Thursday Reading: Religious Knowledge, Religious Studies and the Tea Party's Religion

Kelly Baker

Here's some interesting reading for your Thursday over at Religion Dispatches and Religion Nerd. First, Brent Plate takes on the much-touted Pew survey about religious knowledge and asks important questions of why religion is always coded as belief rather than practice. How do we get pollsters to start thinking about how religion is embodied?

Second, my colleague, Mark Hulsether engages Newsweek's recent article on the popularity of Religious Studies as an undergraduate major. He writes about Newsweek's portrayal of the major and benefits and pitfalls of this story by Lisa Miller. Here's a snippet:

For starters, there's the characterization of Religious Studies as an “esoteric” field, against a background premise that it is not “useful” and that common sense would lead “anguished” parents not to recommend it to their children. True, the narrative presents the study of religion “reviving” from this baseline, moving beyond the baggage that seems to define its reputation. But what are the costs of granting this premise in the first place?

By its conclusion, the article is referring to Religious Studies as less “esoteric” than “do-gooder”—although the final sentence recommends the field for “students earnestly interested in the Meaning of Life,” so it circles back to a middle ground between esotericism and do-gooder-ism.

The overall logic seems to be that the academic study of religion is a “growth industry” mainly insofar as three things apply: First, that it is no longer “elitist,” as it presumptively has been in the past. Second, that it is virtuously out of step with most Ivy League schools. Third, and most crucially, that it is running away from what is clearly coded as a shame or embarrassment: its “legacy of Christian origins.” Apparently the problem is that some Religious Studies programs—notably Harvard’s, from which Robert Orsi luckily “fled”—still train some of their students for careers related to Protestant Christianity.

Finally, check out Dennis LoRusso's piece over at Religion Nerd on the analysis of the Tea Party's religion, which takes the portrayal of the movement(s) as religious and what's at stake in that claim.

Finishing the Columbia Guide to Religion in American History (I'll Drink to That!)

Paul Harvey

While some of you reprobates were out testing the new micro-beer selections on the 4th of July, some of us were putting our long personal nightmare (a book manuscript) finally to post and ready to be shipped out for its deployment -- at long last! (I tested out a new bottle of Old Raj gin, the best bottle of alcohol God ever invented, at the end of all this, so I'll have to join the reprobate category).

Our contributor John Fea was finishing up his book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction; and yes, John, finishing is a good feeling. Click on the link for a preview of the book and table of contents. Sounds like the publisher is going to get it out pretty promptly -- Feb. 2011.

On the home front, Randall, Ed Blum, and myself have been working on The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History for the last few years, and some of that has been, in the words of gospel great Thomas Dorsey, through the storm and through the night. I thought we'd be done with this a couple of years ago, but, you know, stuff happens. Anyway, the weekend was spent finishing up most of the last few details on the ms and ready to ship out pretty soon. Here's a preview below -- don't start camping out at the bookstore just yet, as it will be a good while before it gets from final manuscript to actual book, but several of our blog contributors are involved in this project, and others of you have asked me about it from time to time, so here's what it's going to look like once the priceless gem is in your hands (or, more likely, on the library reference shelf, as these Columbia Guide books can get a little expensive!).

As you can see, we've got a nice list of contributors who have written excellent essays on time periods, movements, traditions, and themes in American religious history. The volume also has an extensive A - Z glossary of American religious history and a bibliography which includes books, articles, CDs, DVDs, films, and online resources.

Like I said the last time I did an edited book -- not going to do that again!

Here's a preview for you.

Columbia Guide to Religion in American History
Edited by Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum
Bibliographic Editor Randall Stephens

Table of Contents

Preface 1-8
Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum

Introduction 9 - 80
Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum

Colonial Encounters r 81 - 107
Linford Fisher

Native American Religions 108 - 135
Suzanne Crawford

Civil Religion and National Identity 136 - 156
Andrew Manis

Theology 157 - 179
Mark Noll

Evangelicals in American History 180- 198
Douglas Sweeney

Religion and Politics 199 - 222
Jason Bivins

Religion and the Law 223 - 24
Frank Ravitch

Religion, War, and Peace 245 - 271
Ira Chernus

Religion, Gender, and Sexuality 272 - 297
Anthony Michael Petro

Religion, Race, and African American Life 298 - 328
Edward J. Blum

Religion, Ethnicity, and the Immigrant Experience 329-350
Roberto Trevino

Asian American Religion 351 - 365
Timothy Tseng

Alternative Religious Movements 366 - 385
Stephen Stein

Religion and the Environment 386 – 403
Lynn Ross-Bryant

Religion and Popular Culture 404 – 417
Philip Goff

Conservatism and Fundamentalism 418 - 433
Margaret Bendroth

Catholicism in America 434 - 454
Leslie Woodcock Tentler

American Judaism 455 - 472
Alan Levenson

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints 473-489
D. Michael Quinn

Islam in America 490 - 509
Jane Smith

A-Z Glossary 510 - 572

Major Surveys, Textbooks, and Reference Guides 573 - 576

Bibliographies by Chapter Titles 577 - 634

Filmography 635 - 641

Discography 642 - 649

Electronic Resources 650 - 658

Beyond Toleration, and Beyond Those Yellowed Class Notes

Paul Harvey

It’s always annoying when one’s standard classroom shtick on some topic gets upset by new scholarship, compelling the sacrifice of a long-repeated chestnut; I hate it when reading something on a topic disables the ability so blithely to oversimplify long periods of history as easily anymore. It also forces you to move a lecture to the recycle bin and start over, just when you were ready to rely on the proverbial yellowed notes (now I guess the equivalent would be the Word 97 formatted word processed file) for the next thirty years.

One of these nuggets of compression that I had long relied on was this: religious freedom in American history has moved on a long arc from “toleration,” to “diversity,” to “pluralism,” and this generally can be followed or divided up into 18th, 19th, and 20th century components. In the eighteenth, [white] Americans learned that Presbyterians could (grudgingly) tolerate Baptists, and vice versa; in the nineteenth, that diversity of religious expression was a reality of the religious marketplace, and in the twentieth that pluralism ensured freedom of religious expression for those outside the Christian consensus.

Way too simple a narrative, to be sure, but at least in terms of looking at Protestant thought and establishments, it sort of worked, at least as a hanger on which to put stories for classroom consumption and discussion. It also worked to set up for examination those cases where the story did not work, or where it seemed to work in reverse (as in the rise of particular religious bigotries in the nineteenth century, after the more hopeful rhetoric of the eighteenth; Jefferson could blithely dismiss religious difference with his famous reference that contrasting beliefs neither picked his pocket nor broke his legs; many nineteenth-century white Protestants felt quite otherwise about, for example, Catholicism and Mormonism).

One of my longstanding, will-I-ever-finish-it projects has been to complicate that narrative by looking at the history of religious freedom from the standpoint of those who largely did not experience it in American history, especially Native peoples, African Americans, and others. Looking at their stories broadens our understanding of how Americans came to define religious freedom, and thus freedom itself, over the centuries. Others, notably Tracy Fessenden and more recently John Modern’s new long piece in Church History (“Evangelical Secularism and the Measure of Leviathan”), have attacked this narrative arc from other perspectives. Modern suggests, for example, how antebellum religious benevolent organizations unwittingly created secularity by (among other things) quantifying religion. I’m still digesting his long and very difficult piece, so will save more comment on that later. It’s in the latest issue of Church History, and presages a larger project that’s going to present a picture of nineteenth-century American religious history fundamentally at odds with the story arising from books that focus on the evangelical consensus. It appears to be a smart bomb aimed at Noll et al.

From another, and perhaps more fundamentally optimistic side, Chris Beneke’s recent Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism finds a much earlier origin for more capacious ideas of freedom of religious expression. He argues that “toleration” is much too limited a way to understand eighteenth-century discussions of religion, for many already had moved “beyond toleration.”

The ironically named chapter “The End of Toleration,” for example, traces the demise of the limited concept of “toleration” into the sturdier practice of “religious liberty,” part of the overall story of how “Americans learned to live with differences in matters of the highest importance to them.”

In the eighteenth century, as now, Beneke suggests, “inclusion, equality, and cooperation among different groups mattered deeply. But then, unlike now, it was religious inclusion, religious equality, and religious cooperation that concerned people. Though still practiced inconsistently in the late eighteenth century, these ideals had become incontestable. The history of their controversial emergence is the history of America’s first great attempt to accommodate diversity, its first experiment with pluralism.” To put it another way, Beneke’s book totally cracks open the classroom nugget of compression that has served me, if not my students, so well. I hate it when people mess with my classroom M.O.

The bulk of this book traces this story of proto-pluralism through richly detailed case studies of controversies during the Great Awakening, Protestant unification during the threats posed by the French and Indian War, James Madison’s interventions in the religious liberty debate in Virginia, and various other controversies and episodes in particular colonies. All these particular stories are not new; the way Beneke puts them together to craft a large narrative is the true contribution of the book. The prose is lively and sprightly, the stories interesting and well-chosen, the argument engaging.

A couple of objections immediately come to mind -- certainly to my mind -- and to his credit Beneke deals with them forthrightly. One is that this is a story of whites, and white Protestants more particularly. Beneke argues that, by the nineteenth century, arguments for white supremacy no longer could really be based on religion (at least as applied to African Americans), precisely because the language of religious liberty and diversity was so well ensconced in the national discourse by that time. Consequently, defenses of white supremacy hinged more on pseudo-biological notions of race.

The point here is somewhat reminiscent of Colin Kidd’s The Forging of Races, which argues that the biblical narratives consistently undercut theories of polygeny, hence the secularization of racist constructions over time. To that, Beneke adds the following:

Since the 1950s, we have seen a shift in public language regarding race that was matched only once in American history -- by the shift in public language regarding religion that occurred during the eighteenth century. WE can be as thankful that terms such as ‘colored’ and ‘negro’ have most disappeared from our vocabularies as late eighteenth-century liberals and evangelicals were that terms such as ‘sectaries’ and ‘heretics’ had mostly disappeared from theirs. We decry the racial bigot, just as they decried the religious bigot. In both cases, the principle that weighs against exclusivist and implicitly hierarchical language is equal recognition. In both cases, integration helps to ensure that uncharitable language is confined to private life.

The second major objection is the harsh reality of anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century, the rise of which appears to contradict the major thrust of this book. This simply stands as a glaring exception to the story, and Beneke acknowledges the point: “Emboldened by their numbers and chastened by a surge of Protestant bigotry, the Catholic leadership rejected the established formula of religious pluralism in the United States. Full integration would simply have required too many unforgivable concessions. Decades passed before either they or the Protestant majority were fully ready to once again treat Catholicism as just one of many denominations.”

Later he addresses the story of the persecution of Mormons, and again finds that “When it came to antebellum Catholics and Mormons, the Protestant formula of equal rights for private judgment and social integration largely failed. . . . Mainstream Protestants had extended the canopy of ecumenism so broadly that they may have had a hard time understanding why anyone would refuse to take refuge beneath it. What reason could be given for such recalcitrance? When the answer was excessively complex or sufficiently unappealing, Protestants blamed Catholic missionaries and secret Mormon rituals; they blamed the pope and they blamed Joseph Smith. Whenever possible, they refrained from blaming anyone’ s particular beliefs, just as they refrained from blaming their own.”

Beneke’s lively and smartly optimistic book leaves me with a few thoughts. First, the story of Protestant pluralism traced here is more important than I have given it credit for. It was not easy to achieve; it was far in advance of most of the rest of Europe in practice (even if Locke provided many of the theories); and it provided some essential preconditions for pluralisms to come later. Second, the whiteness embedded in the particular concept of pluralism traced in this book remains central; Beneke repeatedly acknowledges this, but I would stress the point further. Finally, it makes me wonder if this is sort of Whig history in reverse. The more somber assessment provided in the epilogue chapter, in which groups outside the Protestant canopy found little or no protection from the rain (pun intended) of intolerance , suggests how Americans who had moved beyond toleration pretty soon thereafter moved back well on the other side of that ideological divide. Perhaps my classroom chestnut had it exactly backwards. History could repeat itself, as it were, twice: the first time as triumph, the second time as farce.

Islam and American Religious History

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

As a corollary to Kelly's previous post on Edward Curtis's work on the NOI, in a recent H-AmRel post he announced a new encyclopedia on Muslim-American history.

The post reads:

How have Muslims shaped American religious history and U.S. history
overall? I am looking for writers--professors, graduate students, or
talented undergrads--to contribute my 1000 pp. Encyclopedia of
Muslim-American History, a reference that will show how Muslims have
mattered to American life since the colonial era. I know we are all
pressed for time, but let me appeal to your sense of public outreach.

"Muslim" continues to be read as "foreign" and "unassimilated" not only
in Islamophobic genres (including the recent film "Obsession," 28
million copies of which were distributed for free in swing states [see
further http://www.obsessionwithhate.com/]), but also in mainstream media
outlets. The exotic, overly-religious, first-generation, "fresh off the
boat" Muslim too often stands in for all Muslim Americans in newspapers
such as The New York Times. Such forgetting writes tens of thousands of
Muslims out of the historical record.

We have a chance to correct that by analyzing--not exaggerating--the
presence of Muslims in the Americas. The work will be published by Facts
on File, which has great success marketing their products to high
schools and community libraries. It will have an impact at the
grassroots.

You needn't be an expert to participate in this project. After editing
this project for a year now, I can tell you that there are virtually no
experts on Muslim American history, with the exception of those who are
trained in African American history. Most Islam in America experts are
concerned only with today, or with the history of Muslim America post
1965.

In addition to documenting "religion," this reference will chart Muslim
involvement in U.S. politics, business, music, sports, agriculture, the
military, literature, the visual arts, poetry, social movements, and
more. It will cover the biographies, events, places, themes, and
institutions that have shaped a Muslim-American community diverse by
race, ethnicity, class, and national origin. Five hundred entries will
shed light on everything from Georgia's Sea Island Muslims and the
Muslim sodbusters of the Dakota plain to Ahmet Ertegun's influence on
the music industry and the hundred-year-old legal struggles of Muslims
in U.S. courts.

If you are willing to write even 500 words, that would be a great help.
Please contact me off list, and I will send you the list of entries and
other information. Thanks very much for your consideration.

This will no doubt be an important work, and serve as a great resource for classrooms at all educational levels. I look forward to seeing it in print and using it in the future. As for teaching, readers might also consult Curtis's great article on Islam and the U.S. history survey in the January 2008 issue of the OAH Magazine of History (John Turner posted on this, too).

In other news, Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd's latest work, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism, is scheduled for release in November. Here's a brief description:

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, many of America's Christian evangelicals have denounced Islam as a "demonic" and inherently violent religion, provoking frustration among other Christian conservatives who wish to present a more appealing message to the world's Muslims. Yet as Thomas Kidd reveals in this sobering book, the conflicted views expressed by today's evangelicals have deep roots in American history.

Tracing Islam's role in the popular imagination of American Christians from the colonial period to today, Kidd demonstrates that Protestant evangelicals have viewed Islam as a global threat--while also actively seeking to convert Muslims to the Christian faith--since the nation's founding. He shows how accounts of "Mahometan" despotism and lurid stories of European enslavement by Barbary pirates fueled early evangelicals' fears concerning Islam, and describes the growing conservatism of American missions to Muslim lands up through the post-World War II era. Kidd exposes American Christians' anxieties about an internal Islamic threat from groups like the Nation of Islam in the 1960s and America's immigrant Muslim population today, and he demonstrates why Islam has become central to evangelical "end-times" narratives. Pointing to many evangelicals' unwillingness to acknowledge Islam's theological commonalities with Christianity and their continued portrayal of Islam as an "evil" and false religion, Kidd explains why Christians themselves are ironically to blame for the failure of evangelism in the Muslim world.

A brief portion of Chapter 1 and the Table of Contents are available from Princeton University Press.

Both Curtis and Kidd have added and, it appears, will continue to offer much to the collective understanding of Islam and American religious history.

John Leland: Unknown Hero of Religious Freedom?

Paul Harvey

This is taken from Mary Dudziak's Legal History Blog -- links to and an abstract for an article of significance on the historical origins of religious freedom clauses, and the Baptist-Jeffersonian alliance.
______________________________

Scarberry on John Leland, James Madison, and Religious Influence on the Constitution and Bill of Rights

Posted by Mary L. Dudziak

John Leland and James Madison: Religious Influence on the Ratification of the Constitution and on the Proposal of the Bill of Rights is a new paper by Mark S. Scarberry, Pepperdine University School of Law. Here's the abstract:

Itinerant Baptist preacher John Leland (and Baptists generally) strongly influenced James Madison's elections to the Virginia ratifying convention and to the First Congress, with possibly substantial effects on American history. New insights include evidence making it seem nearly certain Madison had a key letter concerning Leland in hand at a critical time and evidence showing that George Eve's famous defense of Madison at a Baptist church meeting was in pivotal Culpeper County, rather than Orange County. The paper also notes Leland's relationship with Thomas Jefferson; Leland's consistent advocacy of religious liberty for all persons; his criticism of slavery; and the unusual accessibility of his straightforward and humorous prose. Leland deserves more attention, especially now that his works are very easily accessible on Google Books. As L.H. Butterfield (an editor of the papers of both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams) put it, Leland "was as courageous and resourceful a champion of the rights of conscience as America has produced." Leland (in Philip Hamburger's phrase, "Jefferson's friend and ally, the irrepressible John Leland") is worth getting to know.

An Interview with Stephen Prothero

Randall Stephens

In the May/June 2008 issue of Historically Speaking I interviewed Stephen Prothero. We're a little bit behind, so this just came out in print. Prothero gave his take on the changing field of American religious history, evangelicals in the academy, teaching, religious literacy, and the differences between history and religious studies. I asked: "Are there major concerns that shape how religious studies scholars work?"

Prothero: We don’t really have a discipline like historians do, so we’re always ripping things off from other people. Religious studies still has a lingering status anxiety problem. It has had to justify itself. That’s less the case since 9/11. Obviously it’s harder for administrators to ask the stupid question: Why should we study religion? . . . Not long ago I spoke on the [Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't (HarperOne, 2007)] at the University of Florida. Religious studies students asked, “Why don’t you do more with Judaism in?” And my answer was, “Because it doesn’t matter as much. It doesn’t have the same influence that Christianity did and does.” That was a historian’s answer. I wrote more about Christianity in Religious Literacy because 85% of Americans are Christian, because all the presidents have been Christian, and because Christianity is the language of American politics.

I would like to see a discussion on this issue at the AAR, OAH, or AHA. Are historians concerned with numbers and representation when it comes to the topics they focus on? Should historians and religious studies scholars take percentages into consideration? Many, I think, would argue that scholars have an obligation to write about individuals and groups that were oppressed or underrepresented in society. Since at least the 1980s the model has been to teach diversity. There are some intense arguments to make on either side of the issue.

I told Prothero that the history students in my Religion and American Culture course were big fans of his book American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003). Among other things, most thought it compelling because it showed so much change over time.

Prothero: A religious studies treatment of the topic would have been more synchronic. The tension between history and religious studies is essentially between anthropology and history.

The interview concludes with Prothero's brief discussion of his current work on the Exodus narrative in American history.

Of Summer and Spiritual Staycations

By Phillip Luke Sinitiere

With four young, growing children and a dissertation to finish--in addition to high gas prices as well as other expenses, I'm all about staycations. According to Wikipedia, a staycation is "a period of time in which an individual or family stays at home and relaxes at home or takes day trips from their home to area attractions."

So, inspired by Kelly's recent thoughts about Roadside Religion and summer vacation, Randall's previous reflections on "religious travelouges", and Mike's post on traveling through New Orleans, I wondered what a spiritual staycation might look like in Houston.

With limited funds, half a tank of gas (although my car does have a/c, a nice comfort for sweltering gulf coast summers), and a stack of Mapquest directions, what religious sites could I tour in Houston to get a sense of the city's spiritual offerings? Where might I take a first-time visitor to see some of the landmarks of Houston's religious landscape?



One place I'd go is to the Rothko Chapel. Built in 1971, it is home to religious services, spiritual ceremonies, and showcases art as well as other local events. I'd then travel the short distance into downtown Houston, stopping at the Islamic Da'wah Center, once home to Houston National Bank and co-founded by former Houston Rockets basketball star Hakeem Olajuwon. While in downtown I'd swing by Christ Church Cathedral, an Episcopal congregation founded in 1839 and still very active. The last stops in downtown before heading out to see the spiritual life of suburban Houston would be the Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, recently renovated and (re)dedicated, and consecrated by one of Houston's religious superstars Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, and St. John's Downtown Church, a vibrant justice-oriented (Methodist) congregation led by the tireless service of Rudy and Juanita Rasmus.

Heading out to the suburbs and braving the dense Houston traffic, I'd stop at all 3 locations of Dr. Ralph West's Church Without Walls, billed as "a church that is not restricted by geographical location or sociological background, but limitless in God’s possibilities. It also represents a church where anyone is welcome." I'd then spend some time at the massive Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, Houston's newest Hindu temple, and heading back toward the city stop at Masjid Al-Farooq Islamic Center, where I was once a guest at Friday prayer (or "khutbah").





Other highlights of a summer spiritual staycation would take me to Congregation Brith Shalom, where Hasidic hip-hop, reggae artist Matisyahu once performed, and all 5 locations of Houston's Second Baptist Church (one of the earliest "multi-site" churches). I'd end the staycation with a stop at Lakewood Church, reported to be the nation's largest and fastest growing church and home of rising religious superstar, the "smiling preacher" Joel Osteen--and Marcos Witt, pastor of Lakewood's Hispanic congregation and winner of 4 Latin Grammy awards.


There are of course many other places to visit in Houston, but this would perhaps be a good start.
If you went on a spiritual staycation in your city or town, what what would fill the pages of your "religious travelogue"?

Review Roundup

BookForum has a roundup of reviews (HT) on a variety of books in American religious history, ranging from Garry Wills's Head and Heart: American Christianities, to Charles Reagan Wilson's Judgement and Grace in Dixie, to Terry Givens' history of Mormon culture.

I'll just mention a few that caught my eye. Jane Smiley (the novelist, I'm presuming) reviews Frank Schaeffer's (son of Francis Schaeffer, whose intellectual retreat at L'Abri and various books inspired some of the intellectual side of the religious right) memoir Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Frank was something of an evangelical celebrity for a while in the 1980s, mostly for his association and co-authorship of books and films (notably including Whatever Happened to the Human Race?) with his father. But his memoir shows him to be a not-very-happy camper, hard to blame him with a mother who was, ahem, very problematic, as well as an association with those from the religious right who his father considered "co-belligerents" on the one hand, but also as "loonies." Frank considers all of the leading evangelical lights with whom he associated in the 1980s -- Graham, Robertson, Dobson, etc. -- either insane, or power-hungry, or just plain strange. One could invoke Freud here; but one won't.

I'll be interested to see what Barry Hankins has to say about all this in his biography of Francis Schaeffer which he's currently completing; I suspect the story is more complicated than what the memoir suggests. Smiley concludes cynically but in line with the bitterness (so I gather) of this particular memoir:

One lesson of all of Frank Schaeffer's work is that the inherent contradictions and terrors of Calvinist doctrine have been intolerable to the very family most famous in our day for spreading them. Another is that however the Schaeffers tried to mitigate those cruelties with personal kindness, their allies and associates have gone wholesale for the divisive, the inhumane and the mercenary. Francis Schaeffer's failure was that he didn't learn, from the very cultural history that he loved, the simple historical truth that tribalism and damnation are what organized religion does best.

Next up is Rich Barlow's review of Garry Wills, Head and Heart, a lengthy book for the normally more laconic Wills. The reviewer summarizes the thesis this way:

Definition is the first step to comprehension, and Wills deftly defines the two great tides of American faith, what he calls "Enlightened" and "Evangelical" religion. The former treasures reason for unlocking "the laws of nature and of nature's God" and deems compassion the commandment of those laws. Evangelicals profess "an experiential relationship with Jesus as their savior, along with biblical inerrancy and a mission to save others. . . . The emphasis of Enlightened religion is on the head. The emphasis of Evangelicals is on the heart." The Puritans were heart-believers. The Founding Fathers, aware of Puritan intolerance and its collateral damage, such as Dyer's execution, were head-believers. Wills sides with Enlightened religion.

Another review linked there, from the historian Glenn C. Altschuler, concludes that Wills's partisanship for "Enlightened" and over-reaching estimate of the influence of "Evangelical" religion somewhat mars the text. Oh my, so many books, so little time.

Finally, from The American Scholar, Ethan Fishman's "Unto Caesar: Religious groups that have allied themselves with politicians, and vice versa, have ignored at their peril the lessons of Roger Williams and U.S. history," continues a discussion that we've been having on this blog courtesy of John Fea.

A key passage from Fishman's article connects the differing yet related concerns of Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson, and the costs of the contemporary ignorance or flaunting of those concerns:

The two religious clauses of the First Amendment reflect the different concerns of Jefferson and Williams. Jefferson’s fear that one church would gain control of government resulted in the establishment clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” Williams’s emphasis on protecting the independence of churches became the free exercise clause: “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Taken together, these two clauses prohibit government from either helping churches or hurting them. These few words set into law the standard of neutrality that Williams and Jefferson prescribed.

The Bush administration has sought to undermine almost every one of the contributions Williams and Jefferson made to the tradition of religious freedom in the United States. By giving religious denominations the power to directly influence public policy, it has allowed them to force their tenets on others. The administration has also exploited religion for the sake of gaining and maintaining political power. And it has used religious faith to justify the carnage caused by the war in Iraq.

A bit further down, Fishman concludes:

Roger Williams acknowledged that even the most devout religious communities cannot avoid living in the wilderness of the temporal world. The role that government plays in maintaining temporal order is valuable to religious and irreligious citizens alike. How, then, are churches supposed to resist the temptation to cross the line between mere coexistence with government and active political participation? In the eighth century B.C. the prophet Isaiah responded by teaching the Jewish people to strive to be in the world but not of it, and Williams sought to apply Isaiah’s message to colonial New England.

In June 2007 the National Association of Evangelicals debated whether to advise members to “guard against over-identifying Christian goals with a single political party, lest nonbelievers think that the Christian faith is essentially political in nature.” Perhaps that debate will cause the Bush administration and complicit religious groups to reexamine their policies in light of Isaiah’s teachings and Williams’s views.

You have your assignment. Discuss. One at a time, please. And you, in the back row, yo, turn OFF the cell phone, even if your ring tone is set to "Precious Lord, Take My Hand."

ellery's protest

Below (scroll down), Kelly provides some thoughts on Stephen Prothero's Religious Literacy--a reminder of the importance, as well as the difficulties involved, in understanding religion in school/academic contexts. Prothero's work joins a host of others (notably including Noah Feldman's) which attempt to define new ways for public discussion or practice of religious faith.

This morning I awoke to another reminder: of the bad old days when religion was in the public square in intrusive and coercive ways. It wasn't that long ago. In 1956, as his school's public address system resounded with readings of the Bible, Ellery Schempp (a Unitarian) silently read the Koran. Six years later, he was in the Supreme Court. Check out this interview with Ellery Schempp, plaintiff in the case that became a landmark school prayer decision (Abington School District v. Schempp). Law professor Stephen Solomon's work Ellery's Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition and Sparked the Battle over School Prayer (read an excerpt here) gives a social history of the case and its importance in American life. The author provides a resource page here, which includes the oral argument, previous cases (notably including Engel v. Vitale), court records, and current controversies.

I really didn't know anything about the personal story behind this case, and found the interview and author's excerpt a good place to start; it might pique your interest too.

Religious (Il)Literacy

Religious Literacy
Kelly Baker

Since this is the first week of classes for me, my mind is a jumble of syllabi, additional readings, and learning names that are attached to new faces in my classrooms. To begin the semester for my World Religions course, I decided to give the religious literacy quiz from Stephen Prothero’s newest book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't. I did this last semester as well to allow my students to gauge their own literacy. Bald Blogger used this quiz in his American Religious History course, and he commented:

Having recently read Stephen Prothero's newest book on religious literacy, and being more or less convinced of his arguments, I set out to (unscientifically) test his thesis by giving my students the first night of class his suggested religious literacy quiz. Students seemed to know more than I expected, but some of the things I thought they'd know they didn't. It was an interesting exercise, and prompted much fruitful discussion. Before taking the quiz, I had students read his Christian Science Monitor essay and then I spoke briefly about the book.

This quiz also serves as a sneaky way to sell the value of the course by demonstrating to students that they need this literacy. Thus, they should take the course to gain valuable understanding, not just because they need to fill the ever-elusive humanities credit. It seems to work, and it is helpful to figure how much base knowledge the students bring with them.

My “other hat” (the cranky historian), however, remains curious about how folks who “do” religion in American history feel about the text. Susan Jacoby, the author of Free Thinkers: The Rise of American Secularism, has an interesting review in the Washington Post in which she confirms the rise of religious illiteracy but questions his description of religion’s influence in schooling in the nineteenth century and seeming lack of explanation of how the shift from print to video culture in the mid-twentieth century impacted religious literacy. (Jacoby noted this shift is known to have eroded cultural literacy.) She is most critical of his solution to this illiteracy. She writes:

The weakest part of this otherwise excellent book is Prothero's proposed remedy: high school and college courses dealing with the historical and cultural role of religion. As the author rightly notes, teaching about religion -- as distinct from preaching religion -- is not prohibited by the First Amendment's ban on "an establishment of religion." But given the failure of so many schools to inculcate the most elementary facts about American history, it is hard to imagine that most teachers would be up to the task of explaining, say, the subtleties of biblical arguments for and against slavery. Furthermore, a curriculum that would meet with the approval of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant and nonreligious parents would probably be a worthless set of platitudes.

I guess I am wondering how historians have received the book as well as the thoughts from our readers about their view of the work. Any commentary or links would be much appreciated as I continue to mull the applicability of this book for my teaching and the larger field.