A Cheerful and Comfortable Study of Colonial Material Religion

Paul Harvey

Since yesterday I mentioned Lauren Winner's essay in the Sunday Times book review, which reflected on Rob Bell and American conceptions of hell (and heaven), seems like a good time to showcase this review of her new book A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith, recently published by Yale -- the review is from Choice.

Winner, Lauren F. A cheerful and comfortable faith: Anglican religious practice in the elite households of eighteenth-century Virginia. Yale, 2010. 272p bibl index afp ISBN 0-300-12469-4, $45.00; ISBN 9780300124699, $45.00. Reviewed in 2011may CHOICE.

This study by Winner (Duke Divinity School) of the domestic religious life of elite families in Colonial Virginia both builds upon and modifies earlier work, including Dell Upton's Holy Things and Profane (1986). As Upton did, Winner focuses primarily on material objects as evidence; however, she deals not with public, male-dominated church buildings but rather with articles found in and around the home: needlework, baptismal bowls, prayer books, articles related to food preparation and consumption, and garments and rings worn in times of mourning. Winner's argues that although their roles were circumscribed, Anglican women nevertheless carved out a sphere in which they subtly contested the authority over religious matters claimed by clergy and male relatives and that their religious life, though not as dramatic as that of their Puritan counterparts, was an authentic appropriation of Anglican tradition in a Colonial setting. Winner's work is thoroughly and imaginatively researched, informed but not overwhelmed by theory, adequately illustrated, and accessibly written. This book is an important contribution to Anglican, elite, Colonial, material, and gendered dimensions of American religious life. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through researchers/faculty. -- P. W. Williams, Miami University

No Sympathy for the Devil

Paul Harvey

Those of you who know Randall know that one of his hobbies is collecting quotations from evangelicals hysterically opposing the newfound demon of rock-n-roll music in the 1950s and 1960s (maybe Randall will post a few of those here for us), part of his research on the reaction of evangelical to rock in its early days. Going a bit further: I once saw Julian Bond give a great talk about civil rights and popular culture, starting with one of those overwrought quotations, which sounded like a typical screed against rock coming from some straightlaced white evangelical ca. 1957 -- but as it turned out came from Martin Luther King, who could preach the anti-rock message with the best of them.

Obviously a lot has changed in the relationship of evangelicals to popular musical culture since then. And I expect to see that explained thoroughly in this forthcoming text, that I think a lot of you are going to be interested in this one when it comes out (pub. date is listed as April 2011): David Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism.

Stowe, who teaches English and religious studies at Michigan State, previously authored a book about big band jazz in the New Deal Era (Swing Changes), and more recently (and relevantly for this blog) the really fine study How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard Press, 2004), an exploration covering topics from hymns to hip-hop, and from Jewish cantors to Native American chanters.

I look forward to digging into this one soon; information from the book's website is pasted in below.

In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. For an earlier generation, the idea of combining conservative Christianity with rock--and its connotations of nonreligious, if not antireligious, attitudes--may have seemed impossible. Today, however, Christian rock and pop comprises the music of worship for millions of Christians in the United States, with recordings outselling classical, jazz, and New Age music combined.

Shining a light on many of the artists and businesspeople key to the development of Christian rock, Stowe shows how evangelicals adapted rock and pop in ways that have significantly affected their religion's identity and practices. The chart-topping, spiritually inflected music created a space in popular culture for talk of Jesus, God, and Christianity, thus lessening for baby boomers and their children the stigma associated with religion while helping to fill churches and create new modes of worship. Stowe argues that, in the four decades since the Rolling Stones first unleashed their hit song, "Sympathy for the Devil," the increasing acceptance of Christian pop music by evangelicals ultimately has reinforced a variety of conservative cultural, economic, theological, and political messages.

Charles Taylor's Secular Age and the American Zodiac

Paul Harvey

In "Higher Times in the Bible Belt," John Schmalzbauer considers why historians have not been discussing Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Part of it has to do with the relative lack of social history in the work, of the kind that has most interested American religious historians of late. Of the work, Jon Butler has noted the lack of attention to the "experiences of ordinary people."

Butler draws on a deep knowledge of colonial American religion, noting that eighteenth-century observers found a combination of belief and unbelief. Together with recent scholarship on medieval and early modern Europe, such accounts challenge Taylor’s tendency to dichotomize the sacred and the secular.

Noting the interaction of the sacred and secular in the lives and practices of ordinary Americans, Schmalzbauer calls attention to one recent example, in Richard Callahan's Subject to Dust:

Focusing on twentieth-century Appalachia, historian Richard J. Callahan documents the persistence of such beliefs in Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields. Discussing the role of religion in everyday life, he describes how residents used the signs of the Zodiac to govern sowing and reaping, justifying such practices with appeals to both the Bible and the farmer’s almanac.

Some more potential material along the same lines: John Fea calls attention to the latest edition of Early American Studies, just as I had been using from that journal a very interesting piece, from a few years back, by Sarah Rivett: "Empirical Desire: Conversion, Ethnography, and the New Science of the Praying Indian" (Project Muse access required). Rivett has a fascinating passage about how English apostles of the 17th century sought to "hear" in Indian conversion voices the sound of authentic Christian primitivism; when they heard instead the same Puritan rhetoric that they had taught them, they heard it as false. There's much else of interest there, too.

The new edition of Early American Studies features a piece by T. J. Tomlin, "Astrology's from Heaven not from Hell: The Religious Significance of Early American Almanacs." Hope to get to that soon, or perhaps one of our readers can and give us a synopsis.

The Gay History of Gospel

Paul Harvey

The New Yorker this week features a fascinating piece (subscription required) about the gospel singer Anthony Charles Williams II, known as Tonéx, and more broadly about the gay history of gospel as a genre alongside the well-known condemnations of homosexuality from the black pulpit. I believe this could be extended further; this story seems to me a subset of the suspicion of the arts more generally among a lot of conservative Protestants (including the enquiring eyes focused on how the choir director behaves or dresses, and at the waify looking boys playing the handbells). Anyway, the abstract is below, and aside from the specific issue raised by Tonéx's coming out, the article delivers a nice short historical musicology lecture on black gospel. A podcast with the author is here.

ABSTRACT: PROFILE of gospel singer Tonéx. Anthony Charles Williams II has never had a comfortable relationship with the industry that made him famous. Fans know him as Tonéx. His eccentric style and vertiginous high notes helped make him one of the most acclaimed praise singers of the past decade, and, for a time, one of the most successful. He had a certain hip-hop swagger and the status of a sex symbol. A boisterous live double CD, “Out the Box,” won him six trophies at the 2005 Stellar Awards, gospel’s most prestigious event. Tonéx was a welcome guest at all the biggest black churches, a regular presence on BET’s gospel shows, and a headliner at gospel festivals. He has released dozens of CDs, which contain some of the strangest and most seductive Christian pop music since the glory days of James Cleveland; his most evident musical forbears are adventurous pop stars such as Stevie Wonder, Janet Jackson, and Erykah Badu. He made it a habit to tweak old-fashioned, upstanding churchgoers. In 2005, Tonéx was divorced, after four years of marriage to Yvette Graham. This past September, the television host known as Lexi broadcast an interview with Tonéx on the Word Network, a gospel channel, in which he made his clearest public statements about his sexual orientation. He is, within the church world, the first high-profile gospel singer in history to come out of the closet. Within hours, he started to realize what he had done. His relationship with the mainstream gospel industry was effectively over. Tonéx was brought up in the church. The Williams family belonged to the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (P.A.W.), and his father, A. C. Williams, founded Truth Apostolic Community Church. Mentions the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Nearly all the Pentecostal gospel stars were COGIC. Mentions T. L. Carter. In the nineties, Tonéx was signed by a local Christian label called Rescue, and then by Jive Records. Mentions his first album, “Pronounced Toe-Nay” (2000) and his second album, “Out the Box” (2004). Tonéx sensed early on that he was attracted to other boys, and he spent the better part of three decades trying to figure out what that might mean for him. Along the way, he has honed a style of his own, a sly but ecstatic form of electronic pop. Early last year, he made a major-label comeback with “Unspoken,” but the album was largely ignored by the gospel industry. By going public, and by suggesting that a homosexual relationship can be as godly (or ungodly) as a heterosexual one, Tonéx went from being just another sinner to being a high-profile heretic. Mentions Long Island pastor Donnie McClurkin. As a stock character in African-American folklore, the gay choir director probably predates gospel music. Mentions Alex Bradford, Prophet Jones, and Rev. James Cleveland. In Bishop Yvette Flunder’s view, gospel music is gay music, with vanishingly few exceptions; she estimates that the proportion of gospel performers who are, or have been, same-gender-loving might be as high as ninety per cent. Gospel music has offered generations of same-gender-loving singers a place to call home, in exchange for their obedience, or their silence. By talking plainly about his sexual identity, Tonéx has scrambled his professional identity.

Envious Dudes: The Sacred Harp Diaspora in Contemporary Scholarship

Today I'm reposting reflections on two books about Sacred Harp singing in contemporary America, originally published in Books and Culture.

"Get enough people singing weird harmonies at the top of their voices and you start feeling a little sorry for the devil."—From a review of the documentary Awake My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp

I have a friend in California who, although an atheist, once sang in the church choir at the Reverend Cecil Williams' Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco. At first, I thought he did so just because the music there rocked. For a time, he seemed almost consumed by his increasingly important role in the choir, and the community he found there. One day, he abruptly quit, saying he just couldn't be clapping and praising to "this Jesus thing" anymore. He felt like a hypocrite. I was sad to see that, all the more so now that he lacks a community that might help him while he struggles with depression.

At the same time, another friend in California, a gay man who long has been active in pacifist and other politically radical groups, took up the hobby of square dancing, and now has reached almost the highest rung of expertise in that "calling." I learned this when he came to Colorado to call for the International Federation of Gay Square Dance Clubs, an organization whose existence I had been unaware of previously, but one which took over Hyatt's convention center in Denver that weekend.

Kiri Miller and Kathryn Easturn confirm much of what my gay square dance-calling friend seems to intuit: we all need someone, many someones, to lean on and sing (or do-se-do) with. Miller's Traveling Home is an academic study, an ethnography with occasional bouts of the heavy jargon usual for that genre, of the contemporary culture of Sacred Harp singing, while Eastburn's A Sacred Feast is a lighter series of personally reflective essays and anecdotes about her discovery of the Sacred Harp tradition, her use of it to reconnect with her Southern Baptist past, and the joy she finds feasting at the "dinner on the ground" that usually accompanies shape-note singings and conventions. Eastburn is almost a case study of the kind of participant-observer that Miller (herself a participant-observer, and a professor of music at Brown who leads a campus Sacred Harp singing group) discusses in Traveling Home:

Sacred Harp singers tend to be politically engaged, and they report that their Sacred Harp participation expresses their resistance to all sorts of things—among them, disintegration of community feeling, the pervasiveness of commercial broadcast media, the professionalization of music making, the destruction of distinctive local tradition, the failure to respect one's elders, the decline of family values, the strip-mall homogenization of the American landscape, the secularist (or fundamentalist) drift of American culture, and the polarized atmosphere of national politics.

Thus, Sacred Harp conventions and gatherings, as well as the vibrantly active website and listserv at fasola.org, draw together northerners and southerners, liberal folk music revivalists and southern family values voters, young and old, punk urbanites and rural families. The gatherings draw few non-whites, even though Sacred Harp singing has deep roots in African American church traditions as well. But African American shape noters have their own local church- and kin-based networks, without the national listservs, clubs, and organizations that have done much to keep the predominantly white versions of fasola singing alive and kicking.

Beyond that, Sacred Harp singing long since has been established as a "white ethnic"—southern, or Celtic—tradition, based largely on George Pullen Jackson's 1932 work White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. A quintessential romanticizer of the southern folk (and, implicitly, an author who devalued the African and African American contributions to American music), Jackson made much of the association of "Sacred Harp Singing with white rural Southerners—and of these citizens with early American history," as Miller observes, establishing the practice as "indigenous American folksong." In this mythic narrative of American folksong, Sacred Harp singing came from the "presumed natural musicality and stubborn backwardness of rural Southerners," and especially from highland and mountain Southerners, viewed as "our contemporary ancestors." Jackson's interpretation contained a good deal of balderdash, but it's too late to change it now, for Sacred Harpers, even the liberal intellectual ones, have adopted it as their own story.

This invented tradition was carried forward and given currency by the folk recordings of Alan Lomax and others— and the romanticizing of the "authenticity" of those recordings by folkies. The reprintings and updatings of the Sacred Harp tunebook renders the imagined southern musical culture of the 19th century "duplicable by urban folk revivalists, reenactment hobbyists, and early music choirs," Miller writes, even while local practices and oral traditions of particular Sacred Harp conventions and communities "inscribe layered memories" in these books and act as a safeguard against "facile and superficial acquisition of Sacred Harp practice." In preserving their tradition, moreover, Sacred Harp participants privilege oral tradition and venerate Southern singers who intuitively hit the minor 6th and find the microtonal flattenings that lend the music its powerfully mournful minor cast.

Most of Miller's book traces what she calls the "Sacred Harp diaspora," a "dispersed landscape of singing communities" based on a "metaphorical claim of organic dispersal and reproduction." At its best, the fasola community brings together singers who remake "their own sense of alienation into membership in this musical community of the marginalized." This metaphorical diaspora includes "not only life-long Southern singers but also gay and lesbian singers, radical leftists, folk music enthusiasts, singers who have left or been expelled from Christian congregations," and numerous others. Southern singers, often venerated as the carriers of the tradition, confirm their own "authenticity" while also engaging in a kind of "performative" southernness, giving liberal singers the "twin pleasures of ethical community and retrospective guilt," even as these singers get "rejected by church brethren for singing with the known liberals, gays, and unbelievers who revere them as tradition-bearers."

At times, Miller teeters on the edge of letting the academic jargon of ethnography overwhelm the material. Of one venerated singer, who performs a parody of a southern mountain sermon and exaggerates "southern" traits in some internet postings, Miller writes: "Tollie Lee's postings do not merely hold up a mirror to an essentializing gaze." She means that Lee can poke fun (as an insider) at Southern religious practices even while reaffirming that "Southern traditional singers are in touch with the essence of Sacred Harp, while newcomers make laudable but imperfect attempts in that direction."

Academic theorizing directed at something so inherently enjoyable as singing your brains out with a community that becomes a deep part of your life can threaten to weigh down the subject. Fortunately, Miller's heavier passages are usually followed with concrete sentences and examples. Moreover, her academic analysis provides something that a charming, if occasionally naïve, set of reflections such as Eastburn's A Sacred Feast cannot: a richly complex survey of the meaning of Sacred Harp singing and communities when set in hypermodern contexts in Cambridge, Chicago, or Boulder. Miller's book is sure to become one of the standard references on the subject.

Eastburn's light collection of reflections, anecdotes, and recipes provides a nice counterpart to the excellent PBS documentary on shape-note singing, Awake My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp. Like Eastburn, the documentary portrays the deeply emotional connection of Sacred Harp communities, shorn of the complex academic analysis Miller provides. And the film captures the haunting beauty of the music as no book can.

In the Sacred Harp hymnody, Eastburn finds relief from the culture wars raging all around her. Here, readers should understand that Eastburn is a founding editor of the Colorado Springs Independent, a weekly paper that, in my community of Colorado Springs, a militarized haven for suburban warriors and conservative religious activists, is really the only publication with a political voice anywhere to the left of the Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity axis of egregious commentary. In Colorado Springs, choosing what church to attend can be an intensely political act. It's against this backdrop that Eastburn particularly savors the communal pleasures of Sacred Harp singing.

More than anything else, though, here is what you will feel after reading this book: hungry! Each chapter comes loaded with recipes that Eastburn has collected from Sacred Harp gatherings, and foodies will love the heavy dose of culinary Americana in her short and enjoyable book.

Not that Miller's more academic study is without its own lighter moments. Consider how a self-professed liberal folk music revivalist such as Miller deals with this lyric from "Stafford," a beloved Sacred Harp classic with lyrics by Isaac Watts:

See what a living stone
The builders did refuse

Yet God hath built His church thereon,
In spite of envious Jews.

Serious suggestions for replacing the embarrassing last line included "lest we salvation lose" or "in spite of envious few." But, Miller tells us, fasola class clowns came up with their own alternatives, such as "in spite of empty pews," "in spite of drugs and booze," and—my favorite— "in spite of envious dudes."

For the obvious pleasure and the emotional gratification Miller derives from her Sacred Harp experiences, I'm one envious dude. Watch Awake My Soul, and you may be, too.

Give Me Your Ears: Religion and Oral History

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

As some readers may have heard, the Library of Congress is in the process of compiling an oral history of sermons, speeches, and other orations relating to the inauguration of Barack Obama. It is formally called Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project, and will be part of the LOC's American Folklife Center. The center is only taking oral materials delivered between Friday, January 16 and Sunday, January 25, 2009.


This collection will obviously be of interest to historians and other scholars of religion in America, and the assembly of this collection is certainly interesting in light of the role pastors and sermons played through the campaign season (and since).

Oral religious history (and a sort of corollary, sensory history) has received some attention on this blog before (among others, John Turner's book employs oral history, for example, Paul Harvey commented on this, and the JSR Katrina issue has a bit of oral history). From those in the know I'd love to hear more about the state of the field, or any other thoughts related to religion and oral history (including bibliographic suggestions/leads).

Perhaps a place to start on the blog is Mike Pasquier's insightful methodological post from last September that discusses what he calls "religion-in-the-moment" as well as Rebecca Carter's notion of "spiritual dwelling" and Thomas Tweed's concept of "crossing and dwelling."