Religion and the Marketplace: Fall Conference in Heidelberg

Below is an announcement for a conference this fall in Heidelberg that will be of interest to many of you. Click the "call for papers" link below for further details.

Conference "Religion and the Marketplace:
New Perspectives and New Findings"

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October 6-8, 2011, Heidelberg Center for American Studies

Call for Papers

As decided at the 2010 meeting of the European Association of American Studies in Dublin, the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA), in cooperation with the American Studies Network (ASN), will host a conference entitled “Religion and the Marketplace: New Perspectives and New Findings.” The HCA will host the conference on October 6-8, 2011, as part of Heidelberg University’s 625 anniversary celebration.

This international and interdisciplinary conference aims to investigate and explain how the conditions of the marketplace have determined, influenced, and limited American religion in the past and present. Given the prominence of the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses in the American constitution, a broad-based ‘competition for souls and purses’ has historically helped define the contours of religion in America. This conference will build upon previous insights while probing further into the complex relationship between religion and the marketplace along the lines described below.

We invite scholars in American Studies and related fields (geography, history, law, literature, media studies, political science, religious studies, theology, etc.) to submit paper abstracts for this conference. Individual paper abstracts (200-250 words) should be specifically directed at one (or more) of the panel topics included in the CFP. Abstracts must be received by March 31, 2011. Participants will be notified by May 1, 2011. All questions and submissions should be sent electronically to:djunker@hca.uni-heidelberg.de.

We especially desire participation from European scholars working in these fields, but welcome submissions from all around the world. The HCA will cover travel expenses (economy), lodging and meals for conference participants.

The Religious Marketplace -- From New Contributing Editor Phillip Sinitiere

Editor's note: Yes, I admit it, the trainer has been administering those steroid and HGH shots again, hence the added muscle and firepower of this blog yesterday and today. Today we introduce our new contributing editor Phillip Sinitiere, aka the Baldblogger, together with his first post!

Phillip Luke Sinitiere is a Ph.D. candidate in American religious history at the University of Houston where he’s in the final stages of a dissertation on congregational conflict, church scandal, and pastoral dismissal in colonial America. He also teaches world, U.S., and European history at a college preparatory school in Houston. His research interests include American religious history, religion in world history (with a focus on Africa), and the pedagogy of religion, and recent publications examine religious identity in contemporary evangelicalism, global Christianity and teaching, and a forthcoming book with NYU Press titled Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace (co-authored with Shayne Lee).

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Cashing In or Selling Out?: Spiritual Marketplaces and Religious Economies
By Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Is the United States a spiritual marketplace where “religious capitalists” compete for religious consumers? Does a viable religious economy exist in America where the most effective spiritual firms carve out their niche to offer religious goods and services that meet the tastes and desires of spiritual consumers? Are such formulations useful for teaching, simple or reductionist descriptive devices, or can scholars craft meaningful and convincing interpretations of American religious history by imagining this country as a spiritual marketplace? (For teaching and the religious marketplace, see parts IV, V, and VI of “Deg’s Dispatches” below) Or, perhaps, given the reach of globalization and the reality of international commerce, is there a global religious marketplace? Perhaps so, since recently scholars have found religious economies in Latin America, and spiritiual marketplaces in China and Africa, and even among some Muslim martyrs.

Famously argued by sociologists of religion Rodney Stark and Roger Finke in The Churching of America (1992; 2nd ed. 2005)—with due regard to Max Weber and Peter Berger—and subsequently refined by fellow sociologists such as Wade Clark Roof, Robert Wuthnow, and Stephen Warner, to name only a few, historians have found a religious economy in the archives as well. R. Laurence Moore’s Selling God (1994) comes to mind, as does Nathan Hatch’s Democratization of America Christianity (1989), and Terry Bilhartz’s Urban Religion (1986), among many others.

Even some contributing editors offer thoughts on the subject: Matt Sutton’s book has a great chapter on Sister Aimee’s deft marketing strategies, for example. John Turner’s fine book finds that Bill Bright and Campus Crusade were to some extent into selling Jesus, and Darren Grem’s fascinating article on the business behind Jim and (the late) Tammy Faye Bakker’s spiritual empire shows that the bottom line competed with the Bible. Even Ed Blum’s fantastic book on Du Bois addresses the topic—albeit indirectly as the American Prophet had nothing but spiritual rage and righteous indignation for masquerading prophets, pastors, and religious leaders working only to make a profit. Katie Lofton’s keen look at pastoral self-promotion in her 2006 Religion and American Culture article, “The Preacher Paradigm: Promotional Biographies and the Modern-Made Evangelist,” creatively finds consumer-driven spiritual commodities in multiple contexts. (One also imagines that her forthcoming work on Oprah and religion will provide yet another stellar contribution to the field.)

So, if the spiritual marketplace fits as a helpful way to teach American religious history, and if there is a growing body of work on the subject offered by historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars, who are the religious capitalists, the spiritual merchants who are about the business of faith in a religious economy? George Whitefield? Dwight Moody? Billy Sunday? Carrie A. Nation? Norman Vincent Peale? Fulton Sheen? Eddie Long? Rick Warren? Juanita Bynum? T.D. Jakes? Paula White? Luis Palau? Joel Osteen? This list could go on and on. And where does religious architecture, or religious language or spiritual practice fit into such an interpretation? What about the role of electronic media in/on a spiritual marketplace?

Since I’ve posed questions that would take many more blogposts to answer, not to mention several books, it is only appropriate I end with one more: how effective a formulation is the spiritual marketplace and/or religious economy as both scholars and students labor to imagine and understand American religious history and its infinite complexities and contradictions? Why or why not?

Hearing Things

Paul Harvey

Our blog routinely promotes reviews and discussions of new books, including the don't-miss post just below by Ed Blum on two new religious biographies.

To supplement this, I thought it would be nice occasionally to feature older books, either older classics or books published in the last decade but no longer hot off the press; or to highlight reviews published in places where historians and religious studies folk probably would miss them; or just to publish reviews that we enjoyed writing. Contributions are welcome.

So, to kick this off I'm reprinting below a review of mine of Leigh Schmidt's Hearing Things. I'm reproducing this here for several reasons. First, I've been facing terrible pain in my family recently, a terminal cancer that will soon take a loved one, and at such times the inexplicably cruel nature of such deaths, and the apparent silence of the gods, strike one hard, and the questions we contemplate in the Humanities become less academic and more internally pressing (and no more answerable). With this in mind, I read this book, and my review, more personally than I did when I wrote this several years ago. (I should add that my absence from the blog lately, and in the coming days as well, is due to the personal energies taken up by this situation; my thanks to my co-editors for filling in in the interim).

Secondly, as will be obvious from the review I admired the book, and this blog seems to be a good place to plug books we admire, whether current or older works.

Finally, this review appeared in a theological journal (Spiritus) that historians would typically not read (I had not heard of it myself until asked to do this review). Moreover, I just enjoyed writing this as much or more than just about anything I've ever done. So, without further adieu, I give you . . .
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Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. By Leigh Eric Schmidt. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 318. $37.50; ISBN 0–674–00303–9.

“You called up in the sky
You called up in the clouds
Is there something you forgot to tell me... tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me.”

(from Joan Osborne, “St. Teresa,” 1995).

For much of Christian history, the ear was the way to God. “Hearing things” meant hearing God’s voice, directly, unmediatedly. One could not see God, but one could hear the voice of the divine.

Now, of course, “hearing things” is a colloquialism that suggests mental instability, and perhaps the need for a quick dose of some psychotropics. The street people I stepped over every morning on my way to the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, during graduate school, heard things, and talked back in response, but everyone else ducked their heads and walked along quickly, at once embarrassed and disheartened at the collapse of state mental health services and the consequent intrusion of psychoses into the public square.

Along the way, as well, God has stopped speaking––or at least it seems that way to many, both Christians and non–Christians. The street corner St. Teresa, the dealing street-corner angel of Joan Osborne’s Grammy–winning song, cries out to the sky, vainly importuning God for leaving her in her situation, without so much as a sentence of explanation or comfort. The “talkative” God of the Bible has fallen silent, frustrating those who await the still, small voice. “Is there something,” we want to ask God, “you forgot to tell me?”

But of course Christians and others still hear the voice of God. He has not fallen silent for everyone, even if the presence of God might be represented in Hollywood by the avuncular George Burns or the hipster Alanis Morissette. Meanwhile, postmodern theorists have “unmasked” the ethnocentrism implicit in the valorization of the eye over the ear, the visual over the auditory, that came as part of the whole package of false promises of the Enlightenment. Reliance on the ear was characteristic of the primitive and the African, Enlightenment thinkers asserted, hence the western emphasis on the visual as the surer road to knowledge. The eye could not be fooled as the ear could––by ventriloquists, spiritualists, and all manner of illusionists who delighted in deception, and whose relentless assault on the unreliable ear is chronicled in fascinating detail in Schmidt’s brilliant book.

Leigh Schmidt gives an extended and wonderfully entertaining intellectual history of how “hearing things” underwent such a transformation. Along the way, we learn a great deal about fascinating but relatively unknown characters from the Enlightenment era and the nineteenth century, who developed the field of acoustical studies, delighted audiences with Mickey-Mouse voice effects produced by inhaling hydrogen gas, and played around with sound trumpets and other means of transmitting sound. In western thought, hearing the voice of God moved from being a divinely spiritual moment to being inevitably trapped in the world of illusion (at best) or the asylum, the home for those who heard things. Schmidt traces the evolution of our contemporary understanding of hallucination (defined in the 1880s as “perception without an object”) and illusion (a false perception). “It is this breakage of the sign, the loss of any presence in these experiences,” he argues, “that marks the real undoing of God’s listeners . . . disembodied voices . . . had no actuality except in the memories, imaginations, desires, and agonies of those who heard them.” In sum, Schmidt’s work explains the process of the “normalization of God’s silence” (198).

“What would you ask if you had just one question,” Joan Osborne sings in another tune about God, suggesting again that God’s silence is so normal that asking God a question is a fantasy along the lines of “what would you do if you won the lottery?” or “who would you meet if you could meet anyone?”

The twist in Schmidt’s analysis, however, lies in his recognition, in the epilogue, that the “desire for a ‘holy listening’ has hardly subsided in American culture.” Rather, as he concludes, “the noisier and more frenetic the contemporary world is perceived as being, the stronger that spiritual longing becomes.” So today we have the increasing popularity of music therapies, or the “heightened attention to contemplative silences, evident in New Age appropriations of Zen Buddhism and Eastern Orthodoxy,” as well as the recurrent fascination with angels and “their whispers of consolation.” Apparently, then, God’s silence has never been as normalized as the Enlightenment skeptics, scientists, and stage–performing illusionists would have had it.

Schmidt discusses “sound Christians” of the modern era, discussing in depth their perceptions of God’s voice. Methodist preacher Lorenzo Dow, the black Methodist female exhorter Jarena Lee, and the noisy evangelicals of the camp meeting era of the early Republic all receive extended discussion. But as Schmidt points out, “extraordinary calls and sudden leadings continued to flourish in popular Protestant piety, and evangelical ways of hearing hardly lost their resonance; if anything, they radiated even more widely in modernity’s wake” (76). Schmidt concludes the chapter on “sound Christians” with the story of Oral Roberts’s healing and call to preach. The audible call Roberts heard was hardly surprising to him, “given the enveloping devotional culture of these sound Christians,” but at the same time “that very intimacy with divine speech proved a two–edged sword, imperiling his standing in the wider society and ultimately turning him from evangelist to laughingstock” (77).

In the following two chapters, “oracles of reason” and “how to become a ventriloquist,” Schmidt follows the stories of those who pulled the curtain from the Wizard of Oz, exposing the tricks and manipulations and deceptions behind God’s apparent speech, whether that speech come from ancient oracles, from nineteenth–century spiritualists, or from other disembodied voices. Contemporary figures who devote full–time to exposing fraudulent mysticism––debunkers of spoon–benders, UFO sightings, angelic presences, and the like––carry on the tradition of the acoustical experimenters of the eighteenth and nineteenth century that Schmidt discusses in detail. The newly emerging science of acoustics demystified what previously had been divine sound, and (evidently) left behind “sound Christians” in a cultural backwater of irrelevant religious mystics and eccentrics. Even with the triumph of the acoustical scientists, however, the sound of the divine yet remained real for many who continued to hear “Voices from the Spirit–Land,” the title of chapter five.

Chief among these was Emmanuel Swedenborg, part of a panoply of figures who restored apostolic speech and “made part of a communications network [into] a wonderland of good vibrations” (202). While Enlightenment figures “had been dedicated to the proposition that the technological disembodiment of the voice and the artificial propagation of sound were useful means of exposing the absences in the oracular,” others (including Henry David Thoreau) found instead that “mechanical mediation became instead a vehicle of presences, a salvific force alive with vibrational and telegraphic connections” (239). Thoreau famously heard God in the “sonorous revelations” of nature, but he also “discerned a universal harmony, a music of the spheres, through telegraph posts and wires” (241). Walt Whitman sang the body electric, because for many nineteenth-century Americans the electric transmitted the spiritual, as unseen forces moved over the wires.

Schmidt’s work will leave the reader with a greatly heightened sense of the interplay of the oracular, the auditory, and the visual in religious understanding. Many of the questions that perplex us now, he makes clear, were fully in evidence already in the eighteenth century. The postmodernists are late to the game of contemplating the fractured and disembodied self. At the same time, and unfairly, some readers may grow frustrated as Schmidt raises, elaborates, and so deftly plays around with fundamental questions, without proposing any solutions other than that “suspicion can be turned on the suspicious,” and the unmaskers will inevitably themselves be unmasked.

Thus, the “ ‘midnight of absence that now haunts much of religious studies and the humanities generally” (251) also haunts this book, and it is a testament to Schmidt’s brilliance (and to the intractability of the questions he studies) that the reader will await anxiously, but unsuccessfully, for the author to provide some resolution to street corner St. Teresa's cri de Coeur to God, “is there something you forgot to tell me?”

Proctor and Gamble, Out of the Closet

BY KATHRYN LOFTON
and the Burnt-Over District sisterhood

As a special end-of-the-semester treat, As The World Turns has finally given its viewers the demanded embrace between Noah and Luke. For those worried about super-delegates and electoral tallies, this is a story that gives hope again to the democratization of Christianity. Through Hershey kiss campaigns, online petitions, and wails to Proctor and Gamble, celebrants of on-screen love got the goods. Now the struggle will be that age-old drama: how to keep it hot. Fans of Moonlighting wish them well.

Deg's Dispatches, Part V

Dispatches from LeConte Hall 323 – Part V
by Darren Grem

During a review session for an exam I gave in this course last fall, a student remarked that the early nineteenth century’s religious history was the most confusing subject she had ever studied. That’s understandable. The era has certain qualities that students might find familiar, such as the voluntary principle, and others that are completely unfamiliar, from Shaker communalism to slaveholder apologetics. The sheer number of religious groups that fight for prominence – or fade from prominence – after the Revolutionary era likewise can be daunting. Thus, to make it more of a sensible mess, I divided up the pre-Civil War section into three parts: 1) the “early religious marketplace” 2) African-American religions and slavery and 3) the Civil War era.

We started our investigation of the early religious marketplace with the evangelicals, looking at how and why revivalism spoke to Americans in the early 1800s. I’ve often found it hard to convey through lectures why revivals were meaningful events, so I decided to use the “sights and sounds” of the early revivals to do the job for me. I showed a number of slides that detailed what occurred at camp meetings and coupled these with early evangelical song lyrics, hoping to get students to think about why someone living in the early nineteenth century might find these events attractive or off-putting. By following this analysis with selections from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Philip Schaff’s America, I wanted students to consider how the voluntary principle could have long-ranging effects, allowing new groups to develop followings while fundamentally reshaping the relationship between religion and the broader political order. De Tocqueville and Schaff offered the additional benefit of having my students reflect on how others have tried to make sense of America’s religious environment, much like they were trying to do in the class (other readings, such as selections from Will Herberg’s Protestant-Catholic-Jew and Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart will follow in this vein). Initially, I thought the tour of evangelical revivals was more successful in conveying the ramifications of a religious marketplace than the more conceptual reflections of de Tocqueville and Schaff. But after reading their essays on these observers, I noticed that they grasped the complexities of the religious marketplace well enough, which set us up to start playing with their first impressions about the liberties of that marketplace.

In a lecture about “religious insiders and outsiders” I told my students that “religious freedom does not necessarily result in full scale religious tolerance.” They read selections from Leonard Dinnerstein’s Anti-Semitism in America to drive home this point, as well as several chapters from our textbook, Butler, et al.’s Religion in American Life, which detailed the various religious groups that were at odds with “respectable” religious practice in early America. To illustrate why certain religious groups – like evangelicals, Mormons, Catholics, Transcendentalists, and African-Americans – would conflict with one another, we had a Presidential-style debate in the class after the lecture. The idea for a mediated debate came from one of my undergrad professors, who frequently used them to show why certain historical conflicts were reconcilable and others were not. To prepare for their debate, the students read documents from five different religious figures – Joseph Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Grandison Finney, Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, and Jarena Lee – and were instructed to engage in a debate with anyone in the room on matters of religious authenticity and authority. They had to speak in the voice of the figure they represented and had to be aggressive (for some reason, undergrads have a tendency to be too nice with one another during exercises like this, working toward consensus instead of conflict).

Both classes got into the exercise to varying degrees, but I was especially pleased with how well they assumed the perspective of the leaders under study. Some were more difficult for them than others (e.g. Emerson), but all in all, they laid out the conflicts and concessions of the era quite well. I worried afterward, however, that they might remember the debate as a fun exercise instead of an instructive one. Could they, if I asked them now, remember the particular points that, say, Smith and Finney disagreed about? I suppose I will have to wait until their end-of-the-term comprehensive papers come in to find out. Regardless, it was a nice exercise that forced them to read the documents under study (to avoid embarrassment during the debate) while breaking up the rhythm of the course.

We started our study of African-American religions with the first episode of the excellent PBS series This Far By Faith. This documentary lays out the multiple genealogies and expressions of African-American religious culture, and it set us up for broader considerations about how the religious history of slavery fit into America’s early religious marketplace. Since we had been on the topic of religious freedom, insiders, and outsiders, I asked students to view African-American religions along those lines, looking at how slaves, free blacks, and ex-slaves utilized religion to craft their own interpretations of “religious freedom.” Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography, Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s account of “Negro Spirituals,” and W.E.B. Du Bois’s commentary in The Sorrow Songs helped them do that, offering perspectives on pre- and post-emancipation black Christianity in particular. Their papers on these individual accounts of black Christianity were quite insightful (grammar and style, of course, remain a never-ending battle). In general, however, they showed that they grasped how and why religion mattered for slaves, slaveholders, and ex-slaves. To clarify the long-term importance of this religious culture, I lectured about the history of African-American Christianity after slavery, reiterating that the “outsider” status of many blacks continued to grant an important role for religion (and encourage religious innovation), both in the South and in the North.

We also stayed in the post-Civil War period briefly to end our examination of the pre-Civil War era. I took the students (on a particularly frigid day for Georgia!) down to a Confederate Monument downtown. Like other monuments to the “Lost Cause,” this one is double-dipped in religious imagery. The students did some field work there, making inferences about how this monument’s religious aspects helped (white) southerners make sense of the war’s coming and going. Given that the monument proclaimed the Civil War to be a “religious event,” I asked them to make connections between it and documents from before the war, which likewise interpreted the conflict over slavery in religious ways. Via the writings of Angelina Grimké, Catharine Beecher, and George Armstrong, they were exposed to abolitionist, gradualist, and apologist perspectives on slavery. They debated in small groups how each utilized religion to build their various platforms and we inferred from their writings whether the Civil War fit the definition of a “religious war.” I think that the next time I teach this class, I will need to include an additional day to make more explicit the connections between the pre-war religious sentiments circulating about slavery and the post-war interpretations of the conflict. By compressing the topic into two days, we simply didn’t have enough time to draw those lines as tightly as I would have liked. In addition, we didn’t get the chance to connect the war as clearly to the broader themes of voluntarism, religious tolerance, insider/outsider status, and the ironies of “religious freedom.”

Overall, I think the exercises I used to navigate the students through the pre-war religious marketplace were good, although some were better than others. I relied a great deal on Butler, et al’s Religion in American Life to fill in the blanks, which I might supplement next time around with more direct instruction. In turn, I wonder if some of the debates helped clarify particular matters for students or prevented them from deeper understanding since they were depending on one another’s understanding of the readings instead of my direction. All in all, I don’t think they misunderstood the importance of some of the era’s major themes and, as far as I could tell from their essays and comments, they certainly “got” that there was certainly a lot of considerations and conflicts that you have to take into account when you talk about the meaning of “religious freedom.”

Next up, immigration, industrial capitalism, and fundamentalism.

Is Mormon History American History? From the Juvenile Instructor

Such is the question posed at the Juvenile Instructor (a blog I just found that attempts to discuss Mormonism within the wider context of American history -- the blog's title is from a 19th-century Mormon periodical). The discussion there concerns the relative treatment of Mormonism by Charles Sellers, Sean Wilentz, and now Daniel Walker Howe in their respective treatments of the antebellum era, discussed further in John Turner's post below. The post concludes by asking: All of this leads to the question: how significant is Mormon history to the larger narrative of American history? Is Wilentz right in granting Mormonism just one paragraph in a 800-page book on antebellum American history? Or is Sellers (and possibly Howe) more accurate in devoting more time to Mormonism’s place in American history?

The post is well worth checking out as part of our discussion here of religion, the market revolution, and the antebellum era, as well as for those with a special interest in discussing Mormon history in more depth. And thanks for the links and references.

Also, this of interest on the same topic, from American Religious History:

Mormon-studies professorship is first in California

The Claremont Graduate University program will be led by Richard Lyman Bushman, a church elder, media commentator and author.

By Larry Gordon, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 30, 2007

Claremont Graduate University is establishing a new professorship in Mormon studies and hiring a prominent historian and biographer of the religion’s founder to fill that slot — starting the first such academic program in California and the second of its kind at a secular school nationwide.

Non-Mormon academics and Mormon church leaders described Claremont’s appointment of Richard Lyman Bushman, professor emeritus of early American history at Columbia University, as a significant advance in serious scholarship about the religion, which is growing quickly worldwide but also raising puzzlement and even hostility. (Click on link above for rest of article)

John Turner: Wilentz, God, and What Hath God Wrought, Part II

BY JOHN TURNER

I haven't yet had a chance to read Daniel Walker Howe's What God Hath Wrought (see Paul's post below). There is only time for so many 900-page books, especially when one is forced to stay up late at night pondering the possibility that God might be a sports fanatic from Boston (I retain the irrational belief that Jesus, who understands suffering, still favors the Fighting Irish).

Alongside Charles Sellers's Market Revolution -- as Lepore notes in her review of What God Hath Wrought -- Howe's book should also be read alongside (and in partial opposition to) Sean Wilentz's recent The Rise of American Democracy, which out-hefts Howe's effort by more than 100 pages. As Gordon Wood commented in the New York Times, "Wilentz makes no concessions to his readers' patience." For an engaging discussion of Rise of American Democracy, see the Journal of the Historical Society's December 2006 forum on the book (not available online, alas, but worth tracking down). And while we're in the habit of plugging Jill Lepore reviews, her account of Wilentz's book (also in the New Yorker) is again witty and engaging.

Like Sellers, Wilentz despises Howe's heroes and extols anti-capitalist movements that fought against "the monied interests" in the Jacksonian age. Wilentz admires Andrew Jackson, finds the presidency of John Quincy Adams uninspiring at best, and identifies an arch-villain in Nicholas Biddle. Like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Wilentz credits democrats (later Democrats) from Jefferson to Jackson for rejecting the aristocratic republicanism of the Federalists and proto-Whigs and ushering a much more robust and inclusive American democracy. As Wood notes: "The key to Jacksonian politics," Wilentz says, was "a belief that relatively small groups of self-interested men were out to destroy majority rule and, with it, the Constitution."

Gordon Wood observed that "Andrew Jackson is Wilentz's hero." "Not so," Wilentz responded to the New York Times, and he also rejected Wood's attempt to link his portrait of the Jacksonian age to contemporary partisanship (I wonder what Daniel Walker Howe thinks of Sellers's comment on their "warring assumptions). "If I intended to portray any president, warts and all, as heroic, it was Abraham Lincoln, and he was no Democrat at all." Perhaps I was fatigued by the time I reached Lincoln, but I thought Jackson was Wilentz's "hero" as well. To be fair, however, Wilentz's book (unlike Schlesinger's, I would argue), is no simple morality play. While he cannot applaud the Whig Party as a whole, he praises evangelical Whigs like Joshua Giddings for their fervently moral opposition to slavery. Having begun the book with a fairly negative impression of Andrew Jackson because of Indian removal and white supremacy, I found myself at least partly persuaded by Wilentz's careful portrait of the bank war, somewhat less persuaded by Wilentz's emphasis on the radical Democratic contribution to abolitionism.

What of religion? Wilentz does not mention William Miller and only briefly discusses Mormonism in connection with "the evasive truce of 1850." Henry David Thoreau only appears in the context of John Brown and Harper's Ferry. Wilentz does include lengthy and informative passages on the role of evangelicalism in disestablishment campaigns, Sabbatarianism, anti-Masonry, and Whiggery, and I am impressed with the amount of scholarship on evangelicalism and other religious movements that Wilentz digested and incorporated into his synthesis of the Early Republic. Moreover, his pages on the religious diversity of urban environments provide a quick introduction to a number of intriguing sectarians and radical thinkers, such as the Universalist and union leader William Heighton in Philadelphia.

Especially apart from anti-slavery agitation, Wilentz has little sympathy for the Whig Party's "Politics of Moral Improvement." But like Howe writes of the dominant political figure of the 1820s and 1830s (if not also the 1840s): “Jackson was a controversial figure and his political movement bitterly divided the American people.” Given the disparate treatments of this era of American history by Wilentz and Howe, Old Hickory continues to divide contemporary historians as well. Therefore, I'll have to move What God Hath Wrought toward the front of my reading list.

What Hath God Wrought? Or, Can Money Buy You Love, Revisited

As promised, some more on Daniel Walker Howe's new volume for the Oxford History of the United States, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of the United States, 1815-1848, as well as on the coming and going of another millennium day of October 22, anniversary of the Great Disappointment but also the birth of any number of American religious groupings.

With permission from Oxford University Press book blog, I'm cross-posting Daniel Walker Howe's reflections on the millennial dreams of the era that saw William Miller search for Jesus in the skies while Samuel Morse strung together the telegraph. Click here for Jill Lepore's review of Howe's work in the New Yorker -- which reflects on the striking contrast (one clearly of the values of the respective historians) between Charles Sellers's Market Revolution thesis and Howe's take on the same period. A nice appetizer for the Lepore's typically perceptive and smartly written review:

Sellers summarized Howe’s argument as “Market delivers eager self-improvers from stifling Jacksonian barbarism” as against his own “Go-getter minority compels everybody else to play its competitive game of speedup and stretch-out or be run over.” Fair enough. “Where Howe’s assumptions suggest that I undervalue capitalism’s benefits and attractions,” Sellers continued, “my assumptions suggest that he underestimates its costs and coercions.” Again, fair enough. But Sellers attributed these “warring assumptions” not to different evidence, methods, theories, or strategies of analysis but to the two historians’ different values. Howe writes from “within the bourgeois middle-class culture,” Sellers scoffed, while his own (presumably more Waldenesque) life had taught him that “relations of capitalist production wrench a commodified humanity to relentless competitive effort and poison the more affective and altruistic relations of social reproduction that outweigh material accumulation for most human beings.” In other words, money talks, but it can’t buy you love.

Anyway, here is Howe's piece:
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The Oxford History of The United States series has won two Pulitzer Prizes, a Bancroft and a Parkman Prize. The newest addition, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe, looks at the period from the battle of New Orleans to the end of the Mexican-American War. Howe’s narrative history shows how drastically America changed in thirty years. Below Howe, Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus, Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus, University of California, looks at how October 22nd resonated throughout America.

On October 22, 1844, somewhere between twenty-five and fifty thousand people gathered in groups all over the United States to watch the sky. They stayed up until after midnight, straining to see Jesus Christ coming out of the heavens. A Vermont farmer named William Miller, undeterred by his lack of knowledge of Hebrew or Greek, had applied his naive ingenuity to biblical study. Calculations based on prophecies in the Book of Daniel had convinced him and his disciples that the long-awaited Second Coming of Christ would occur on this day.

How would people behave if they were convinced the world was coming to an end on a known day only months away? In 1844, many paid their debts, quit their jobs, closed their businesses, left their crops unharvested in the fields. Some who felt guilty about past frauds and cheats turned over money to banks or the U.S. Treasury. Others simply gave away money keeping no accounting of it. There was a rush to get baptized. On the appointed night, thousands gathered in many locations outdoors to watch the sky. But Jesus did not appear to them, and October 22d became known among Adventists as “The Great Disappointment.” The legend that Miller’s people had donned ascension robes for the occasion was one of the many humiliations heaped on the Adventists over the next year by a laughing public that had not quite dared risk scorning them until after the fact.

William Miller had never formed a denomination while expecting Christ, for there would have been no point in any long-term planning. But after the Great Disappointment his followers, many of them were expelled from their previous churches, kept their movement alive by differentiating themselves more sharply from mainline evangelicalism. The largest group organized as the Seventh-Day Adventists, under the new leadership of Joseph Bates, who declared Sunday observance an unwarranted innovation and restored the Jewish Sabbath, and Ellen Harmon White, an inspired visionary who instituted dietary reforms opposing tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and meat. The denomination re-interpreted Daniel’s prophecy and decided that Christ had entered a new “heavenly sanctuary” on 22 October, 1844 in preparation for an early but unspecified return to earth. Miller himself never got over his great embarrassment and retired quietly, but the Seventh-Day Adventists survive to this day.

William Miller’s prophecy was only one of many manifestations of the millennial belief widespread in the America of his time. Others include the picturesque Shakers, who called themselves the Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, and the much more potent Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly knows as Mormons. The “latter days” refer to the Mormon belief that the Second Coming of Christ will occur soon, bringing history to an end. The Mormon prophet, seer, and revelator Joseph Smith was assassinated by an Illinois mob in June of the same year that Miller’s people searched the skies for Jesus. The leader of the largest slave revolt in U.S. history, Nat Turner, a literate religious visionary who listened to “the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days,” heard that Spirit tell him the day of judgment was at hand, when “the last would be first.”

Many Americans of that time and since have believed in their country’s special destiny to help prepare humanity for the Second Coming of Christ. Faith in democratic progress, in equal human rights, and even in economic and technological improvement have all been expressed in terms of paving the way for Christ’s return. The same year that William Miller was disappointed and Joseph Smith murdered, Samuel F. B. Morse publicly demonstrated his electric telegraph, its wires strung from the Supreme Court Chambers in Washington to Baltimore forty miles away. Morse transmitted a message of portentous religious significance: “What Hath God Wrought.” As Morse later commented, the message “baptized the American Telegraph with the name of its author”: God. America’s self-image was bound up with millennial expectation. In some significant ways, it still is.