Hannah Adams' Intellectual Grandchildren; Or, Maybe It Was All Liberal Protestantism, After All?

By Michael J. Altman

Robert: I feel that an earlier generation of scholars of religion was willing to consider these questions. The answers may not always have been satisfying–but I think of William James here, or even the early theorists of crowd behavior. There were scholars interested in talking about how we think about these sorts of human events, but I don’t see it anymore.

Richard: James is the perfect example of it–

Robert: But in the end he’s too individualistic for me!

Richard: Very Protestant, maybe?

Robert: Yes. [Laughs]

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like it's a strange time in the field of religious studies. I've been hiding in my dissertation cave for the past few months so maybe that's part of it. Yet, every time I poke my head out I keep noticing things. Little things. Reports of unease in the rooms of that conference in Indianapolis here, a dialogue about "presence" and "abundant events" that seems to run out of vocabulary before it can get off the ground there. To me, these moments signal the slow death of liberal Protestant religious studies and the grasping about for whatever will come next.

Paul already mentioned James Turner's Religion Enters the Academy but I want to come at the book from a different angle.  Paul is right, William James is the hero of the book in the final chapter. But the first two chapters narrate the rise of the comparative and academic study of religion in America among liberal (mostly Unitarian) Protestants. In the first chapter, Turner brings Hannah Adams and Joseph Priestly to the fore as the early comparativists before 1820. Chapter two follows the growth of Unitarian and Transcendentalist interest in world religion from 1820 to 1875. This includes Thomas Wentworth Higginson's The Sympathy of Religions (1871), Lydia Marie Child's Progress of Religious Ideas through Successive Ages (1855), and James Freeman Clarke's  Ten Great Religions (1871). Meanwhile, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton offered comparative religion as part of their ministerial training in the latter quarter of the century. The University of Chicago opened its doors in 1892 and quickly added a department of comparative religion. Then, a year later and in the same town, the World Parliament of Religions attempted to unite "all religion against all irreligion" with the help of many liberal Protestants. The long and the short of it--the history of religious studies is the history of liberal Protestantism.

It's not that early scholars of comparative religion happened to be liberal Protestants. Rather, Turner shows that comparative religion, and later religious studies, was a particularly liberal Protestant project. As he puts it, "Comparative religion during its first academic decades in the United States was thus a historically minded, text-based study, oriented toward articulated religious or ethical propositions. And the discipline's driving motive, stated or unstated, was t understand how non-European religions stacked up against Christianity" (65-66). It was a project by Protestants, for Protestants, using Protestant categories.

Enter our hero, William James. James shifted the categories in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Gone were texts. Gone were institutions. Gone were beliefs, creeds, and doctrines. James went after experience. James also threw out the hierarchy of "world religions" and placed religious experience on a level playing field, drawing on contemporary accounts of religious experience. James got rid of the Protestant categories, and took little interest in comparing Christianity to other religions. Turner ends the book noting that, in the end, William James won. Maybe. James is still taught in "Theory of Religion" courses. I even read Varieties in a graduate seminar a few years back. We don't read James Freeman Clark anymore.

But Robert Orsi's laugh takes all the wind out of Jamesian sails. Even William James is too Protestant--too individual. Religion for James was "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine." I imagine Cotton Mather in his private solitude meditating on the grace of God not a procession in Italian Harlem.

As I read work on Asian religions, mostly Hinduism, the argument against the term religion--and by extension religious studies--seems rather easy. It's a Western term that doesn't fit well with the realities of Indian culture. Fine. We can have the debate if you want. But what if it isn't an East / West problem? What if the unease of religious historians not knowing their Bible or not wanting to admit to it, the back and forth of Bushman and Orsi trying to find a way to account for "abundant events," and the liberal Protestant history of religious studies are all linked? What if religious studies doesn't fit well with the realities of American culture? Maybe the unease in Indy and the search for adequate language to describe religious experience are really the unease of our liberal Protestant history and the search for a way out of it.

The field has been trying to shed its history for a long time now. As a religious studies major in college I took the "Theory of Religion" course. We read Durkheim, Freud,Weber and other European thinkers important to the field. Other than James we didn't read any Americans until we go to the late twentieth century--Eliade, J.Z. Smith, Russell McCutcheon. We ignored the American history of the field and its liberal Protestant baggage--poor James Freeman Clark.

William James won. But is that enough?

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.

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?

IT is Happening Here (Re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale)

by Steven P. Miller

Recently, I have been thinking about how the rise of the evangelical right influenced late twentieth-century American liberalism. My inquiry led me to take another look at Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). I first encountered the novel during my high school days in the mid-1990s. Reading it—or at least knowing about it—was something of a rite of passage for aspiring members of the new class. (I never went through an Ayn Rand phase, thankfully, and hence never aspired to join the productive class.) The Handmaid’s Tale may or may not have inspired some of its readers to spray paint X’s across the ubiquitous Oliver North for Senate signs in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

The Handmaid’s Tale is a riveting story driven by the alternately righteous and resigned, but always ironical, narrative voice of “Offred.” She is the handmaid of Commander Fred; which is to say, she exists to bear his seed; which is to say, the Republic of Gilead (nee New England) is a nightmarish patriarchy. In fact, the “early Gilead era” is the conflation of all things right-wing; not merely patriarchal, it is also theocratic, nativist, racist, and belligerent. The only thing missing is capitalist, although Offred’s Commander does have a background in market research. The regime is a composite of past models: the predictable Stalinist USSR-Nazi Germany template (Born of a coup, Gilead is in a continuous state of mobilization; the state police force is known as the Eyes), antebellum slavery (The handmaids are breeders subject to the whims of Commanders and the spite of Commanders’ wives), and Puritan Massachusetts (The book is dedicated to convicted witch Mary Webster, an ancestor of Atwood’s). More striking are the contemporaneous analogues: apartheid South Africa, Khomeini’s Iran, Ceausescu’s Romania . . . and, most importantly, the religious right’s looming Christian America, which in the novel is firmly in place by the 1990s. Thus, fundamentalism—a category then in the process of being conceptually stretched from Dayton, TN, all the way to Tehran—was the new “it” (more like an IT) that can happen here (or there, for the Canadian Atwood), specifically, in a city not unlike Cambridge, Mass. (not too far from Canada, when you think about it).

If Gilead’s complementarian view of oppression is a little too convenient, its religious politics are downright incoherent. (Why exactly does Gilead war against the Baptists down South? Are they the Socialist-Revolutionary Party to Gilead’s Bolsheviks?) Theo-ideological consistency was not really the point, though, in this unabashedly political novel. Fundamentalists, after all, are not averse to making up some rules as they go along; they’d rather play Geneva than wait for the promised new Jerusalem. Gilead’s basis for legitimacy is the law-and-order God of the Old Testament. But the basis could just as well have been some other IT rooted in some other reactionary resource, so long as IT provided an alternative to a sexual revolution that, by late 1970s and early 1980s, had created an opening for counter-revolution. As Norman Lear said during the early days of People for the American Way, “every generation must deal with its own Infallibles.” For Atwood, the more historically distinctive thing was the target: sexual freedom and, by extension, women’s bodies, and by further extension, women’s humanity. (Here, Atwood’s own targets included feminist anti-porn activists as well as anti-feminist female dupes.)

So much for my very impressionistic re-reading of Atwood. Has this novel served any serious political significance—other than to scare the hell out of impressionable readers? Atwood’s attitude toward the Christian Right is that of the distant literalist; fear trumps contingency as a heuristic device. Thus, the book offers little in the way of counter-intelligence. It tells us next to nothing about the Christian Right’s appeal, save to point out its ironic—in the novel, tragic—overlap with feminist moralism. While gallows humor spills forth from the oppressed, the villains remain predictable in their two-dimensionality: The Commander is a traditionalist who makes an exception for himself; his wife, a former televangelist (“Serena Joy”) who now chafes at her separate sphere.

Still, The Handmaid’s Tale undoubtedly reminded many readers of what they had to lose. Perhaps Colorado Springs was the Salem of our time, and the Republican National Convention the new Munich. At the very least, the novel gave young liberals such as myself a handy foil during the mid and late 1990s—a time when, amid my mistaken belief that Michael Kelly’s The New Republic really was a liberal publication, it was not always easy to gauge the stakes of political discourse (Boy, did Michael Kelly hate Bill Clinton). Opposing the Christian Right seemed a clearer vantage point; if liberalism was anything, it was not fundamentalism. In an age of presumed backlash, it seemed more pressing to be libertarian than liberationist on social issues; the best way to celebrate freedoms was to defend them. But what about religion? If The Handmaid’s Tale was to be believed, then religion was an inherently destabilizing force in politics. But didn’t such talk play into the hands of the opposition? Wise figures on the right long had warned (with a wink) that, should the decadent tide fail to ebb, the back-lashing masses would find recourse in authoritarianism.

Then came “W.” A decade later, I teach this stuff. So many of my students interpret religion-in-general through the lens of politically-conservative-religion-in-particular. They may have read The Handmaid’s Tale (I will take a poll next semester), or perhaps they have just absorbed its echoes.

Jim Wallis, Sojourners, the LGBT Ad, and the Trials of Progressive Christianity

Hey, it's a good week here at the blog. Please welcome our new contributor Brantley Gasaway! Brantley is an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Bucknell University. His book on the history of the progressive evangelical movement since 1965 is under contract with UNC Press and should appear in 2012. Brantley's post below concerns the recent controversy over a progressive Christian stalwart and the LGBT community. Welcome to Brantley! We look forward to many more posts from him.

Why Jim Wallis and Sojourners Rejected the LGBT Ad

Jim Wallis is no stranger to controversy. As head of

the progressive Christian organization Sojourners, Wallis has been the leading representative of evangelical progressivism over the past four decades. Throughout his career, Wallis has insisted that his "biblical" and "prophetic" political engagement is neither conservative nor liberal--a position captured in the title of his 2005 best-selling God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. Nevertheless, his more liberal politics and refusal to prioritize culture war issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage have long drawn the ire of the Religious Right. Because Wallis has attempted to promote an evangelical alternative to their movement, his most sustained and strident opposition has come from Christian conservatives.

But not this week.

Wallis and Sojourners are facing a hailstorm of criticism from religious and secular liberals for refusing to run a video ad from Believe Out Loud, a group describing itself as "a trans-denominational movement that promotes LGBT-inclusion in the Christian church." In the video, a lesbian couple and their son enter a church but face silent hostility from the congregation as they search for a seat. Yet the minister at the front of the sanctuary greets them with a warm "Welcome--everyone" and helps seat the family. The ad concludes with the words: "Open Your Heart. Break the silence." In a written statement explaining their rejection, Sojourners stated: “I’m afraid we’ll have to decline. Sojourners position is to avoid taking sides on this issue. In that care [sic], the decision to accept advertising may give the appearance of taking sides.” Religious and political progressives are responding with incredulity, disillusionment, and outrage (see the coverage here and here at Religion Dispatches). Many have charged Wallis and Sojourners with hypocrisy for claiming to represent progressive causes and to promote justice but refusing to take a stand for LGBT rights.

Yet even prior to this present controversy, Sojourners' responses to homosexuality (and abortion--but that requires separate treatment) have made them uncomfortable and on occasion unwelcome partners with more liberal Christians who otherwise share their vision for social justice. Sojourners magazine did not address homosexuality as a matter of either Christian ethics or public policy until 1982, over a decade after its inception as the Post-American. In an editorial entitled “A Matter of Justice,” publisher Joe Roos outlined the magazine’s interpretation of homosexuality as a civil right but religious wrong. “While we do not believe that Scripture condones a homosexual lifestyle,” Roos explained, “we do believe that homosexuals, like anyone else, deserve full human rights” that are not “conditional upon agreement over sexual morality.” Churches can privilege heterosexuality within their own communities, he argued, and thus Sojourners welcomed but did not affirm gay and lesbian Christians. But within “the public arena,” Roos insisted that “the first Christian duty is to love”—an act that need not entail approval but “must always include justice.” And justice, he concluded, required Christians to defend the full civil rights of gays and lesbians.

In 1985, Sojourners reiterated this position. Despite confusion that stemmed from empathetic relationships with gays and lesbians, the editors remained convinced that “a clear biblical word” did “not condone homosexual practice.” Yet they rejected any "attempt to deny them their God-given humanity and their civil rights.” The editors endorsed an accompanying article by popular evangelical author Richard Foster in which he wrote that the Bible clearly "views heterosexual union as God’s intention for sexuality and sees homosexuality as a distortion of this God-given pattern.” While Foster acknowledged the reality of a homosexual orientation, he compared such orientation to “clubfootedness”—a “distortion of God’s intention” that deserved empathy rather than condemnation from Christians.

A backlash, similar to the current one, immediately ensued. In addition to self-identified gays and lesbians who felt “betrayed,” a significant protest came from a group more liberal Christian leaders who not only supported Sojourners' comprehensive commitment to justice but also regularly contributed to the magazine. Among those jointly signing a critical response were prominent Catholic peace activist Daniel Berrigan; celebrated social justice advocate William Sloane Coffin, Jr.; theologian Walter Wink; and leading evangelical feminist Virginia Mollenkott. In a lengthy letter, the group challenged the relevance of biblical condemnations of homosexuality; argued for left-handedness rather than clubfootedness as an analogy for homosexual orientation; and appealed to “the reality of deep and abiding love between two gay persons” as evidence that God also intended homosexuals to express their particular “gift of sexuality.” To these authors, affirmation of homosexuality represented a basic “question of justice.”

While Sojourners responded to these criticisms by reiterating a commitment to defending the civil rights of gays and lesbians but regarding homosexual practice as unacceptable for Christians, Wallis and other editors seemed chastened. The intensity of this criticism from ecumenical Christian supporters clearly shaped the magazine’s subsequent coverage. Rather than promoting its controversial welcoming but not affirming position for Christians, Sojourners declared itself committed to a "dialogue" on the issue while unequivocally supporting LGBT civil rights. Thus, for example, the July 1991 issue of Sojourners carried a forum dedicated to "The Need for a Better Dialogue in the Churches on Gay and Lesbian Sexuality" but only included authors who "share a commitment to justice and human rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation." Likewise, in 1999 Sojourners published " a dialogue on the church and homosexuality" between Tony Campolo (who believes "that the Bible does not allow for same-gender sexual intercourse or marriage") and his wife Peggy Campolo (who "believes that within the framework of evangelical Christianity, monogamous gay marriages are permissible"). Most important, Sojourners muted its coverage of LGBT issues in comparison to the urgency or frequency with which it addressed issues of poverty, peace, racial and gender justice, or environmental stewardship.

The current controversy reflects this background. While the video ad itself seems only to advocate a welcoming position, Believe Out Loud promotes "LGBT equality in the church and in broader society" that includes both ordination and marriage equality for LBGT individuals. Sojourners likely believed that accepting this ad without any "dialogue" around these issues would imply endorsement--a concern that Wallis expressed in a 2008 interview with Christianity Today after feeling remorse for accepting ads from Human Rights Campaign, another organization promoting LGBT rights. Indeed, both the blog post from Sojourners' communication director and Wallis's own statement on "Sojourners' Mission and LGBTQ Issues" emphasize Sojourners' history of supporting LGBT civil rights and their commitment to promoting dialogue among Christians who disagree theologically on affirming same-sex practice. Wallis admitted that Sojourners' "core mission concerns" are focused on "matters of poverty, racial justice, stewardship of the creation, and the defense of life and peace" and not debates about justice for LGBT individuals.

Thus, the disillusionment of religious and political liberals among Sojourners' supporters is understandable. Many who define full equality for LGBT individuals as vital to social justice are angered. Few find credible Wallis's and Sojourners' desire to promote social justice but allow for different standards within the church. And many would even question Wallis's ostensible commitment to LGBT civil rights since he supports civil unions rather than same-sex marriage.

Ultimately, this controversy illustrates why the progressive evangelical movement has remained small over the past four decades. Leaders like Wallis, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo have been too politically progressive for most evangelicals but too theologically conservative for most political liberals. Wallis may consider his political positions "prophetic," but he no doubt wishes they would remain more popular.

Myth of American Religious Freedom: Part II

Paul Harvey

Today we continue our interview with David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom.

PH: A good portion of your book is taken up with dissenters -- the abolitionists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mormons, freethinkers, and progressive intellectuals in the twentieth century. Time after time, they get beaten down by the moral establishment, yet in the end they more or less triumphed in crafting a new definition of religious freedom. Can you give us briefly one example of how you use dissenters in your book, and how they confronted and, over time, whittled away at the foundations of the moral establishment?

DS: Of all the people I talk about, my favorite is Elizabeth Cady Stanton. As most of your readers know, Stanton was a radical women’s rights activist who argued that the subservient place of women in law grew out of a Christian patriarchy. To make way for the emancipation of women, Stanton was relentless in her criticism of the connection of Christianity to law. According to her opponents, women’s liberation would entail societal degradation, because treating a woman as an individual before the law would undermine the institution of the family, the mechanism for inculcating morals in society. As a result, Christian proponents of the moral establishment placed the obligations of society over the desires of individual women such as Stanton. By contrast, Stanton placed the individual above society. She argued that laws too often required that the individual—especially the female individual—to be “sacrificed to the highest good of society,” which was the fundamental error of the moral establishment. She claimed instead that a society could not suppress the individual and still uphold the highest social good. Only when individuals possessed full freedom would the possibilities of a society be realized.

Stanton laid out the basic question in the debate, which was: which is most basic, the society or the individual? This claim about the importance of the individual and of individual rights in a liberal, democratic society circulated among the many dissenters to the moral establishment in the nineteenth century. But the notion did not finally triumph until the twentieth century, through progressive intellectuals, such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, and liberal legal theorists, such as Louis Brandeis, who used the Court to enforce individual rights.

PH: You hit liberal justices pretty hard for misusing history, particularly in claiming a strict separationist position on the First Amendment that basically never really existed. In other words, since the "wall of separation" is basically a historical myth, it is a bad idea to use that myth in reasoning in legal cases. How do you think those on the center/left of the spectrum should view your history of the moral establishment in making arguments favorable to their position? Is this akin to Brown v. Board –acknowledge crimes against freedom committed in the past, including by the Court, and just say we need a completely different model than that?

DS: Yes, that’s exactly right. Using bad history does not help public debate and it does not make stable law. Liberals should acknowledge that the past did not feature a harmonious arrangement of freedom that sprang from the minds of Jefferson and Madison. By reframing their arguments away from that bad history, I actually think liberals would strengthen their own position because the most powerful argument for liberal jurisprudence is historical. It goes something like this: Once upon a time, the individual was subject to religious oppression that used the apparatus of the state. But then the Supreme Court realized that the Bill of Rights, which defines the rights of American citizens, should apply to the states because the states were infringing upon the rights of the individual guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. As the Supreme Court began applying the Bill of Rights to the states, it made a host of questionable historical arguments. But it did so for a still legitimate purpose that is now under attack by religious partisans in the present. The Court sought to free the individual from oppression in order to make the United States into a liberal democracy. We can uphold those rulings while not repeating the same bad history, because acknowledging past Protestant power helps to show why the liberal jurisprudence is necessary.

PH: The latter portion of the book deals with some more contemporary controversies and decisions, and you suggest very strongly that the Roberts Court, when it has the chance, will "continue to aid political conservatives and religious activists in rehabilitating the moral establishment." This is a different argument than I have seen from some other legal scholars, who have suggested that recently the Supreme Court has moved more towards a position of shying away from big religion decisions, because First Amendment law as to what is or is not a "religion" has just become a huge mess of contradictory decisions (as in the one a few years ago allowing for the use of a religious symbol in a public place in one state, but disallowing it in another state). In what ways do you foresee a possibly more activist court under Roberts, and why would it be interested in rehabilitating a moral establishment that has led to so much dissent and conflict over two centuries, as you trace in your book?

DS: It depends upon what you mean by “big religion decisions.” I agree that the Court seems chastened by the daunting (if not impossible) theoretical task of defining religion in a way that is fair and stable and does not violate the establishment clause. But I don’t think that this strongly conservative Court is going to calmly accept past liberal jurisprudence. Part of my argument is precisely that a case doesn’t have to be about “religion” per se to uphold religious power.

Consider two cases. The Court currently has a case before it that involves an Arizona law which funnels money to private religious schools through a complicated tax credit system. I find this an instructive case. In the nineteenth century, Protestants controlled the schools but they lost that control in the mid-twentieth century as the Supreme Court forbade prayer and Bible-reading in schools. When the Supreme Court dismantled religious control over schools, religious conservatives began to advocate the use of public money in private schools. The Arizona law is in that tradition of seeking an end-run around mid-twentieth-century legal decisions. The state claims that the money given to private, often sectarian schools is not public money because an individual donates the money to a school and is then reimbursed by the state through a tax credit (not a tax deduction) on a matching basis up to a certain amount. As a result, Arizona claims, it cannot be considered a violation of the establishment clause. This sounds like money laundering to me, and I would like to think that the Court would strike it down. But the last thirty years has seen the Court ever more comfortable in providing public money to private schools, even private sectarian schools. If the Court upholds the Arizona law, it would be in keeping with the general jurisprudential trend of rehabilitating Christian schools through the use of public money.

The second case that bears watching is the California gay marriage case, which is going to wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has been amenable in the recent past to the notion that the law cannot be used to advance private moral norms. In Lawrence v. Texas in 2002, Justice Kennedy used that argument to strike down all anti-sodomy laws in the United States. Moreover, in 1967 when the Court struck down miscegenation laws, it ruled, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the most vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” Putting these two opinions together might suggest that the Court will uphold gay marriage, but it is not at all clear. As usual, the decision seems likely to boil down to Kennedy’s position. He wrote the opinion striking down sodomy law but did not give any indication of his stance on gay marriage. If I had to read the tea leaves (always a dangerous practice), I’m not optimistic that the Court will rule in favor of gay rights because I don’t think it likely that Kennedy will use the same kind of argument that he made in Lawrence. I hope I’m wrong, but should the Court strike down gay marriage, the ruling would, once again, serve as an extension of religious power.

PH: Getting to the bottom line: in 3 or 4 sentences, can you tell us what is the single most important takeaway point you want people to get from your book?

DS: I think it is time that we stopped celebrating ourselves. And by “we” I mean both liberals and conservatives. This nationalist self-celebration has generated a debate on religion in public life whose most notable feature is a pervading sense of falsity. By looking squarely at the religious coercions of the past and the multiple limits of religious freedom, I’m hoping that we can have a new conversation—both a more honest conversation and a more productive one—on a better historical foundation.

Thanks for the stimulating questions, Paul, and thanks again for reading the book.

Religion and the Liberal Public Realm

Randall Stephens

Over at the NYT's Opinionator blog Stanley Fish weighs in on "Religion and the Liberal State Once Again." An excerpt:

The question is what does the liberal state do with those religious believers [fundamentalists and the range of exclusivists]— the popular answer in the comments is “tell them to go back where they came from” — and my contention, and the only one I make (in agreement with John Milbank), is that the liberal state is incapable of doing anything with them except regard them, as many of the posters do, as fanatical, medieval, crazy, dictatorial and downright dangerous. As I point out, liberalism’s inability to regard strong religious claims — claims that spill out into public life — as anything but a mistake and a transgression is not something liberalism can correct or get beyond; it is the inevitable (and blameless) reflection of what liberalism is and must be if it is to sustain its particular, not to say peculiar, brand of universalism, a universalism that operates by reducing persons to formal entities, all of which are, in the essential political respect, exactly the same. (It’s universalism writ small.)

Fighting words, in some quarters. It will be interesting to read the blazing comments on the NYT and elsewhere. Mostly elsewhere.

Liberalism Without Illusions

Paul Harvey

Here's a review of a new book about religious liberalism through the 20th century, by the author of a very fine biography of Walter Rauschenbusch (The Kingdom is Always But Coming). It should be of interest to some.

Evans, Christopher H. Liberalism without illusions: renewing an American Christian tradition. Baylor, 2010. 207p bibl index afp; ISBN 9781602582088 pbk, $24.95. Reviewed in 2010sep CHOICE.

Evans (Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School) offers a careful, nuanced book about American theological liberalism. As a professor at a school "identified with the heritage of theological liberalism" and as "someone who has spent years in parish ministry," Evans believes that "there is much in the liberal tradition that is critical to the future of American Christianity" and that "the tradition is in need of critique." Following chapter 1, "Why Do Americans Distrust Liberals?" Evans narrates the progress of liberalism from the 19th century through the social gospel of the early 20th century and into the heyday of liberalism before and immediately after WW II. He then discusses its "diffusion" and even decline in the last half of the 20th century. In the face of negative numerical indicators (mainline denominational size, etc.), Evans argues that liberal theology still matters. He urges liberals to focus less on the academy and more on the local congregation and to discover ways of fueling a grassroots movement, as evangelical theology has been so successful at doing. This is a valuable work for anyone interested in the past and future of Protestant theology in the United States. Summing Up:Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above. -- I. Birdwhistell, Georgetown College

Rival Revivals and Liberal Protestant Recovery

Rival Revivals and Liberal Protestant Recovery
Paul Harvey

Just back from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), I had planned on doing an extensive post on the excellent panel I saw there, “Rival Revivals,” featuring papers by Alison Greene, Jarod Roll, and Matt Sutton, and with commentary by Kenneth Fones-Wolf and chaired by Lizabeth Cohen. But now I don’t have to, as we have an excellent summary of the panel from the OAH reporting at HNN, with full videos of the presentations and summaries of the papers. I would just say in addition to what is there that the panel featured the interesting twist of having the fundamentalists of the 1930s/1940s (discussed in Matt’s paper) as the northern, educated elites, in comparison to the various folk preachers, Garveyites, and premillennial radicals discussed in Alison and Jarod’s papers, turning the usual stereotypes about recent fundamentalism on its head.

The material in Jarod Roll’s paper came from his book, out any day now (I saw it at the University of Illinois press table at the OAH, but wasn’t between regular hard covers yet), entitled Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the Cotton South. A bit more about the work here:

In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the South used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century.

On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri’s Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions, workers found common ground as dissidents fighting for economic security, decent housing, and basic health, ultimately drawing on the democratic potential of evangelical religion to wage working-class revolts against commodity agriculture and the political forces that buoyed it. Roll convincingly shows how the moral clarity and spiritual vigor these working people found in Pentecostal revivals gave them the courage and fortitude to develop an expansive agenda of workers’ rights by tapping into existing organizations such as the Socialist Party, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP, and the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union.

Yesterday morning I attended an equally excellent panel of a very different sort: “Putting Faith in American Democracy: Remembering Liberal Protestantism in the Twentieth Century,” featuring papers by Mark Edwards, Matthew Hedstrom, and Bryan Peery, and with commentary by Mark Hulsether. Mark discussed Protestant ecumenicism in the post WWII era, emphasizing how it dovetailed with a one-world liberalism rather than a Cold War realism that we associate with Reinhold Niebuhr. Matt’s paper discussed the Protestant liberal influence on the American Library Association, which created a sort of quasi-canon of books to read each year (sort of a well-publicized “top 50” list), one which pushed a reading public towards Protestant liberal thought and thus exerted more influence culturally than we might recognize looking only at the Protestant liberals and politics. Bryan Peery, a graduate student at George Washington, covered the course of Protestant-Catholic dialogue after WW II and the vital influence of Robert McAfee Brown in the same, who held that “dialogue itself was valuable, even if it only led to more dialogue.” Those views competed with an upsurge of anti-Catholicism signaled in Paul Blanshard’s 1949 screed American Freedom and Catholic Power, which compared the Vatican to the Kremlin.

Hulsether called for more appreciation and respect for mid-century liberal Protestants. Often they are interpreted as being powerless -- thus, nowhere -- or as leading the charge for a “secular neutrality” that was just liberal Protestantism in disguise -- and hence, everywhere. He suggested that the Protestant liberals assumed a position sort of like the UN non-aligned movement in distinction to the choosing up of sides going on in the Cold War, and that their vision should be given more respect and credence than is usual in a scholarship which in recent years has made the Protestant liberals the object of target practice.

Politically radical premillennialists, preachers jumping out of airplanes to call attention to the imminent millennium, Garveyite devotees picking up the cause of radicalism in the South, Protestant liberals demanding alternative visions besides those given to them during the Cold War, northern fundamentalists wondering if the “Blue Eagle” of the NRA was the mark of the beast -- who said 20^th century Protestants were boring? Actually, I just said that, a few posts ago, about Methodists. My bad.

All You Need is Love (or, A Book I Should Have Read Three Years Ago)

by Steven P. Miller
I was doing many things back in 2006—namely, defending a dissertation, then beginning the laborious task of revising it. I was not, I regret, reading Debby Applegate’s thrilling and richly contextualized biography of Henry Ward Beecher, The Most Famous Man in America—and wouldn’t finally do so until last week. Paul talked a while back about a “boomlet in religious biography.” Applegate’s Pulitzer Prize winner puts the boom in boomlet. The book provides a window into the human (very human) side of perhaps the greatest of the many great reversals in American Protestant history: the transition from Lyman Beecher’s providential God, who already was warming up to the idea of human improvement, to his son Henry’s Gospel of Love, from which derives that warm fuzzy feeling I get every time I attend a Presbyterian Church, USA service. In short, Applegate offers a riveting coming-of-age story for liberal Protestantism. In the sense that Beecher was at the center of so much of mid-nineteenth century American history, the book also is a mini coming-of-age story for the nation itself. (Applegate proudly writes in the old-school—that is, pre-theory—American Studies tradition, which practically begs for such sweeping generalizations.)

Ward’s status as the man at the center got me thinking. Purportedly, more than a few conservative Protestants in this country are nostalgic for an earlier golden age of evangelical culture and influence, which likely occurred sometime in antebellum America. Likely, that is, just as Beecher started mucking everything up with his Gospel of Love and, if you believe the evidence in the book (from which Applegate, in an odd replication of the euphemistic ways of her Victorian subjects, skirts around outright conclusions), his propensity to express that love in diverse fashions. Maybe Beecher wasn’t a hypocrite, but rather a good anything-goes liberal, suggests this shallow reading of Beecher, which Paul smacked down when it surfaced in a Books & Culture review. But, if you think about it, shouldn’t fans of the old-time Christian America wish that, say, Ted Haggard’s own extramarital endeavors had caused as much of a stir as did the charge that Beecher seduced Elizabeth Tilton? Perhaps what evangelicals should really be nostalgic about is a period when an adulterous minister was the subject of a national scandal precisely because that minister had real influence outside of his home base. On the cusp of the Beecher-Tilton scandal, New York elites genuinely believed that revelations about Beecher’s exploits “would tend to undermine the very foundation of social order” (408). Say what you what you will about Ted Haggard, but he can only wish he had ever been a pillar of the social order. Besides, Beecher’s story would make a much richer movie. Anyone know if one is in the works?

Defining and Engaging Transcendental Religion

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

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Defining and Engaging Transcendental Religion
Benjamin Park

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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