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]

Blackness, The Book of Mormon, and Broadway: Part II

Christopher Jones

(cross-posted at the Juvenile Instructor)

When the news feed on my facebook began to be flooded with links to the same page last week, I excitedly clicked over the the Washington Post On Faith Op-Ed by John Mark Reynolds, professor of Philosophy at Biola University. Reading the title,"Amos and Andy and the Book of Mormon," I hopefully (but mistakenly) assumed that the article was evidence of Jared Farmer's critique--that lurking beneath the portrayal of religion in the Book of Mormon musical was not-so-subtle racism in the show's portrayal of Africans--starting to gain traction.

Instead, I proceeded to read the following:

"The Book of Mormon is a minstrel show for our present age with Mormons as the joke.

Ugly plays did not by themselves produce the Klan or keep some Americans from voting for African-Americans. Original sin was enough for that, but minstrel shows did give racism an artistic and comedic whitewash. When Americans were hurt by the cruel stereotypes, they were told it was 'just a joke' and were painted as petty for not laughing along."

Mormon, Reynolds appears to suggest, is the new Black. The comparison is problematic to say the least, even with Reynolds's caveat that "no group has been as cruelly treated as African Americans." Mormonism's "history of being persecuted" that Reynolds mentions certainly deserves attention, and has received such quite recently from several up-and-coming historians and scholars, including Patrick Mason, whose excellent new book on anti-Mormon violence in the postbellum South deserves wide readership, and Spencer Fluhman, whose forthcoming monograph from UNC Press on anti-Mormon literature in the nineteenth century can hardly come soon enough. In fact, instead of situating the Book of Mormon musical within the tradition of minstrel shows of yesteryear, Reynolds would do well to pick up a copy of Megan Sanborn Jones's recent volume from Routledge Press, Performing American Identity in Anti-Mormon Melodrama. Anti-Mormonism, it turns out, has its own history of being portrayed and performed on the stage; perhaps we would do well to look at and understand that history before making comparisons to blackface and minstrelsy.

Besides, by invoking Mormonism and race in the same breath, Reynolds wades into troubled waters. The subject is far more complicated than he acknowledges, and no op-ed can adequately address the topic. Mormons, to be sure, have a history of being portrayed as something other than racially white. Nate Oman's fine research on the legal aspects of this story is telling, and Paul Reeve's book-in-progress (under contract with OUP and entitled Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness) promises to expand on the social and cultural aspects of it all in the 19th and 20th centuries.

And Mormons, of course, have not always been innocent victims in America's racial history, as even a quick glance over at the Juvenile Instructor's posts on Mormonism and race reveals. From the so-called priesthood ban, which denied the admission of Africans and African Americans to the Mormon priesthood and restricted their entry in Mormon temples until finally being rescinded in 1978, to the Book of Mormon's complex portrayal of American Indians, to the public opposition to the Civil Rights Movement by several high-ranking Mormon officials in the 1950s and 1960s, Mormons have often found themselves on the wrong side of America's pathetic history of racism. Mormons themselves even participated in and put on their own minstrelsy shows well into the 20th century.

Perhaps most glaringly, though, Reynolds's comparison of the Book of Mormon musical to "Amos 'n' Andy" passes over entirely the portrayal of Africans in the show. While lamenting "the cruel, tasteless jokes" and "mindless mockery" leveled at the Mormons, he ironically seems to have missed the "talented African American actors hamming up 'African-ness' for cheap laughs."

And in a final touch of irony too rich not to mention, several of my Mormon friends--most of whom, like the op-ed's author, are politically and socially conservative and outspoken supporters of Mitt Romney--who linked to Reynolds's piece on facebook with apparent satisfaction that someone from outside the church was finally defending their religion and co-religionists, excerpted the following paragraph to accompany their link:

"This new play will pander to our prejudices and treat our Mormon neighbors as we would never wish to be treated. Some Americans will allow it to confirm unthinking prejudice, while cowardly Mormons will applaud it hoping for crumbs of respectability."

Mormons applauding something while hoping for crumbs of respectability, indeed.

"To Normalize the False Teachings of Mormonism the World Over"

Paul Harvey

As the long -- very long -- Republican primary season just begins to get going, here's a little reminder that anti-Mormonism didn't die out in the 19th century, or in the 20th century, or after that: Warren Cole Smith, "A Vote for Romney is a Vote for the LDS Church." A little taste:

Placing a Mormon in that pulpit would be a source of pride and a shot of adrenaline for the LDS church. It would serve to normalize the false teachings of Mormonism the world over. It would also provide an opening to Mormon missionaries around the world, who could start every conversation: "Let me tell you about the American president." To elect a Mormon President is to advance the cause of the Mormon Church.

Yes, like the election of Richard Nixon normalized the teachings of Quakerism, and the election of Clinton the teachings of Southern Baptists. Anyway, further discussion of the evangelical division about Romney's faith may be found here, and doubtless in a million other places in the months to come. As for said pending discussion, don't you know that you can count me out.

Our friend Joanna Brooks is about to fire up a post about this, so I'll update here when that is up.

Update: It gets worse. Joanna recounts her conversation with the author here.

In the meantime, that little blast from the past requires an antidote, so here's an interview with the South Park-ers Trey Parker and Matt Stone talking about their musical The Book of Mormon, the full soundtrack of which I'm looking forward to hearing sometime soon. Maybe they'll follow with a sendup musical about the United Church of Christ, or the Unitarian Universalists.

Update: Also, I meant to put this in the original post, but blog friend and part-time basketball analyst Matt Bowman of Georgetown University reflects here, in The New Republic, on the comparative "business Mormonism" of Romney and contrasts that with the much hipper public image of Jon Huntsman. Taking the two together, he says, suggests a sort of generational shift in internal LDS dynamics and culture. Very interesting reading.

Hate Week in the OC

Paul Harvey

In 1984 it was "Two Minutes' Hate"; now it's 5 minutes' hate I guess. Hussein Rashid explains the context for the event here, and further background information on how what originally was (so I gather) a protest against a speaker for a charity event devolved into a spectacle of indiscriminate hate-mongering is here as well. To some extent, this is standard-issue stuff, a group of idiots exercising their free speech rights to make known their bigotry and ignorance, but the way the public officials fire up the crowds brings to mind some of the worst incidents in American history.

Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America

Paul Harvey

Congratulations to our contributor Chris Beneke, and to Christopher S. Grenda, whose edited anthology has just come out: The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

(Incidentally, a shout out to U. Penn Press, which has been putting out great stuff in American religious history over the last several years, ranging from this book to Janet Lindman's Bodies of Belief to Ed's religious biography of Du Bois to Steven Miller's study of Billy Graham).

Chris has posted here before on some recent scholarly discussions on religious tolerance and intolerance generally in the early modern world, a subject that has produced a number of landmark scholarly works in the last few years. And quite a long time ago we blogged about this particular book, then in its "forthcoming" state (click on the link for the table of contents), and blogged also about Chris's seminal text Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism.

With this new edited anthology, featuring twelve essays from many of the top scholars of this subject, the conversation continues. I'll have more to say about this volume later after I have time to digest all of it, but suffice for now to say that it provides just the kind of first-class scholarly analysis that one would hope for, and will be an absolutely essential text for university libraries. Perhaps most importantly, the editors don't try to elide or explain away the differing arguments put forth by the various authors, but include a sterling introduction which explains and sets in context some of the major debates in this field. The editors propose a "co-existence" framework, one that was neither "tolerant" nor "intolerant" per se, and then suggest a research agenda that should warm the hearts of historians: get thee to the archives!

If this volume can bring mainstream religious history and its focus on identity and practice into a fuller dialogue with the traditional concerns of church-state history and its focus on ideology and law, it may become possible for teachers and scholars to communicate more confidently about the history of tolerance and intolerance in early America. There is hard work ahead. To understand how religious differences were lived in early America, we may need to resuscitate a long neglected tradition in American religious historiography: town and parish studies. That would mean renewed attention to local records . . . It would also entail investigations of the many sites where inter-religious interaction took place, including the unlikely places that recent cultural and social history has equipped us to probe such as homes, shops, taverns, and the streets.

In short: playing around on Google Books is no substitute for the hard historical research required in exploring this topic.

The editors are self-consciously bringing together two disparate forms of inquiry which have been pursued simultaneously but without a lot of dialogue in recent years: the social history of religion in early America (including lived religion), and the intellectual/constitutional studies of church and state, primarily concerned with ideas rather than everyday behavior. The editors explain that the authors of the chapters in the anthology "depart from both recent scholarship on the history of religious culture and the venerable study of church-state relations by their willingness to relate changes in law and rhetoric to the social experience of religious differences across British America and the early United States. They gaze broadly across the vast expanse of tolerance and intolerance in America, at the many varieties of persecution and the various manifestations of toleration, at the groups that were immediately affected by constitutional guarantees of religious liberty, and those that were not." The intent is to help "identify intersection points where the tangle of regulations, rhetoric, and customs that governed relations between early American faiths can be addressed without reflexively defaulting to the languages of toleration, religious freedom, or church and state."

Any number of recent works, including David Sehat's Myth of American Religious Freedom and the edited primary source anthology Religious Intolerance in America, have documented the substantial history of religious intolerance/repression in American history, while much older scholarship and newer works such as Chris's Beyond Toleration have explored the history of relative freedom and toleration. The dialogue continues renewed and afresh in this terrific new anthology. For my own research interests, I especially appreciate the inclusions of essays by Jon Sensbach and Richard Pointer on what "toleration" meant for Natives and African Americans. The last two essays, by Chris Beneke and Christopher Grasso, provide wonderfully contrasting examples of "America's moderate religious revolution," on the one hand, and the "boundaries of toleration and tolerance" experienced by religious skeptics and "infidels," on the other.

Dangerous Religion--It isn't who you think.

Kelly Baker

In the media storm about the Lower Manhattan mosque, Gary Laderman, at Religion Dispatches, offers an interesting take on "dangerous religion" in the U.S. His assessment of dangerous religion might surprise some, but probably not those familiar with Laderman's other work. His target is white (Anglo-Saxon) Protestant men.

Here's a snippet:

“Christianity” of course is a meaningless label, as I’ve written before. Like “Islam” it is too broad a category to cover the radically diverse practices, beliefs, and interpretive communities associated with it. So let me be even bolder and say that Protestants, and even more specifically, Anglo-European Protestant men, would appear to be the most dangerous religious individuals in American history. Without question white Protestant males from the colonial era to the dawn of the twenty-first century have inflicted more pain, more suffering, more terror than any other individuals in this so-called “city on a hill.” >>>

While Laderman admits no one really wants to answer the question about "dangerous religion", it is a question that is asked by the general public and often our students. Even working on what I do, I avoid this question and focus more on ambiguity. Yet, I can't help but wonder about the function of the label "dangerous" in tandem with religion. What do we gain analytically by declaring danger? How does it relate to legitimacy (or so-called illegitimacy) of religious movements?

Blog editors, contributors and readers, what do you think about this assessment? How does Laderman's perspective further the discussion of what is at stake in the current media portrayals of Islam in the debate about Park51? Does applying the label to a group that most assume is innocuous help our understanding of the current controversy or does it muddy the analytical waters?

Protestant Minister Kills Catholic Priest, but Where's the Religious History?

As promised a few posts ago, I'm delighted to introduce you to our new contributor, Janine Giordano, who introduces herself further below and provides some reflections on Sharon Davies' new book on race, religion, and a murder in Birmingham in 1921.
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Greetings from Illinois! An advanced graduate student in the History Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, I'm excited to be a new contributor to the blog!

While I look forward to teaching 19th-20th century US Labor and Political History, Gender and Religion, World Religions, and bending the ear of anyone else who will talk with me about the past, I spend most of my time working on my dissertation, Between Religion and Politics: The Working Class Religious Left, 1886-1936. My interest here is in how left-leaning working class Christians, especially the broad alliance of Christian Socialists during the height of the organized labor movement, navigated between churches and labor unions in their movement to critique the Christian foundations of unbridled capitalism. Though I rarely permit my historical subjects much room for hesitation, this is my usual response when asked if I, too, am a Christian Socialist. The movement has a deeply inspiring but terribly complicated history. Many of my thoughts these days consider the tenuous and moving boundaries between religious and political convictions, both within our Churches and within our political discourse. Thank you all for your welcome!
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Protestant Minister Kills Catholic Priest, but where’s the Religious History?
by Janine Giordano

The summer of 1921 in Birmingham, Alabama, Ku Klux Klan member Edwin R. Stephenson shot and killed Father James Coyle, the Irish Catholic priest who had married his daughter earlier that day. Eighteen year old Ruth Stephenson had not only decided, months earlier, to convert to Catholicism, but she had without her parents’ permission married an older, Catholic man, who called himself Spanish and traced his heritage to Puerto Rico.

Stephenson’s lawyers, among them Hugo Black, the future Supreme Court justice, would successfully move the white, male, probably-all-Protestant Birmingham jury to acquit Stephenson from the crime of murder because he acted in self-defense. After all, argued Black, “A child of a Methodist does not suddenly depart from her religion unless someone has planted in her mind the seeds of influence!... There is such a thing as imprisonment of the human will by influence, vice and persuasion. When you find a girl who has been reared well, persuaded from her parents by some cause or person, that cause or person is wrong” (Davies 275). Father Coyle’s influence was considered vile enough to excuse Stephenson from shooting him while on his own front porch in the middle of the day.

What made Catholicism so compelling to Ruth Stephenson that she was willing to forsake her parents and secretly elope? What moved Edwin Stephenson to shoot Father Coyle rather than his unwelcome son-in-law, Pedro Gussman? Why would Stephenson refuse to admit on the witness stand that he hated Catholics? In Rising Road: A True Tale of Love, Race, and Religion in America, legal historian Sharon Davies’ dramatic retelling of the trial of Edwin Stephenson for murder, it was not just religious ideas that were so important to Ruth, and not just Catholicism that felt so threatening to Stephenson and the Birmingham justice system. Anti-Catholic propaganda had circulated widely in the years leading up to the trial, but unless it were in aggravated self-defense, it alone would not move the jury to acquit a man for murder. What would move these white male Birmingham jurors were the fears of miscegenation and the desire to “protect” young women from exercising the freedom to tarry on the borders of the color line.

Catholicism for Davies (and perhaps Edwin Stephenson) functioned as an identity rather than a conviction. Ruth’s conversion was a stand-in for Protestant rebelliousness in the early twentieth century South, not a well-weighed decision about who God is and what the Church ought to look like. This conflation of religion with power-laden categories of identity: either dominant or minority, hegemonic or subversive, is not uncommon among scholars of race and ethnicity, a field within which Davies readily identifies. However, Davies’ failure to explore the religious landscape of 1921 Birmingham renders her subtitle, A True Tale of Love, Race and Religion in America misleading and ultimately disappointing to scholars of twentieth century religion. To be fair, we will never know for sure what compelled Ruth to become Catholic, nor will we know why Edwin chose Coyle as his scapegoat for his daughter’s rebellion. Davies gleaned as much as she could from the court record. But for many of us, the version of this story buried in the court record is not the begging story that needs to be told.

It is now our responsibility to make sense of this murder in terms of the religious landscape of 1921 Birmingham. How aggressively did Catholics proselytize among Protestants in the late 1910s and early 1920s, and how common were conversions? How did Catholics’ understanding of race differ from those of Protestants, and would this have been a motivation in Ruth’s decision-making? What would Catholicism offer to an eighteen year old woman that Protestant Christianity did not? How would Father Coyle have understood the religious heresy of Edwin Stephenson? Davies’ fantastically crafted courtroom drama is a page-turning, provoking, stellar read fit for every reading list, for it reveals yet another example of the depth of white Protestant, male control of the legal system. The subtitle may be misleading, but if it weren’t for the subtitle, we might have missed a deeply interesting story.

Christian Militias, White Supremacists, and Scholars Who Study Them

Kelly Baker

I know that many of you who know me well for just waiting for me to comment on the Hutaree, the Michigan Christian militia group, the nine arrests, and the larger white supremacist plot to reclaim America. What might be more surprising is that I sort of don't want to. What?, you say, How could a girl who works on the 1920s Klan, religious intolerance, and the hate movement not want to talk about this? What have you done with the real Kelly Baker? Is she locked up somewhere? Has her course load gone to her head?

No, I think I might be suffering from white supremacist fatigue. For the past two weeks in my Religious Intolerance class, we have been discussing terrorism (more later, I pinky swear), domestic terror and (surprise) white supremacy's relation to religious intolerance. We examined the SPLC's new report that caused much news fervor. We looked at the racial slurs flung at members of Congress about health care reform. Menacing phone calls, faxed nooses and scary racist slurs became topics of interest. This week before the Hutaree story broke (or before I knew it broke anyway), we covered the World Church of the Creator and Christian Identity. We've debated fantastic and terrifying racial theologies, yearnings for a racial apocalypse, the weird insistence that Obama is the anti-Christ. This is the part of the semester, in which I start to feel guilty about the focus on white supremacy and domestic terrorism. This is, generally, because students aren't aware of Christian militias, The Turner Diaries, and the promotion of racial separation and longing for a return to white America. This semester, however, my students are hyperaware because of recent events and their frequency in the news cycle. We, ny students and I, have covered this topic in length, and I am terribly unsettled.

In all fairness, my students could be unsettled too, but my discontent comes the realization of something that has always lingered in the back of mind when I decided to study groups like this: Despite how fantastic and racist these worldviews are, people believe in them and act upon these ideologies. Many of you might be saying, "Well, duh." But, there is a keen difference in knowing this intellectually and watching these sorts of things happen in real time. I recite these words like a mantra to my students, to public audiences and to my peers to showcase how important work on groups like the Hutaree is, but there is often a disconnect between my study and actual events. Part of this is from the obvious, my work now centers on the 1920s Klan, whose members are long gone or aged and the structured movement no longer exists. Sure, there have been more recent incarnations of the Klan but they aren't central to my more historical case study. The disconnect has allowed me to write on the 1920s Klan in depth and to showcase how common prejudices and positions that the order held dear were. The recent upsurge in coverage on the contemporary movement gives me the opportunity to showcase how my historical work is important to our particular moment, but it also gives me pause. Part of me wants to retreat into my historical work and ignore the Hutaree altogether.

The other part of me wants to proclaim how these movements are similar to the 1920s Klan and how these movements feared the loss of white dominance in America. The Hutaree don't present a complete picture of our nation in this moment but they do signal the growth of white desperation about the direction of our nation (Chip Berlet catalogues Hutaree's beliefs at Religion Dispatches). For this particular movement, America has lost her religiosity and her racial hue, and this Christian militia also continues a long tradition of Hofstader's "paranoid style"in American culture. Their positions aren't new, but they are important to understanding why certain segments of white America finds these ideas appealing. It, of course, is about more than loss of dominance, frustration or anxiety. It is also about the soul of America, the religiosity of Americans, and America's role in a global affairs. The Hutaree tells us something how Americans envision our nation and the place of religion and race in that vision. Somebody has to study these groups, even if we (myself included) sometimes might not want to.

Rival Revivals: Some Religious History at the OAH

Paul Harvey

Those of you going to the OAH in Washington, D.C., April 6-9, should find much of interest in religious history to select from. Just wanted to point you to a couple of sessions of particular interest:

Here's one on religion in the Great Depression, a subject which is undergoing a sustained re-examination in a number of recent works:

Thursday, April 8, 8:30 a.m. (in the Hilton Washington Headquarters Hotel -- does anyone know why the room locations of these sessions are not printed?)

Rival Revivals: Religion, Politics, and Labor in the Great Depression

Chair: Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University

Revival or Revolt: Religious Foretelling at the Dawn of the Great Depression

Alison Greene, Yale University

“The Gospel Sends You Home Mad”: Rebellious Religion and Rural Protest in the 1930s South

Jarod Roll, University of Sussex

Was FDR the Antichrist? The New Deal and the Rise of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism

Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University

Comment: Ken Fones‑Wolf, West Virginia University

I've read Matt and Jarod's stuff that they're presenting here, and word on the street is that Alison's dissertation is terrific, so this promises to be a great session on some of the best new work from this period.

Then, at 1:45 on Thursday April 7 somewhere or other in the Hilton, we're going to have some fun dissecting the concept of religious freedom in American history:

New Approaches to Religious Freedom in American History

Chair: Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University

History and Historiography in Church‑State Relations

Eric Mazur, Virginia Wesleyan College

Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom

Paul Harvey, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Native Americans and the Dilemmas of Religious Freedom

Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Comment: Tracy Fessenden

Then, finally, very annoyingly scheduled for EXACTLY the same time (1:45 Thursday April 8), is a great-looking session on teaching religious history; maybe I'll draft the other Paul Harvey to read my paper above so I can sneak off to this session:

Teaching American Religious History:

Challenges and Strategies

Chair: Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

Laurie Maffly‑Kipp, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Deborah Dash Moore, University of Michigan

Rudy V. Busto, University of California, Santa Barbara

Rowena McClinton, Southern Illinois University

The full OAH program can be accessed here.

Religious Intolerance in America -- New Documentary History

Paul Harvey

This just in, from a flyer I received from University of North Carolina Press: John Corrigan and Lynn Neal, eds., Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History. Out in May in both hard and paper, and at 304 pp. very classroom usable.

The book's website all the details, and how exactly I had missed the fact that this work was soon to be in existence at all is beyond me. Anyway, this is the bailiwick of our associate editor Kelly Baker, so we hope she’ll have a chance to blog about this book more extensively down the road. In the meantime, here’s a brief description, and I look forward to delving much further into this work!"

American narratives often celebrate the nation's rich heritage of religious freedom. There is, however, a less told and often ignored part of the story: the ways that intolerance and cultures of hate have manifested themselves within American religious history and culture.

In the first ever documentary survey of religious intolerance from the colonial era to the present, volume editors John Corrigan and Lynn S. Neal define religious intolerance and explore its history and manifestations, including hate speech, discrimination, incarceration, expulsion, and violence. Organized thematically, the volume combines the editors' discussion with more than 150 striking primary texts and pictures that document intolerance toward a variety of religious traditions. Moving from anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan propaganda to mob attacks on Mormons, the lynching of Leo Frank, the kidnapping of "cult" members, and many other episodes, the volume concludes with a chapter addressing the changing face of religious intolerance in the twenty-first century, with examples of how the problem continues to this day.

Religion in American History Television: Popular Intolerance (Religious or Otherwise)

Kelly Baker

In my Religious Intolerance class yesterday, one of my wicked smart students (this class is full of sophisticated, clever students, which makes me very lucky) made the fateful mistake of asking me what I thought about American History X, the 1998 film about white supremacy and what happens when you try to leave hate behind. He, of course, didn't know that he tapped into one of my soapbox issues: popular representations of intolerant peoples (in this instance white supremacists).

This issue, which I have blogged about before, consumes me when I should be thinking about much more important things (like 1920s Klansmen and Klanswomen). My Intolerance class this semester, thus, revolves around popular culture and the media's representation of intolerance, but the more I teach about this, the more I am interested not only how the victims of intolerance are portrayed but also those who are considered "intolerant." American History X's portrayal of white supremacists, particularly Neo-Nazis, strikes me as both stereotypical and novel. The Neo-Nazis, of course, read Mein Kampf, sport shaved heads, and ink their skin with white supremacist symbols and swastikas. They are dysfunctional, violent, backward, and uneducated (except the leader). They are members of a prison gang, and they hate African Americans as well as Jewish people. (More often than not, they are also Southern.) This is standard fare. Almost all television portrayals of white supremacists render them as burly, uneducated dudes whose looming physical presence should signal their racist agendas. See, the film says, we can easily identify the bad guys, and these types of guys are always the bad guys.

Joshua Alston at Newsweek points out the popularity of "primetime supremacy" or white supremacy on television. Alston writes:

Maybe it's just my naiveté, but having lived in cities large and small, both north and south of the Mason-Dixon, I can't recall ever having seen a skinhead wash his car, or eat an ice-cream cone, or even glower from a dusky corner.... According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, membership in white-extremist groups is ticking upward, as downtrodden, angry Caucasians seek an outlet for their anxieties about a black president, illegal immigration, and a leaky economy. Still, the supremacy surge seems to be much more acute in Hollywood than anywhere else in the country.

Hollywood, it seems, has caught the supremacist bug. Popular television shows document your local skinhead menacing someone about something while these groups gain ground in our nation. Moreover, Alston thinks that these characters prove popular because Americans like to distance ourselves from "occupational racists" and then we don't have to address racism: if racism looks like this, then we are clearly not racist. He continues:

The reason the card-carrying white supremacist lingers in the public imagination is not just because he's scary, but because he fortifies our self-regard in an area where we all occasionally need some convincing. As the puppet of Avenue Q sang on Broadway, "everyone's a little bit racist." On some level we all recognize this, and to acknowledge—or even inflate—white supremacists is to assuage our guilt with the knowledge that there are people out there far more prejudiced than most of us could ever be. For writers, these characters have even more appeal. Their beliefs are so stigmatized, there's no need to bog down the story with motives and expository monologues. As Henry Rollins said of his skinhead [Sons of] Anarchy character, "I'm [playing] a white supremacist—I have no redeeming qualities whatsoever besides that I like my kids." Apparently there's some redeeming quality, or bald white actors wouldn't be getting so much work.

Redemption is fascinating language to use in this context because I disagree a bit with Alston's analysis. These characters because they are easy. We can clearly identify their moral wrongness and vituperative hate. The problem with the stereotypical presentation of white supremacists or intolerant peoples is that ignores the reality of modern white supremacist movements. These movements organize under the banner of religion, race, and common prejudice but they aren't as easily identifiable as television or film would like us to believe. These movements are not backward but savvy in both cultural and technological circles. Yes, there are members of these movements who might have resonance with their portrayal on TV, but many of the members are educated, non-tattooed (or at least covered), articulate and highly motivated. Movements like these contain David Duke as well as those who we expect to cling to base prejudices. On celluloid, the characters are not redeeming at all, but in everyday interactions, they are more likely to seem so. If only those who believed in the bizarre racial worlds of white supremacists were as easily identifiable as their movie counterparts, then it might be easier to discount the fantastic nature of their beliefs and practices. They look strange, the film says, they must be strange. Our everyday encounters with people that hold these beliefs are not so forward or obvious. By rendering the intolerant as obvious, film and television lulls us into believing that we can easily identify those with unseemly, clearly racist agendas. It is, however, not so easy.

As someone who studies the religious worlds of hate movements, the disconnect between white supremacy and religion in popular culture is even more disturbing. Scary white dudes make more sense visually than engagement with systems of belief. Moreover, religiously intolerant people are also represented as frothing from the mouth crazy instead of the more subtle forms of religious intolerance. For instance, HBO's vampire drama True Blood renders the Fellowship of the Sun (FOTS), the vampire hating and hunting church, as religiously quacky and dangerous. They spout salvation and collect weapons. The well-meaning but intellectually lacking Jason Stackhouse, the central character Sookie Stackhouse's brother, is wooed by the leaders of FOTS and lured into their rhetoric of danger of vampires despite his personal experience otherwise. FOTS members are young, evangelical, wholesome, and eventually violent and unyielding. They plan attacks to murder vampires while wearing camp t-shirts and good suits. They are intolerant, and it becomes obvious as they become kookier and kookier. Their religious theology is thin, but their hate is apparent. Again, the stereotypes focus on uneducated folks, but these members of the Fellowship are more well-meaning but confused than primetime supremacists. They are still fringe and small, like we hope all intolerant communities are. Alston calls this "hate's new look" but it is just the same old stock characters.

American History X, then, proves to be novel and unique in Edward Norton's transformation from white supremacist to a reformed man. He abandons the racist world view yet he is still bound by the tattoos on his skin. Every time he looks in the mirror, he confronts the swastika on his chest. His previous identity scars his skin and his past. Moving beyond hate proves to be hard to do. This is part of the brilliance of the film, handling the aftermath of supremacy and chains of violence attached to this world view. The portrayal of intolerant peoples on film and tv, however, generally stick to stock figures but Norton's character tries for redemption and doesn't necessarily succeed. Redemption is not necessarily the correct language about celluloid portrayals of intolerance. To engage the complexity of intolerance might prove too difficult for television or film, and audiences might not be receptive to the bad guys looking more like the rest of us.

The Devil is in the Details: Hulsether on Robertson

Kelly Baker

In the wake of Pat Robertson's comments on Haiti, Mark Hulsether explores the top five ways that Robertson is dangerous, which often are overshadowed by Robertson's bombastic rhetoric. Over at Religion Dispatches, Hulsether explores the prevalence of Robertson's ignorant comments and notes that the focus on outrageousness of Robertson's claims often obscures his commonality with "mainline" conservatives. The media frenzy that surrounds Robertson also means that the more pressing dangers of the minister's career go unmentioned or ignored. (For a clip of Robertson's comments, check Paul's post here.)

Here's a preview:

Is this worth acknowledging? Comments by Robertson that are racist, sexist, arrogant, complacent, misleading, and/or embarrassing are like a bus: if you miss one today, there will be another tomorrow. Those who stir the pot by writing “can you believe he said that!” do not always seem to grasp that Robertson makes such comments continually. The question is when and why a larger public tunes in and makes an issue of it—and who benefits if they do.

Often it is Robertson who benefits, and a ritual of liberals mocking him actually strengthens his subculture. Susan Harding’s Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton U. Press, 2001) shows how leaders of the New Christian Right (NCR) purposefully hone a rhetoric that creates “gaps” of credibility for listeners. Such gaps continually challenge people who are tempted by NCR rhetoric to reaffirm loyalty to their leaders—and by extension to burn bridges that could change them from believers to skeptical outsiders. The more outrageous the gaps, the more that reaffirming loyalty in the face of them allows conservatives to maintain their self-image as misunderstood and persecuted. Thus they can discount Robertson’s flaws within frames like “the sincere leader with feet of clay” (who, like King David, models repentance and rehabilitation) or the “truth-teller quoted out of context” (who, like Christ, will triumph in the end.)

Meanwhile, beyond an NCR subculture, sensational images of Robertson as a fringe figure—an extreme loose cannon—underplay continuities between him and mainstream conservatives, making allies with roughly similar ideas seem like lesser evils. (To see Mark's top five, click here.)

Native American Religious Freedom: An Interview with Tisa Wenger

Paul Harvey

My colleague in the Young Scholars in American Religion program, Tisa Wenger, has had quite a year. First she had baby Dylan; then she (as of the last month) gave birth to her long-awaited new book; and this fall, she will be having a new job: as Assistant Professor of American Religious History at Yale University Divinity School!! Congratulations to Tisa on all three counts.

Earlier we had posted a preliminary notice for her (then) forthcoming book We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009); now that it has forthcome, I'm happy to post this blog interview with the author, who discusses her background growing up in Africa, her interests in the field of religious studies, and her work on Native American religions.

(on a related note, here's a great slide show on Native artists and art during the New Deal era in Santa Fe, from an exhibition last year).

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1) Tisa, you have an unusual background, as I recall as a "missionary kid" in Southern Africa. Can you say something about your background and how it has influenced your scholarly choices in terms of topics, approaches, or whatever?

Being a missionary kid has absolutely shaped my work, from the decision to go to graduate school in religious studies to the kinds of questions that I am working on today. I was born in Sierra Leone, in West Africa, where my parents taught English for three years, although we returned to the U.S. when I was only two. Most of my early childhood memories are from the small country of Swaziland, where my family lived when I was five to eleven years old (from 1975 to 1981). We were very aware of the politics of apartheid in neighboring South Africa; as Mennonite missionaries with a reputation for opposing apartheid my parents could not obtain visas, so we never visited, but the responsibility of the church to act against apartheid was a constant topic of discussion. My father's primary assignment in Swaziland was to provide training and leadership development for the Swazi independent churches, and I will never forget attending all-night services with what seemed like endless sermons, prayers, and most of all the singing and dancing that is so characteristic of African churches. Midway through our time there the Swaziland Council of Churches invited my father to become its General Secretary, a position he tried to refuse on the grounds that it should be held by a Swazi person. The Anglican bishop, a Swazi man, informed him that since he had come to serve the churches in Swaziland he must now do as he was told. He took the position, but I remember his discomfort with doing this as a white American. We left Swaziland a year earlier than planned because he realized that this was the only way that the council would make a serious search for a suitable replacement, and he was very gratified when the council chose a well qualified Swazi woman for the position. After I left home my parents returned to Africa, spending six years in Tanzania with the Eastern Mennonite Board of Missions and then six more in Mozambique with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). In all of these assignments my parents were very conscious of the legacy of missionary involvement in colonialism, and of the ongoing racism and global systems of inequity that placed them in positions of power. In line with the current policies of the Mennonite agencies they did their best to undercut these dynamics by serving only at the invitation of African churches; as MCC country representatives in Mozambique they worked with local church organizations who wanted missionary teachers, doctors, nurses, agricultural workers, etc.


My interests in topics of missionary history, race and religion, and religion and politics developed through these experiences. For various reasons I wanted to situate my own research within the United States, looking at these dynamics within American culture and the complex relationship of racism, colonialism, etc. with American Christianity. Methodologically I suppose these experiences have made me very concerned with presenting the full complexity of any given story. Like most missionaries my parents never fit the negative stereotype of missionaries, and there is almost always more going on than the familiar narrative of missionary complicity in colonial and imperial projects would suggest.

2) How did you become interested in the topic of your book WE HAVE A RELIGION? Take us through your process, from initial conceptualization to finished book.

WE HAVE A RELIGION is a major revision of my dissertation (Princeton University, 2002), which began with a question about how missionaries and anthropologists represented Native American religion. This topic brought together my growing engagement in the cultural history of the study of religion (investigating the social contexts and implications of developing conceptions of "religion") with my ongoing research interests in the intersections of religion, race, and colonialism. Rather than asking this question in general I wanted to ground it in a very specific historical case, and was looking at the American southwest as a region mostly neglected in U.S. religious history. I finally decided to focus on the Pueblo Indians because the amount of attention they had received over the years from both anthropologists and missionaries created a very interesting story and meant there was a rich set of sources.

Early in my research I ran across the Pueblo dance controversy of the 1920s and determined that this little-known yet historically important dispute would allow me to address all my theoretical concerns in a focused and compelling way. As I worked on the topic I became more and more interested in the perspectives of the Pueblo Indians themselves in these events, and was able to find Pueblo voices from that time in the records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, the New Mexico state archives, various reform agencies, and the Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Project (completed in the 1970s). The Pueblos' resourcefulness in a very tough situation deserves recognition, and the implications of their appeal for religious freedom became one of the most interesting aspects of the story. More and more the book became about the difficulties for Native Americans of gaining religious freedom, and about the cultural bias of the religious freedom ideal. Religious freedom is based on conceptions of religion-- as a matter of individual conscience, and as something separable from other spheres of life-- that really do not make sense for Native American traditions. WE HAVE A RELIGION shows the impact of these notions of religion on the Pueblo Indians at a time when, in order to protect their ceremonial traditions from government suppression by appealing to religious freedom guarantees, they increasingly spoke of these traditions as a religion (for various reasons they had not done so previously, as my first chapter explains).

Secularism and secularization are themes that emerged rather unexpectedly in my writing. The anthropologists and artists who romanticized Pueblo religion and fought for Indian religious freedom in the 1920s were also fighting against a virtual Protestant establishment that had long dominated Indian affairs, and they sought to replace Christianity with secular/scientific sources of authority. They were eventually successful in that effort, though it was a very gradual process, and an important step was their valorization of Indian traditions as religions just as legitimate as Christianity. But I also came to see that the new more "secular" regime maintained many of the same cultural biases regarding religion as an individual and non-political sphere of life. By the 1930s the government formally recognized Indian ceremonies as religion with the right to constitutional protection, but in many ways this recognition only strengthened the pressures to "modernize" other aspects of Indian life by clearly separating this newly identified religion (now the designated repository of tradition) from tribal governance and other aspects of tribal life.

3) Religion in the Southwest is certainly, I think, a neglected topic in the more general field of religious history. The establishment of Santa Fe, after all, preceded Jamestown and Boston. Can you say something about how you conceptualize studying religion in the very specific and unique historical context of the current-day American Southwest?

Religion in the U.S. west as a whole has not received much attention either from religious studies or from the burgeoning field of western history, which has tended to focus on economic and environmental questions without much acknowledgement of the importance of religion to those topics or for its own sake. The southwest is a distinctive region in its own right, given its long history as part of New Spain and then Mexico, and its ongoing status as a borderland between the U.S. and Mexico. As such it raises a set of crucial issues for the study of American religion. Some of these are faced by all American historians: to the extent that we conceive of our field as "American history," our narratives perhaps necessarily focus on the formation and development of the United States, starting with the British colonies and the patterns set in the early republic. How then can we do justice in survey texts and courses to the distinctive histories of regions that were relatively late additions to the union? As a field we are still struggling to shape new narratives that do not reinscribe the old grand narrative of white Protestants moving westward to "conquer" a continent, but convey something of the scope and diversity of experiences and actors that have made America what it is. Some of the answer may be in the trend in American studies away from the focus on the nation, to look at issues of transnationalism and globalization; perhaps a rich history of the southwest that is not exclusively oriented around U.S. nationhood is another side of that trend. The nation is far from irrelevant, but surely there are other stories to tell as well.

Studying religion in the southwest requires us to abandon the assumption of Protestant dominance, although the role of Protestants in the nation as a whole remains an important part of the story. Catholics have a much longer history here, and there are many layers of Catholic presence (Spanish, Native American, Mexican-American, European immigrants moving west) that have never been adequately studied. Racial dynamics and racial categorizations are also quite different here than in most of the country: Native Americans are far more visibly present than in many other areas, Asian Americans are very important especially in California, and of course Hispanics were here long before "Anglos." Thinking about the intersections of race and religion in the southwest therefore requires thinking beyond (without losing sight of) the black-white duality that is otherwise so important in American racial formations.

Many people in Arizona, where I have lived for the past five years, are recent arrivals; in many ways the region epitomizes the transient and immigrant qualities of the country as a whole. It would seem important then to look at the significance of religion in the context of this transience, and how people may construct religious identities and seek out religious communities to address feelings of instability and unrootedness, while others quite happily leave formal religious affiliation behind but may find meaning in alternative or individualized spiritualities. At the same time there are the much longer and deeper histories of Native Americans and Hispanics in the region, histories of which many of the newer arrivals seem blissfully unaware. Whether or not our work focuses specifically on the west or the southwest, it would seem extremely important to integrate these dimensions into our general narratives of American history and religion, not just as a "regional" story but as crucial and revealing parts of the larger whole.

4) One big interest of yours is the category of "religion" itself -- how it has been defined historically, and the problematic nature of those definitions. Can you say something about how your background in Religious Studies influences your focus on religion as a category of analysis in your scholarship?

Yes, many of us in religious studies have been engaged recently in these questions about the category of religion, and in many ways WE HAVE A RELIGION is intended as an intervention in that debate. Most important in my thinking was a series of works, most importantly Talal Asad's GENEALOGIES OF RELIGION, arguing that there can be no final definition of religion because the category of religion itself is the product of a specific historical context, that what is considered "religion" changes over time, and that every configuration of this category has political implications. The concept of religion emerged in Europe as part of a cluster of social/cultural configurations associated with modernity, and the very identification of religion implied a separation of that newly identified religion from other spheres of life (politics, art, education, economics, etc). The effort in western modernity—-and arguably this has always been more of an ideological programme than an accomplished reality--has been to define religion as a private and individual affair, the realm of tradition, that must be kept strictly separated from (and is implicitly irrelevant to) "modern," "public," and "secular" affairs of government and business. (Some like Bruce Lincoln have taken the current backlash from Islamists and fundamentalist Christians against such concepts of religion as evidence that only a privatized religion is workable for western democracies. I would argue instead that the effort to privatize religion created the conditions for such a backlash, and that longer-term solutions will require alternative configurations of religion and its relationship to other spheres of life.)

One of my interventions in this book is to point out the rather obvious fact that although "religion" may originally have been a Western construct, many groups of people around the world have made it their own. Religion may not have been an indigenous category centuries ago, but Native Americans in the United States today certainly do understand and describe their indigenous traditions as religion. They began to do so for obvious reasons, in part to claim constitutional protection from government suppression under the First Amendment, and more broadly because identification as religion provides a certain legitimacy and status in America's cultural and legal systems. This happened at different times for different tribes across the United States, and WE HAVE A RELIGION looks specifically at how this process occurred among the Pueblo Indians of the early twentieth century. I tried to convey the full complexity and ambivalence of the process: on the one hand the Pueblos successfully defended their dance ceremonies; on the other hand the conceptual apparatus of religion and religious freedom only exacerbated a variety of "modernizing" pressures on tribal life. More specifically, government officials increased their demands that the Pueblos treat ceremonial participation as a matter of individual conscience and choice rather than as community obligation, and that they generally separate ceremonial life from tribal governance. Their story provides a glimpse into the process of cultural change in colonial conditions. But it is important to see that Native Americans have also made the concept of "religion" their own and in many ways have used it to their own advantage. Such conceptual categories are always shifting and multivalent, and I think it's a mistake on many levels to suggest that "religion" is inherently or universally a tool of colonial control or of western domination.

5) Like the work of Emma Anderson featured previously on our blog, your topic has painful contemporary application, particularly in terms of Native religious practices that are either unprotected by law, or are commodified, or both. To what degree did these kinds of more present-day concerns impact your work?

The final chapter of the book traces a few of the major religious freedom battles waged by Native Americans over the course of the twentieth century, asking how dominant conceptions of religion and religious freedom have affected these struggles, and to some extent how useful these categories have been to larger indigenous quests for sovereignty and self-determination. WE HAVE A RELIGION did not start with present-day concerns in mind, and my research was entirely historical, but I have become more and more aware of the contemporary importance of these issues and was careful to consider how my work might impact Indian religious freedom struggles today. I was very careful, for example, NOT to imply that the constructed nature of the categories made Indian religion or religious freedom claims somehow illegitimate. On the contrary, I would advocate for more expansive understandings of religion in order to strengthen such claims, but also would support efforts (and many already exist) to look beyond religious freedom for additional legal and cultural tools that might improve the status and living conditions of Native Americans today.

5) More generally, what do you think Religious Studies scholars have to teach historians, and vice-versa?

In my experience, religious studies scholars are necessarily conversant with a variety of approaches to religion, and so they tend to have a broader theoretical and methodological toolbox and spend more time problematizing the concepts and categories with which they work. Not all historians have this level of interdisciplinary theoretical engagement, and especially those interested in any dimension of the study of religion can learn from religious studies in this way. On the other side, folks in religious studies sometimes need to be reminded to keep their work carefully grounded in historical context, and to avoid treating religion as if it somehow existed in isolation from other cultural, social, economic, and political developments.

6) What kinds of future plans/writing projects do you have in mind?

I have pondered a series of possible topics for the next book, such as the role of religion in developing notions of whiteness in American history, or the significance of American Protestant home missions for cultural formations of race, religion, and pluralism. But what I've started working on now is the issue of religious freedom in nineteenth and twentieth century America. A familiar narrative of progress charts the expansion of religious freedom from the time of the Pilgrims, to the founding of the new republic and its guarantee of religious liberty to all, to the gradual inclusion of Jews, Catholics, and eventually (at least in theory) adherents of any of the world's religions. I have no desire to disprove this narrative as such, but I do want to make the picture more complex by showing some of the contradictions and limitations of the religious freedom ideal. Ironically, for example, America's very self-identification as the bastion of liberty (along with Protestant certainties about the Protestant origins of liberty) often provided ideological justification for the marginalization of religious minorities, particularly of Catholics, who were repeatedly condemned as the enemies of liberty, as well as for imperial conquests and invasions around the world. Further, as I've shown for Native Americans in WE HAVE A RELIGION, the very ideal of religious liberty carries cultural assumptions about the very nature of religion, assumptions that have continued to push religious minorities to fit into the dominant mold. Religious liberty is of course a laudable ideal and I would not want to abandon it, but we need to grapple with the problems of bias and exclusion that may actually be intrinsic to its historical and theoretical formulations.