Rob Bell, Emergence, the Past, and the Future

After news this week of Mark Driscoll's homophobic facebook status, the emergent church again pops into the news cycle. For those of you not in the an emergent hotbed like Knoxville, the term might be unfamiliar. RiAH mentioned the emergent church while pointing to the controversy over Rob Bell's Love Wins back in May, so today's guest post tackles the label "emerging church." Our guest poster, Charlie McCrary, interviewed Bell for his thesis on Bell's evangelical anti-intellectualism. Charlie received his BA in religion from the University of North Dakota in May and begins the MA program in American Religious History at my alma mater Florida State University in the fall. His post reflects on Rob Bell, emergence, and the ambiguity of this very label. Charlie makes an excellent case for why scholars should be paying attention to the emergent church and their appeal as method to understand shifts in American evangelicalism.

Rob Bell, Emergence, the Past, and the Future

Charlie McCrary

The release of Rob Bell’s latest book, Love Wins, and the accompanying evangelical controversy thrust Bell into the broader American consciousness. CNN ran multiple stories about him, and Good Morning America hurried to book him. However, most media outlets, made suddenly aware of Bell, struggled to contextualize him. Most Christian media chose either to condemn or celebrate the book, and thus the “secular” media reported primarily on the theological brouhaha. Measured attempts to understand and analyze Bell and his context were almost completely absent.

Most categorizations of Bell associate him with the “emerging church” (or, sometimes used synonymously, the “postmodern church.”) This term is potentially useful, but it lacks a consistently helpful definition. This is due in part to the fact that many who use the term do so in order to stigmatize certain theological positions and not to analyze evenhandedly. In addition, many figures to whom the label is often applied tend to resist the label. The emerging church movement—or, “conversation,” as many would have it—is necessarily amorphous, as most within it recoil at “dogmatic” epistemological certainties and tend toward apophatic (de)constructions of theology. Also, a main feature of the movement is “cultural relevance,” and thus emerging folks tend to reinvent themselves fluidly.

Granted, it can be difficult to come up with some useful analysis for a group so diverse it includes Bell, Peter Rollins, Mark Driscoll, Brian McLaren, and Scot McKnight. That being said, I think there are two foundational points we should be able to use as our bases for inquiry about the emerging church. First, the word “emerging” itself implies a sort of protest, naturally prompting the question, “emerging from what?” The emerging movement should be seen as a self-conscious reform movement. Most emerging leaders’ books take the form of a response, a correction or expansion of the ideas with which his/her target audience is familiar. This leads to the second point: the emerging church is an evangelical movement. While the term “evangelicalism” is not easily defined and carries a variety of connotations, enough literature and use has been devoted to it that we at least have a sense of what it means. Emerging churches, by and large, function in typically evangelical ways, from the styles of worship music and preaching to the pastors’ book deals with Zondervan. The structure of an emerging church service or the layout of the sanctuary is usually much closer to an average Southern Baptist gathering than a liturgy- and doxology-infused Presbyterian service or a Catholic mass.

Furthermore, the form of Christianity from which emerging folks seek to emerge is usually some version of conservative evangelicalism. Emerging leaders have taken issue with prudish views of sex, a lack of care for the poor, the arrogance of systematic theology, the non-tenability of biblical literalism and young-earth creationism, and more. Given the above description, one might be tempted to characterize the emerging church as simply liberal Protestantism (and some critics have done this.) However, this characterization elevates the theological above all else and ignores the style, the aesthetic, the language, and all the other elements of the evangelical habitus, most of which remain alive and well in emerging churches. In this somewhat paradoxical way, the movement exists as a sort of protest against certain aspects of evangelicalism yet staged by individuals and communities who seek to do so within a steadfastly evangelical context. This is why emergence tends to be popular among college students and in cities with significant young-adult populations; students from evangelical backgrounds go to college and inevitably read Derrida or take a course on biblical literature/history or biology and experience cognitive dissonance. Rather than the two older options, covering one’s ears and claiming that “the world” is out to destroy one’s faith or abandoning religious belief (or at least evangelicalism) altogether, the emerging church represents for many a middle path, so to speak.

So why should scholars care about the emerging church? There are many reasons, but I think the significance of the movement can be summed up with temporal tropes: when we think of the emerging church, we are thinking of a group (or groups) of evangelicals who seek to emerge from the past and shape a new reality for themselves in the present. In turn, this will shape the future of American evangelicalism.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to conduct a mini-interview with Rob Bell via email. In his response to one of the questions he wrote, “People are desperate for narrative — a big story, something large enough to live for. That’s the question right now for millions — is there a story? One we can trust? I say yes. The other stories have failed, which, of course, creates all sorts of new opportunities.” The task for scholars is to identify and analyze what those “other stories” are, why they have failed Bell and his audience, and what “new opportunities” will be seized and what they mean for the future of American evangelicalism.

Ecumenicists, Evangelicals, and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity: Some Personal Reflections on David Hollinger's OAH Address

by David Stowe

Reading David A. Hollinger's OAH presidential address, "After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity" (just published in the new Journal of American History) puts me in mind of a little family history. The dialectic he analyzes, between liberal ecumenically minded Christians played out in my family exactly as he scripts it.

Raised Nazarene in Iowa, my father discovered the life of the mind while attending a tiny college in Nebraska, finished his BA in history at UCLA, went to seminary, served for a time in China, completed a doctorate in theology. He had gravitated to the social-gospelly Congregationalists--later merged into United Church of Christ--for whom he directed overseas missions in the last stage of his career. His younger brother Gene stayed in the Nazarene fold, became a pastor and eventually ascended to the pinnacle of the church hierarchy: General Superintendent.

Our side of the family grew up in the East, became liberal Democrats, stayed with the UCC. My uncle's family stayed in the West, remained mostly rock-ribbed Republicans and Nazarenes. We read Christian Century, they undoubtedly read Christianity Today (and sent us a subscription to Herald of Holiness). Their menfolk hunted for elk in the Rockies; we trapped (and often released) squirrels to keep them out of our attic. The Boomer offspring had little contact; families didn't fly around a lot in those days. Consequently the cousins remained slightly exotic to each other. How could two brother/fathers turn out so differently while remaining committed Christians?

Hollinger lays out the historical context within which their lives diverged. In the middle decades of the last century, ecumenical Protestants dominated the American Establishment. Beginning well before the Sixties, ecumenicals pursued "diversity-accepting, captive-liberating projects" on behalf of people of color, women, and gays and lesbians--movements that allied them with secular intellectuals, mainly of Jewish descent. In the Sixties, self-interrogating ecumenical intellectuals like Wilfred Cantwell Smith, William Stringfellow, John A. T. Robinson, and most famously Harvey Cox eroded the theological foundations and moral complacency of mainline Christianity.

Evangelicals who had earlier red-baited ecumenicals with mixed success began to overtake their liberal rivals, increasing their cultural capital through savvy media use, outbreeding their mainline rivals and doing a better job holding their kids in the churches. “But just as a substantial portion of the missionaries found that the Hindus and Buddhists they encountered abroad were not quite so much in need of Christian conversion as once assumed, thousands of children of the old Protestant establishment found that Christianity was not so indispensable to the advancement of the values most energetically taught to them by their Methodist and Congregationalist tutors."

Hollinger makes a useful point about avoiding Whiggish assumptions in assessing the impact of a movement like ecumenical Protestantism:

To recognize the historic function of ecumenical Protestantism as a halfway house, if not actually a slippery slope to secularism, is in no way invidious unless one approaches history as a Christian survivalist. Religious affiliations, like other solidarities, are contingent entities, generated, sustained, transformed, diminished, and destroyed by the changing circumstances of history. Those circumstances still render ecumenical Protestantism a vibrant and vital home for many persons. A genuinely historicist approach to the history of religion will not teleologically imply that those committed to that faith today are headed for history's dustbin.

That’s a relief. If Hollinger is correct, my uncle's family won the battle for the soul of American Protestantism, but my father's side may...may... have won the war for the nation's heart and mind. Hollinger sees a powerful analogy between ecumenists and the post-1964 Democratic Party:

The evangelicals gained the upper hand in the struggle for control of Protestantism just as the Republicans gained the upper hand in the struggle for political control of the South.... [J]ust as the nation got something in return for the loss of the South to the Republican party, so, too, did the nation obtain something in return for the loss of Protestantism to the evangelicals: the United states got a more widely dispersed and institutionally enacted acceptance of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural diversity.... Those impulses and capacities generated a cascade of liberalizing consequences extending well beyond the diminishing domain of mainstream churches, running through the lives and careers of countless post-Protestant Americans distributed across a wide expanse of secular space [no doubt including many in higher education]. Our narrative of modern American religious history will be deficient so long as we suppose that ecumenical Protestantism declined because it had less to the offer the United states than did its evangelical rival. Much of what ecumenical Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches, and hence we have been slow to see it.

Probably we'll never equal my uncle's kin in elk-hunting prowess, but we can out-squirrel-trap them any time. The (usually) friendly rivalry continues. In lieu of a definitive resolution (mark your calendar for October 21), and given Hollinger's point that American religion has increasingly come to serve as politics by other means, we'll have to await the results of the 2012 elections.

The Future of American Religious History Monographs

by Edward J. Blum

If you take a quick glance at Paul Harvey’s vita, you’ll see that he plans to dominate the publishing world of the next 12-24 months (from my sociological skills, I count that he has 4 books that will probably be published in that window).

But there are other books that look pretty exciting too – both of which I’ve checked out in dissertation form. As mentioned a few times on this blog, Kelly Baker’s Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 should be available in September. David Morgan – by far one of my favorite historians, writes of it: “An original and sobering work. In the present age, when we may no longer pretend that the lines between violent fanaticism and religious fervor are clearly discernible, this book makes a timely and urgent intervention. Hatred may have more to do with religion than we care to acknowledge.”

Her title alone reminds me of a little section in Matt Sutton’s book on Sister Aimee where on a church survey form, one congregant wrote down for occupation: “Chief Klansman.” Way to go, Kelly, and what a striking cover!

Then Art Remillard’s Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era should be out by December. Not only a blogger, Art is an editor at the terrific online Journal of Southern Religion. Doyen of southern religious history Charles Reagan Wilson claims of Art’s book, “anyone wanting to understand how a variety of people in the South have understood its spiritual and moral meanings will like this book.” I think he’s right, and my guess is that reviewers will read it in comparison with Paul Gaston’s New South Creed and John David Smith’s terrific Old Creed for the New South. Art’s book may also be read as a kind of prequel to Andrew Manis’s Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars (2002).

Speaking of J. D. Smith … he’s blurbed another forthcoming book that looks fascinating: W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (out in October). Smith writes, "Poole brings to life American horror stories by framing them within folk belief, religion, and popular culture, broadly unraveling the idea of the monster. Thanks to Poole's insights we see the ubiquity of the monster lurking in and around us." Scott is one of my favorite historians of religion and culture – whether we’re talking South Carolina during Reconstruction or Satan in comic books. This is sure to be another path-breaking book.

And look out early Americanists. Amanda Porterfield’s study of religion and politics in the early Republic – Doubt – should be published soon too, and I think given her work and David Sehat’s Myth of American Religious Freedom we’re going to have to rethink Nathan Hatch’s democratization thesis pretty seriously.

Congratulations to Kelly, Art, Scott, and Amanda.

Simple Things You See are All Complicated: Random Reflections on the 2nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture

Paul Harvey

The simple things you see are all complicated
I look pretty young, but I'm just back-dated, yeah
The Who, "Substitute"

If it's a lie, then we fight, on that lie. But we gotta fight.
Slim Charles in The Wire

Elesha, Janine, and Kelly have initiated a vigorous conversation arising from one particular session at the 2^nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture which concluded just over a week ago. Because I had to leave just before this particular session, I don’t have much to add to it in particular, but I had a few stray thoughts on other parts of the meeting to throw up here. Today’s post will be lighter, more observations about some key phrases and indelible memories that I’ll carry from the conference. Tomorrow I hope to develop a few more serious thoughts about one session in particular, the one involving a discussion about the "bracketing" of religious belief in religious studies -- its rationale, its benefits, and its costs.

Before continuing, the last session was on "The Future of American Religion," but I was unable to be there, so am really hoping that one of ya'll out there will post on the discussion that went on there.

The first thought: a shout out to my partner in crime Philip Goff for organizing the conference in the first place, a huge undertaking of fundraising and organization. I don’ t know whether Phil got thanked at the end, but having lunch with him just before I left, he told myself and someone else present about his death struggle with the J.W. Marriott (the conference hotel) to get them to do what they had in fact been contracted to do (such as set up our room chairs in a circular pattern, put us in the room agreed to, etc.). Conference attendees don’t normally think about stuff like that, but suffice to say after threatening to call in his university lawyers and engaging in numerous conversations with the Marriott staff, the hotel at last came through with what they were contracted to come through with. That was a lot of work they had to go to just so we could sit around and talk.

All went smoothly, but not without a lot of background fighting leading up to the event. Anyway, since scholars tend to bitch and find fault with individual sessions or presenters or anything else, a shout out for those (Phil and his assistant Becky Vasko in particular) who make these things possible.

Second, I have no doubt that long after some of the substantive intellectual discussions have been forgotten, I’ll still remember some of the shorter or even “throwaway “ observations, conversations, and barroom late night jesting. Here are a few that stick with me (I had some others at the time, but they disappeared after the third martini).

One presenter, Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, discussing her research on the styles and head scarves of inner-city Muslim women, related that the women she studies refer to their scarf styles as “hood-jabs.” Her entire discussion of the phenomenon of "Muslim Cool" was the single most interesting ethnographic description I've heard in a good while, and a reminder of the tireless vitality of American religious cultures. She might have been the only person there from the discipline of Anthropology (maybe there were others, but I didn't see any), and as someone who did a minor field in Cultural Anthropology lo so many years ago I still enjoy hearing work from that perspective.

At the session on religion and market models, James Hudnut-Beumler, a scholar of religion and economics, author recently of In Pursuit of the Almighty's Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism, and Dean of the Div. School at Vanderbilt, related a conversation he had once with Ben Bernanke at some kind of conference or meeting. Bernanke asked him what he studied, and he replied “religion.” Bernanke answered back, “I can explain that.” Bernanke was being a little facetious, but only a little, for he went on to give an economic analysis, based on rational choice theory, on why women historically would predominate in many types of religious organizations (basically, their “wages” from this participation were equal to or greater than the discriminatory wages they would have faced – and would still face – in the secular marketplace and workplace). The idea here was both to suggest what we can learn from approaches drawn from market models of religion, as well as why we resist the hegemony of those models – the irritation we feel at the “I can explain that,” even when meant only half-seriously, is an irritation at a reductionism run amok.

And yet, reductionism is a tool that leads to significant insights (like, what's causing that e coli outbreak? and why are there more religious "nones" now than there used to be?), so it never hurts when humanists get exposed to social science scholars who use the word "data" a lot. There will always be a fair amount of cross-disciplinary carping at these kinds of conferences, a small price to pay for crossdisciplinary conversations.

At the very first session, we had a great “ethnographic moment,” in an impromptu discussion between Robert Orsi and Jan Shipps, renowned scholars both but slightly separated generationally, concerning whether we can “bracket out” religious belief in our studies. In reflecting on her pioneering studies of Mormonism, Shipps noted how she always said (or implied) “for them,” as in “for them, these visions were real.” Orsi replied that the problem with the “for them” bracketing was that it could easily lead to “for them, these visions were real – and they are crazy.”

I hope to develop a fuller post on this conversation early this week, as it was the session that ultimately interested me the most, but just this brief conversation between the two raised the same kinds of issues and back-and-forth responses which Orsi and Richard Bushman discussed recently in the journal Dialogue (see Chris Jones’s post on that), and which Orsi and Stephen Prothero batted back-and-forth several years ago in a discussion that is still frequently referenced – click here for a useful summary of that. I have noted recently that a lot of folks are assigning that discussion to students in classes, because it really gets to the heart of the matter of how scholars conceive of themselves and their work in religion.

Is the “whoosh” that we get from sporting events (or from some other mass group activity that induces emotional excitement in individuals) the same as the “whoosh,” the rapid firing of neurons and physiological response, that “we” get from religion? If so, is religion some sort of minor subdiscipline of cognitive psychology and neuro-biology? This became the theme of a lively discussion between Ann Taves (whose recent work has been done in collaboration, so I gather, with neuro-psychologists and other scientists) and Tracy Fessenden, who spoke eloquently of her resistance to adopting the scientific model of study as a means of accessing the huge money and prestige that scientists win at universities, in comparison to the perpetually impoverished and denigrated state of the humanities at many (most?) institutions nowadays – especially state institutions where “productivity” is measured in grant dollars raised. I don't mean to suggest that Taves was leading that direction -- certainly not true for the President of the AAR! But we are entering a new era of discussion (beyond the "two cultures" model) of sciences and the humanities, and there's an awful lot at stake in those discussions.

Rachel Wheeler concluded one session by noting how our generation of scholars always ends up saying, in effect, “it’s complicated.” That is certainly my classroom mode, and the message one would end up with at a conference like this. Yet others in the room, especially those in the social sciences, bring more concrete questions (and therefore answers) to the table, as when Roger Finke discussed some of the findings that can be gleaned from sociological studies of religious behavior such as he has conducted in some of his well-known studies. That brings us back to the discussion that Hudnut-Beumler and Ben Bernanke had about “I can explain that.” The humanists in the room stiffen their backbones against any explanation that does not invoke complexity and some degree of unknowability; some (not all) of the social scientists naturally are drawn to projects that focus on concrete questions and answers – has religious/philanthropic giving risen or fallen over time as a percentage of people’s incomes? Has the pay of clergy risen or fallen relative to other professions over the longue duree (answer: fallen, but you already knew that)? And so on.

As a humanist at heart, naturally I gravitate towards “It’s complicated” as my answer for most important questions. For the smaller questions, we can find answers, but for the bigger questions that drew me into academic studies in the first place, our answers will be tentative at best. Therefore, my classroom pedagogy tends to be deconstructively Socratic, in the sense of proposing questions, letting students pose hypotheses, poking holes/finding problems with those hypotheses, and then commanding them to “go and research some more” at the end of the period (they probably go to toga parties instead, but at least I want to leave them with the idea of the beautiful confusion of historical research). Is that, ultimately, where I want to leave it? I don’t think that will leave the assessment committee at my university very happy, since we are supposed to be assessing concrete bits of student learning.

But that leads to a final irony: I am chair of our departmental assessment committee (that's a committee of one -- but full of self-doubt as I am, reaching consensus is surprisingly difficult), so I get to develop the instruments to test exactly what bytes of data students "learn." Since I developed them, our instruments, therefore, essentially capture the degree to which students "get" the concept "it's complicated."

Is “boring from within” the way to beat a bureaucratic system that inevitably beats down individuals? On the other hand, as a lover and scholar of The Wire, I also know that, ultimately, the institution always wins, so we shall see whether, like Slim Charles, I "fight on that lie," just because we have to fight, or whether "boring from within" is simply carving a hole in my own academic soul.

Ultimately, in this age of the privatization of public goods such as education, the game does change, while it also just gets more fierce -- as Kathryn Lofton and Sylvester Johnson reminded us in their presentations on/critiques of (respectively) neoliberalism and its influence in market models of religion, and the relationship of American religion to the American imperial state. Reflecting further on the privatization of the public good of education (as in Colorado, where state funding now represents less than 8% of the CU budget) threw some cold water on the neural "whoosh" that conferences such as this, at their best, provide. (And if, like Janine, you live in Illinois, then that water bath is even colder.)

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

Paul Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Cloven Tongues of Fire, The Nation (Magazine) Gets Religion

Paul Harvey

I think a lot of you are out there are having fun thinking about Elesha's provocative post yesterday Do Religion Scholars Read the Bible, and the conversation about it will continue tomorrow with a follow-up post by Janine -- but in the meantime here are some more items of great interest that passed my way today, and very much related with one another.

First, The Nation magazine has given one of its reviewers, Chris Lehmann, ample space to discuss together Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt alongside Matt Sutton's Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (which, as some of you know, was John Updike's alltime favorite book in his New Yorker review). Subscribers can read the review here, and the rest of you will have to track it down somewhere else, but if you're at a subscribing library as I was today it will show up as well.

Lehmann's lengthy discussion is fascinating, and framed in a way I have not seen before; he begins by discussing Golden State high-tech boosterism characteristic of TED conferences, Wired magazine, and the early Whole Earth catalog, and then tries to figure out how religious conservatives previously suspicious of free market orthodoxies (as discussed in Darren's book) came to be in the same camp as the "Californian ideologues" who preached "an anti-statist gospel of hi-tech libertarianism," concluding that "No less contradictory than the gospel truths of the California digerati, the dogmas of West Coast evangelicalism proved instrumental in acculturating an earlier generation of Jeffersonian golden dreams to a life of abundance bolstered by government-driven subsidies and development policies that, over time, they came to despite with a righteous fury."

Anyway, given a few years separation of publication dates, I have not seen Dochuk and Sutton's works considered together elsewhere, but they are here, and very fruitfully. Plus, Lehmann picks out some stories from Sutton's book about McPherson, who of course is an endless fount of fascinating tales, which I had forgotten about. And yes, that "who" pronoun was deliberately ambiguous.

Next semester I'm having my MA students read Sutton's biography of Aimee together with Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right -- a wonderfully engaging book I'm just now finishing. I'm expecting this pairing to lead to a great class discussion -- two of the most self-inventive Americans of the twentieth century, with personal sagas which no fiction writer could make up (indeed, fiction writers of McPherson's time modeled characters after her precisely because they could not make her up), but obviously at opposite ends of the spectrum in their relationship to Christianity. Or maybe not, since Rand's visceral hatred of religion didn't prevent her from creating her own version of a rigid belief system.

The other article to call your attention to is David Hollinger's Presidential Address at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Houston a few months back, which is now published in the Journal of American History:

"Presidential Address: After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity," by David A. Hollinger

It bears mentioning that Hollinger, who teaches at Berkeley, was the PhD advisor for blog friend and occasional contributor Kevin Schultz, whose book Tri-Faith America has received attention here, as well as of Jennifer Burns, author of the Rand biography just mentioned above. Congratulations to Prof. Hollinger for his OAH presidency and for the outstanding work that his students are doing.

Here's a brief summary of the main point:

In his presidential address to the 2011 Organization of American Historians annual meeting, David A. Hollinger argues that the flourishing of evangelicals and the membership decline of ecumenicals since World War II constitute a single dialectic driven by contrasting dispositions toward ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural difference. More sensitive than their evangelical rivals to the diversity of American society and of the globe, ecumenicals abandoned a series of ideas that were not supportive of diversity, but those same ideas remained popular with the white public that was the chief constituency of Protestantism. Evangelicals then energetically espoused ideas such as the notion of a "Christian America" to appeal to Americans dubious of the accommodations with diversity that ecumenists had enacted with secular liberals. Americans become increasingly comfortable with the liberal ideas espoused by the ecumenical churches, while Protestantism itself became an evangelical stronghold.

What is interesting here -- among many other things -- is that the histories of "mainline" or "mainstream" Protestants have been largely considered separately from the "rise of the evangelicals" historiography, and Hollinger suggests one way to bring them together.

I hope my buddies over at U.S. Intellectual History might take up some of the ideas discussed by Hollinger and weigh in on his argument -- down the road when people have had a chance to read it, of course. In the meantime, if you historians out there haven't joined the OAH, what's wrong with you?

A Nation of Outsiders

Paul Harvey

Sometimes I like to take note of books here which don’t fall into the category of American religious history in some formal sense, but which address religious/cultural themes in ways that are fresh and innovative. Today we have such a text, just published with Oxford: Grace Hale’s A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America. Kaye Hymowitz reviews it here for the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post discusses it here.

The author has been at work on this book a long time, and it’s worth the wait (I read a previous rough draft of the book manuscript a couple of years ago and am going off that; I think nothing drastically changed between then and its publication this year). I admit I preferred the original title of this manuscript before it got changed for the book. Originally it was titled Rebel, Rebel: Outsiders in Twentieth Century America. I loved the multiple signifiers of Rebel there. Oh well, it looks like the publishers wanted one of those “how” subtitles that so many books have now.

More important are the wide-ranging connections Grace Hale draws between romanticism, a sense of alienation and outsiderism, and cultural politics through the twentieth century. The “New Left” and the “New Right” (both very old now) both receive extensive attention, as do writers ranging from Norman Mailer and Elizabeth Bishop to Bob Dylan to William F. Buckley. Hale writes compellingly of the central role musical desires for “authenticity” played in shaping 1960s culture. “Romanticism and a sense of social justice were inseparable,” Hale says, and that romanticism came not just from some sense of alienation from conformist 1950s America, but from much older roots in the Romantic period. As Hymowitz writes in the review:

The new rebels looked to the country's outsiders to clarify their own feelings of alienation. In this respect, postwar rebellion had roots in 19-century romanticism. In their "Lyrical Ballads," Wordsworth and Coleridge had tried to locate hidden human truths in the experience of "people on the margins," Ms. Hale argues—children, peddlers, miners, even the insane. Kerouac wrote in the same vein though with less literary art: "The only people for me are the mad ones," announces the hero of "On the Road," "the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk . . . desirous of everything at the same time." Other rebels, including folk singers like Pete Seeger and, soon enough, back-to-the-land hippies, believed that they spied in rural America the rootedness and authenticity that was being devoured by suburbia and mass culture.

Of great relevance for this blog are the last two chapters, one on the Christian right generally (with a broad conceptual map of what constitutes Christian right there, including William F. Buckley, Jerry Falwell, Jesus People, and others from all over the spectrum), and another more specifically on Operation Rescue.

Book description from Oxford:

At mid-century, Americans increasingly fell in love with characters like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye and Marlon Brando's Johnny in The Wild One , musicians like Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, and activists like the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. These emotions enabled some middle-class whites to cut free of their own histories and identify with those who, while lacking economic, political, or social privilege, seemed to possess instead vital cultural resources and a depth of feeling not found in "grey flannel" America.

In this wide-ranging and vividly written cultural history, Grace Elizabeth Hale sheds light on why so many white middle-class Americans chose to re-imagine themselves as outsiders in the second half of the twentieth century and explains how this unprecedented shift changed American culture and society. Love for outsiders launched the politics of both the New Left and the New Right. From the mid-sixties through the eighties, it flourished in the hippie counterculture, the back-to-the-land movement, the Jesus People movement, and among fundamentalist and Pentecostal Christians working to position their traditional isolation and separatism as strengths. It changed the very meaning of "authenticity" and "community."

Ultimately, the romance of the outsider provided a creative resolution to an intractable mid-century cultural and political conflict-the struggle between the desire for self-determination and autonomy and the desire for a morally meaningful and authentic life.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Outsiders and Rebels
Part I: Learning to Love Outsiders
Chapter 1: Lost Children of Plenty: Growing Up as Rebellion
Chapter 2: Rebel Music: Minstrelsy, Rock and Roll, and Beat Writing
Chapter 3: Black as Folk: The Folk Music Revival, the Civil Rights Movement, and Bob Dylan
Chapter 4: Rebels on the Right: Conservatives as Outsiders in Liberal America
Part II: Romance in Action
Chapter 5: The New White Negroes in Action: Students for a Democratic Society, the Economic Research and Action Project, and Freedom Summer
Chapter 6: Too Much Love: Black Power and the Search for Other Outsiders
Chapter 7: The Making of Christian Countercultures: God's Outsiders from the Jesus People to Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority
Chapter 8: Rescue: Christian Outsiders in Action in the Pro-Life Movement
Conclusion: The Cost of Rebellion

A Theological Crisis at the Heart of State Budget Crises

by Janine Giordano Drake

In the old days, states would balance their budgets by carefully managing their wealth held in property. Their means of acquiring more wealth was the state militia, and wealth, of course was, control over Indian territory. Indian land seizure could either result in fast money from speculators (usually represented by banks), or a slow, long term income stream garnered by renting to municipalities and land developers. When that was no longer easy, states sold exclusive government contracts to companies that traded with and in the state. What I want to argue here is that raising funds for state projects has never relied very much on taxed assets of the people. Today, however, we all have to decide whether it ought to be.

Only a tiny portion of state spending in this country comes from income taxes. Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming do not levy any state income taxes. New Hampshire and Tennessee tax only tax dividend and interest income. To me, the problem in budget-starving agricultural-heavy states like Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York and California is that states have never established the principle that effective ownership of land and other income-deriving assets requires services of a state to keep the assets in operation. These services include public servants from police forces and firefighters to teachers and municipal workers.

Cash-poor farmers have essentially been contending against urban service workers since the last Gilded Age over who ought to carry the heavier burden for public services. Henry George, who argued that poor people should not be fighting with one another but recognize the common adversary of those who own large amounts of natural resources, would turn over in his grave at the prospect of undermining organized workers' wages without taxing property owners. Together with Eugene Debs and many other land reformers, George worked hard to get poor farmers and farm workers to agree to hold their property in common in order to simulate the First Century Church (or some other equivalent utopia of peace through cooperation) and together reap the fruits of their labor. However, as Randall's recent post reminds us, pretty much all of these experimental communities failed.

Even though many Christian Socialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century believed very strongly in George's concept of a single tax on the ownership of natural resources, Christian landowners put up just as big a fight, often by repositioning their theology of God's grace. Land provided to them through Indian conquest was often understood as a gift from God for the sake of Christian stewardship for one's family, not something borrowed from the state for the sake of the public, or, of course, stolen from Indians for the sake of power and hegemony. Landless and socialist Christians often fought back, criticizing landowners time and again for owning something that was ultimately not theirs but everyone's, and really God's. So, in the 1890s, landowning Populists began to talk about the main assets of their occupation as not land at all. Rather than engage in a business that exploited land and labor, these populists argued that they earned their living through the work of rain and sunshine--their bounty, therefore, was a gift from God.

Many farmers today still point to rain and sunshine (rather than land and labor) as the essential raw materials to their financial prosperity. International trade conditions still keep many farmers cash poor and therefore starved by higher state and municipal taxes on land. Farmers' comparatively low incomes (compared to their net worth if they own land) means that they bring in little income tax revenue to the state, compared to the federal and state subsidies that they use.

In many ways carrying out the Populist agenda, farmers and agribusiness have united to call themselves "growers," a maneuverer that accomplishes at least two political goals. First, it constructs the money-making asset of agricultural capitalists as the weather-cooperating-with-fertilizers, rather than ownership of the land in the first place. Secondly, it renders the agricultural labor required to harvest the crop as something apart from the act of farming. Therefore, "growers" have since the Depression received subsidies and tax breaks for providing food for the masses, but the migrant workers and other agricultural farm hands who do the grunt labor of harvest and farm maintenance are not even required to be paid a minimum wage, let alone a living wage with benefits or the dignity of calling oneself a farmer.

Starving states today rely primarily on revenue streams in sales taxes and a la carte fees for use of services (registrations and licenses, court filing fees, college tuition, tobacco taxes, gas taxes, etc)--in addition, of course, to large loans from banks--loans that bankers rarely complain about because states' inability to go bankrupt means banks' loans are virtually no risk.

Tying state revenue streams to general consumption and fees-for-use rather than pooled fruits of production is not only paralyzing state budgets in this new Gilded Age of poverty, wealth, and high unemployment (especially with tax laws to conserve the wealthy). Even more debilitating, it has established a myth that the state can operate independently of taxes on the production of its residents. Wisconsin never, of course, actually had a budget problem until Walker gave away so many tax breaks and contracts to his corporate sponsors. Wisconsin was in that respect an exception to the rule of starving state budgets over the last decade. However, we must admit that in handing out tax breaks and special contracts to growers and businesses, Walker was only doing what most state governors do.

I think Paul Grant is absolutely right when he talks about cooperation and consensus-building as essential cultural heritages of many working class Wisconsinites. This is not only confirmed in my research on Wisconsin socialists but helps me understand something I had been trying to figure out--why the Milwaukee atheist socialists and Christian Socialists I study feuded so terribly but still got along so well. Why, for example, Eugene Debs was not kicked out of leadership in the Social Democratic Party in 1897 when he was clearly in the minority in his belief in the possibility of establishing those Christian cooperative communes. Wisconsin socialists fought with Debs but, remarkably, kept him in charge. As Grant suggests, Scandinavian and German immigrants brought to Wisconsin not only a working class consciousness but a dense network of cultural institutions (gymnasiums, cultural clubs, churches, unions, freethinker clubs, political parties, etc) that served as schools for consensus building that would make such political and economic cooperation comfortable. I think Grant is also absolutely right that the national, conservative trend toward "brinksmanship" that Walker has recently employed in Wisconsin is to a large degree in tension with the cultural fabric of his state.

We all hate to admit it, though, but there are still many Wisconsinites who may believe in consensus building in rhetoric and demeanor but do not believe that public services should be paid for through their own pooled economic resources. Rural landowners around the country still resist tax hikes. This, I would argue, is the legacy of Populist rhetoric from the era of Indian landgrabbing: a belief that one's land is all one's own and not really a wealth-producing asset. It is a gift from God for oneself and one's family. State services, too, should be plentiful, but to Populists these should come from public revenue streams contributed to through fees-per-use and state provision, not state tithes on assets like land and income.

I find especially among evangelical Christians in the midwest a surprising combination of "Christian cooperativeness" in demeanor and rhetoric but real resistance to understanding one's income as anything but entirely one's own (and perhaps the Church's). Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Walmart articulates and historicizes this tension so well.

To me, the referendum in all these state budget crises today is about where state revenue should come from when seizure and sale of state-contraband-territory is no longer as viable an option. Will we continue to find assets in the state's possession to exploit anew--like mines, quarries, aquifers and, err, government buildings, public parks, and guilds of municipal employees--or will we agree to issue higher state income taxes and property taxes, especially on those who can afford to pay more?

Furthermore, Madison is one of the hippest places for left-wing evangelical Christians to find each other. Will our present moment's resurgence of the virtues of communalism, the dangers of environmental destruction, and the violent legacy of settler colonialism stir a rebirth of nineteenth century Christian Socialist theologies? I think this Wisconsin battle may serve as a laboratory for American Christians reconsidering the difference between gifts provided to them and gifts provided in common.

Religion, Consensus, and Conflict in Wisconsin

Paul Harvey

A number of good pieces have analyzed the conflict over public unions and collective bargaining in Wisconsin from religious history perspectives. Some, such as Kim Bobo over at Religion Dispatches, have reproduced mainstream Protestant liberal and Catholic support for the workers, while our own Heath Carter has weighed in here more skeptically on the same issue. From the other side of the divide, Julie Ingersoll has investigated the justifications in Christian Reconstructionism for union-busting, and Diane Butler Bass explains Governor Scott Walker's evangelical surety (you Cheeseheads have Colorado Springs to thank for that, apparently, yet another gift we've given to the world). Over at Immanent Frame, John Boy's "The Cross and the Cheeseheads" summarizes much of this discussion and provides some other links as well.

But here is what I think is the best short piece on the religious angle of the story I have read on this: Paul Grant, "Neighbor Against Neighbor in Wisconsin," a succinct and eloquent essay on the passion about public order and public works that underlies this conflict (hat tip to Janine Giordano Drake and Seth Dowland for calling my attention to it). Just a brief excerpt:

In the 1870s, waves of Scandinavians and Germans came, motivated this time by poverty. These were the builders, the people who brought their Northern European instincts for consensus-building and cooperation to bear on their projects. It is because of them that Wisconsin is stacked with credit unions, farmers markets, co-ops of every variety, native grass seed exchanges, strong public libraries, and impressive music departments in tiny rural high schools. Largely Lutheran and Catholic, the bedrock Wisconsin way of doing culture is to blur the boundaries between public and private . . .

Why does this matter? It helps explain the anger of the moment. We are seeing a collision of distinct traditions of political conversation—one grounded in mainstream American traditions of brinkmanship, and another drawing on midwestern traditions of consensus-building. It is not insignificant that Governor Walker was born in Colorado Springs to a Baptist minister: he represents national political cultures.

It's often pointed out that Wisconsin gave us both Robert LaFollette and Joseph McCarthy, so this "brinksmanship" is certainly not entirely new; and of course serious labor conflict in Wisconsin and elsewhere is not new either. Nonetheless, Grant's piece helped me understand something of the way this movement has combined passion and order, and also something more about the religious motivations undergirding Governor Walker and his supporters.

Update: Janine Giordano is working on her own piece on the Wisconsin issue as well as a response to Grant, so with any luck that will be up here soon!

The Dream is Freedom: Pauli Murray and the American Democratic Faith

Paul Harvey

I remember attending a conference once, I think it was around 1990 or so, and someone was talking to me about the life of Pauli Murray. I said something more or less like, "who?" The name was totally unfamiliar to me. I didn't even realize then how embarrassed I should have been by that admission; since then, reading her wonderful autobiography, encountering her in various historical works (such as Glenda Gilmore's Defying Dixie, where she plays a central role in the narrative), and now seeing the publication of works such as the one discussed below, she has come better into full view as a central player in twentieth-century American civil rights and religious history.

Sarah Azaransky's The Dream is Freedom: Pauli Murray and the American Democratic Faith, to be published in February, is a full-length intellectual history of Murray's life and work, from young civil rights activist, to law school, and to her late life study to become an Episcopalian minister. I'm pasting in information below from the Oxford website, and definitely look forward to perusing this work.

Description

Pauli Murray (1910-1985) was a poet, lawyer, activist, and priest, as well as a significant figure in the civil rights and women's movements. Throughout her careers and activism, Murray espoused faith in an American democracy that is partially present and yet to come.

In the 1940s Murray was in the vanguard of black activists to use nonviolent direct action. A decade before the Montgomery bus boycott, Murray organized sit-ins of segregated restaurants in Washington DC and was arrested for sitting in the front section of a bus in Virginia. Murray pioneered the category Jane Crow to describe discrimination she experienced as a result of racism and sexism. She used Jane Crow in the 1960s to expand equal protection provisions for African American women. A co-founder of the National Organization of Women, Murray insisted on the interrelation of all human rights. Her professional and personal relationships included major figures in the ongoing struggle for civil rights for all Americans, including Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt.
In seminary in the 1970s, Murray developed a black feminist critique of emerging black male and white feminist theologies. After becoming the first African American woman Episcopal priest in 1977, Murray emphasized the particularity of African American women's experiences, while proclaiming a universal message of salvation.

The Dream Is Freedom examines Murray's substantial body of published writings as well personal letters, journals, and unpublished manuscripts. Azaransky traces the development of Murray's thought over fifty years, ranging from Murray's theologically rich democratic criticism of the 1930s to her democratically inflected sermons of the 1980s. Pauli Murray was an innovative democratic thinker, who addressed how Americans can recognize differences, signaled the role of history and memory in shaping democratic character, and called for strategic coalition building to make more justice available for more Americans.

Features

• First book-length study of Pauli Murray's democratic vision
• First consideration of Murray's democratic and religious thought from the 1930s through the 1980s

Reviews

"The Dream Is Freedom brings much needed attention to the remarkable life of Pauli Murray--activist, author, advocate, legal scholar, theological critic, poet, and organizer for freedom, justice and democracy. Across discrimination by race, gender, sex, and class, Pauli called us to be our better selves, join the struggle for change, and fulfill the promise of what America and we could be. This is a terrific book about an extraordinary and too little recognized fighter for a better world."--Heather Booth, President, Midwest Academy

"This careful and thoughtful study offers readers important insights into the nature and meaning of Pauli Murray's contributions to our theological self-understanding and our democratic desires." --Anthony B. Pinn, Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities, Rice University

Product Details

224 pages; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4;ISBN13: 978-0-19-974481-7ISBN10: 0-19-974481-5

Commie Pinko Pilgrims and Peaceful (?) Puritans

Paul Harvey

A little Thanksgiving history blogging for you. I hadn't quite realized how much of a cottage industry peddling the anachronistic "Socialist Pilgrims" thesis had become, but this piece from the New York Times explores the spread of this myth. I was shocked -- SHOCKED -- to learn how much of a role Glenn Beck and his historical henchman W. Cleon Skousen have played in marketing this story, My favorite part: the time when Rush Limbaugh added in the bit about how they grew organic vegetables, after they had learned that capitalism worked and produced an abundance which they could share with the Indians.

In "Peace, Love, and Puritanism," David Hall, of Harvard Divinity School, defends the Puritans against generations of Hawthornian and Menckenian scorn (and adds that, yes, wild turkeys probably appeared on the original menu). He writes:

Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.

Historiann has no problem with Hall's conclusion, but points out some of the darker underside to the history of feasting and fasting in America -- in particular, its long connection to war and tribalism:

Both fasts and feasts were opportunities to reaffirm tribalism, of a world view of us versus them. The history of fasting and feasting in the English communities of New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should be written in blood–both blood in the sense of kinship ties, and in the sense of the shedding of outsiders’ blood in war.

The history of fasting and feasting is "more complicated and much darker than Americans would like to remember," she reminds us. Reading the many pages on this subject in George C. Rable's God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War, reinforces this point. About every five pages, it seems, someone from North or South is calling for a fast day, or preaching a fast day sermon. There was a lot of ostensible bowing, scraping, and humility, but ultimately it was all about killing. With all these fast days during the war, it's a wonder anyone ever ate.

John Fea reflects on what he would teach about the original Thanksgiving here, at his new column over at Patheos, and what it meant for the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, who both had been through some brutal times, to share a brief celebration together. I hope your celebration goes well.

Christianity and Scholarship in the Public Square, the Guild, and the Church

Paul Harvey

My blog contributors John Fea, Gerardo Marti, and Michael Utzinger joined me last weekend at a really wonderful event, the 20th anniversary conference and celebration of the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University. John, Mike, and I were postdoctoral fellows there (1993-95 for me, 99-00 for Mike, 2000-02 for John), and Gerardo was there giving a keynote address this weekend to an assembled group of representatives from various church-related colleges and institutions across the country. I was able to catch up with some old friends, meet some new ones (including some rising younger stars in American religious history), and enjoy hearing a variety of papers in Humanities and the Arts around the theme of "Finding One's Place." John Fea has blogged more about the program here. Graduate students who read this blog, make sure and check out the opportunities provided by this 2-year postdoctoral fellowship by clicking here.

Below is some more on a book of reflections on "Christianity in the Public Square" of higher education, based on talks given at the last Lilly Fellows reunion conference in 2007. I'm pasting the below in from John Fea's Way of Improvement Leads Home blog (hope you don't mind, John) -- it includes information on the short book as well as authors, titles, and descriptions of the contents:

_____________________________________

This weekend I just received my copy of For the Whole of Creation: Christianity and Scholarship in the Public Square, the Guild, and the Church, ed. John Steven Paul and James Paul Old (Valparaiso University Press, 2010).

If you are interested in church-related higher education this may be a book worth reading. (I am not sure how to order a copy. Perhaps the best way to obtain one is to contact the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University--www.lillyfellows.org).

The book includes sections on "The Christian Academic and the Public Square," "The Christian Academic and the Academic Guild," and the "Christian Academic and the Church."

Here is the table of contents:

Foreword: Joe Creech

Tal Howard, "On Plausability, Post-Secularism, and Evangelicalism."

Jeffrey Zalar, "The Roots of Public Virtue in Christian Intellectual Practice."

Colleen Seguin, "Classrooms as Public Spaces."

Paul Harvey, "Exile from Valpo: On Being a Religious Scholar in the Historical Guild at the Public University Amidst a Charged Atmosphere of Religion, Politics, and War."

Maria LaMonaca: "My Teaching Load is None of Your Business, and Don't Steal My Desk: Seeking an Identity Among Academic Guilds."

Heath White: "The Profession is the World: Some Thoughts on Being in the Guild But Not of It."

J. Michael Utzinger, "Faith That Kills?: Reflections on Religion after 9/11."

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, "Have Women Souls?: The Council of Macon and the Dilemma of a Catholic Feminist Scholar."

Martha Greene Eads, "The Professor in the Parish: Beyong Gourmet Coffee and High-Quality Handouts."

John Fea, "Worshipping with 'Christian America': A Historian's Search for a Spiritual Home in Mainstream Evangelicalism."

Scott Huelin: "Dual Citizenship: The Politics of Belonging to Church and Academy."