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.

Reassessing John Brooke's The Refiner's Fire

Christopher Jones

In 1994, Cambridge University Press published John L. Brooke's The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844. As indicated by the subtitle, Brooke's work aimed for a wholly unique and provocative re-interpretation of Mormonism's origins. While it was generally met with praise in the academy and won the Bancroft Prize in 1995, the book was almost universally panned by historians who specialized in Mormon history, and received its harshest (and most polemic) critiques from believing Latter-day Saint scholars (and especially from pseudo-scholarly apologists, some of whom seemed intent on making the most out of the publicity that might come with reviewing an award-winning book).

In the almost two decades since Brooke's work appeared, the sometimes hostile and always intentionally-unique world of Mormon studies has undergone significant changes (though the ever-earnest apologists remain). So have the disciplines of history and religious studies. All of these changes have led a younger generation of Mormon historians to reconsider Brooke's argument and approach. When I recently re-read The Refiner's Fire while preparing for comps, I was surprised at what I'd missed last time through and at how much I liked much of what he was trying to do (and indeed, did). Over at the Juvenile Instructor, Matt Bowman has posted his own brief thoughts on The Refiner's Fire, together with those of Steve Fleming, whose currently in-progress dissertation aims to expand on and revise some of Brooke's central ideas, and Mark Ashurst-McGee, editor of the Joseph Smith Papers project, whose research focuses on Joseph Smith and folk magic and Joseph Smith's social and political thought.

Matt explains by way of introduction his own take on the book and its importance:

It’s my opinion that the further we get from the publication of John Brooke’s The Refiner’s Fire, a wildly inventive examination of Mormon origins through the lens of various esoteric European -isms (including occultism, the quest for hidden and often mysterical knowledge; hermeticism, a particular brand of the occult supposedly derived from ancient Egypt and for Brooke basically a restorationist concept that sought to regain Adam’s access to God, and the non -ism alchemy, or the transformation of the mundane into the exalted) the more interesting a book it seems. Its flaws - most revolving around the difficulty of transplanting such quirky early modern concepts as these to frontier America, though Brooke gives it a go with the vehicle of Masonry – have been well documented; its strengths have been less well recognized by LDS historians, who have tended to find the book, frankly, weird. Thus, too many of the doorways Brooke opened have remained unused.

The whole entry is really quite interesting and well worth the read.

God Didn't Make Me No Monkey Man: An Evolutionary Biologist and a Humanist Discuss How to Discuss the Scopes Trial at 85

Paul Harvey

Readers of my entries on this blog (those of you who are still awake, at any rate) will know of my previous career as a biology major (and thanks a lot, Physics 201, for making me see that perhaps History was a better way for me to go), and my literary love of Darwin's Origin of the Species, which I've blogged about before.

HNN this week is featuring a great set of responses and reflections on the Scopes Trial and the issue of the tortured discussion of evolution in public discourse. No other scientific "theory," even those which would appear to pose major challenges to certain genres of biblical interpretation, invokes such passion and furor. There is no equivalent, in chemistry or molecular biology or even in physics for god's sake, to the various "Creationist" institutes and museum dotting the landscape. That fact has long puzzled me.

David Reznick's "An Evolutionary Biologist's Reflections on the Scopes Trial," notes that "A peculiar attribute of evolutionary biology is that, even though it is an arcane science, many people have opinions about it, much more so, I think, than any other science. Why?" He then goes on to detail some possible reasons, and at the end to ask for the help of humanists:

"Some historians and philosophers have helped by articulating how evolution fits in to the development of science, but also by dealing with the relationship between science and religion as a topic for the humanities classroom, rather than the science classroom. We need the help, so I encourage my colleagues in the humanities to expand these efforts."

Everett Hamner provides precisely that help in his terrific piece "A Humanist's Reflections on Evolutionary Biology." Our faithful blog readers will recall that just a bit ago Everett posted his reflections on William Brown's The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder.

In today's piece, Everett calls for classroom discussons to distinguish between science and scientism, to humanize scientists engaged in discovery, to "question bifurcations between the religious and secular," and to cultivate more careful readings of scriptures (plural), not their dismissal.

I would add that it wouldn't hurt humanist students to be required to take some more science classes (and, yes, vice-versa) so they can engage this discussion more knowledgeably, but that's just me.

On the latter point, the importance of cultivating careful readings of scriptures, Everett writes the following: To encourage this shift is merely to appreciate that setting the writings of an amazingly resilient ancient Near Eastern tribe or of a sixth-century Meccan revolutionary against a product of Victorian science is to compare apples and oranges. When people grasp the differences in purpose between the Bible, the Qur’an, and The Origin of Species, major stumbling blocks on the path to consilience begin to dissolve.

Yes, and yes -- another way of saying that we should help students cultivate a true historian's sense of the past.

And finally, I leave you with some unforgettable music: Eli Framer's God Didn't Make Me No Monkey Man, a country blues/string band classic you can listen to while reading Origins or taking a look at Jeffrey Moran's excellent article "Reading Race Into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science,and Fundamentalism," from the Journal of American History 90 (December 2003) (access to History Cooperative or J-Stor required).

First Annual Conference on Public Intellectuals, 23-24 April 2010, Harvard University

Randall Stephens

Next month I'll be taking part in an interesting new conference on public intellectuals. (I've been working on public anti-intellectuals of late, so this should be fun.) The organizers Larry Friedman (Harvard) and Damon Freeman (UPenn) hope to draw interested parties to the conference. All sessions are open to the public.

Here's the summary:

In 1993, literary critic Edward Said defined the ideal intellectual as someone who stood outside circles of power while advancing knowledge and freedom for the wider public in "speaking truth to power." This first annual Conference on Public Intellectuals seeks to deepen and broaden Said's critique by providing an opportunity to scholars who are writing on public intellectuals.

The conference will take place over a period of two days, Friday and Saturday, 23-24 April 2010 at Harvard University. It is free and open to the public. The conference venue is in Room 1305 of William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street on Harvard's campus. Sixteen papers are spread over four sessions: Public Intellectuals as Cultural Icons; Religion, Science, and Tolerance; and Race, Gender, and Protest, Parts One and Two. The conference also features two plenary sessions on Career Reflections. The conference is also working in conjunction with "The Future of American Intellectual History" symposium taking place Friday afternoon, 23 April in the Lower Level Conference Room at Harvard's Busch Hall.

See the full program here.

See this recent post on a conference exploring a related theme: CFP: “Intellectuals and Their Publics”: Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference Sponsored by USIH and the Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York City