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.

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

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
October 21-22, 2010

Paper and panel proposals are welcome for the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference to be held on October 21-22, 2010 in New York City. The Conference is being organized by the editors of the U.S. Intellectual History (USIH) blog in coordination with the City University of New York's Center for the Humanities (The Graduate Center). Founded in 2007, USIH promotes discussion of American intellectual history and fosters connections between scholars from any discipline sharing this interest. Visit our site: http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/

This year’s theme is “Intellectuals and Their Publics.” We seek papers and panels reflecting upon the social, political, and cultural impact of intellectuals and their varied relationships to a diversity of publics, such as ethnic or racial groups, professionals, scholars, artists, politicians, or civil rights organizations. Intellectuals have always worked in relationship to their audience. In what ways have intellectuals defined, or been defined by, their audiences? In the pluralistic public culture of the United States, have audience divisions shaped distinctive intellectual traditions or supplemented a common public culture? In general, how have intellectuals—whether scientists or theologians, philosophers or authors, artists or policymakers—sought broader public relevance, as social critics, “public intellectuals,” or in other ways? In what ways have academic intellectuals breached disciplinary boundaries and/or reached non-academic audiences? Have the responsibilities pressed upon, and accepted by, Black, Latino/a, Native American, and Asian-American intellectuals been different from those expected of Euro-Americans? While we solicit papers on these and related issues, we welcome papers and panels on other aspects of U.S. intellectual history as well.

In addition to individual papers, we also encourage submissions of full panels and applications from those who would be interested in moderating a session. Please submit electronic abstracts for papers, panels, or both by Monday, June 15, 2010. Proposals should be approximately 200 words and include a concise curriculum vitae for each participant. Be sure to include your postal and e-mail addresses, as well as a phone number. Those interested in chairing a session or commenting should send a CV indicating areas of expertise and interests. Panels will feature three papers, no longer than 20 minutes each. Sessions will last 120 minutes.

Please address all inquiries and abstracts to:

Andrew Hartman
ahartma@ilstu.edu

The Formerly Evangelical Intelligentsia

Paul Harvey

Kiera Feldman, "New York Literati on Growing Up Evangelical," from Killing the Buddha, explores the early evangelical influences of writers James Wood ( critics for New Republic), Malcolm Gladwell (New Yorker staff writer known for Blink and other books), and Christine Smallwood (of The Nation). All three live and write on the grounds of what Wood called "disappointed belief," and a search for a substitute for the transcendent:

What remains in the absence of faith is the very question of secular life: how are we to feel deeply without access to the divine in everyday experience, warming our hearts with a love that is not of this world? And how are we to think?

Recommended piece.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, 15 Years Later, Oct 1-2, 2009

Randall Stephens



Few scholars have so deftly studied the intellectual life of a mass religious movement as Mark Noll has. Peter Steinfels praised Noll's 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, in the New York Times. "Fundamentalism hardened evangelicalism's emphasis on the authority of the Bible into a strict theory of literal interpretation," summarized Steinfels, "a preoccupation with apocalyptic prophecies and a fierce concern with keeping true believers uncontaminated by others. Although much of evangelical America is now 'post-fundamentalist,' [Noll] says, it suffers from lingering habits of anti-intellectualism and of using the Bible as a data bank of detailed information rather than for spiritual guidance and rejuvenation." The following year, participants in a symposium on the book published in First Things described the Noll's book as a “jeremiad, profound in implication but simple in form.” They aptly summarized his chief argument: “The problem, in short, is evangelicals’ appalling parochialism, their unwillingness to break out of the vast but all-too-comfortable ghetto of evangelical churches and colleges and publishing networks and engage an intellectual world long ago captured by Marx and Darwin and Freud.”



Even an author in Ken Ham's creationist magazine Answers acknowledged the book’s importance. “There is in fact a great deal in it which Christian thinkers need to digest,” wrote Carl Wieland in 1996, “in spite of its tragically wrongheaded approach to the authority of Scripture.” (Carl Wieland, “Book Review: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind,” answersingenesis.org [April 1996]).



In addition to the high praise it received it has another legacy. The Scandal has influenced hundreds of young scholars, who have taken it as a challenge. Some of those, a few who were playing tetherball back in 1994, now populate the halls of major research universities and teaching colleges.



So . . . with the help of colleagues at Gordon College and Eastern Nazarene College, I've been putting together a mini-conference to be held at Gordon, Oct 1-2. We will use the 15th anniversary of Mark Noll's Scandal as a starting point for a wider conversation/debate about evangelicalism. The conference will be free and open to the public.



Here's the write up from Gordon College:

Co-sponsored with Eastern Nazarene College and the Gordon College Center for Christian Studies and partially funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind: Fifteen Years Later will be held on the Gordon campus, located on Boston’s North Shore. It will include presentations and responses by Noll himself, who is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame and was named one of Time Magazine’s top 25 most influential evangelicals in 2005.

The Program:

THUR, OCT 1

7:00 P.M.—Reception: Ken Olsen Science Center, DEC Loggia / Foyer



7:30 P.M.—Opening Lecture—Ken Olsen Science Center, MacDonald Auditorium

Mark Noll, University of Notre Dame, interviewed by: Maura Jane Farrelly, Brandeis University



FRI, OCT 2

8-8:30 A.M.—Coffee Service



8:30-10:00 A.M.—Morning Session—Ken Olsen Science Center, MacDonald Auditorium

A Roundtable on Conservative Evangelical Expertise

Karl Giberson, BioLogos Foundation, Eastern Nazarene College, Gordon College

Randall J. Stephens, Eastern Nazarene College

Comments—Jon Roberts, Boston University; James C. Wallace, Boston University



10:25 A.M.—Convocation—A. J. Gordon Memorial Chapel

Mark Noll—“The Evangelical Imperative for Evangelical Intellectual Life”



11:30-12:45 P.M.—Break (Lunch may be purchased in the Lane Student Center)



1-2:30 P.M.—Afternoon Session—Ken Olsen Science Center

David Hempton, Harvard Divinity School—“Minds and Mentalités in the Evangelical Tradition”

Margaret Bendroth, Congregational Library—“Women, Anti-Intellectualism, and Evangelical Identity”

Comments—Heather Curtis, Tufts University



2:30-3:00 P.M.—Refreshment Break



3:00-4:30 P.M.—Evangelicals, Politics, and Global Engagement

Timothy Samuel Shah, Council on Foreign Relations

“A Survey of Intellectually Serious Evangelical Contributions to the Theory and Practice of Politics”

Dennis Hoover, the Institute for Global Engagement

“American Evangelicals: From Activists to Internationalists?”

Comments—David Lumsdaine, Gordon College