Simple Things You See are All Complicated: Random Reflections on the 2nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture

Paul Harvey

The simple things you see are all complicated
I look pretty young, but I'm just back-dated, yeah
The Who, "Substitute"

If it's a lie, then we fight, on that lie. But we gotta fight.
Slim Charles in The Wire

Elesha, Janine, and Kelly have initiated a vigorous conversation arising from one particular session at the 2^nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture which concluded just over a week ago. Because I had to leave just before this particular session, I don’t have much to add to it in particular, but I had a few stray thoughts on other parts of the meeting to throw up here. Today’s post will be lighter, more observations about some key phrases and indelible memories that I’ll carry from the conference. Tomorrow I hope to develop a few more serious thoughts about one session in particular, the one involving a discussion about the "bracketing" of religious belief in religious studies -- its rationale, its benefits, and its costs.

Before continuing, the last session was on "The Future of American Religion," but I was unable to be there, so am really hoping that one of ya'll out there will post on the discussion that went on there.

The first thought: a shout out to my partner in crime Philip Goff for organizing the conference in the first place, a huge undertaking of fundraising and organization. I don’ t know whether Phil got thanked at the end, but having lunch with him just before I left, he told myself and someone else present about his death struggle with the J.W. Marriott (the conference hotel) to get them to do what they had in fact been contracted to do (such as set up our room chairs in a circular pattern, put us in the room agreed to, etc.). Conference attendees don’t normally think about stuff like that, but suffice to say after threatening to call in his university lawyers and engaging in numerous conversations with the Marriott staff, the hotel at last came through with what they were contracted to come through with. That was a lot of work they had to go to just so we could sit around and talk.

All went smoothly, but not without a lot of background fighting leading up to the event. Anyway, since scholars tend to bitch and find fault with individual sessions or presenters or anything else, a shout out for those (Phil and his assistant Becky Vasko in particular) who make these things possible.

Second, I have no doubt that long after some of the substantive intellectual discussions have been forgotten, I’ll still remember some of the shorter or even “throwaway “ observations, conversations, and barroom late night jesting. Here are a few that stick with me (I had some others at the time, but they disappeared after the third martini).

One presenter, Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, discussing her research on the styles and head scarves of inner-city Muslim women, related that the women she studies refer to their scarf styles as “hood-jabs.” Her entire discussion of the phenomenon of "Muslim Cool" was the single most interesting ethnographic description I've heard in a good while, and a reminder of the tireless vitality of American religious cultures. She might have been the only person there from the discipline of Anthropology (maybe there were others, but I didn't see any), and as someone who did a minor field in Cultural Anthropology lo so many years ago I still enjoy hearing work from that perspective.

At the session on religion and market models, James Hudnut-Beumler, a scholar of religion and economics, author recently of In Pursuit of the Almighty's Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism, and Dean of the Div. School at Vanderbilt, related a conversation he had once with Ben Bernanke at some kind of conference or meeting. Bernanke asked him what he studied, and he replied “religion.” Bernanke answered back, “I can explain that.” Bernanke was being a little facetious, but only a little, for he went on to give an economic analysis, based on rational choice theory, on why women historically would predominate in many types of religious organizations (basically, their “wages” from this participation were equal to or greater than the discriminatory wages they would have faced – and would still face – in the secular marketplace and workplace). The idea here was both to suggest what we can learn from approaches drawn from market models of religion, as well as why we resist the hegemony of those models – the irritation we feel at the “I can explain that,” even when meant only half-seriously, is an irritation at a reductionism run amok.

And yet, reductionism is a tool that leads to significant insights (like, what's causing that e coli outbreak? and why are there more religious "nones" now than there used to be?), so it never hurts when humanists get exposed to social science scholars who use the word "data" a lot. There will always be a fair amount of cross-disciplinary carping at these kinds of conferences, a small price to pay for crossdisciplinary conversations.

At the very first session, we had a great “ethnographic moment,” in an impromptu discussion between Robert Orsi and Jan Shipps, renowned scholars both but slightly separated generationally, concerning whether we can “bracket out” religious belief in our studies. In reflecting on her pioneering studies of Mormonism, Shipps noted how she always said (or implied) “for them,” as in “for them, these visions were real.” Orsi replied that the problem with the “for them” bracketing was that it could easily lead to “for them, these visions were real – and they are crazy.”

I hope to develop a fuller post on this conversation early this week, as it was the session that ultimately interested me the most, but just this brief conversation between the two raised the same kinds of issues and back-and-forth responses which Orsi and Richard Bushman discussed recently in the journal Dialogue (see Chris Jones’s post on that), and which Orsi and Stephen Prothero batted back-and-forth several years ago in a discussion that is still frequently referenced – click here for a useful summary of that. I have noted recently that a lot of folks are assigning that discussion to students in classes, because it really gets to the heart of the matter of how scholars conceive of themselves and their work in religion.

Is the “whoosh” that we get from sporting events (or from some other mass group activity that induces emotional excitement in individuals) the same as the “whoosh,” the rapid firing of neurons and physiological response, that “we” get from religion? If so, is religion some sort of minor subdiscipline of cognitive psychology and neuro-biology? This became the theme of a lively discussion between Ann Taves (whose recent work has been done in collaboration, so I gather, with neuro-psychologists and other scientists) and Tracy Fessenden, who spoke eloquently of her resistance to adopting the scientific model of study as a means of accessing the huge money and prestige that scientists win at universities, in comparison to the perpetually impoverished and denigrated state of the humanities at many (most?) institutions nowadays – especially state institutions where “productivity” is measured in grant dollars raised. I don't mean to suggest that Taves was leading that direction -- certainly not true for the President of the AAR! But we are entering a new era of discussion (beyond the "two cultures" model) of sciences and the humanities, and there's an awful lot at stake in those discussions.

Rachel Wheeler concluded one session by noting how our generation of scholars always ends up saying, in effect, “it’s complicated.” That is certainly my classroom mode, and the message one would end up with at a conference like this. Yet others in the room, especially those in the social sciences, bring more concrete questions (and therefore answers) to the table, as when Roger Finke discussed some of the findings that can be gleaned from sociological studies of religious behavior such as he has conducted in some of his well-known studies. That brings us back to the discussion that Hudnut-Beumler and Ben Bernanke had about “I can explain that.” The humanists in the room stiffen their backbones against any explanation that does not invoke complexity and some degree of unknowability; some (not all) of the social scientists naturally are drawn to projects that focus on concrete questions and answers – has religious/philanthropic giving risen or fallen over time as a percentage of people’s incomes? Has the pay of clergy risen or fallen relative to other professions over the longue duree (answer: fallen, but you already knew that)? And so on.

As a humanist at heart, naturally I gravitate towards “It’s complicated” as my answer for most important questions. For the smaller questions, we can find answers, but for the bigger questions that drew me into academic studies in the first place, our answers will be tentative at best. Therefore, my classroom pedagogy tends to be deconstructively Socratic, in the sense of proposing questions, letting students pose hypotheses, poking holes/finding problems with those hypotheses, and then commanding them to “go and research some more” at the end of the period (they probably go to toga parties instead, but at least I want to leave them with the idea of the beautiful confusion of historical research). Is that, ultimately, where I want to leave it? I don’t think that will leave the assessment committee at my university very happy, since we are supposed to be assessing concrete bits of student learning.

But that leads to a final irony: I am chair of our departmental assessment committee (that's a committee of one -- but full of self-doubt as I am, reaching consensus is surprisingly difficult), so I get to develop the instruments to test exactly what bytes of data students "learn." Since I developed them, our instruments, therefore, essentially capture the degree to which students "get" the concept "it's complicated."

Is “boring from within” the way to beat a bureaucratic system that inevitably beats down individuals? On the other hand, as a lover and scholar of The Wire, I also know that, ultimately, the institution always wins, so we shall see whether, like Slim Charles, I "fight on that lie," just because we have to fight, or whether "boring from within" is simply carving a hole in my own academic soul.

Ultimately, in this age of the privatization of public goods such as education, the game does change, while it also just gets more fierce -- as Kathryn Lofton and Sylvester Johnson reminded us in their presentations on/critiques of (respectively) neoliberalism and its influence in market models of religion, and the relationship of American religion to the American imperial state. Reflecting further on the privatization of the public good of education (as in Colorado, where state funding now represents less than 8% of the CU budget) threw some cold water on the neural "whoosh" that conferences such as this, at their best, provide. (And if, like Janine, you live in Illinois, then that water bath is even colder.)

Friday Jesus on the Mainline Blogging

Paul Harvey

Thanks to blog reader Chip Callahan, a little musical joy for your Friday, via Ry Cooder and David Lindley, some live "Jesus on the Mainline," from the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1994. Maybe it will restore a bit of your spirit as it has mine. When I call Jesus up to tell him what I want, I think it would be to have the House Republicans not shut down the government just because they want to deny health care to women. Is that too much to ask? (And, don't miss Heather Cox Richardson's narrative of a similar governmental shutdown debacle in 1879, again due to pet project riders, an unwelcome bipartisan tradition in Congress).

Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold Johnny Cash's Body Down

Paul Harvey

"Want to be part of a new Johnny Cash video?" You can.

I had forgotten that Cash's last recording, in his American Recordings series right before his death, was the southern spiritual classic "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down" (sometimes done as "Can Hold My Body Down", or with other variations of same), recorded countless times by just about everybody except the Rolling Stones it seems (Keith Richards not wanting to tempt fate, perhaps). Way back in the last century (summer 1998), I once heard a cover of it, completely unexpectedly, performed by the Tarbox Ramblers at The Burren in Somerville, Massachusetts, one of those magical live musical moments one never forgets. A shout out to the Tufts students smart enough to dance in a frenzy to the Ramblers' uptempo version of the tune.

Today's Morning edition features Chris Milk's Johnny Cash Project, which I was previously unfamiliar with. Milk is virtually stitching together pieces of digital art together with Cash's recording as a posthumous tribute to the man in black (click on the link to the Johnny Cash project to submit your own entry). Just for fun, here's a Youtube tribute along the same lines, the recording together with photograph highlights of Cash's career. A review of the entire last album is here. Johnny lives.

Latest Research Shows Whig View of American Religious History A Little More Problematic Than I Thought

Paul Harvey

Still clinging to that Whig interpretation of history? You know the one -- we go through tough times, but things get better, people improve, perceptions shift, intolerance gives way to pluralism, falsehoods are put away, stocks go up in the long run, bigotries have to go into hiding, people cultivate their own gardens and don't try to burn other ones down, we learn from our mistakes, enemies reconcile, etc. Full disclosure: that's stuff I basically believe in my heart of hearts.

Here's a little cold water on that rosy-hued view:

Now comes fresh evidence of misperceptions about the president taking root in the public mind: a new poll by the Pew Research Center finds a substantial rise in the percentage of Americans who believe, incorrectly, that Mr. Obama is Muslim. The president is Christian, but 18 percent now believe he is Muslim, up from 12 percent when he ran for the presidency and 11 percent after he was inaugurated. [note: this poll was taken BEFORE the recent ground zero mosque pseudo-event].

Moreover, according to the poll, about 1/4th of Americans are certified "birthers," and who knows how many others kinda sorta think that way. I realize 10% of people will believe just about anything. I realize a lot of people, including a large number of U.S. Senators, perpetrated the death panel myth, and well over 50% don't understand or "believe in" some pretty basic scientific concepts, starting with evolution and going on from there. But still, the 1/4th figure on something like this was in the category of things that make you go hmmm.

The article considers the possibility that the increasing number of people who believe this complete horsesh(BEEP) is because because Mr. Obama is doing a poor job of communicating who he is and what he believes.

Possibly true that, to a certain degree. Or maybe people are just getting stupider. I report, you decide.

Just a little more seriously: I recently concluded an essay for a forthcoming publication with a very smiley-face happy set of paragraphs on the rise of religious pluralism in very recent American history, throwing some props George W. Bush's way for some of his strongly affirming statements about Islam after 09/11 in contrast to events in the past (internment of Japanese Americans, etc.). The peer reviewers for that particular piece pointed out some obvious evidence to the contrary -- Guantanamo, attacks on mosques and people who looked vaguely Middle Eastern even though they were actually Sikhs, and so on and on. All true, all disheartening, and I could have written an essay concluding with the opposite point from what I argued easily enough. But, I was speaking from a comparative historical perspective -- compared to the past, things were not perfect, but they were better.

The recent spasm of hyperbolic bigotry, and stories like the above, leave me a little more sour than the Whiggish end to my essay (it's in press, so can't change it now!). So I'll try to improve my mood by surveying the recent edited collection of essays African Immigrant Religions in America, which we've noted on the blog before -- and so far, it's an extremely informative collection of essays which covers everything from Ethiopian Orthodoxy to Nigerian Muslims to Ghanian Pentecostalism.

More immediately, though, I have to celebrate the advent of a true miracle, something you don't see every day: Colorado Springs' first Ethiopian restaurant! And (by all accounts) a great one. Even better, the name of the place is Uchenna, which means "God's Will."

Having spent my first two years of grad. school, a million years ago, living about a 2 minute walk to three fantastic outposts (and several other pretty good if not quite fantastic outposts) of East African cuisine, I got a little spoiled, admittedly. Even more spoiling, the owner of one of those places used to give me her leftovers (bottom of the stew pot, all that stuff simmering for 24 hours -- possibly the best food I've ever eaten in my life), all nicely packaged in a styrofoam box. I think she thought I was a homeless drifter, when in fact I was a graduate student. What's the difference, you ask? Well, let's just say, I didn't really visit the laundry mat all that often in those days. I saved those quarters for a treat of tibbsi, alicha wat, and some honey wine.

And yes, every other civilized place got their nice Ethiopian restaurants ten or twenty or thirty years ago, and in reality it wasn't all that far to drive to Denver's versions of doro wat and kitfo. Nonetheless, just thinking about having to drive just a few minutes to get my fix of homemade injera cheers me up. Things will work out soon, things will come round again. Keep hope alive, peoples.

Sarah Palin, Tea-Party Texas Textbook Trivializers, and the Heartless Bastards

Paul Harvey

Without a second to breathe or to blog the last several days, and for the next several as well, my thanks to John Fea for finding this classic of contemporary popular historical interpretation: a dialogue between noted historians Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin:

Read John's gentle, admirably patient, but devastating blog post on this subject for more. John rightly emphasizes the complexity of the history of America's founding -- or any history, for that matter. As he writes,

Any student of the past knows that history is complicated and complex. Documents need to be understood in context. Interpretation of documents are essential to a fuller understanding of the motivations of the founders of this country. It is this kind of knee-jerk, sound-bite simplicity that I am hoping to address in my forthcoming book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: An Historical Primer (2011).

On a related subject, here is the History News Network roundup of historians' responses to the Great Texas Textbook Massacre. John Willingham, "The God in Whom We Should Trust," covers the religious angle of the controversy, interestingly from the perspective of William James and Isaiah Berlin.

Best yet, Mark Lilla, "The Tea Party Jacobins," takes a hammer forged by Christopher Lasch to certain contemporary apocalyptic rhetoricians:

Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

I think I prefer the opposite (i.e. apocalyptic pessimists when it comes to our own powers), hence my growing love for the Heartless Bastards, a group normally found in hipper regions but unaccountably playing in my sleepy home town this week. In "Hold Your Head High," lead singer Erika Wennerstrom wails out, "You see I've got this fascination with all the wrong ways to go/I get lost even in the places I know." I may be too old and finals-addled to stay awake long enough for their debut, but amid the dreary chatter replayed above, The Mountain stands as a stiff drink and poetic antidote (lyrics are a little hard to make out here, but may be found here):

Blogging and the (Non-) Democratization of American Religious History

Paul Harvey

At the 2010 American Historical Association, my co-editor Randall Stephens organized a session "American Religious Historians Online," featuring presentations by the likes of Randall himself, Kathryn Lofton (Yale), Gary Laderman (Emory, and editor of Religion Dispatches), Rebecca Goetz (who started blogging at Historianess back in the Stone Ages), and myself. I was not present at the session itself, but Randall read my presentation for me. I'm going to post it here for anyone interested, and will put Randall's up as well soon, and perhaps one or two others. The session was put into the dreaded AHA "death zone" of early Sunday morning, just as everyone is leaving, so attendance was about on par with one of my classes right before spring break, but we have the blog to broadcast parts of the session for those unfortunate enough to miss it. My contribution reflects on the origins and impact (or lack thereof) of this blog, and on broader themes of the relationship between self-selected and regulated scholarly communities and the unregulated blogging community. Your responses are welcome! Not you, though, evil spammers; your responses will be deleted as usual.

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Blogging and the Democratization (or not) of American Religious History

Is there a there there for bloggers in academic fields? And who are we supposed to be talking to, anyway? Is this like some kind of online version of a graduate seminar, a la Immanent Frame? Is this an online journal in which the tools of academic thought are applied to contemporary issues and controversies, a la Religion Dispatches? Is this a place where very particular historical issues get argued about and resolved to the satisfaction of the fifteen people who actually care about the topic? Is this a place for a mixture of academic and personal ventilation, a la Religion in American History (sometimes)? Is this a place to promote your favorite books/articles/moves, a la lots of blogs? What’s the point? Is there one? And if a blog goes out of existence and no one notices, did it really exist in the first place? (My therapist told me to talk about my fears, so there you go).

Since beginning Religion in American History, mostly on a whim in June 2007, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to think through such questions, and more, but I’ve not yet come to any answers in particular. Or perhaps the answer is whatever works for today. If I’ve got a book I want to say something about, there the blog is. If my co-editor Randall Stephens has a personal you-tube style interview with a top scholar, there the blog is. If I’m feeling depressed and lonely and want to write about some significant and emotionally moving event (often a musical concert of some sort) in my past mostly to make myself feel better, or if Ed Blum wants to write about the religious significance of Death Cab for Cutie, there the blog is. If I read something that leaves me simultaneously amused and pissed off, such as all the publicity about David Barton and Peter Marshall’s undue influence on the Texas state history standards last year, there the blog is. If I’ve written something for a conference and figure other people might be interested in reading it, there the blog is. If I just re-read an old review of mine and think it’s actually pretty decent and want to share it with others, there the blog is. If I want to share a review/takedown of which I'm proud, there the blog is -- and there the blog is to let the author blast right back at me (or, more happily, reviews of books and author interviews of works that I loved but also wanted to engage critically).

The list could go on. What I was hoping for in this session was some more collective thought on the relationship between our field and the public. I’ve been trying to sort through how much a blog like Religion in American History is a professional venue, kind of a fancy listserv oriented towards specialists; and how much RiAH is a public forum, more generally open for anyone to read and follow, and perhaps even “friend” on our facebook page. I had started it as a professional blog modeled after Mary Dudziak’s Legal History Blog -- a compendium of links, resources, citations, book reviews, conference and professional announcements, and the like, with not much in the way of personally reflective content such as would be found on other blogs. I was thinking of it as an experimental professional service, especially for graduate students and younger scholars in the field. But then I immediately violated that rule by posting more personally reflective stuff early on, and then all manner of things began finding their way onto the blog. So then I thought, this could be a blog that performs a professional service but finds a wider public, and educates them a bit on some higher-level thinking about religion in American history. After all, my sitemeter.com stats and google analytics show that people visit the blog from all manner of locations, and from all manner of google referrals. I didn’t think that figures such as Michael Jackson and Sarah Palin would be big attractions to come to my blog, but actually they are -- in fact, Palin more than Jackson. And once there, maybe they’ll read about some other stuff as well.

But then I faced an immediate limitation. I’m not really running much of a public blog in the manner of Religion Dispatches or Killing the Buddha or other online journals. I don’t have the time, the funding, or the resources to do any such thing. Instead, I’m just another one of millions of plain ol’ blogs running off free programs and servers; since I use blogspot (which is the only one I had ever heard of when I started this), I am but a servant to Master Google.

Thus, periodically people contact me with lots of great ideas about turning the blog into a serious online journal, more like Salon than blogspot, with more professionally prepared longer substantive entries. All well and good, I think, but the thing is, I have a job. And I’m late on a book, wait, make that late on two books. And I’m teaching a new class on a subject of which I’m almost entirely ignorant. And on and on. So if it doesn’t fit into the 30 minute time slot for the day that I have for blogging, then it’s not going to happen.

Then there’s the conflicted question of talking to scholars versus talking to the public. This is a basic dilemma of blogging that relates to a conflict I’ve felt elsewhere and have never really resolved in my mind. To what degree should scholars speak to “the public.” On the one hand, of course we should, and the fact that we don’t do so very well as historians is partly why people are so ignorant of history, and why our discussions of current issues are so historically impoverished. Beyond that, I teach at a public university, where standards for admissions are not exactly shockingly stringent, so I’m talking to the public everyday whether I like it or not. And as a public university professor I get asked to talk to the public all the time anyway. So what’s the difference between talking to the Rotary Club and posting something on my blog. No difference at all when I post my talk to the Rotary Club ON the blog.

On the other hand, my professional commitment is to advance the field of American religious history, and that involves doing a lot of stuff which interests “the public” not at all. And why should it? Other fields have legions of folks who do specialized work, and then a few who translate the cutting edge of that work into something comprehensible for the rest of us. So if I want to know about something in physics, I’ll read something by Stephen Weinberg in the New York Review of Books, or Steven Pinker in psychology, or Peter Brown in the history of Late Antiquity. I expect them to take esoteric findings and communicate them to me in a way I can understand. And why should historians not operate along those lines. I doubt very many people in the public will read Michael O’Brien’s two volume over one-thousand page study of intellectuals in the Old South, or last year’s Bancroft-prize winning book from Yale on the Comanche Empire. But I expect these cutting-edge findings eventually will find their way into works that will be disseminated more to a public, and I see no reason why we should place some expectation that scholarly books must always necessarily find a huge public and express disappointment when they don’t. I doubt very many people in "the public" ever read Perry Miller's New England Mind, all glorious 2 volumes of it, but so what? Fields advance when esoteric discussions occur between specialists who really have devoted years of research to a subject, and can establish a paradigm that can then get translated into a work meant more for a general public. History is a big tent; there is plenty of room for the esoteric works, and the people who tell us what all those esoteric works actually mean once all their findings have been digested.

The blog is where these two scholarly/public lives of ours intersect, for in the interests of communicating about and possibly advancing a “field,” we also naturally intersect with an almost randomly selected public who stumble on us by googling queries such as “was paul Harvey a Christian,” or just googling “Paul Harvey” and voila! finding me. And then they find the comments section of the blog and leave commentary ranging from the highly insightful to the mundane to the harassing stalker notes. But mostly we don’t have a lot of comments as compared to other blogs, and that tends to make me think that on the whole this remains something primarily of interest to students/scholars in the fields with a few others hanging about possibly. And so after a few years I think the blog usually fulfills its initial very modest purpose, and that other blogs and online journals will reach audiences and do things that Religion in American History is not meant to do very well. So in answer to my question posed in the title: do blogs democratize American religious history? My answer would be that perhaps some will do that, but mine won’t, and I’m ok with that. Let the church roll on.

Just 'Cause You Feel It, Doesn't Mean It's There

Days of Hope, Religion of Fear:

Reflections on Jason Bivins's Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism

by Paul Harvey

Just 'Cause You Feel It, Doesn't Mean It's There -- "There There," Radiohead

Reading Jason Bivins’s Religion of Fear made me think, not so much of Hell Houses or planes flying aborted fetus pictures over Notre Dame, but of Arcade Fire’s Intervention:

I can taste the fear
Gonna lift me up and take me out of here

And it made me think of Don Delillo’s White Noise, which played so expertly and wittily on social paranoia as a broader product of secular horror – as seen in the “airborne toxic event” that drives the plot of the novel.

Perhaps I’m thinking of that today while hanging in hippy-trippy Crestone, Colorado, right at the base of the Sangre de Christos, surrounded by a plethora of religious communities; and sitting at the Shambala Café, overhearing the musings of some of the locals, who are (unwittingly) serving as a counterpoint but also counterpart to the subjects of Bivins’s work, and who seem cumulatively like a DeLillo character come to life.

It should be called the Department of Offense, not the Department of Defense, man. Dude,

Obama’s just doing their bidding, man. They'll get someone else to run the Ponzi now.

Paranoia's seductions strike deep in the heartland, and even a fur piece down the road from the heartland. Arcade Fire captures their voice as well:

Don't wanna give 'em my name and address,
Don't wanna see what happens next,
Don't wanna live in my father's house no more. . . . .

Don't wanna fight in a holy war,
Don't want the salesmen knocking at my door,
I don't wanna live in America no more.
'Cause the tide is high,
and it's rising still,
And I don't wanna see it at my windowsill.

Indeed in reading Jason’s work I was wondering if DeLillo was going to come up. And he does in one of the quotation epigraphs for the last chapter, where a character in DeLillo’s Mao II says: “So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where wefind emotional experience not available elsewhere.”

But evangelical audiences did have that emotional experience available elsewhere, which is exactly what this book is about.

Starting with Jack Chick tracts in the 1960s, and moving on through evangelical critiques of popular music, hell houses, the entire oeuvre of the Left Behind novels, and a variety of other evangelical popular productions, Bivins traces how and why the audience for these productions could taste the fear, and why it lifted them up and took them out of here, from the 1960s to the present. Throughout, the emphasis is on the erotics of fear, and how the cultural products of evangelical fear dovetailed with the horror genre in ways that simultaneously provided titillation, fright, anger, and reassurance. This is religious studies that cultural historians need to engage.

Jason’s textured work provides one of the richest exploration of evangelical popular culture since the 1960s that I’ve ever read. He manages to avoid the demons of this genre: on the one hand, the left-wing journalism school that sees theocracy anywhere and everywhere; and on the other hand the penchant for celebrating products of popular culture on their own terms, without seriously considering any normative statements about the meanings of these cultural products.

Here is how he puts it at the end of chapter 2, setting up the series of topical chapters to come:

The frights are not propagandistic, but they are politically coded. While they may not be designed to generate political ideologies or programs directly, they are created out of sociopolitical concern and they underwrite antiliberal politics . . . none of these creations [Chick’s cartoons, anti-rock/rap censorship, Hell Houses, and Left Behind novels] takes a “mustard seed approach,” waiting patiently for faith to blossom. They are proudly direct and confrontational, seeking to alarm in God’s name . . . Through blood, shock, death, and destruction, the religion of fear ushers into being a world whose very terrors announce its redemption.

Consistently throughout, we find Bivins’s subjects (conservative evangelical audiences who consume these products) “drinking deeply of the forbidden in order to deny it,” with the “compulsions, desires, and fascinations that these representations seek to displace” inevitably returning “in vicarious experiences and representations which promise the erasure of these desires even as they deliver a surrogate thrill . . . Desire is thus, even when expressed in a litany of repudiations, a central part of the religion of fear.”

This is the case with his tracing of the history of evangelical anti-rock/rap/metal tracts: these demons are never fully driven out but, like an endlessly glitched compact disc, return to infinitely reassert their place of prominence in this discourse.” The repressed returns again and again to the same stuck place in the CD, and the audience can’t stop watching/listening, not unlike the one place in the Arcade Fire song quoted above that I just had to keep replaying while driving home from school.

But here’s my favorite quote that sums up the theme of the work. Commenting on the Left Behind novels (and I didn’t know how many of these novels there were – enough to form a genre by itself), a fifteen-year old fan is quoted as saying, “The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God.” Sometimes it takes a fifteen-year old to raise a thesis.

Fear has its erotics, and it has its politics, the subject of the final chapter:

The religion of fear’s exemplars are public creations, representations meant for the entire sinning world . . . Slowly, since the 1960s, the seeming outlandishness of its many claims have been reframed. The discourse now normalizes and naturalizes ideas that are antithetical to the kind of pluralism on which democracies thrive. Or as put in a previous paragraph: Nowhere in the religion of fear do we see suasion and reason, only ramparts manned and fingers pointed.

Where does the religion of fear go from here? (Feel free to respond to that question, Jason!). The prevailing tension between hope and fear seems especially urgent now, as gun stores sell out, the usual pundits and radio show hosts prattle on, Glen Beck sells his own unctuous evangelical paranoia – but also while the political rhetoric of hope had strong currency in the 08 political marketplace in America, and the 09 political marketplace in Tehran. I’m just asking.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll engage this book. It is not easy reading; it avoids simple philosophizing or sloganeering; and it requires (or at least required from me) frequent bouts of re-reading denser sentences that balance competing ideas and theoretical reflections delicately posed on a teeter-totter. Ultimately, despite its somewhat pessimistic conclusion, the book is a resounding affirmation of democratic pluralism against the erotic seductions of the culture of fear, as are the protagonist's unconcious realizations in "Intervention":

Been working for the church
While your life falls apart
Singing hallelujah with the fear in your heart
Every spark of friendship and love
Will die without a home.

The Graduate

Paul Harvey

This one goes out especially for you grad. students out there, but perhaps veterans would have some responses as well.

Historiann has a typically engaging post on "Modern Graduate Studies and the Value of Historiography." I recommend it to all.

(Since we're historians, a little history: This post follows up on a discussion initiated last year, in which I participated a bit, on our annoyance at the cult of assessment and some of the rhetoric [not all, by any means] that emanates on occasion from teaching and learning centers [which inspired a rant of my own, "Why the More Time I Spend Doing Assessment, the Worse I Become as a Teacher, and Vice-Versa"]. Having just filled out another of those reports, I'm ready to rant again, but will restrain this time; don't get used to that).

Historiann's latest reflections occasion two thoughts here. First, the best teacher I ever had -- my graduate advisor Leon Litwack -- broke every rule in the "teaching and learning center" handbook; so did one of my other beloved teachers, the late Russian history scholar Martin Malia, who was about as far afield ideologically, personally, pedagogically, and professionally from Prof. Litwack as it is humanly possible to be. When we had a conference to honor Litwack some years back, I reflected on this very fact, asking the question, "how do you emulate the un-emulatable"? The answer, of course, is that you don't; but the answer also is that great teaching is singularly related to (albeit not guaranteed by, more on that below) absolute mastery of a field.

That's not to say the rules in those how-to-be-a-good-teacher-books and workshops don't have a lot of useful suggestions, nor that attending teaching/learning workshops isn't a good thing, nor that others who also break all those rules also happen to be horrible teachers (although I can only think of one that I ever saw at Berkeley who fit the stereotype of the fabled superannuated professor reading off outdated yellow notes to audibly bored undergraduates; it was impossible to restrain laughter at seeing such a stereotype so perfectly enacted in person). It's just to say that teaching liberal arts is an awfully mysterious and wonderfully personal art. May it ever remain so, even when we have to quantify "outcomes"; nay, especially when we have to do so. One of my goals is to foster confusion and ambiguity, and I have yet to figure out how to quanitfy that "learning outcome." Like Mario Savio and Charlie Chaplin, a little throwing of our bodies onto the machine is a good thing, as long as you get off in time.

Historiann's post also made me reflect on what kinds of "training" people have to teach American religious history. Anybody care to comment? Here's the training I had: none, nada, zilch. I was doing American history, and southern history, and back in the day we didn't really have anything, at Berkeley anyway, called religious history. Some other places probably did, even then; a lot more do now, either as separate programs, as sub-units within larger American history departments, or within ye olde Department of Religion or Religious Studies.

I have no idea what discussions are like among those training to research/teach American religious history, and whether there are moves afoot to fundamentally change something about graduate study in the field (especially along the lines of linking training more directly to teaching). Anybody want to share experiences in this regard. Rants welcome; for once, I've turned off my rant-o-tron. Does training to teach American religious history (or studies, or whatever) look like training for any other field of history? How about in Religious Studies?

Update: Last year Deg did a great series on his "uncoverage" approach to American religious history. Today, Historiann issues her own "Manifesto Against Coverage," this more generally in the American history survey. So in addition to the invitation for comments on the post above, feel free to talk about how you deal with the devil of "coverage" in the American religious history context.

Odetta, 1930-2008

Editor's note: One of my musical heroes, the South African singer Miriam Makeba, recently passed away. Tuesday brought the unfortunate news of the passing of another giant, Odetta. Our occasional guest poster Judith Weisenfeld sent me this remembrance. Here's an interview with Odetta in which she sings a spiritual and talks about her musical phrasing. Here's an audio-visual obituary as well.
____________________________________________

Odetta (1930-2008)

by Judith Weisenfeld

To say that Odetta was a hero of mine does not begin to get at the influence she has had on my life. I “discovered” Odetta in my late teens when I had begun to participate in what was still an active folk music scene in New York in the early 1980s and had immersed myself in the music to build a repertoire. Hearing her music and learning about her involvement in the Civil Rights movement opened up worlds that made so many more things possible than I had dreamed of before I knew of Odetta. She sang folk music –she rocked spirituals, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, chain gang songs, and Anglo-American ballads equally – and was also a historian of American music whose repertoire came from deep research in the music archives of the Smithsonian, the National Archives, and other repositories. My discovery of Odetta taught me that one could create a rich portrait of African American history from non-textual sources, that constructions of “authentic” black culture were more complex and textured than I had imagined, and that historical work – in her case, pursued through music – matters and can make things happen in the ongoing struggle for civil and human rights.

Her legacy in the music world is clear as her influence on a wide range of musicians – from Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Joan Amatrading to Cassandra Wilson, Jewel, and Tracy Chapman, among others – is unmatched. Her impact has extended far beyond the realm of musical performers, however. When asked late in life about what music had been important to her for her activist work, Rosa Parks responded, “Essentially, all the songs of Odetta.” Parks is not the only participant in the Civil Rights Movement to have learned and drawn inspiration from Odetta’s music.

I have for many months now been working with my friend and colleague Judith Casselberry to organize a tribute to Odetta at Princeton and we were beyond excited that she had agreed to visit with us so that we could explore her career and many legacies. I am in deep mourning today that I will never have the opportunity to tell her in person how important her work has been for my life. I would probably not be doing what I do had I not heard her singing “Ramblin Round Your City” on the 1972 Tribute to Woodie Guthrie album in a friends’ apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and gone on to ravenous consumption of her many other recordings.Although she was an active performer and recording artist until just weeks before her death, the Jazz Foundation of America provided great support to her for the past few years and her manager asks her fans to help make it possible for the foundation to aid other artists in need in the future.

The New York Times recently conducted an amazing interview with her that I commend to anyone familiar with her career or interested in learning about her. I agree with Judith Casselberry, who wrote today that Odetta "lived an amazing and powerful life and her example changed how I move through the world."

One Nation Divisible

Paul Harvey

We’ve blogged here several times about the “Religion by Region” series of books put out by Rowman & Littlefield (full disclosure: I contributed to the one entitled Religion and Public Life in the South: In the Evangelical Mode, a volume which demonstrates demographically that the “Bible Belt” is not just a myth). I blogged previously about Laurie Maffly-Kipp's lengthy and thoughtful review of all these volumes in the Journal of American History, a couple of issues ago.

Mark Silk and Andrew Walsh have now published their summary volume from this entire project: One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics.

Here’s a summary of the volume:

From the evangelical South to Catholic New England to the "unchurched" Pacific Northwest, regional religious differences have a dramatic impact on public life not only in the regions themselves but also in the United States as a whole. As the interplay between religion and politics continues to dominate public discussion, understanding regional similarities and differences is key to understanding the debate around such national issues as health care, immigration, and the environment. For the first time, One Nation, Divisible shows how geographical religious diversity has shaped public culture in eight distinctive regions of the country and how regional differences influence national politics.

Examining each region in turn, Mark Silk and Andrew Walsh provide historical context, stories that reveal the current cultural dynamics, and analyses of current politics to create rounded portraits of each region. They then present a compelling new account of the evolution of national religious politics since World War II. In doing so, they suggest that the regional religious forces that have fueled recent culture wars may be giving way to a less confrontational style rooted in different regional realities.

Individual chapters follow the regions as outlined in this project, from the Southern “Evangelical Mode,” to the “Fluid Identity” of the Mid-Atlantic region, to the “None of the Aboves” of the relatively religiously indifferent Pacific Northwest region.

Much can be said of this project, and the volume, and I’ll blog on the book further later. What particularly struck me in sampling parts of the book upon arrival was the importance of the “Southern Crossroads” region, including my home region of Oklahoma and Texas. The authors argue in effect that to the extent the culture wars have defined politics from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, they have waged in the Southern Crossroads more than anyplace else: “It is not too much to say that the Crossroads provided the country’s model for religion in public life during [Clinton and Bush], two of its favorite sons. “ The authors then propose the Midwest, where religion is strong but no one tradition is dominant, as a place where the conflicts of the culture wars may be resolved -- but read the book for further detail.

The authors begin this chapter with a story from a Nashville Tennessean reporter, which rings true to what I observed when I was a pup (and I’ll insert my own details below from my younger years in Northwest Oklahoma):

GET US OUT OF THE U.N.! [I grew up driving by that sign almost every day]

JESUS IS COMING SOON—ARE YOU READY? . . .

These insistent messages were just a normal part of the scenery, like azaleas in bloom, icebox pies, and LSU football [for me, that would be cottonwood trees, Dr. Pepper machines, and Oklahoma football]. But the anger was puzzling. I saw it in letters to the editors, in leaflets left on the car windshield, in the scowls of TV preachers—attacks on “weak sister” liberals [“limousine liberals” in my day], blasts against secular humanism, detailed predictions of Armageddon.

Why were the adults so mad? What were they afraid of? It seemed out of proportion to the facts. No one could tell me why. My part of America was always filled with gracious people, charming neighborhoods, and faithful churchgoing. But there was something else in the air—a cloud of political fierceness and aggressive Protestant argument. The very sky was a riddle of anxiety. We saw it as the staging area of a gathering apocalypse. . . It didn’t occur to me until I left home that our brand of confrontational culture wasn’t so normal after all. It was the strange brew of a specific religious and social past, an accident of history.

Darren Dochuk’s ongoing work From Bible Belt to Sun Belt, to be published by Norton a year or two from now [hurry the hell up, Darren], ultimately will explain this peculiar regional religious configuration definitively. This book and Darren's work help me understand what was going on in my public high school, for example, when we watched a "debate" between a local Farm Bureau agent, not-too-well "disguised" as a East German Communist propagandist (complete with Col. Klink monocle), and some guy from the local National Guard, on that debate perennial "Communism Versus Capitalism."

By the end, the "East German" debater blew his top, and then revealed himself to all, with a smile. I was geeky enough actually to pay attention, and to wonder why that same Farm Bureau guy was so obssessed with Henry Kissinger and the Trilateral Commission, who of course were determined to take away farm subsidies and send all our money to those Eat Coast bankers (I'll leave you to guess the bankers' religious heritage; it starts with a "J"). Fortunately, most of my class comrades were too busy trying to produce fart sounds with their hands inserted in underarms to pay much attention, and besides, they knew that capitalism was great because it provided their fathers with those wonderful checks from Earl Butz at the Department of Agriculture. But those guys (and gals, presumably) now puzzle the likes of Thomas Frank, who tried (with limited success) to understand them in What's the Matter with Kansas?

Oh, and yes, very public prayer, Protestant hymn singing, and school assembly "devotionals" were standard fare in my high school, Engel v. Vitale be damned.

But I digress. This book serves not only as an excellent introduction to the eight-volume Religion by Region series, but also as a stand-alone work synthesizing a good deal of American religious history and demography. Based on what I know personally of the Southern Crossroads region, I'd say that the astute analysis in that chapter, one that accords with my own experience, speaks well for what readers will find in the rest of the book.

Here’s the table of contents:

Preface Religion by Region The Middle Atlantic: Fount of Diversity
New England: Steady Habits, Changing Slowly
The South: In the Evangelical Mode
The Southern Crossroads: Showdown States
The Pacific: Fluid Identities
The Pacific Northwest: The "None" Zone
The Mountain West: Sacred Landscapes in Tension
The Midwest: The Common Denominator?
Retelling the National Story

Summer of Love, Listening, Death Cab Meets Cutie, and Mortal Kombat

“Send Me an Angel”: Some Spiritual and Historical Ruminations on Contemporary Music

by Ed Blum

I’ve spent the summer on the road. Virginia may be made for lovers, but southern California is made for drivers. If I want to meet Matt Sutton for dinner in Huntington Beach, I have to drive; if I want to get to downtown San Diego, I have to drive. If I want to make a meeting, I have to drive. My poor little Honda Civic is taking a beating; thankfully my radio has been blaring some new songs that continue to inspire my spiritual strivings and interest in religion. I wanted to take you on a quick jaunt through the emotive, sensual, fun, and energizing moments I have had in the car with some new (and not-so-new) songs.

Since driving is my theme, it is fitting to begin with the band Death Cab for Cutie. I hate their name... or rather the second half of their name. For some reason, the word “cutie” irritates me. “Death Cab” strikes me as a better name, but that would be too dark for their fun, albeit eerie, pop. My favorite Death Cab song is “Soul Meets Body,” because it makes me think of the intersection of race and religion – where the soul and the body meet, collide, and blend. But that’s an old song, a more recent one chock full of religious inspiration is “I Will Follow You Into the Dark.” It’s a relatively slow song with simple guitar accompanying voice. One portion of the chorus brings me great hope. Lead singer Ben Gibbard smoothly voices of the hereafter:

No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark
If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs

I am fascinated by the idea of heaven and hell being satisfied, that both are full, that neither will take new visitors. It comforts me – perhaps I deserve to go to hell, but will not have to because there are no more vacancies. And heaven has rarely appealed to me. So what will the dark be like if heaven and hell are satisfied? I do not know, and I find the confusion inspiring.

Then, Death Cab juxtaposes an experience in Catholic School with alleged true love:

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black
And I held my tongue as she told me
"Son fear is the heart of love"
So I never went back

Since I never went to Catholic school, I have no idea how common this is. I have heard a tale or two of the meanness of nuns; and we all know about the sexual voraciousness and deceit of the Catholic church, but the nun’s claim to be teaching love through the physical violence is striking. And, as historians, we know that Catholic school teachers have not been the only ones to use physical force to uphold principles. In the late 1850s, a Boston court dismissed charges against a teacher for beating a Catholic boy because he refused to read the Protestant 10 commandments. In this case, little Thomas Whall had his knuckles bruised not by a lady in black, but by a prejudiced, evil teacher who viewed Catholicism as an impediment to the glory of American liberty. Each time I hear these Death Cab lyrics I think about the stereotype of Catholic mistreatment of children and the amnesia about Protestant abuse. Then I feel a contradiction within myself about the song: I wonder if I’m OK with hell being satisfied when it comes to those who violate children? I wonder if I would want hell to have vacancies for men like the teacher who beat Thomas Whall?

Then there’s Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida.” Cold Play got a bad rap in the Judd Apatow film Forty Year Old Virgin. As actors Seth Rogin and Paul Rudd (two of my absolute favorites) played video games (I believe it was Mortal Kombat), they accused each other of being gay (a “put down” in films that elicits a ton of laughter and shows me just how homophobic our culture is). At one point, one explains that he knows the other is gay because he listens to Coldplay. I really enjoy Coldplay, and don’t see it connected to my sexuality at all. “Viva La Vida” is a fascinating song, where the chorus runs:

I hear Jerusalem bells a ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field

I’m not going to comment on the chorus, but it is so clearly replete with religious imagery that it strikes me as a spiritual onion – layers upon layers, some of which lead to tears when exposed. There is another line that captures my attention. Near the end, the singer exclaims: “For some reason I can't explain / I know Saint Peter won’t call my name.” Now, most lyric databases have Coldplay claiming that they know Saint Peter “will” call his name. But my ear hears another lyric. I hear the singer claiming that Saint Peter “won’t” call it. You can judge for yourself. But following my own ear, I am thrown back to the problem of heaven and hell – the problem from which Death Cab had almost saved me. What do I think of Saint Peter at the pearly gates? Will I get in? And what of the people I study? Did Saint Peter call their names? Or, and more importantly for my scholarship, how did their beliefs about heavenly lists influence their choices? Were American missionaries the bourgeois, imperialist, and hyper-nationalists I and so many others paint them as or were they people hoping that heaven had vacancies and that Saint Peter would call their name (or perhaps the names of the individuals they encountered abroad)?

These are the questions I have as I speed up the 5 to Los Angeles. These are the thoughts I have as I scroll through the radio stations. Just as songs like “Send Me an Angel," “Like a Prayer," and just about anything from Phil Collins led me to spiritual highs and questions as a teenager, so now Cold Play and Death Cab let me ruminate on my own spirituality and my life in the religious history of our nation.

There are so many other songs that I could discuss that whirl me into different worlds of American religious history. Bruce Springsteen, Dave Mathews, and The Killers all have great songs about Jesus that are helping me on that project; Eminem was inspiration for Reforging the White Republic; Jars of Clay, and their song “Redemption,” gave me the rhetoric and spirit to approach lynching and the sacred in W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet. Eventually, I plan on writing some on demons in America, and I have a coterie of devil songs just ready to roll on my I-Tunes. I would love to hear more about how music is influencing you, your religious life, and your scholarship. Please feel free to comment or drop me a line.