretation is Marcus J. Borg’s Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally (HarperSanFrancisco,2001). Borg recommends that Bible readers adopt a posture of “postcritical naivete,” whereby one “hear[s] the biblical stories once again as true stories, even as one knows that they may not be factually true and that their truth does not depend upon their factuality.” One of his best elucidations of this attitude builds on the way many Native American storytellers begin their performances: “Now I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true” (50). Like such narrators, Borg demonstrates that story-truth extends beyond factual evidence, that wisdom exceeds empiricism without countermanding it.

Why is this realization so important, yet so elusive? In my experience with Literature of the Bible, almost every student openly or secretly expects in week one that a choice must be made: either embrace the world of religious tradition and personal righteousness or adopt the route of scientific abstraction and intellectual integrity. And beneath their politically-correct facades, many of the students can only characterize opposing convictions with inflammatory terms. But a realization that consistently helps both groups is that religion is not just Christianity, and apparent tensions between the natural and the supernatural extend well beyond this tradition’s purview.

Consider the scientism critiqued in this paragraph from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, I invite them:

The spider came out first. She drank from the edge of the pool, careful to keep the delicate eggs sacs on her abdomen out of the water. She retraced her path, leaving faint crisscrossing patterns in the fine yellow sand. He remembered stories about her. She waited in certain locations for people to come to her for help. She alone had known how to outsmart the malicious mountain Ka’t’sina who imprisoned the rain clouds in the northwest room of his magical house. Spider Woman had told Sun Man how to win the storm clouds back from the Gambler so they would be free again to bring rain and snow to the people. He knew what white people thought about the stories. In school the science teacher had explained what superstition was, and then held the science textbook up for the class to see the true source of explanations. He had studied those books, and he had no reasons to believe the stories any more. The science books explained the causes and effects. But old Grandma always used to say, ‘Back in time immemorial, things were different, the animals could talk to human beings and many magical things still happened.’ He never lost the feeling he had in his chest when she spoke those words, as she did each time she told them stories; and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school—that long long ago things had been different, and human beings could understand what the animals said, and once the Gambler had trapped the storm clouds on his mountaintop. (87, emphasis in original)

This passage shares a great deal with the mindset Brown’s book encourages: an openness to the possibility of meaning beyond factuality, of wonder beyond mastery, whether the facts to be mastered spring from religious or scientific sources. As the introduction to The Seven Pillars proposes, the book is “a tour of the biblical contours of creation conducted in conversation with science” (5), an expedition that looks beyond the obvious passages in Genesis to equally significant ones in Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Second Isaiah. While Brown may too easily equate “biblical” with “Christian,” his book models a wonder that usefully contests both religious and scientific absolutism. In this he stretches toward the same goal I pursue for my students: a sense that profound meaning has not disappeared with secularization, that not just “long long ago” but even now, there is great reason for awe. In fact this response remains the source of our best science, a point also made by a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I think biblical criticism like Brown’s may prove essential if our culture is to move beyond simplistic arguments about evolution, stem cell research, and genomics. So much of the resistance to biological knowledge and medical intervention is bound up with fear that God is being dishonored, and many Americans need to see either-or thinking about these issues give way to more complex both-and possibilities. By reading Genesis beside preexisting creation narratives like Mesopotamia’s Enuma elish, Brown’s book pulls readers toward active interpretations of their scriptures, much like those of other literature. In the process, he provides fresh images with clear implications for contemporary debates.

Two quick concluding examples: I like the way Brown wittily argues that instead of defining women in terms of men, “in Genesis 2, the separation of flesh makes possible gendered differentiation and, in turn, sexual union. Call it splitting the ‘adam. Through the creation of the woman, the groundling has become a man” (83). In other words, we Earth creatures only find gender identity in relationship; there is no “male” without “female.” Similarly—and unlike too many biblical commentaries—his book recognizes that the natural world of the Pentateuch is “red in tooth and claw” long before human beings appear on the scene, and that in representing “the quintessential ‘alpha male,’” Genesis is hardly attempting to refute concepts of biological evolution that would not emerge for thousands of years. I’ll be referring to Brown in my next version of Literature of the Bible for that reason alone: whether self-identifying as Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, or otherwise, my students need every opportunity to grasp that neither the Bible nor any other great wisdom literature is the enemy of scientific discovery.

Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

by Everett Hamner

We're approaching the lovely season when department chairs start asking for next semester’s textbooks, and while the syllabi themselves may still be months away, it’s never too early to dream up something different. In the spirit of collegial inspiration, and partly to build on recent journalistic treatments of unusual teaching approaches in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times (not to mention Michael Pasquier’s post from Tuesday), I want to share a nontraditional seminar project I undertook this time last year. While few readers of this blog may work in bioethics, the methodology is easily transferable to American religious history, or whatever else rocks one’s boat.

On the first day of my Genetics, Ethics, and Narrative seminar last spring, I looked around the room at thirteen students and saw not only reasonably strong academic abilities, but also moderately high computer skills and levels of personal responsibility. One student worked part-time cutting video at a local television station; another had shared several short films with me during the previous semester. I had already planned for students to do some kind of creative work in the course alongside their major research papers, and my idea was simple: why not collaborate on a documentary film instead of doing individual projects?

Some may respond, “Why not take your students on a field trip every week and drive them for ice cream, too?” Sure, this is beyond-the-call-of-duty stuff, and it requires that a professor generally likes her students and is willing to deal with surprises. It also helps if one’s institutional context welcomes rather than frowns upon innovation. Given these criteria, though, there are excellent reasons to risk such an unorthodox endeavor. Paramount for me was the way it motivated my students’ curiosity about the subject matter. Knowing they would be screening the film for their peers at an end-of-semester reception, they wanted it to be good, and they had to understand the subject matter well for that to happen.

How does one begin such an undertaking? Fearlessly. Confidently. Even when one feels grave doubts. It is amazing what students can achieve when their professor believes in them. I also think they respond well to a professor working not just in front of them, but also beside them. Too often we hide the boundaries of our expertise, expecting students to collapse in dismay if there is something we do not know. Watch what happens in class, though, when the learning direction occasionally reverses, even in casual chats outside of class time. When my students have a minute to instruct me on the finer points of motorcycle engines, the logic of a baseball trade, the experience of raising children while a spouse is stationed in Afghanistan, or the going rate at local egg donation centers, we become people to each other, not just roles. They begin to care what I think rather than merely submitting to my authority for a time.

There must be a downside to such creative collaboration. Indeed: time. The investment here can be immense, especially on a first go and insofar as one cares about the result. I did, and though the final cut of our film retained minor flaws, it was accurate and cohesive. I moderated discussions, distributed tasks, and signed off on most components. According to my email client, this involved more than five hundred messages. Even so, my students owned the project: they parsed the relevant ethical questions, arranged and conducted interviews, wrote more than ten screenplay drafts, created five times more footage than we used, researched copyright laws and acquired the rights to soundtrack music, completed several edits of the whole, and advertised the screening at nearby campuses.

I’ll add one other thought: even if the final product had self-destructed after the screening, the project would have been worthwhile for its impact on the more traditional academic aspects of the course. When students work together on something they think is cool, it significantly strengthens the course’s more ordinary components. Having decided to look each other and their professor in the eye, it is no longer an option not to do the reading or just to phone in the research paper. Not every essay submitted for the course achieved all it could, but almost. .

For those who would like to view the result, here is our fifteen-minute claim to fame, Imagining Genetic Enhancement. You’ll notice how extensively bioethics and questions of American religion intersect, and that while the future is the explicit focus, past contexts remain inescapable. Whatever decisions we make about testing or modifying human genomes, we need to do so in light of the history of science and technology. And for better and worse, whether we are discussing eugenics or stem cell research, cloning or IVF, these debates have almost always involved American religion.

For those interested in the pedagogical minutiae, I’m happy to provide further details. I’d especially enjoy hearing other ways people have used collaborative or individual art in “non-creative” courses; conversely, I’d welcome skepticism about its ultimate value. Perhaps I’ll follow up in the months ahead with a post on the less time-intensive but still promising creative project I’m trying this semester.

The Doubt, the Faith, and the Satanic Origins of Harry Potter (Egads!)

As a follow-up to Phil Sinitiere's posting last week about novels in history classrooms and related heresies, here's the beginning of a pre-press book review in Literature and Theology from RIAH's real literature scholar, Everett Hamner. The book in question is Conversations with American Writers: The Doubt, the Faith, the In-Between, by Dale Brown, published last year by Eerdmans.

by Everett Hamner

ABOUT A decade ago, I walked into my local Family Christian Store®. This US chain’s website claims to represent ‘the largest brand in the Christian retailing market,’ and I was curious about its literary wares. After a half an hour in the fiction section—in which themes of apocalypse, sexual purity and political insularity figured heavily—I carried a book entitled something like The Satanic Origins of Harry Potter to the front desk. Upon politely inquiring as to criteria by which books were selected, I was told with equal politeness, ‘whatever sells’.

Herein lies the apparent dilemma for US novelists like many featured in Dale Brown’s most recent book of interviews, Conversations with American Writers—which might just as well be subtitled, The Inseparability of Faith and Doubt. In pursuing wide audiences for stories with theological elements, how does one reach both (i) the dominantly secular and liberal market catered to by most US booksellers and (ii) the dominantly religious and conservative market served by ‘Christian’ suppliers? Some might immediately reply that this is an impossible or even unworthy goal; an author may choose (i) or (ii), but not both. However, Brown’s book may be most valuable for the way it deconstructs the binary itself. Again and again, we hear from authors who cross such perceived boundaries without hesitation. If categories were necessary, most of Brown’s interviewees would be more easily filed as religious liberals or secular conservatives than as straightforward fundamentalists or atheists, and many of them are managing to straddle the ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ markets described above.

Taken as a whole, Brown’s book of conversations offers what could be a startlingly diverse collage of perspectives on US Christendom—particularly its more evangelical regions—and on lived experiences of the faith–doubt dynamic.

Continue the review here, including its engagement with such tantalizing subjects as epistemology, literary mysticism, Jan Karon, and David James Duncan (whose The Brothers K, despite its length, really should be added to the many comment-recommendations affixed to Phil's post).

Critique of Dignitas Personae: Problems in the Vatican's Genetic Code?

A Critique of “Dignitas Personae,” or, Two Misspellings in the Vatican’s Genetic Code

by Everett Hamner

In September 2008, the Vatican published a 36-page instruction entitled “Dignitas Personae: On Certain Bioethical Questions” (summary here). Updating its briefer 2004 “Document of the Holy See on Human Cloning,” the text is commendable for its extended engagement with complex scientific and ethical questions. The First Part reviews the Catholic Church’s foundational principles in this area, the Second Part considers new methods of fertility, and the Third Part evaluates emerging possibilities for gene therapy, human cloning, therapeutic use of stem cells, human-animal hybridization, and use of biological material of various origins.

With sincere appreciation but also deep concerns about the Vatican’s effort, I want to offer a critique of “Dignitas” in what seem to me two under-discussed areas. While not pretending any sort of exhaustive treatment, this posting considers (1) the document’s conflation of preference with prejudice and its inconsistent definitions of “normality” in analyzing pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD); and (2) its status quo bias and failure to distinguish between co-creation and sacrilege in considering gene therapy.

First caveat: While not Catholic myself, I am as respectful of this tradition as I am troubled by its historical failings. As a human being, and as a scholar of religion and literature, I am more complete for my encounters with such future saints as J.R.R. Tolkien, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. I also recognize that this occasion for challenging the Catholic Church exists only because it is one of very few religious organizations to reflect publically and thoughtfully about stem cell research, genetic intervention, and other bioethical realities and possibilities.

Second caveat: While increasingly liberal in my attitudes toward these issues, I am not a freewheeling, technology-will-solve-everything enthusiast. As philosopher Michael Sandel argued in a widely circulated 2004 Atlantic article, “The Case Against Perfection,” there are good reasons to be cautious about genetic engineering. While I find some of Sandel’s concerns badly misapplied, my reservations should not be attributed to a Dawkins-esque, anti-religious scientism. To the contrary, they stem from a desire to hear faith and reason harmonize more complexly.

Before offering my critique, it may help to quickly lay out the Vatican’s own summary of its two foundational principles for evaluating these questions:

(a) “The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception; and therefore from that same moment his rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life” (n. 4).
(b) “The origin of human life has its authentic context in marriage and in the family, where it is generated through an act which expresses the reciprocal love between a man and a woman. Procreation which is truly responsible vis-à-vis the child to be born must be the fruit of marriage” (n. 6).

In this context, I will leave aside widely-critiqued problems with both principles. Regarding (a), many bioethicists (probably a strong majority) would argue that “conception” is a process irreducible to the moment a sperm cell penetrates an egg cell’s outer wall (see a helpfully diagrammed explanation in the blog Human Enhancement and Biopolitics here). Regarding (b), I will simply express my objection to the implicit censure of all LGBT individuals, as well as those whose procreative desires and/or disabilities motivate legitimate laboratory-based efforts.

Now to my main arguments, the first of which focuses on the Vatican’s treatment of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. PGD involves ex utero selection of disease-free embryos before these are reinserted into a woman’s womb, and the Catholic Church has objected historically because of the association with in vitro fertilization (IVF) and because of the likelihood that unselected embryos will be destroyed. As “Dignitas” explains, “Preimplantation diagnosis – connected as it is with artificial fertilization, which is itself always intrinsically illicit – is directed toward the qualitative selection and consequent destruction of embryos, which constitutes an act of abortion” (emphasis original). Of course this objection turns on the long-debated question of the point at which one ascribes “personhood” and therefore grants protective rights (the “conception” question noted earlier). However, a new emphasis emerges in this document via its selective appropriation of an older source, a 1995 encyclical from Pope John Paul II, “Evangelium Vitae,” which is primarily about abortion but meditates briefly on “prenatal diagnostic techniques.” Eventually quoting John Paul II, “Dignitas” continues,

Preimplantation diagnosis is therefore the expression of a eugenic mentality that “accepts selective abortion in order to prevent the birth of children affected by various types of anomalies. Such an attitude is shameful and utterly reprehensible, since it presumes to measure the value of a human life only within the parameters of ‘normality’ and physical well-being, thus opening the way to legitimizing infanticide and euthanasia as well” (emphasis original).

Setting aside the selective quotation here (John Paul II said more positive, nuanced things about PGD earlier in the paragraph), my objections are that the new document equates preference with prejudice and that it critiques the term “normality” only when convenient. First, the document assumes that if we would prefer our offspring to be spared the experiences associated with a condition like deafness or a disease like Tay-Sachs (which in its most common infantile form, usually causes death by age four or five), we are therefore prejudiced against any human beings who exhibit such conditions or diseases. This is hardly necessary, however. As Ronald M. Green demonstrates (via Frances Kamm) in his accessible, well-argued book, Babies by Design: The Ethics of Genetic Choice (Yale, 2007), “there is a world of difference between caring to have a child with some trait and caring about that child once the child is born” (132). To make an analogy to the (far less serious) realm of internet dating, the premise enabling the Vatican’s newly-extended prohibition against all PGD is like the inference that a request-in-the-abstract for a dark-haired partner denotes hatred of actual blondes.

Furthermore, it seems disingenuous for “Dignitas” to challenge impositions of “normality” when normalization is precisely the Vatican’s intention. The teaching’s final sentence, after all, dares to assert that not just Catholics but “all persons of good will […] will understand and agree with these principles and judgments.” Such compliant individuals can participate in an acceptable “norm”; those of LGBT orientation and those who would attempt IVF cannot. Also, just a few pages after rejecting PGD because of its “eugenic” reliance on “normality,” the instruction blithely reintroduces this very category. Defining appropriate uses of gene therapy, “Dignitas” allows those that “seek to restore the normal genetic configuration of the patient” (n. 26, emphasis added). Apparently, if the Vatican wants to reject a procedure designed to avoid disease before an embryo is implanted, any kind of normative language is anathema; if, however, it wants to affirm treating diabetics by raising their insulin to “normal” levels, or even to embrace certain uses of gene therapy, such language is just fine.

Admittedly, this first critique of the Vatican’s engagement with PGD is partly semantic. By contrast, my second critique of the document’s response to genetic manipulation is founded on my understandings of both biology and Christian theology. In short, the authors adopt a status quo bias appropriate if Christians were called to padlock themselves inside Eden, but not if they are to help build the “Kingdom of God” or “the New Jerusalem” to which Jesus and the Greek scriptures regularly refer. Put another way, we might ask what is really behind the Vatican’s insistence on “accepting human life in its concrete historical finite nature” (n. 27). Scientifically, such conservatism ignores the fact that human life expectancy in developed countries has risen by approximately two decades over the last century, a development to which the Catholic Church presumably does not object. Theologically, the Vatican’s emphasis on passive acceptance of our fates implies that the story of Christianity ought be one merely of returning to our Edenic origins, a very problematic assumption in the minds of many biblical scholars (including Catholics like Luke Timothy Johnson). The mistake is that this requires the Garden to constitute a state of perfect human completion and fulfillment, suggesting our only purpose since the Fall has been to eradicate sin so that our tickets may be validated for reentry. This seems to woefully miss the broader arch of the Genesis-to-Revelation narrative, eclipsing the significance of the Imago Dei and limiting humanity’s vocation to the most banal self-purification.

So what, though—why am I so uptight? Such an Eden obsession, I think, allows us to uncritically adopt the historically known, even when highly unattractive, over the future unknown, even when it holds great potential for good. In the immediate case, “Dignitas” explains in its discussion of IVF that “the replacement of the conjugal act by a technical procedure […] leads to a weakening of the respect owed to every human being” (n. 16). There are a whole host of problems with this assertion: by extension, a person needing to be fed by a robot would be less worthy of respect than people who could lift their own spoons; more mundanely, the manufacture of a syringe would make one party to heroin abuse. The flaw here is not so much the attempt to confront sin as the compulsion to prevent its possibility. Because some people might allow the circumstances of a person’s birth to reduce their respect for an individual, all of humanity must forego the potential blessings of IVF or genetic therapy? Particularly thorny is the argument’s reliance on phrases like “opens the way” and “leads to”: by implication, any morally licit behavior that might conceivably enable a morally illicit behavior becomes itself illicit. The impracticality here should be evident, but just in case, here is another analogy: because posting this critique may “lead to” others’ questions about “Dignitas” and even about the authority of the Holy See, I am responsible for their eventual excommunication.

Perhaps the greatest reason not to accept such fear-driven decision-making arises from the tension between the Vatican’s simultaneous enthusiasm for scientific discovery and its concern that human beings not usurp God. I share both impulses, but even if I didn’t, I would be worried by the Vatican’s willingness to charge sacrilege one moment and encourage that we “transform creation” the next, without laying out criteria by which to separate those actions. At the conclusion of the section on gene therapy, for instance, “Dignitas” is adamant: “in the attempt to create a new type of human being one can recognize an ideological element in which man tries to take the place of his Creator” (n. 27, emphasis original). Leaving aside the echoes of Mary Shelley, this begs the question of how genetic manipulation is any more impious an act of “transform[ing] creation” than elevating life expectancy by treating heart disease. Who gets to say what constitutes “a new type” of person, and why are genetic changes more likely to hinder than to assist in laying aside the “old self” and putting on the “new”? Or, as in the last sentence of “Dignitas,” why cannot genetic engineering itself become a way of “participat[ing] in the creative power of God” and “transform[ing] creation by ordering its many resources toward the dignity and wellbeing of all human beings”?

I may not be quite as gung-ho about all genetic engineering as this might sound, but I hope such critiques will assist those who take religion seriously in avoiding the extremes of both genetic determinism and genetic dismissivism. The opportunities and reasons for stem cell research, genetic testing, genetic manipulation, and non-reproductive cloning are likely to keep multiplying, and we will need many more thoughtful analyses if religious individuals and groups in the U.S. and the world are to play constructive roles in the changes ahead. Incidentally, I would welcome constructive critiques of my own thinking at e-hamner@wiu.edu, as this is far from my last wrestling match with these issues.

A Religio-Sociological Survey in the Quad Cities Area

A Survey Experiment: Race, Religion, Politics, and Other Comfortable Topics
by Everett Hamner

A few weeks ago I took off my customary literary critic hat and spent nine hours wearing a sociologist costume. During the early stages of an interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar entitled “Ethnic Literatures of the United States: Race, Religion, and Election ’08,” I took my ten students to a weekend multicultural festival in the Quad Cities (IL/IA) and spent an afternoon and evening surveying attendees on Gallup questions ranging from likely choices for president to assessments of local race relations to beliefs about evolution and creation. This is not my usual gig, but after reading autobiographies by Obama and McCain, and before launching into novels about civil rights and Vietnam, I wanted my students to get outside the classroom and into conversations with others of very different racial backgrounds, political persuasions, and religious traditions. 252 such discussions later, we ended up with data that is suggestive if not conclusive, a number of eye-opening personal encounters, a broader appreciation of each other as human beings, and—to my knowledge—not a single sunburn.

I would emphasize up front that our data was drawn entirely from voluntary attendees of a multicultural festival, one which required either a $2 admission fee or two cans of food for donation to a local food bank. Bastion of red-blooded conservatism this was not, so we certainly expected the crowd to favor Obama. Even so, the actual numbers were surprisingly lopsided: 80% for Obama, 13% for McCain, and 7% other/undecided. Granted, the crowd was one-third African American and over half Democratic, but the survey was administered before the stock market lost a couple thousand points over the last few weeks. Curious about factors associated with voters’ choices, I queried our data with the help of a generous sociologist colleague, Dr. David Rohall (also of Western Illinois University).

In the end, the following categories appeared to have the most significant correlations with choice for president:

**gender (Obama drew 62% of his voters from women and 38% from men, while McCain drew 39% of his voters from women and 61% from men);

**educational attainment (McCain drew 36% of his voters from those with a high school degree or less, while only 18% of Obama’s voters fit these categories; conversely, 56% of Obama’s voters had a BA or more, while only 36% of McCain’s voters held college degrees or more); and

**attitudes toward job opportunities available to racial minorities (when asked, “do you feel that racial minorities in this country have equal job opportunities?”, 21% of Obama supporters said yes and 68% said no, but 63% of McCain supporters said yes and only 25% said no). (By comparison, in a national Gallup poll asking the same question this summer, 53% answered yes and 46% said no.)

Enough with the basics. Personally, the answers I found juiciest were those engaging attitudes toward biblical interpretation and evolutionary theory. Here the broader Gallup information is crucial for setting the context. As is regularly lamented by scholars of biology and religion alike, over the last quarter-century, anywhere between 43-47% of Americans have steadily chosen a survey response stating, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” rather than other answers accepting evolutionary theory (one of which even allows for God’s “guidance” of that process). With this in mind, our survey’s lower measurement of only 28% identifying with young earth creationism might seem a significant drop, at least before one considers the liberal-leaning demographics of our sample. However, what fascinates me is the fact that in a crowd that was only 9% Republican, three times that percentage still denied the validity of evolution, a claim upon which modern biology places as much weight as modern physics does the notion of gravity. Not coincidentally, when asked about their views of scripture, a similar 32% of our respondents chose “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word,” rather than “The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally” or “The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man.”

What do these numbers mean? Admittedly, in terms of “quantitative proof,” our survey is rather humble. Nonetheless, as much as I may be “reading into” the data (rather than pretending the strictly neutral, absolutely objective posture that often seems the sacred cow of quantitative analysis), a key insight seems buried beneath these figures. As Katie Lofton emphasized at an ASA panel on fundamentalism we shared last fall, academia desperately needs to counter rather than exacerbate our culture’s all-too-common equations of political conservatism with religious fundamentalism, and vice versa. Recent months have brought greater visibility to relatively liberal Christians like Sojourners founder Jim Wallis and Saddleback Church pastor and author Rick Warren (whose August presidential forum featured questions about environmental stewardship and global poverty, not just abortion and homosexuality), so this error may have become less tempting of late, but one election does not an entrenched assumption erase. Indeed in all of our disciplines, might we not do well to explore the growing number—one in five, this survey would suggest—of Americans who are not necessarily Republican, not necessarily politically conservative, but who still assume the first eleven chapters of Genesis should be read as the introduction to a scientific textbook? Rather than a culturally-mediated ancient Near Eastern effort to interpret reality in light of a God who daringly claimed superiority above all others, the flannel-board image of Genesis is amazingly tenacious. Instead of dividing people into religious believers and enlightened atheists—categories themselves highly dependent on traditional Western, monotheistic assumptions about the nature of “religion”—perhaps we need to spend more energy asking how American culture continues to transmit fundamentalist assumptions, even when individuals and groups appear untouched by groups like Focus on the Family.

A last note about the pedagogical impact of this kind of project: very time-consuming, but very rewarding. Because my students were involved at all stages of the project, from choosing the site and questions to administering surveys and analyzing responses, I think they became more thoughtful critics of the “hard data” and “fast facts” that contemporary media constantly offer. Equally importantly, they got to know me and each other in a setting where we were quite clearly all on the same team, working together toward a common goal and without a large gap between “professor” and “student.” Approximately half of my students observed in their project write-ups that the excuse of completing a survey enabled more extensive and personal conversations with members of other ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious groups than they had ever before experienced, and several even said that these experiences strongly challenged stereotypes they had unconsciously maintained. For these reasons alone—and whether our data “proves” anything or not—I’ll be attempting this kind of project again, and I’d be glad to share more with anyone interested in trying something similar.

Graphic Therapy for the Religiously Afflicted

In our ongoing effort to go interdisciplinary here at Religion in American History, welcome to our new contributing editor Everett Hamner. Everett is a just-minted Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa, and this fall will be teaching in English and Religious Studies at Western Illinois University. Everett's dissertation topic, Spectacles of Faith, will interest many of you; here's a brief description:

This project examines intersections of science and religion via twentieth century American fictions. Starting with the Scopes trial and the satires of Sinclair Lewis, it considers objectivism and scapegoating in Ralph Ellison, technological transcendence in Walker Percy, intuition and quantum physics in Ursula K. Le Guin, and memory in U.S. and Latin American science fiction film. Showing how literature and cinema illuminate the science-religion nexus, and vice versa, it reveals an expansion beyond early-century oppositions of fundamentalism and scientism toward the conflations of Cold War era civil religion, and from there toward postmodern efforts to integrate faith and reason.

As you can see, it's another of those small-and-narrow topic dissertations :)

Welcome to Everett, who inaugurates his contributing editorship with a post on religion, comics, and popular culture.
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Graphic Therapy for the Religiously Afflicted

Confession: I am not a historian. I’m a newly minted assistant professor of English and an incurably interdisciplinary former seminarian. Still, I owe this blog. For the past two years, the majority of my working hours (and a few others) have been devoted to completing my dissertation, Spectacles of Faith: Technology, Religion, and American Fiction. Such isolating endeavors necessitate edifying and entertaining respites, and Religion and American History has regularly provided both. Time to start paying up. I could start with a review of some recent critical study, but I’ll save that. For now, a tale of how I faced life once the diss was done, the grad college was happy, and I no longer needed to spend 10-hour days cuddling with Microsoft Word. I turned to comics.

Defy the assumption for a moment that I am discussing male superheroes winning the hearts of two-dimensional women by defeating equally flat bad guys. You will still find plenty of that at your local comics retailer, and some of it is probably better than I think. What I can pass on, though, is a set of recommendations for those who, for one reason or another, occasionally find themselves tired of academic tomes, but still needing more mental stimulus than that provided by the average television show. And admittedly, this is particularly aimed at those fascinated by intersections of religion, race, and popular culture.

If you are new to the serious reading of serious comics (or “sequential art,” as Will Eisner defines it), a great place to start is Hillary Chute’s “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative” in the March 2008 PMLA (123.2). Chute provides a clear overview of basic definitions, references many of the best works in the field, and offers sharp insights into comics’ nonsynchronous presentation of the visual and the verbal. Less recently but more entertainingly, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) guides neophytes and experienced readers alike through the complexities of graphic narrative via the form itself. A gifted artist, writer, and aesthetician, McCloud further hones Eisner’s definition (“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”), and in the process delighted and instructed this reader at once.

Enough on the how-to: you want to know why historians of American religion should care (or at least how to convince your chair that this is scholarly research). Please turn immediately to Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003) and Kevin Huizenga’s Curses (2006). Thompson’s 582-page autobiography of first love, adolescent sexuality, and Midwestern, Protestant fundamentalism is achingly good. The narrative’s power derives not only from obvious depths of personal experience and reflection, but also from its self-conscious dramatization of the author’s reconciliation (and potentially the reader’s) with his religious and romantic past. Huizenga’s work is shorter (as an interrelated collection rather than a graphic novel), but his “Glenn Ganges stories” seek a slightly more erudite audience, fictionalizing philosophy of religion and American consumerism with equal ease. As in Blankets, the setting is suburbia, but readers will find themselves wrestling with Origen and Neibuhr before it’s over.

One last set of leads for those with a particular interest in race and religion (this is for you, Ed). First, if you haven’t read Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1973-91), do it—enough said. This uncanny rendering of the Holocaust via mice and kitties is far from the only significant work in the area, though. James Sturm’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2001) powerfully blends baseball and anti-Semitism, while his similar work alongside Rich Tommaso, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (2007), throws a similar pitch to African-American history. Graphic narrative about black racial and religious experience is particularly on the rise: see Matt Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro (2008) and Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo’s Bluesman (2006) and The Castaways (2007). Similarly poignant reflections on immigration and class-based injustice may be found in Will Eisner’s Invisible People (1992) and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006).

There is much more, of course, but consider these recommended starting points, and do drop me a line if you find yourself moved. I work principally on religion, science, and American literature and film, but there may be a course and/or an article on this material in my future, and I’d enjoy hearing from you … even if you are a historian.