Disputing Sacred Space in America

Kelly Baker

The newest issue of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief is now available (with a library subscription). For those of unfamiliar with this journal, it is an excellent, interdisciplinary journal that provides cutting edge scholarship on the materiality of religion. Every time the table of contents arrives in my inbox, I stop whatever I am doing to see what the issue holds. The July issue is no different, and it contains a conversation about sacred space in America with Erika Doss, Anthea Butler, Jacob Kinnard, and Edward Linenthal. From outdoor space at the U.S. Air Force Academy for Wiccans and Druids to worship to a disappearing cross in the Mojave to "the shadow of ground zero" to the Enola Gay, ordinary spaces become sacred, contested, desecrated, and defiled.

Doss argues that public debates are both "sweeping--indicative of widespread interests in claiming public spaces and places as an extension of personal values and beliefs--and presentist--driven by the inconstant and fluctuating aims and concerns of particular publics at particular historical moments" (270). What becomes sacred space and who claims its sacrality emerge as crucial components of public debate. The contributors note how questions of space, and whether it is sacred or not, become markers of deep religious intolerance in contemporary America. Contestations over sacred space become contestations over the place of religion in public life, and certain religions garner more legitimacy, cultural capital.

Butler writes about how a cross in a desert emerges in discourse as both a religious and a secular symbol, and the space it inhabits, thus, becomes significant and ambiguous. Its absence even more so. Kinnard emphasizes that the debate over Park51 becomes an"easy synecdoche" to understanding the place of Islam in the nation (275), and the all of America becomes a "ground zero" with any mosque nation-wide, a violation. Linenthal ponders the ease at which sites of mass murder become sacred to Americans and how space becomes sacred, if it can be defiled. Space can emerge as separate from the ordinary because of the "power of events on the land (279). For Linenthal, the Enola Gay, an object and a space that housed and dropped an atomic bomb, functioned both to sacralize and the desecrate, and it could not be easily managed. This space was wrought, like the other examples in this issue, with questions of legitimacy, illegitimacy, redemption, terror, and narrative authority. Who makes a space sacred and what are the costs? The confrontations over sacred space, then, provide a way to understand the place of religion in public discourse and its material presence.

[Cross-posted at kellyjbaker.com]

Catholic Looks at American Culture in the Antebellum Era and the Mid-Twentieth Century: Two New Books

Paul Harvey Just a brief note on two new books that will be of interest to some readers here, both important pieces of scholarship on the Catholic relationship with American politics and culture. First, a review from Choice, just below, on Catholics and slavery: Wallace, W. Jason. Catholics, slaveholders, and the dilemma of American evangelicalism, 1835-1860. Notre Dame, 2010. 200p index afp ISBN 026804421x pbk, $30.00; ISBN9780268044213 pbk, $30.00. Reviewed in 2011jul CHOICE.

Over the past 40 years, scholars have produced a cornucopia of quality scholarship detailing the importance of religion in the antebellum era and how particular religious ideas shaped competing visions of the American Republic, creating the context for and animating the Civil War. Wallace's fine volume elucidates the challenge Catholicism brought to that discourse. Its traditional theology challenged the individualism in the hermeneutics of northern and southern Protestants. Increasing German and Irish Catholic immigration threatened the English domination of the US. In five crisp chapters, Wallace (history, Samford Univ.) outlines how Catholicism debated the hegemonic discourse of Protestant-based acquisitive capitalism, articulated a traditional accommodation to slavery as a product of human sin, and asserted its own historic and ongoing contribution to the discussion of social morality and the proper sources of the Christian life. In their attempts to explain, Catholic leaders offered a powerful critique of nationalism and religion rooted solely in the authority of individual believers under the Constitution and Scripture, an intellectual impeachment given credence by the outbreak of Civil War. Catholicism offered an alternative vision rooted in tradition, realism, and theology. Summing Up:Recommended. All levels/libraries. -- E. R. Crowther, Adams State College Next up, a book just received which appears to be a landmark study: Anthony Burke Smith, The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, hot off the press from the University Press of Kansas. I've only had the chance to skim through parts, but it looks fascinating, and later this summer Emily will give us a more substantive discussion of the book up here. A brief bit from the book's webpage:

For much of American history, Catholics’ perceived allegiance to an international church centered in Rome excluded them from full membership in society. Now Anthony Burke Smith shows how the intersection of the mass media and the visually rich culture of Catholicism changed that Protestant perception and, in the process, changed American culture.

Smith examines depictions of and by Catholics in American popular culture during the critical period between the Great Depression and the height of the Cold War. He surveys the popular films, television, and photojournalism of the era that reimagined Catholicism as an important, even attractive, element of American life to reveal the deeply political and social meanings of the Catholic presence in popular culture.

Smith shows that Hollywood played a big part in this midcentury Catholicization of the American imagination. Leo McCarey’s Oscar-winning film Going My Way, starring the soothing (and Catholic) Bing Crosby, turned the Catholic parish into a vehicle for American dreams, while Pat O’Brien and Spencer Tracy portrayed heroic priests who championed the underclass in some of the era’s biggest hits. And even while a filmmaker like John Ford rarely focused on clerics and the Church, Smith reveals how his films gave a distinctly ethnic Catholic accent to his cinematic depictions of American community.

Smith also looks at the efforts of Henry Luce’s influential Life magazine to harness Catholicism to a postwar vision of middle-class prosperity and cultural consensus. And he considers the unexpected success of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s prime-time television show Life is Worth Living in the 1950s, which offered a Catholic message that spoke to the anxieties of Cold War audiences.

Revealing images of orthodox belief whose sharpest edges had been softened to suggest tolerance and goodwill, Smith shows how such representations overturned stereotypes of Catholics as un-American. Spanning a time when hot and cold wars challenged Americans’ traditional assumptions about national identity and purpose, his book conveys the visual style, moral confidence, and international character of Catholicism that gave it the cultural authority to represent America.

In short, the book appears to be a cultural history accompaniment to Kevin Schultz's Tri-Faith America, reviewed at the blog here previously by Chris Beneke. The book features extensive discussions of Catholic representations in the movies, going far beyond the usual "Legion of Decency" emphasis that most books about Catholics and the movies cover. There are also chapters on Catholics in Life magazine, on Fulton Sheen and Catholics in television, and on "John Ford's Irish American Century."

Four More Years! Happy Birthday to Us

Paul Harvey

Our blog turns 4 today. In our 3s we had all the temper tantrums, self-promotional outbursts, and screaming fits that one would expect for that age. Expect more of the same in the year to come!

Actually, we got plenty of good stuff coming up for you faithful readers. Soon we'll have up an interview with Jarod Roll and Erik Gellman, authors of the terrific new book The Gospel of the Working Class, out next month with Illinois. John Fea will be discussing for us a new work on "enlightened evangelicalism" in the eighteenth century, Mike Pasquier has us covered on Notre Dame and the Civil War, and Art Remillard will be looking at a new text on Jews and black baseball. Heath Carter will be finishing his dissertation, courtesy of the prestigious Newcombe fellowship, and Elesha Coffman will be enjoying a year in paradise at Princeton. And, of course, Randall Stephens will continue to conquer the world, in the spring semester from his new Fulbright base in Norway. And if Kelly Baker has anything to do with it, we'll have some posts from zombies up here soon. Meanwhile, Matt Sutton will continue to send up intercessory prayers that there will be a fantasy football season this fall, and if there is praying twice as hard that his team will shock the world by finishing over .500 (that is, when he's not using his NEH year-long fellowship to work on his much-anticipated book for Harvard University Press, American Evangelicals and the Politics of Apocalypse, and touch up his article for the Journal of American History).

If you're not on our facebook page, then "like" us there. If you tweet, follow us there. Tell your friends, and your "friends," about us, and let's see if we can get to 1,000 fans and 200 twitter "followers" soon. Those of you who want to contribute, let me know and we'll get you involved. To you publishers: keep your cards and books coming, we'll do our best to cover them.

For now, do not ask for whom the vuvuzela blows. Instead, party on!

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.

The Future of Religion in America

Please welcome our new contributor Elesha Coffman. Elesha first posted here last week on the Religion and American Culture conference. She is an assistant professor of history at Waynesburg University and soon off to the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton for a year's fellowship. Elesha's current work is on the Christian Century magazine and its role in establishing mainline Protestant identity and influence during the first half of the twentieth century -- a sort of "prequel" to the much-discussed decline of the mainline. Before graduate school she was a magazine editor, one of the reasons she is interested in print culture and the ways books and magazines create communities of readers. Welcome to Elesha!

The Future of American Religion
Elesha Coffman

“This is a big question,” the Religion and American Culture conference program admitted, “but what is the point of assembling a group like this unless it is to take a step back and ask the big-picture questions from a variety of perspectives?” The last session in Indy delivered on its promise by offering three very different reflections from scholars with very, very different ideas. It wasn’t that the panelists overtly disagreed about anything, as had the panelists and audience members at the previous session on scriptures. Rather, they responded to different versions of the main question regarding the future of religion in America, proving once again that the answer you get depends on the question you ask.

David Daniels, a seminary-based church historian, addressed his remarks to a question that might be posed as, “How will broad cultural trends affect American religion?” He probably came closest among the panelists to what the organizers had in mind, as their program notes queried “How will technology change religion, or be changed by it?” and “How will civil religion relate to traditional religion?” Daniels foresaw an America in which religious believers were more networked, more socially and ecologically conscious, and less bound by ascribed identities.

Mark Silk, a journalist and professor of religion in public life, spoke to the question, “Which religious groups will gain and lose ground in the coming years?” He based his predictions on trends identified by the American Religious Identification Survey, a project with which he is deeply involved. Silk advised his listeners to “short” the Protestant mainline and Roman Catholicism, which he expects to decline to 10 and 20 percent, respectively, of the American public in the next decade or so. He was more bullish on evangelicals and religious “nones,” groups he anticipates will swell to 40 and 20 percent of the population. (Silk did not mention Pentecostals separately, so presumably he counted them among the evangelicals, a decision many self-described Pentecostals and evangelicals would contest.) Those numbers left just 10 percent of Americans to be divided among all “others,” including world religions and new religious movements.

Julie Byrne, a religious studies scholar with interests in ethnography, took a completely different approach, considering, “What could scholarship on American religion look like in the future?” She took her own writing as a case study. Several years ago, she began to research an independent Catholic church, but before she could finish her book, the church fractured. At least one member of the church thought that Byrne’s research contributed to the splintering, as factions clashed, prematurely, over the attendance boom the book was expected to spark. This was the context for Byrne’s proposed “ethnographic uncertainty principle,” the suggestion that a scholar changes what she studies merely by studying it. So much for scholarly detachment. Byrne added to this cautionary tale a call for more creative presentations of scholarship, a call I jotted down in my notes as “Make art, not monographs.”

If it seems, from reading these summaries, that these three panelists were talking past each other rather than to each other, that’s pretty much what it seemed like in the room, too, despite the fact they were actually facing each other around a small, round table. I didn’t think this was a fatal flaw, however. The lack of direct engagement served to clarify some disciplinary distinctions that underlay a number of conversations that arose throughout the conference. As sociologist Rhys Williams had observed the previous morning, during a session that asked whether the secularization thesis still performed any useful work, “It really depends on, what do we want to know and why?”

The three panelists wanted to know different things for different reasons, and on behalf of different audiences. I expect Daniels’s students at McCormick Theological Seminary are very interested in how cultural trends will affect the interests and activities of religious Americans, while Silk’s interlocutors in journalism and the social sciences really want to know which groups are (to use terms that were hotly debated at the conference) winning and losing market share. Byrne’s questions about method are central for ethnographers, and her challenge to rethink the relationship between art and scholarship had implications for every discipline represented at the conference—though I’m still not sure what a “historical uncertainty principle” might look like or how my research into the early years of The Christian Century could be transmuted into art.

The future of American religion surely includes changes in cultural engagement, group affiliation, and scholarship. Ideally, scholars asking questions about those changes would stay in conversation, as they were in Indianapolis, even if they can’t always figure out how to talk to each other directly. Social scientists counting religious adherents need to be reminded how slippery and complicated religious identities can be. The field of religious studies, which tends to pay a lot of attention to outsiders, could benefit from confronting sociologists’ statistics on mainstream, majority groups. And scholars working within religious institutions and those working outside ought to be reminded periodically how the other half thinks. Is that too much to ask?

Religion Enters the Academy, Looks for Emergency Exit

Paul Harvey

And I don't know if I can do it,
Oh no, I've said too much, I haven't said enough.
REM, "Losing My Religion"

"Jason Kidd is . . . savant-like."
Rick Carlisle, Coach, Dallas Mavericks, on ESPN

My previously promised post reflecting further on one particular session of the 2^nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture isn’t going to happen today (tonight) as planned. Besides, Curtis Evans’s comment on yesterday’s post concisely summarized most of what I was going to say anyway.

But briefly, the discussion at the conference about interpreting supernatural events/experiences/”abundant events”/whatever you want to call them brought my mind to one of the classics of the field, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. And that was coincidental, because on the plane to the conference I just read a slender and very entertaining new volume by James Turner, Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America. And let me say, next time you have a 2 or 3 hour plane ride to a conference, bring along this volume. It’s substantive and meaty enough to make you feel like you’ve earned a scholarly pat on the back, but it’s also funny and entertaining enough to distract you from the 3 year old in the seat behind you screaming his/her brains out and kicking the back of your chair for the entirety of the route from, oh, say, Denver to Indianapolis. Just saying.

This work is the published form of some recent lectures Turner gave at Stetson University in 2010. Unlike my experience with the Lamar lectures, which I gave in 2008 and then spent the next 2 1/2 years piddling around with, Turner was prompt in turning in his manuscript and getting it right out there for publication.

I’m going to take the lazy way out and plagiarize from the book’s website to give you a brief summary, one which captures the argument if not the dry wit and entertaining prose of the book:

Religious studies—also known as comparative religion or history of religions—emerged as a field of study in colleges and universities on both sides of the Atlantic during the late nineteenth century. In Europe, as previous historians have demonstrated, the discipline grew from long established traditions of university-based philological scholarship. But in the United States, James Turner argues, religious studies developed outside the academy.

Until about 1820, Turner contends, even learned Americans showed little interest in non-European religions—a subject that had fascinated their counterparts in Europe since the end of the seventeenth century. Growing concerns about the status of Christianity generated American interest in comparing it to other great religions, and the resulting writings eventually produced the academic discipline of religious studies in U.S. universities. Fostered especially by learned Protestant ministers, this new discipline focused on canonical texts—the “bibles”—of other great world religions. This rather narrow approach provoked the philosopher and psychologist William James to challenge academic religious studies in 1902 with his celebrated and groundbreaking Varieties of Religious Experience.

Turner concludes by writing, “Long recognized as a classic, Varieties now became something of a model. To be sure, the great majority of scholars of religion today study religions in ways far different from James, but many religious-studies experts do follow a Jamesian path to understanding religious experience.” He then goes on to cite a number of works, including Ann Taves’s Fits, Trances, and Visions, as examples of how James “stretched the map of religious studies in America" -- all the way from Boston to the experiments of the 60s to the pluralistic vocabulary of describing brilliantly "in the zone" point guards as savant-like -- an instance of neither saying too much, or not saying enough.

Then, late last week, I was talking to an academic editor for Bedford Books, and we were discussing some of the volumes in the wonderfully classroom-usable Bedford Series in History and Culture. I asked him what else was forthcoming in that series, and guess what he told me: Robert Abzug of the University of Texas is putting out a Bedford edition of a trimmed-down, annotated, sizable excerpt of Varieties of Religious Experience.

Will wonders never cease? This particular editor was a little skeptical of the project, but one of the series editors, the historian David Blight, apparently told one of the Bedford people that James's book had "changed my life,” and for that and other reasons the founder and head of Bedford Books became a major champion of the volume. So, apparently it is on the way.

True confession: I first read James in college, hated it, and gave up about halfway through. Of course, at that age my tastes in a number of things (excruciatingly rancid 3.2 beer, Herman Hesse, Quadrophenia, and those blobs of nothing that passed for "tofu" in the 1970s/early 80s) were very questionable, so it’s no wonder it took me some time and mentoring to understand James and some other classics of that sort. If the Bedford series volume succeeds, it will be the kind of introduction to the text that I didn’t have but needed. Here’s hoping.

In his discussion with Richard Bushman, which Chris Jones wrote about on our blog here, Robert Orsi discusses how we need a new language to interpret religious experience in a way that is neither overtly confessional or crudely reductionist. Bushman suggests that James provides one model, to which Orsi replies that that’s still too individualist (read: Protestant) a model, a point he elaborated on at the conference by noting how the understood subject of religious studies is the “autonomous subject.” Reading Turner’s history of the discipline, it’s easy to see how this became the case, and given the obstacles to its development (cultural, intellectual, political, etc.), it’s a wonder that “comparative religion” ever developed as a discipline in America at all. But it did, and now it's everywhere, in everyday vocabulary, hence Rick Carlisle's brilliantly offhanded description of Jason Kidd's mastery over the psychology of his team, and his mastery over the more talented Heat.

More on this as the week progresses, I hope, but as someone who has spent some time studying folks whose "abundant events" are less than politically neutral or benign, it makes me wonder how Orsi's attractive theories and wonderful discussion with Bushman affect work on religious intolerance and violence in America. Just a quick example comes to mind: sitting in the Southern Historical Collection archives in Chapel Hill years ago, I came across the letters of a white southern Spiritualist, who was writing correspondence to her deceased son in the way that nineteenth-century Spiritualists did.

The Spiritualists in Ann Braude's classic book Radical Spirits are, in a sense, easy to root for: they are women finding their voices, arguing for abolitionism and women's rights during their trances, and so forth. But this particular woman (who initially interested me because Spiritualism was almost totally a Northern thing in the antebellum era, so I was trying to figure out how it made its way South) was writing about a son who was involved in the massively repressive violence that was overturning Reconstruction in Mississippi -- specifically, her son, whom she now saw addressing her from the interplanetary realms in her own rationally inexplicable but emotionally/spiritually powerful event, was a white Redemptionist who was killed trying to deny the vote to black men in Clinton, Mississippi, in 1875, one of the "autumnal outbreaks" that President Grant famously grew weary of as the experiment of Reconstruction ran its course and the fateful federal compromise with southern white supremacy took hold.

This woman's experience clearly was real and powerful "to her," and I don't mean "to her, and she was crazy." I'm no Spiritualist, for sure, but can recognize culturally sanctioned forms of mourning as part of religious experience. But her experience was of hearing the voice of her deceased son who also happened to be a violent white supremacist.

I don't know what to make of all of it, but the fascinating discussion at the first session of the conference and continued online elsewhere just made me recall that reaction to that particular document in the archives.

The best part of "Believe' is the 'Lie'

by Kelly Baker

Continuing the conversations that Elesha and Janine started on the biennial conference on Religion and American Culture, here are my reflections on the issue of authenticity, belief, and the place of the scholar in American religions via road tripping and Fall Out Boy, sometimes we get what we pay for:

Are we growing up or just going down?
It's just a matter of time until we're all found out
Take our tears, put them on ice
Cause I swear I'd burn this city down to show you the light-- Fall Out Boy

Perhaps, I need better road trip music, or a better taste in music altogether, but my weekend at the Religion and American Culture biennial conference was defined by my aesthetics and my sensory experiences as much as the conversation and provocation that occurred. To make my way to Indianapolis from Tennessee, I plowed down the interstate surrounded by lovely green, falling rock signs, and the artifacts of Christianity in the South. A billboard proclaiming Harold Camping's May 21st prediction remained as an artifact of the possibility of the Rapture. Crosses reminded drivers to be safe on hazardous roadways as well as worked in giant form to counteract interstate porn shops that pop up all along the South. Other billboards documented Jesus’s stance on abortion, when life begins, and consumerism and commodity writ large.



Before I even started my standard road trip musical rotation, let’s say that I was primed for a conference to discuss the place of religion in American culture and see some of my favorite folks all in the same place. As I still mull over the presentations and conversation, Fall Out Boy became my downfall. My favored band of my grad school days with guy liner, spiky hair, and angst placed to infectious music. (Pete Wentz still makes me want to swoon, only sort of.) This means that my whole conference experience was framed, primed if you will, by songs that I cannot remove from my mental queue. In the song, “Sophomore Slump of Comeback of the Year,” Fall Out Boy vocalist Paul Stump belts out: “The best part of "Believe" is the "Lie"/I hope you sing along and you steal a line/I need to keep you like this in my mind/So give in or just give up…Are we growing up or just going down?” This song echoed in my head from the first session on academic assumptions about the study of religion until the final salvo with the future of American religions. It seemed fitting that I wanted to hum “the best part of ‘Believe’ is the ‘Lie’” as some of the best scholars in our field circled around the questions of our assumptions about religion, religious people, power, consciousness, and narrative because of the continual reflections (hand-wringing?) about the study of religion.

What is at stake in the study of religion-as-belief seemed to be an undercurrent of the proceedings, and how might we breach the difference between the whom and what we study and our positions as scholars. Can we believe/imagine/analyze alongside without the question of authenticity? Robert Orsi, in the first session, argued for approaches that understand how the gods become real and to develop an empiricism that allows for a study of shared religious consciousness. How can we develop a language that encompasses these experiences and make them intelligible to fellow scholars and a larger public?

If the scriptures session showed collective unease, I would note that unease was also apparent earlier in the conference in the questions and discussion that followed the first panel. How do we manage the collective experiences of visions of Joseph Smith, for example? At a pivotal moment in the discussion, Jan Shipps noted that she discussed experience as a “to them,” which Orsi stated might lead to the corollary “because they are crazy.” How do we discuss the real in religion? Why is "they are crazy" such a common refrain when we discuss some types of religious people? How do we manage the lie within believe? How do we research and write religion without reference to our own assumptions about religion?

While Janine noted that some scholars were nervous about staking their personal identity in relationship to their subjects, especially regarding personal religion, I would argue that my experiences vary because no one could possibly fathom that I could believe what my subjects do from Klansmen to Tim LaHaye to folks prepping for the zombie apocalypse. Of course, I couldn’t possibly believe X is the assumption. The unasked question is “could I?” The most important part of Believe is the Lie in this case. Luckily for me, most scholars-in-arms don’t think that I am (actively) furthering the agenda of my subjects. They might scratch their heads and wonder why I am even interested in such religion or by extension such people. Rhy Williams asked, “What about the Nazis?” And as always I find myself wondering, what is at stake in our assumptions about religion? Authenticity? Lie? Helpful? Harmful? Ambivalent? Human? Suprahuman? Supernatural? Natural? What do we bring to our studies? And why are we nervous about this?

In his review of Katie Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon at Immanent Frame, Jason Bivins documents that the book is about Oprah but it also about how we practice religious studies. He writes:

On the one hand, scholars no longer have the comfort of a kind of shallow critique (which Lofton identifies as either reflexive anti-consumerism or blunt constructions of Oprah’s “trap”). Neither, however, can we afford the luxury of scrutinizing these things forever at a distance—always Hegel watching Napoleon’s armies from Jena’s hills. The implications are great here, because of the way the field is haunted by one chief identitarian assumption, rooted equally in the old politics of representation and in methodological caution: authenticity. Lofton is concerned that “in our scholarly ambition to translate our subjects—to, as the phrasing often goes, take our subjects seriously—we have become sycophants to our subjects, reframing every act as an inevitably creative act.” In this she is part of a growing, and welcome tendency in the field.

Are we indeed sycophants to our subjects? Yes. No. Perhaps. Maybe. Is this what becomes of the question of the real? In her Lift High the Cross, Ann Burlein argues masterfully for “seeing with” to construct the religion, no matter how offending, of our subject. Yet the lingering notion from Bivins-via-Lofton is “that no method or tone, however fervently defended, can avoid the fact that we are always, already, from the moment we begin, complicit with our subject.” Perhaps, the unease is about our own complicity. Perhaps, it doesn’t matter. In her comments in the final session, Julie Bryne eloquently noted that no matter how we understand our study, it is ours. She described the “ethnographic uncertainty principle” in which we change what we study inalterably in our study. Our assumptions about religion inform how and what we do. We are complicit, but maybe, we should be less nervous about it. Or in the mortal words of Fall Out Boy: “We're the lifers here till the bitter end/Condemned from the start/Ashamed of the way/The songs and the words own the beating of our hearts.”

The Beautiful Mind and Life of Jen Lindell

by Edward J. Blum

You’ve never heard of her, but you would have. She had earned a doctoral fellowship to the Religious Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania and in the fall would have begun her apprenticeship under Anthea Butler and Sarah Barringer Gordon. She had just finished a Master’s Thesis on Mormon-Indian interactions beginning with the initial publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830 and ending with the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857. She was my star student who taught me so much about race and religion, helped with my own projects even amid her own routine trips to the hospital, and died far too earlier

.Jen Lindell wrote a Master’s Thesis that easily could have been expanded into an award-winning dissertation. Her broad interest was in the dynamic ways religion influenced the lives of everyday people and on how religious ideas influenced racial perceptions and vise-versa. She fixated on early Mormons and their conceptions of and interactions with Native Americans. She wanted to understand how white people who weren’t considered white by others (in large part because of their distinct faith) at first reached out to non-white people (Native Americans) as potential brothers and sisters, but then years later treated those people with disdain and violence. Lindell refused to take a “top down” approach – which would focus principally on Joseph Smith and Bringham Young – and instead looked to the laity. Reading deeply and widely through diaries, letters, memoirs, and local newspapers, she found epic encounters and love and betrayal, missions and murder, friendship and violence.

Soon, Lindell’s thesis will be deposited in the San Diego State University library and will be available online. I hope scholars interested in Mormonism and race will check it out. She’s got some rich material and fascinating insights. Even more, anyone who reads it will get to know in a small way the brilliant mind that I had the pleasure of learning from for a season. We miss you, Jen, and we’re so glad we got to be a part of your beautiful life.

Faith of the Founders (My Review of John Fea in the Christian Century)

Paul Harvey

I was very happy that the Christian Century asked me to review John Fea's Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction -- and even more glad they gave me relatively ample space (over 1200 words anyway, better than the average review) to develop some thoughts on John's book. The review is here. Here is an excerpt, and then continue at the jump:

BOOKS

Faith of the founders

Jun 03, 2011 by Paul Harvey

Was America founded as a Christian nation? No, is John Fea's answer to the question posed in his title. But the answer is yes if we consider how Americans (especially from 1789 to 1865) understood themselves as a Christian nation. And then again, maybe it's just a bad question, Fea concludes, because it arises not from a rich understanding of the past but from present-day polemics. Only when we remove it from that context can we begin to make sense of it.

Continue <<<

Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity

Paul Harvey

It's a slow news week at the blog -- no Rapture, no David Barton sightings, politics as usual in Washington, the religious left arguing about Jim Wallis, etc. -- and some of you know what that means. Yes, it's time for the time-honored self-promotional post here at RiAH.

Later this summer, August I hope but by September for sure, my new book Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity, will be out with Rowman & Littlefield. It's part of the "African American History" series put out by Rowman & Littlefield. And it's out just in time for your fall course text assignment!

I'm proud to have it standing there with very recent books by some tremendous historians in the same series, including Chris Waldrep's African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era, my old friend Burton Peretti's Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music, and Edward Countryman's forthcoming Enjoy the Same Liberty: African Americans and the Revolutionary Era.

I'm also posting this now because some of you -- and you know who you are! -- are (if you're like me) now facing up to the fact that you've put off your fall book selections (which were due a month or two ago, remember that) long enough, and it's time to pick your texts for the fall. And for a select number of you, maybe this one will be right for you.

The text is short, about 140 pp., and written with the "general reader" and undergraduate reader in mind. I start with the diversity of religious expressions in West and Central Africa in the 14th/15th century, and end with Mama Lola and Kanye West, if that is a far enough chronological reach for you. And trust me, when drafts of this book failed to meet the aim of reaching the general audience and undergraduate reader, the tireless editors for this series, Jacqueline Moore and Nina Mkjagkij, were ever-ready with fierce and sometimes sarcastic pencils, rumbling through my prose like Sherman rumbled through Georgia, leaving a lot of detritus lying around but cleaning up the landscape considerably. Only, unlike Sherman, they rumbled through my landscape four times, Sherman as you recall having only moved through once. Kidding aside, it was a great experience to have a manuscript put through its paces so many times. I'm sure my other books would have been better with a similar full frontal attack on flabby prose.

In addition, the book comes with a "documents" section, about 60 pages, ranging from Virginia laws on baptism and freedom from the 1660s, to an account of the Stono Rebellion in 1739, to Daniel Payne's famous tour attempting to stamp out "ring shouts" in the 1870s, to Mahalia Jackson's reminiscences of growing up in New Orleans, to John Lewis reflecting on the meaning of non-violence, to Vincent Harding's great essay on the white Christ and Black Power, to Kanye West's "Jesus Walks." There is also a bibliographic essay, broken up by chapter, a Glossary, a Chronology section, and a timeline and some brief footnotes (brief enough not to scare off any freshman reader).

If any of ya'll want to preview it for possible purchase or course use, I'd by happy to send pdfs of the page proofs, or a sample chapter or something if you just want to briefly survey. Just email me, and I'll be there.

Table of contents and more info. below. And now after this brief commercial interruption, back to our usual programming. We'll have some blog posts up soon reflecting on the good times coming up at the Religion and American Culture Conference in Indianapolis starting tomorrow evening; I look forward to many great conversations there! Also, my co-blogmeisters Kelly Baker and the ubiquitous Randall Stephens have books coming out very soon, so we'll have some posts up about those soon.

And we won't even mention yet Phillip Luke Sinitiere's work on Joel Osteen, due up next year with NYU Press, and Linford Fisher's astonishing feat of research and analysis, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of New England Indian Cultures in Early America, out I believe next year with Oxford Univ. Press, and sure to shape the study of colonial American religious encounters for the next generation to come. Of course, all these works will be featured here at RiAH in days and months to come.

But, enough about you, let's talk about me -- more on my book below.

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Book description (from book website):

Paul Harvey illustrates how black Christian traditions provided theological, institutional, and personal strategies for cultural survival during bondage and into an era of partial freedom. At the same time, he covers the ongoing tug-of-war between themes of "respectability" versus practices derived from an African heritage; the adoption of Christianity by the majority; and the critique of the adoption of the "white man's religion" from the eighteenth century to the present. The book also covers internal cultural, gendered, and class divisions in churches that attracted congregants of widely disparate educational levels, incomes, and worship styles.

Through the Storm, Through the Night provides a lively overview to the history of African American religion, beginning with the birth of African Christianity amidst the Transatlantic slave trade, and tracing the story through its growth in America. Paul Harvey successfully uses the history of African American religion to portray the complexity and humanity of the African American experience.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Themes in African American Religious History
• Middle Passage for the Gods: African and African American Religions from the Middle Passage to the Great Awakening
• The Birth of Afro-Christianity in the Slave Quarters and the Urban North, 1740-1831
• Through the Night: African Amerian Religion in the Antebellum Era
• Day of Jubilee: Black Churches from Emancipation to the Era of Jim Crow
• Jesus on the Mainline: Black Christianity from the Great Migration through World War II
• Freedom's Main Line: Black Christianity, Civil Rights, and Religious Pluralism
• Epilogue: Righteous Anger and Visionary Dreams: Contemporary Black Politics, Religion, and Culture
  
• Documents Section
• Glossary
• Bibliographic Essay

Advance reviews:

"If you teach, study, practice, or care about African American religion, then this is the book for you. Paul Harvey provides an indispensable overview of black Christianity from the age of slavery to the ascendance of Obama. With it, Harvey offers a bevy of fascinating primary documents that range from Nat Turner's righteous rage to Mahalia Jackson's soulful songs. Through the Storm, Through the Night does it all with such clarity that even the most complex concepts make sense."—Edward J. Blum, Author, W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet

"Harvey provides an elegant and engaging introduction to the history of African American Christianity that charts the diversity of experience and expression among black Christians and illuminates the complex relationship between religion and race in American life."—Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

Jesus and Jefferson: Mark Noll Reviews Dochuk and Williams in The New Republic

Paul Harvey

Here's a discussion of interest to many: Mark Noll reviews Daniel Williams, God's Own Party, and Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, in the most recent New Republic -- a teaser is online, but you'll have to get the magazine for the rest (or, email me and I'll send to you). Here's a small excerpt:

Recent studies have begun to do better, with two of the best being these books by Daniel K. Williams and Darren Dochuk. Williams, who works from the top down in attempting a broad national perspective, does as well as any writer to date in answering the basic questions of what went into making up the religious right and specifying when the movement coalesced. Dochuk, who works from below in a superbly researched study of grassroots political mobilization, goes far to answer the question of where it came from. The solid history in these volumes should be applauded by all as a welcome alternative to the frenzy of earlier efforts. Yet neither Williams nor Dochuk addresses directly what should be one of the most compelling questions about the political history they describe so well: what exactly is Christian about the Christian right

You will remember we have posted extensively about these important new works, and have put up interviews with Williams here and Dochuk here. Noll adds to the discussion with an interesting conclusion reflecting on historians' own moral evaluations. Noll writes: "neither of these writers carries out the moral evaluation, that, especially, in tandem, their volumes make possible," and then a bit further down,

The merger of Jesus and Jefferson that propelled the New Christian Right was neither made in heaven, as in the eyes of its proponents, nor was it a cynical exercise in hypocritical self-interest, as often portrayed by its opponents. It was rather a historically constructed contingency that, judged from a broad Christian perspective, deserves to be both applauded and denounced."

And he concludes:

Theirs [evangelicals'] is not the tradition of Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, or Mater et Magistra. It is instead the tradition of Charles G. Finney, who in the 1830s declared that the problem of slavery could be resolved “in three years’ time” if only slaveholders would recognize that slaveholding was a sin. It is the lineage of Billy Sunday, who in 1919 predicted that Prohibition would empty American prisons and transform the country into a heaven on earth.

The flourishing of conservative evangelical politics in recent American history has done considerable good through the exercise of instinct, anger, energy, and zeal. It would have done much more good, and also drawn nearer to the Christianity by which it is named, if it had manifested comparable wisdom, honesty, self-criticism, and discernment.

Commodification and the Christian Nation

Kelly Baker

Our own faithful leader, Paul Harvey, has an excellent piece on David Barton's packaging and selling of Christian nation ideology at Religion Dispatches, in which he shows attacking Barton's credentials is not an effective strategy because of the popularity of the product Barton sells: the ideology of Protestant Christian America. Commodity not scholarship is the key. This follows his previous post and Randall's post about Barton that lit up our comments section. Here's a taste:

Some of that is because of the skill of Barton and his organization WallBuilders at ideological entrepreneurialism. Barton’s intent is not to produce “scholarship,” but to influence public policy. He simply is playing a different game than worrying about scholarly credibility, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. His game is to inundate public policy makers (including local and state education boards as well as Congress) with ideas packaged as products that will move policy.

Historical scholarship moves slowly and carefully, usually shunning the public arena; Barton’s proof-texting, by contrast, supplies ready-made (if sometimes made-up) quotations ready for use in the latest public policy debate, whether they involve school prayer, abortion, the wonders of supply-side economics, the Defense of Marriage Act, or the capital gains tax. And Barton’s engagingly winsome personality, fully on display on The Daily Show, doesn’t hurt. He fires facts faster than they can be fought off, and he does so with a sort of Gomer Pyle sincerity that makes his critics look churlish.

Besides this sort of organizational skill and personal charisma, however, Barton’s success at withstanding the phalanx of professional critics comes because he taps into a long history of “Christian Nation” providentialism.

After the Historical Revolutions: Or, When the Tree Falls in the Historical Paradigm Forest, Does Anyone Listen?

Paul Harvey

A review of (and an announcement of) some challenging new works in earlier American History, and the history of the American West, got me to thinking about the changing of the historical paradigm guard -- or whether those guards get changed at all by scholarly revolutions. These are questions which affect the course of American religious history, but bear with me for a short detour before discussing that further.

These thoughts first came from reading Charles Mann’s review of Daniel K. Richhter’s new book Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past (Harvard Press) in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (yes, Virginia, I do read the Wall Street Journal! But I'm not sure if the link will let in non-subscribers; if it doesn't and you want to read, I'm happy to send it to you).

I know nothing about this book other than this review, but I am a big fan of Richter’s earlier work Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, a favorite of mine to use in class for its wonderful illustrations of how changing one’s angle of vision creates an entirely different historical sense of a period. Richter also engages in some deft analyses of early American documents of religious history from the European-Native encounter, including John Eliot’s bizarre but fascinating Indian Dialogues, of course the Jesuit Relations, Indian conversion narratives, and various ceremonial encounters at treaty negotiations.

In his review of Richter’s new book, Mann writes:

“Every few decades, historians develop a new way of looking at the past. I am not talking about ‘revisionism’ but unifying conceptual schemes, the sort of mental framework that Frderick Jackson Turner created in his argument for the importance of the frontier to our history or that Bernard Bailyn established in his studies of the American Revolution’s ideological orgins. Historians debated Turner for a long time and continue to debate Mr. Bailyn. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were arguing with Mr. Richter a decade from today.”

When I become King of the World I will permanently ban the word "revisionism" and its variant "historical revisionism" (as I have already banned the words "bias" and "politically correct" in my classrooms, since they have become barriers to thought and discussion), since they have been rendered meaningless for precisely the reason Mann explains there.

But the revolution in understanding is not just in the early America of Richter. My longtime friend Anne Hyde, Professor of History at my sister institution Colorado College, is about to publish her magnum opus for the West of the first half of the nineteenth century, Empires, Nations, Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860, part of University of Nebraska’s outstanding series History of the American West series. If this this means anything to you, as it will to some of you, the immediate predecessor to Anne’s book is Colin Calloway’s monumental work One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark.

(As a brief aside, when Anne and I were in graduate school, she always made it to the library at 8:00 a.m. sharp, while I was lucky to drag myself, half hungover and ears still ringing from some too-loud jazz concert the night before, by 10:00 or 11:00 at best, which explains a lot about the great scholarly discipline it took for Anne to finish this huge work, while I was busy watching the Mavs beat the Lakers).

Anne’s work may suggests a paradigm for understanding the history of the West in that era, in a way such as Richter and Colin Calloway have done for earlier American history. Her work also features chapters fully integrating the Mormon West into the larger picture, and too much else of interest besides to even begin to summarize here.

All of this is exciting as an historian. But all of it also makes me wonder how, whether, and when any of this affects public consciousness of earlier American history. Lately we’ve been talking about Barton et al., and of course the bookshelves at your Barnes & Noble are full of everything Founding Father related. I understand that, but considering the impact of the works above – great on historians, perhaps little on anyone else – makes me wonder about similar questions for religious history.

The older paradigm of American religious history will be familiar to many blog readers here, and most are familiar with its more recent challengers, summarized in works such as Tweed’s edited volume Retelling U.S. Religious History. I once saw Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, God rest her soul, blast away at that book at a Young Scholars in American Religion conference, with most of the authors in that book in attendance; it quickly became clear she was itching for a fight with a group that had no interest in fighting with her on the alleged evils of “postmodernist” history, since that debate was long since old and tired at that point; at the end of it, Diana Butler Bass got up and urged her to give up swinging at phantoms since none of us were in the ring with her. Sitting in the back row with Diana, I gave her a big high-five for trying to extricate us all from such an unproductive conversation.

Much of the newer paradigm seems to come from removing religious history from the specific story of the American nation-state, and using categories that engage religious experience at its own level rather than as some proxy for political parties or current day culture wars. We've blogged here extensively about some recent classics that move American religious history/studies well down this path -- by Leigh Schmidt, Robert Orsi, Kathryn Lofton, and numerous others.

Again, however, for religious history as for the studies of earlier American history mentioned above, one wonders whether and how this affects any sort of public consciousness or discussion, and whether it’s the job of religious historians to evangelize for these perspectives that challenge or disrupt how we perceive the American religious past (and present). Or maybe scholars should just do their work, let popularizers who are good at popularizing disseminate this stuff to the general public (like happens in science all the time -- neuroscientists do their thing, and then someone like Oliver Sacks explains a little bit of it to us), and trust that over a generation or two it will find its way into the more general understandings. That's a comforting and easy role to take, but it leaves not much excuse for complaining about why some pseudo-historians advise presidential candidates while the rest of us get to advise freshmen how to raise their grade from a D to a C.

As usual, I have no answers, only questions. You're welcome.

[Sutton -- sorry about your Lakers. Not].

Gender and American Religious Historian, Part III

By Kelly Baker

And the beat goes on (and on and on). As I continue to put together the list of my favorite scholarship/scholars on gender, women's history, and masculinity for NWHM, I find that hesitate more and more about my choices, their inclusivity/exclusivity, and what they say about me as a scholar: What have I read? What do I need to read? What do I leave out? Why do I like Protestants so much? (That one has an easy answer). What is my lingering fascination with American Catholics? How might I find the good gender scholarship beyond my own research interests?

As commentators have noted, my list is primarily filled with scholarship about white Protestants and Catholics, which is certainly true. I write primarily about white Protestant men and women, so my list does skew that way. This does not give me a free pass, but our readers should know that the list is my favorite hits in gendering American religious history, and thus, it is not a universal, or even close to canonical, list nor should it be viewed as such. These are works that I have deeply respect, admire and even love. They urge me to be a better gender historian. Their questions become my lingering questions. As I write about masculinity and femininity, I reflect on these as lessons on how to do gender analysis, as models for emulation, and as nourishment and encouragement in my own attempts to make gender a primary category of analysis within my religious studies training. Overall, the series functions for me to highlight what I consider to be good work on gender and religion (often Christianity) and encourage you to enjoy the scholarship I list.

What this means is that I hope our readers will continue to list their choices in the comments section. Several folks have already contributed via comments and email, so THANK YOU! I will post your suggestions as an addendum to the Gender and the American religious historian series (available here and here). Please continue to list your favorites or email me your picks.

11. Tracy Fessenden is one of my favorite American religious historians, hands down. Her Culture and Redemption was an inspiring work that challenged the secularization thesis by showcasing how secular can functions as “stealth” Protestantism. She is also the co-editor of the The Puritan Origins of American Sex. In my classes, I assign her “The Convent, the Brothel, and the Protestant Woman’s Sphere,” from Signs, in she argues that anti-Catholicism functioned as tool to maintain the Protestant domestic sphere, so enforcing boundaries on nuns and prostitutes became a way to preserve pure, white womanhood.

12. Marie Pagliarini’s “The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America,” from Religion and American Culture documents how analyzing gender helps us understand historical practices of intolerance. Moreover, religious intolerance works best when historical actors seek to protect innocent womanhood from some dangerous, religious threat. I cannot wait to read her article entitled, 'And the Word was Made Flesh': Divining the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century American and Catholic Culture" in the same journal.

13. Julie Byrne’s O God of Players is a cultural history of Catholic women’s basketball, which emphasizes the physicality and joy of play for these Catholic girls. The Immaculate Mighty Macs negotiated their identities as young Catholic women in the physicality of the sport but also understood the game as a Catholic enterprise. Byrne’s work showcases the fluidity of religious identity as well as the ways in which basketball problematized as well as reinforced notion of Catholic womanhood. I’ve blogged about the book previously here.

14. Heather Hendershot’s Shaking the World for Jesus is not only a good primer for those of you interested in evangelical use of media, but also contains one of the best interrogations of evangelical chastity programs for teens. Using Focus on the Family’s teen magazines for boys and girls, Hendershot shows the dangers of “eruptive” male bodies and “contained” female bodies, and importantly, documents how teens negotiate chastity in their own lives. Chastity events prove to be some of the only co-ed excursions, but the emphasis on purity for teenage women is a larger burden to bear than their male counterparts.

15. Kristy Nabhan-Warren’s The Virgin of El Barrio appears often of my Religions in the U.S. syllabus. It is an ethnography of Estela Ruiz, her vision of the Virgin Mary, and her activism and missionizing. Nabhan-Warren documents Ruiz to showcase not only her life and her visions, but also the blending of Catholicism and evangelicalism in Ruiz’s ministry. Moreover, Nabhan-Warren doesn’t shy away from gender dynamics of the ministry, and she illuminates the complicated relationship between Ruiz, the Virgin Mary, and her family.

16. Margaret Bendroth’s Fundamentalism and Gender was one of my earliest endeavors into understanding the relationship between Christian women and fundamentalism. Her work traces the idea of female subordination in fundamentalist practice, and she demonstrates how the idea of subordination, which seems so necessary to fundamentalism, oscillates between a mandate placed upon all women to loosely enforced dictate, especially when women are needed to fulfill quasi-leadership roles. Moreover, she stresses the fundamentalist attachment to masculinity as necessary to the Christian doctrine as well as the masculine nature of recruiting. This book was one of the first to make me realize how gender is a necessary category of analysis in religious studies. In addition to this work, she is also the co-editor of Women in Twentieth Century Protestantism and the author “Why Women Loved Billy Sunday: Urban Revivalism and Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth Century America” in Religion in American Culture.

17. Janet Moore Lindman’s “Acting the Manly Christian: White Evangelical Masculinity in Revolutionary Virginia” in William and Mary Quarterly is an excellent discussion of how white evangelical men in the South redefined masculinity in Christian terms. Southern manhood did not necessarily fit with the evangelical norms of piety, and thus, these evangelical men redefined themselves as suffering saints rather than gambling toughs. Evangelical manhood was defined in negative terms, in the ability to abstain rather than give in to worldly pleasures. Moreover, Lindman documents how evangelicalism, however, embraced the hegemonic power of white manhood despite the emphasis on suffering and Christian soldiers.

Also, on another NWHM note, go check Historiann's review of Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower. Here's an excerpt:

White and her contributors explain the many struggles that black women faced as they began to enter the profession in the 1960s and 1970s–the obligation placed on many to serve their communities rather than their intellectual ambitions; the scoffing and disbelief they faced in white and black male mentors who were mostly hostile to their interest in women’s history; the stresses of entering work environments in which the other people who look like them are all secretaries or janitorial staff; the racism and sexism of students who walk out of their classes and refuse to recognize their intellectual and professional authority; the cluelessness or plain old racism of overwhelmingly white feminist scholarly communities; and the never-ending suspicion of other historians that black women’s history can never be “objective” if it’s written by black women.