Evangelicalism, Continental Philosophy, and the Deconstructed Church

by Gerardo Marti

While completing my manuscript on race and music in multiracial churches (more on that at a later time), I've had opportunity to focus on some intriguing contemporary developments among Evangelicals which has drawn the attention of a few people across disciplinary lines. As an outgrowth of this research, and thanks to a wonderful invitation from philosopher Jack Caputo, I spent much of last week at Syracuse University participating in The Future of the Continental Philosophy of Religion conference.

The conference in Syracuse was quite an event, a gathering of around 300 philosophers from the US and UK who specialize in distinctive readings of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze and the like along with more recent thinkers like Zizek and Meillassoux (you can check out the conference program). I was pleased to hear Catherine Malabou, Thomas Altizer, and Merold Westphol interacting in sessions. With Harvey Cox, Clayton Crockett, and Philip Goodchild in the mix, it was really quite an occasion.

I was invited to present in a session on Peter Rollins, what I called "the phenomenon of Peter Rollins," as a means to explore one development in the Continental Philosophy of Religion. When I was invited to present, my response to Jack Caputo was something like,"You realize I'm a sociologist and not a philosopher, right?" They were quite willing to introduce a multi-disciplinary dialogue that described not only with the ideas of Peter Rollins but what he may represent as actions and movements in our broader religious context. With thirty minutes to share, I tried to unpack my best understanding of how Peter Rollins lies along a long path of renegotiating conservative Christianity that has been brewing for almost two decades.

Most of us know that the spectacular success of Evangelicalism in the 1970s through the 1990s created a self-sustaining Evangelical world—and that these successes created a backlash. Evangelical leaders came to seek ways to overcome the churched/non-churched divide. But the journey hasn’t been smooth.

As Evangelicals became attentive to creating a closed “Christian culture,” many disaffected evangelicals left their churches, becoming critics rather than compliant members. Listening to criticism from outside, atheistic thinkers resourced their critique. There emerged a number of Christian readers of secular philosophy who were pleased to take up an aggressive questioning of the certainty, “truth,” and the resulting morality and politics that came with it. Much of the underlying tone of such criticism draws on a hermeneutics of suspicion with its post-Marx, post-Nietzsche, and post-Freud sensibilities. Notions and paradigms promoted by these new "Christian" writers and thinkers is buttressed and often inspired directly by Continental Philosophy.

Attention to "postmodern thinkers" complimented a broader surge of interest in “postmodern philosophy” among Evangelical seminarians and church leaders. Christian publishers are still catching up to this hunger, producing more books building on recent philosophical work (e.g., Philosophy and Theology series from Continuum / T&T Clark and Church and Postmodern Culture series from Baker Publishing Group). In practice, a growing number of evangelical church leaders are moving from simple “Bible Study” to openly engaging Continental Philosophy through their books and concepts in small gatherings. On my twitter feed yesterday, I mentioned Gianni Vattimo's work, and that initiated a stream of follow-up discussions with fellow tweeps who pay attention to theology and religion.

This engagement with such deeply intellectual work represents a significant shift. Mark Noll in his Scandal of the Evangelical Mind articulated the historical basis for anti-intellectualism among Ameircan Evangelicals. Now we are seeing more educated Evangelicals who are finding their religious frameworks “lag” behind the theoretical or epistemological/ontological sophistication of their schooling. They have fundamental critiques of what they see as “modern” ways of reading the bible (hermeneutics), organizing the church (ecclesiology), and assessing morality and devotion (spiritual formation) and are forming new types of Christian gatherings to express their developing values.

Continental philosophy "works" because it involves thinkers whose work invokes a sustained social critique. Continental philosophy is concerned with structures, underlying structures of society (often drawn from Marxist orientations) and underlying structures of the psyche (often drawn from Freudian orientations). A pursuit of uncovering the working of underlying, non-conscious, structures, cultivates observations that eventually can move to practical efforts in what to talk to people about (preaching), what humans are to become (evangelism and discipleship), how community is to be lived together (ecclesiology and “loving one’s neighbor”), and how to act in the world (duty to God and others). These writings provide resources for being prophetic to the church and to the world.

These intra-Evangelical critics have been helped by the “religious turn” in Continental Philosophy and the greater availability of religious thinkers in this vein as primary and secondary works were made more available at the same time as the disaffection and pursuit of alternative frameworks happened among evangelicals. This includes writings from and about Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, Rene Girard, Jon-Luc Marion, Emmanual Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Nancy -- Slavoj Žižek,, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Gianni Vattimo). Jack Caputos’s appropriation of Derrida, Levinas’s rejection of Heidegger, Marion’s religious reinterpretation of phenemenologists, and more emerge amidst this re-thinking, aggressively incorporating insights from philosophers who engage in distinctive readings of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger.

In the conference, I dared to raise Peter Rollins to a more significant level by placing him in a broader socio-historical context. Trained in post-structural philosophy, with a PhD from Queens University in Northern Ireland, Rollins intellectually stimulating style of speaking, writing, and consulting fits efforts to flesh out Christianity in new ways that are sensitive to societal shifts and emerging sensibilities. In other words, the happenings around his person are a manifestation of changes across mainstream Christianity. So while Peter Rollins is an interesting person in and of himself, I moved away from assuming that compelling ideas from a single, charismatic leader initiates social change. Instead, Peter Rollins unique “ministry” (which I place in quotes) is an interesting and timely development of American Christianity that finds resonance in the cumulative contradictions of modern Evangelicalism.

Overall, I suspect that Continental Philosophy is underpinning a profound reworking of theological questions including what is the church (ecclesiology), what it means to be human (anthropology), and how life is to be lived (ethics) -- at least for a significant segment of American Christians. Peter Rollins’s appropriation of Continental Philosophy fuels provocative practices in the form of preaching and new types of groups among those who resonate with his message. And it’s the practice of new religious gatherings (like "Pub Churches") that especially attracts the interest of this sociologist. If anyone can contribute any insight or corrections on this, I'm happy to interact on it.

Bowling Alone With God while Catching Hell With Rob Bell

Paul Harvey

In the Wilson Quarterly, my scholarly co-conspirator (and occasional guest contributor here) Kevin Schultz reviews the new book by the eminent sociologist Robert Putnam and American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (we have mentioned the book briefly here before, and Robert Wright reviews it in theNew York Times here, while plenty of the book's other findings, reflections on them, and links to other discussions of the work are posted over at the Social Capital Blog). The findings are not especially surprising, for religious history scholars anyway, but Schultz commends the vast data sets surveyed in the book. In short:

Putnam and Campbell’s thesis, supported by numerous surveys, including two they conducted themselves, is that since 1950 the American religious landscape has become simultaneously more polarized and more tolerant. While 72 percent of Americans today think “America is divided along religious lines,” a “whopping 89 percent” (including 83 percent of evangelical Protestants) nevertheless believe that heaven is not reserved solely for those who share their faith, a finding that suggests tolerance absent just a generation ago.

It's amusing that this review coincides with the latest internet flare-up of religious polemics: Rob Bell, pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church, publishing a new book Love Wins which, so I gather, questions the existence of eternal hell. For that sin, he's being cast down into hell by some powerhouse evangelical theologians and gatekeepers (not that they could have read the book yet -- the condemnation came based on some a publisher's press release promo for the book). Eric Reitan summarizes the story over at Religion Dispatches, where he terms the reception to Bell's book "excommunication by tweet":

This short description launched a frenzy ofreactions within the evangelical community. Justin Taylor, vice president of editorial at Crossway,quickly posted a fierce condemnation—based solely on advance material. “It is unspeakably sad,” writes Taylor, “when those called to be ministers of the Word distort the gospel and deceive the people of God with false doctrine.” He concludes that Bell “is moving farther and farther away from anything resembling biblical Christianity.” Taylor’s post spurred a furor of tweeting and blogging, including a curtly dismissive tweet from Bethlehem Baptist Church’s John Piper: “Farewell, Rob Bell."

It reminds me of reading through countless denominational controversy polemics from the 19th century, esp. ones pitting the Methodists and the Baptists firing away at each other on Calvinism, infant baptism, and other controverted issues. Ultimately, that sound and fury signified little but the explosion of an antebellum evangelical empire. And internecine theological food-fights are fun to watch, and fun to study, in part because they suggest how much religion matters personally. And how much it doesn't matter in other ways. As Schultz puts it in his review, paraphrasing a part of Putnam and Campbell's book:

A Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor, confronted with data showing that more than four-fifths of his denomination don’t believe that one’s faith is the only avenue to heaven, remarked that he and his fellow pastors had “failed.” But while most clergy side with that pastor, most parishioners are quite happily tolerant. This is the American grace of the book’s title.

And I might mention that some Appalachian religious folk, the "No-Hellers of Central Appalachia," beat Rob Bell to the punch a long time ago (a brief summary of their tenets may be found here). There's nothing like hearing Universalism preached with an Appalachian inflection. The downside of their theology: no "Hell Houses" on Halloween. And that leaves us with the question: What would Jason Bivins do/study?

2011 Summer Research Seminar: Congregations and Social Change

Gerardo Marti

Congregations and Social Change:
Adaptation and Innovation among Religious Communities
June 27 - July 22, 2011

I will be directing a research seminar at Calvin College next summer. I've met other readers and contributors from this blog during the oh-so-pleasant Michigan summers and enjoyed the stimulating dialogue and scholarly support encouraged through these seminars. This is an open invitation:

Seminar Description

This research seminar will closely examine the ongoing relationships between congregations and processes of broad ranging, societal change. By incorporating a historical sensitivity and scholarship rooted in a sociological perspective, the seminar will continually connect societal arrangements with adaptation, reaction, innovation, and experimentation in congregational beliefs and practices. The focus will be on congregations of all types (whether church, synagogue, temple, or mosque) and encourages a look at both interpersonal dynamics (beliefs, micro-exchanges, small group interaction, etc.) as well as more macro-level phenomena (globalization, technological shifts, political systems, etc.).

The analytical perspectives on congregations can include --

• singular case studies, particular historical periods,
• whole denominational networks (Mormon wards, eastern orthodox churches, Jewish synagogues, mosques and Islamic centers as well as Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Zoroastrian and other religious temples and missions),
• types of congregations (small, rural, independent, mega, etc.),
• regional centers (Southern California, Manhattan, Chicago Metro), and
• any other appropriate and manageable arena of analysis.

The seminar also welcomes any aspect of congregational life that can be examined in relation to social change, for example,

• changes or comparisons of liturgical design,
• formation and negotiation of political identity,
• mobilization tied to extra-congregational organizations or social movements,
• creation of age-targeted ministry (twenty-somethings to retirees),
• incorporation of creative arts,
• negotiated relationships between religious and civic service structures or public agencies,
• adoption of online social networking or use of new media and technology,
• management of multiethnic/multiracial dynamics,
• etc, etc.

Seminar participants will read sociological and historical literature, engage ethnographic methodology commonly employed in contemporary research, and discuss their own work toward creating a community of scholarship oriented around common concerns. Ideally, each participant will produce a polished piece of writing as a result of the seminar, eg., completing a conference paper, journal article, dissertation chapter, book chapter, or publishable mass-media article. As participants work on their own congregations and social change research during the seminar, they will receive guided feedback in a supportive environment. Housing, daily lunch with other scholars, library access, and a small research stipend is provided for seminar participants.

Who May Apply

This research seminar is most intended for current and recent doctoral students in fields related to religious and organizational studies (sociology, anthropology, history, ethnic studies, folklore, and others). While the seminar is designed toward social science-oriented scholars holding, or advanced to candidacy for, the terminal degree in their field (typically the PhD), I eagerly welcome humanities-oriented scholars as well theologically-oriented participants from seminaries and divinity schools. To the extent possible, I will select a group diverse in gender, ethnic, confessional, and disciplinary backgrounds, and with a variety of research sites (i.e., the confessional and/or social identities of the communities they plan to study). I also plan to choose among applicants a mix of participants ranging from doctoral candidates through recent doctorates in tenure-track positions and scholars working on their first or second books to mid-career scholars retooling with defined projects.

See Calvin Seminars for more information

on the director, guest speakers, and application process.

Application information is at the bottom of the page. Deadline is January 14, 2011.

Heidegger and the Quandary of Insider/Outsider Roles in Religious Research: A Methodological Note

Gerardo Marti

This week afforded me a bit of reading and reflection through Heidegger’s Being and Time as part of my ongoing attempt to grow in my scholarship.

As an ethnographer, I regularly immerse myself in religious communities both short and long term -- see a recent post at Duke Divinity blog about a recent church visit -- and as such am regularly confronted with what was introduced to me as “the insider/outsider problem of religion.” The dilemma centers around a core question: Who is best able to understand religion, the committed or the agnostic? More important, what are the challenges and solutions for achieving a satisfactory understanding of religion (not just for scholars, but for everyone) considering one’s stance? My first attempt to answer this question is printed in an extended appendix of my first book A Mosaic of Believers. But reading that now, and continuing to think on the issue, I’m finding my framing of both the problem and the answer to be much too glib.

My methodological answer there was essentially that immersion in a religious community along with a simultaneous immersion in a scholarly community allows scholars enough “distance” to reasonably comment on issues and concerns of scholars without being unredeemably caught up in the interests and pretensions of any particular religiously committed sphere. It’s a serviceable answer, passes muster for the pragmatic work most social scientists do every day.

Yet I continue to find the issue to be important, not the least of which is that I consider myself to be a religiously committed person. I am not entirely comfortable with the notion of a self that is caught in a back-and-forth motion, swinging between two blatantly idealized communities, and sustaining an assurance that I am able to not only keep these things in check but to truly believe that the doing of such a thing accurately represents our lived experience as researchers.

Looking back on my experience in doing the work of two ethnographies in the past ten years, I find my resonance, my “affinity,” to the churches I studied to contain more complexity than I usually have the time or the patience to consider. Not only did my stance as a sociologist create some tensions with in first study of Mosaic, but then my later relationship to the energetic Prosperity/Word of Faith church Oasis in Hollywood Faith (another article here) produced entirely new ambiguities as many aspects of the religiosity found there does not entirely lie with all my religious sympathies. Especially at Oasis, the boundaries of being an “insider” became so fluid (usually in considering all aspects of figuring out to what degree am I part of these people) that I no longer found the neat division between “insider” and “outsider” I wrote about in my appendix to be so helpful – and that perhaps my articulated stance is dangerously misleading to my scholarship.

This week I’ve been taking a trip through Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (with help from Magda King) and am once again captured by his articulation of “authenticity” or “owned-ness” of our selves. Heidegger sees our humanity as ever-always caught up in the doing-of-things as we continually project ourselves into the world. But Heidegger’s important nuance is that we “fall” into the world by being so-easily enrapt in the an everydayness among fellow beings such that we don’t ever stop to consider the wider implications of what we are doing (descriptive) or, especially, the possibilities of who we may become (prescriptive) should we grasp onto our available limits within our finitude.

His point is especially important to me as a researcher. Looking back at my initial answer to the question of the “insider/outsider problem,” Heidegger suggests that I may be leading a dis-owned, inauthentic existence in my methodological approach because I merely “fall” into the ways of being within these two communities. On the one hand I take on the lifeways of a religious community, and on the other hand articulate, translate, commiserate with the lifeways of a scholarly community, with my work constantly going back and forth across the in-between void in my person juxtaposing two seemingly “isolated” positions in an endless array until a satisfactory product (Book! Tenure! Career!) resolves itself -- which then propels into a new cycle.

It’s Heidegger’s notion of authenticity and “owned-ness”/"disowned-ness" that’s got me. He’s profoundly right that our normal day-to-day life, even as highly self-aware scholars, is to be caught up in our ways without question. It’s one of the liberating aspects of being historians and sociologists – we come to see through distance how embedded human beings are in the structures of their world without their being conscious of it. And it is the privilege of scholars that we self-consciously reflect on ourselves and our various apprehensions in order not to "fall" easily prey to facile pretensions of what we think we know. I strongly value this primary privilege of scholarship, the ability to embrace our self-reflexivity in productive ways, and I fear that my first answer to the study of religion misleads the earnest task of becoming a more-wholly-self-possessed person who is accomplishing the uniquely human task of carefully considering all the potentialities for yielding insights and knowledge in our world.

Heidegger's point becomes even more salient when I consider the dominating aspects of institutionalization – that human beings ritualize ways of being and knowing in such easy, non-problematic ways. I come to this: If religious scholarship is simply learning to engage the institutionalized spheres of “religion” on the one hand, and then articulate them within the institutionalized spheres of “scholarship” on the other, then we “fall” into highly ritualized ways of being that radically limit the potentialities for our work. Here I will quickly mention Courtney Bender’s wonderful new book The New Metaphysicals (see current dialogue at Immanent Frame) which thoughtfully engages the issues of institutionalization in religious life and in scholarship in a fresh way. The book has got me thinking about a lot of things (It is a wonderful conversational read), and it seems to fit this particular dynamic well. Her focus on “practices” is strategic, and it is perhaps this approach I must absorb even moreso since it appears to allow Bender to be far more “self-possessed” than I feel at the moment.

In the end Heidegger stimulates my courage to consider how it is that I regularly constitute my world not merely in my role as "scholar" but as a full person. I no longer wish to maintain a pretense of bounded areas which do not touch one another, especially when I am fully aware that it is “me” (the “I am”) who is engaged in my whole life. Rather than "fall" into a false sense that I am merely receiving and recording on the one end, then resolving and reporting on the other, knowledge in such simple-minded ways, I'm thinking that f I am to continue to grow as a scholar I must take much better possession of my own self and extract whichever awareness with accompanying conceptualizations as best I can so as to more fruitfully participate in truly authentic dialogues with my colleagues and other "beings" around me. It is hopefully taking the best aspects of the best conference sessions with the most stimulating, original, and engaged minds which I've witnessed at conferences and seminars over the years and accentuate that to a much higher degree into my work with friends, neighbors, and (dare say) even my own self.

So, with more historians of American religion engaging in ethnographic practices I thought it might be worthwhile sharing these few preliminary thoughts here. Whether it is Heidegger or the resources from the historian’s craftbox or somewhere else I'm missing, I am in need of a much different conversation on the ability to sustain an “owned” scholarship of religion that respects our ongoing engagement with the world that maximizes the creative potential of our as-yet-unyielded insights.

Crossposted at my Praxis Habitus blog.

Everywhere and Nowhere

Paul Harvey

In "Everywhere and Nowhere," in today's Inside Higher Education," Kevin Schultz (of the University of Illinois, Chicago) and I summarize some of the basic points made in our new article (of the same title) just out in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion -- you can access that article (free access) here, or in PDF form here. In the shorter piece and the article, we explore the paradox that "In a sense, religion is everywhere in modern American history, but nowhere in modern American historiography," as well as the two major exceptions to that generalization -- in the historiographies of civil rights and modern conservatism:

our general thesis that religion has been everywhere in history but nowhere in historiography has two major exceptions: in historical works on the civil rights movement and the religious right. When it comes to civil rights historiography, religious interpretations have vitally influenced scholarship; indeed, those who downplay the influence of religion tend to be the “heretics,” rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, we now have a small library of books on contemporary figures of the Religious Right, from Jerry Falwell to James Dobson to Phyllis Schlafly.

Noting these two exceptions raises important questions. For example, since these are two groups that have been historically racialized and/or marginalized, does that make it “safer” to incorporate religion more centrally into their intellectual trajectories? And to what degree do they influence the mainstream narrative? In other words, when we move from the mainstream to the margins, does it become safer to introduce religion as a central actor in people’s lives? And if so, will that scholarship focusing on the margins find its way into the mainstream narratives? The almost complete absence of religion from David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear and James Patterson’s Grand Expectations, the two Oxford History of the United States volumes covering the period from 1932 to 1974, provides just cause for such reflection.

For an interesting companion piece looking at similar developments in the field of sociology, "Sociologists Get Religion," Inside Higher Ed., Feb. 9. A brief bit of it:

The new study on sociology arrives as a working paper of the Social Science Research Council, based on analysis of 587 sociology journal articles on religion, published between 1978 and 2007. The paper -- by David Smilde, a professor of sociology, and Matthew May, a graduate student, both at the University of Georgia -- finds much that would encourage scholars who want to see more research on religion. But the paper also raises questions about whether American sociologists may be too narrowly focused on some religious groups over others, and over the impact of outside funding, which is growing.

Among the key findings:

• The most important general sociological journals have been publishing a modestly growing number of articles about religion over the period studied.
• The articles show "a strong program" emerging on the role of religion in society. At the beginning of the period studied, religion was rarely the independent variable in the research, but by the end of the period, more than half of the articles had religion as the independent variable.
• For most of the period studied, there was an upward trend in positive findings about the role of religion and a downward trend in negative findings. The last five years have seen an increase in negative findings.
• American sociology's study of religion is dominated by religion in the United States and Christianity, with relatively little work on non-Christian religions or the Christian faith of non-Americans.
• Private funding has increased significantly for sociological research on religion, notably from several foundations.
• A positive correlation was found between receiving outside funding and positive findings about religion, although to the surprise of the authors, the strongest correlation was not from private sources of funds but from public sources. (The authors do not have a definitive theory on the source of this correlation and suggest it as a topic for further research.) The changes outlined in the report "are pretty significant" and show "a realization on the part of sociologists and other academics, too, of the enduring significance of religion in the modern world," said Neil Gross, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. Gross studies the sociology of academic life, and while he noted "the stereotype that most professors don't pay attention to religion," he added that it has "never really been true."

On Interdisciplinarity at the Religion and American Culture Conference

by Gerardo Marti

Many thanks to Linford Fisher for his welcome post highlighting the 1st Biennial Religion and American Culture Conference in Indianapolis. For those interested in more, I've written a series summaries of conference sessions on my own Praxis Habitus blog -- with a few more posts coming this week.

Here, I want to quickly write about the conferences's attempt to reflect on interdisciplinarity.

Image by joanieofarc via Flickr

Because of the great accomplishments and expansive academic network of the Center for Religion and American Culture at IUPUI, the conference provided a unique opportunity to draw several conversations together. So, it's not surprising that the theme integrating the conference was the question of interdisciplinarity – What are the possibilities for a productive interchange between disciplines that study American religion? The question turns out to be more significant than I anticipated. Although not all fields were represented, the two-day dialogue engaged people who really care about cross-disciplinary work and who, in some degree, have already done it.

To pursue the question, the conference highlighted scholars who have made outstanding advancements in their own discipline. Yet, there is an interesting, unintended consequence of bringing in big-time academics. Here's what I mean.

To be an outstanding scholar very often means confounding the prevailing wisdom of a particular field. When professional boundaries are breached, scholars are forced to address issues and concerns often taken for granted by their own colleagues. Further, when these scholars achieve notoriety, they are caught up in debates (often defending their work) arguing and addressing issues within their own discipline. So when these scholars give 15 minute presentations catching people up to “the state of the discipline,” they end of talking about issues that lie at the very center of their own fields.

Image by navets via flicker

Because panelists spend so much time talking in the context of central issues and debates within their own fields and the conversation happens in such a summary fashion, discussions that may be stimulating to historians (for example) become nearly untranslatable to me as an outsider. On the other side, I felt there was not enough sociologically sensitive discussions to address my own concerns -- at the same time I'm sure historians thought far too much was said about topics that don’t seem to matter much at all.

This has nothing to do with the value of each scholar’s contribution, only with the difficulty of addressing an academically diverse audience. Such are the perils of interdisciplinary conversation. Certainly there are challenges to continuing cross-disciplinary dialogues and making them more productive.

On a friendly note, perhaps future conferences would benefit by greater intentionality to include discussions that addresses confusions and misunderstandings that occur when scholars attempt to cross disciplinary lines. Future conversations might include scholars who explicitly address the process of learning to work the boundaries from those academics who occupy the gaps and successful researchers who have navigated their own disciplinary waters while remaining open to issues beyond their home base.

In my own case, I was sad to see how the rich contributions of sociology are being missed by many scholars of religion, and a bit of "translation work" might unlock those analytical resources. Perhaps sociologists are not doing what they can to make knowledge more accessible. How have scholars in other disciplines learned to productively mine the field?

Image by vanrooy_13 via Flickr

Other scholars can address similar issues, and I can already see the conversation from other areas that says, "You did what? Here's what you might consider next time..." With sociologists, too many scholars studying religion see Stark and Finke's "Rational Choice Approach" as THE contemporary sociological approach to religion. That's just wrong; the field is much more varied and nuanced, and the critiques against Marketplace Religion can be quite severe. Let's help each other draw out each other's analytical resources.

Besides learning to "think" better, It may also be profitable to mix in younger scholars to address today's challenges of writing, publishing, and funding across the disciplines. They can also speak to the way they have benefited by the sponsorship and mentoring of senior colleagues in the crossing between disciplines -- perhaps venture a discussion on the tensions and conflicts involved in the process.

Also, this conference smartly avoided tales of "the monograph," yet other helpful discussions could have guided us on alternative venues for creating conversational spaces (for example, this blog was mentioned), and the potential for monies of various types of research and collaboration.

These are just a few of my ideas. I'm sure many of you could add your own.

In these and other occasions, I appreciate the progressive broadening of relationships, love the encounter with ever-new streams of research literature, and progressively gain a more substantive understanding of various methodological and theoretical approaches to studying the richness of human behavior. I had a great experience at the conference and am eager for more. And I basked in the very "spirit" of the conference, a gathering of people eager to learn from one another. Whether the occasion is casual or formal, let's all do that a whole lot more.

A Religio-Sociological Survey in the Quad Cities Area

A Survey Experiment: Race, Religion, Politics, and Other Comfortable Topics
by Everett Hamner

A few weeks ago I took off my customary literary critic hat and spent nine hours wearing a sociologist costume. During the early stages of an interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar entitled “Ethnic Literatures of the United States: Race, Religion, and Election ’08,” I took my ten students to a weekend multicultural festival in the Quad Cities (IL/IA) and spent an afternoon and evening surveying attendees on Gallup questions ranging from likely choices for president to assessments of local race relations to beliefs about evolution and creation. This is not my usual gig, but after reading autobiographies by Obama and McCain, and before launching into novels about civil rights and Vietnam, I wanted my students to get outside the classroom and into conversations with others of very different racial backgrounds, political persuasions, and religious traditions. 252 such discussions later, we ended up with data that is suggestive if not conclusive, a number of eye-opening personal encounters, a broader appreciation of each other as human beings, and—to my knowledge—not a single sunburn.

I would emphasize up front that our data was drawn entirely from voluntary attendees of a multicultural festival, one which required either a $2 admission fee or two cans of food for donation to a local food bank. Bastion of red-blooded conservatism this was not, so we certainly expected the crowd to favor Obama. Even so, the actual numbers were surprisingly lopsided: 80% for Obama, 13% for McCain, and 7% other/undecided. Granted, the crowd was one-third African American and over half Democratic, but the survey was administered before the stock market lost a couple thousand points over the last few weeks. Curious about factors associated with voters’ choices, I queried our data with the help of a generous sociologist colleague, Dr. David Rohall (also of Western Illinois University).

In the end, the following categories appeared to have the most significant correlations with choice for president:

**gender (Obama drew 62% of his voters from women and 38% from men, while McCain drew 39% of his voters from women and 61% from men);

**educational attainment (McCain drew 36% of his voters from those with a high school degree or less, while only 18% of Obama’s voters fit these categories; conversely, 56% of Obama’s voters had a BA or more, while only 36% of McCain’s voters held college degrees or more); and

**attitudes toward job opportunities available to racial minorities (when asked, “do you feel that racial minorities in this country have equal job opportunities?”, 21% of Obama supporters said yes and 68% said no, but 63% of McCain supporters said yes and only 25% said no). (By comparison, in a national Gallup poll asking the same question this summer, 53% answered yes and 46% said no.)

Enough with the basics. Personally, the answers I found juiciest were those engaging attitudes toward biblical interpretation and evolutionary theory. Here the broader Gallup information is crucial for setting the context. As is regularly lamented by scholars of biology and religion alike, over the last quarter-century, anywhere between 43-47% of Americans have steadily chosen a survey response stating, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” rather than other answers accepting evolutionary theory (one of which even allows for God’s “guidance” of that process). With this in mind, our survey’s lower measurement of only 28% identifying with young earth creationism might seem a significant drop, at least before one considers the liberal-leaning demographics of our sample. However, what fascinates me is the fact that in a crowd that was only 9% Republican, three times that percentage still denied the validity of evolution, a claim upon which modern biology places as much weight as modern physics does the notion of gravity. Not coincidentally, when asked about their views of scripture, a similar 32% of our respondents chose “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word,” rather than “The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally” or “The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man.”

What do these numbers mean? Admittedly, in terms of “quantitative proof,” our survey is rather humble. Nonetheless, as much as I may be “reading into” the data (rather than pretending the strictly neutral, absolutely objective posture that often seems the sacred cow of quantitative analysis), a key insight seems buried beneath these figures. As Katie Lofton emphasized at an ASA panel on fundamentalism we shared last fall, academia desperately needs to counter rather than exacerbate our culture’s all-too-common equations of political conservatism with religious fundamentalism, and vice versa. Recent months have brought greater visibility to relatively liberal Christians like Sojourners founder Jim Wallis and Saddleback Church pastor and author Rick Warren (whose August presidential forum featured questions about environmental stewardship and global poverty, not just abortion and homosexuality), so this error may have become less tempting of late, but one election does not an entrenched assumption erase. Indeed in all of our disciplines, might we not do well to explore the growing number—one in five, this survey would suggest—of Americans who are not necessarily Republican, not necessarily politically conservative, but who still assume the first eleven chapters of Genesis should be read as the introduction to a scientific textbook? Rather than a culturally-mediated ancient Near Eastern effort to interpret reality in light of a God who daringly claimed superiority above all others, the flannel-board image of Genesis is amazingly tenacious. Instead of dividing people into religious believers and enlightened atheists—categories themselves highly dependent on traditional Western, monotheistic assumptions about the nature of “religion”—perhaps we need to spend more energy asking how American culture continues to transmit fundamentalist assumptions, even when individuals and groups appear untouched by groups like Focus on the Family.

A last note about the pedagogical impact of this kind of project: very time-consuming, but very rewarding. Because my students were involved at all stages of the project, from choosing the site and questions to administering surveys and analyzing responses, I think they became more thoughtful critics of the “hard data” and “fast facts” that contemporary media constantly offer. Equally importantly, they got to know me and each other in a setting where we were quite clearly all on the same team, working together toward a common goal and without a large gap between “professor” and “student.” Approximately half of my students observed in their project write-ups that the excuse of completing a survey enabled more extensive and personal conversations with members of other ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious groups than they had ever before experienced, and several even said that these experiences strongly challenged stereotypes they had unconsciously maintained. For these reasons alone—and whether our data “proves” anything or not—I’ll be attempting this kind of project again, and I’d be glad to share more with anyone interested in trying something similar.

Religious Sociology

In our continuing quest to diversify the fields and interests of our contributors here at Religion in American History, please welcome our new guest poster Gerardo Marti!

Gerardo Marti is author of Hollywood Faith: Holiness, Prosperity, and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church (Rutgers University Press, 2008) and A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church (Indiana University Press, 2005).

Active in researching race, religion, and social change, he is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Davidson College and will be the Lynette S. Autrey Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University this fall while completing a book project on worship in racially integrated churches. Here's his first post.
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History and Sociology - A Dispatch from Boston
by Gerardo Marti

Among the most stimulating events surrounding this year's American Sociological Association meetings in Boston was the "Culture Mini-conference" hosted at the Harvard Business School organized by the Sociology of Culture section, one of the most popular sections of the association. For me, a real highlight was hearing a great talk from Geneviève Zubrzycki, an assistant professor from the University of Michigan, who spoke on the relation between history and culture.

Zubrzycki is the author of The Crosses of Auschwitz (Chicago, 2006), an award-winning book that is (as she describes it) an "analysis of a specific event, the so-called War of the Crosses, when ultranationalist Poles erected hundreds of crosses just outside Auschwitz to mark the site as one of Polish martyrdom (as opposed to one of the Jewish Shoah), and to stridently affirm Poles' Catholic identity." The book is interesting and insightful as it suggests a means to examine how memorials and broader historical events contribute to the collective identity of nation-states.

In her talk, Zubrzycki described her work "as a cultural sociology of historical transitions and transformations, of historical crossroads and turning points, of moments of what I call 'narrative shocks' that question collective memory and redefine national identity." Historical sociology is a mode of inquiry, "a way of thinking through social problems that is dynamic and processual." She looks to the meaning given to events through narratives and then how those narratives determine "the direction of social transformation and institutional change." Analysis of the crosses of Auschwitz provides a strategic opportunity for demonstrating how symbols (in this case, a nationalized memorial) "are embedded in layers of historical narratives created through key events." In other words, sociologists like Zubrzycki believe the past affects the future through the collective meanings people give to events, and then those event-meanings shape the future. In her work, symbols are not static but historicized.

Like other sociologists, my basic training often pushed quantitative analysis over qualitative inquiry. Yet as I continue to grow in my fascination with history, I am thrilled to hear careful thinking from colleagues on the relation between history and the fundamental dynamics of the social world. Scholars like Zubrzycki are pushing sociologists like me beyond merely providing a mere "historical context" for significant social dynamics but rather to force ourselves to work through the complex issues of collective memory and the nature of temporality in social constructions. Stay tuned for more from Zubrzycki. Her current research focuses on religion and Canada-but of course the nuance of the work goes beyond such a quick blurb.

The Evangelical Complexion

At The Immanent Frame, Joel Carpenter asks what will be the effect of immigration on the social and political makeup of American evangelicalism. Immigration and American religion often is told as the story of pluralism, the burgeoning of religious traditions from around the world. Even more important, perhaps, is the diversification of American Christianity:


Yet the most important religious dynamic of recent immigration, sociologist Steve Warner argues, is that it has brought even more diversity to American Christianity. Two-thirds of the new immigrants are Christians. The most prominent factor in this realm is Latin American immigration and the burgeoning Latino population in the United States. The conventional wisdom is that Latin America is pervasively Roman Catholic, and so are Latinos in the United States. Indeed, some 68 percent of Latinos in the U.S. are Roman Catholic and Latinos now are 30 percent of all U.S. Catholics. More than half of Latino Catholics in the U.S., however, identify with the charismatic movement. Another major piece of news is the rise of evangelical Protestantism in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos. In both Latin America as a whole and among U.S. Latinos, about 15 percent are now evangelical Protestants.

Carpenter considers, for example, where Latino evangelicals will head, politically; current signs are mixed.

Carpenter's essay is the one of an ongoing series currently being posted at Immanent Frame, featuring essays from some of the best-known scholars in the country. Here's a description of the series, and I'll continue to post links here as they are published:

In response to the media's increasing focus on the role of “evangelicals” in this fall's presidential election, we have organized an ongoing series of pieces that will examine what politicians, journalists, scholars and even evangelicals themselves mean when they refer to this highly contested category. Our series on "Evangelicals & evangelicalisms" looks critically not only at assumptions about evangelicals both in the US and beyond, but also at the ways that the "evangelical" category has been used to position people institutionally and historically. While scholars of religion have long recognized the category's complexities, it rarely receives sustained critical attention in either academic or public circles. Dedicated not only to high intellectual quality, dynamic discussion, and critical debate, but also to reaching both academic and non-specialist audiences, The Immanent Frame provides an ideal context in which to air out some of these issues.

Penitente Renaissance

I recently reviewed a rather unusual picture text on the Penitente Brotherhoods of northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado, for a local interest newsletter. It occurred to me the book's subject may be of interest to a wider audience. While this is a work of an enthusiast and caretaker of a tradition, not a scholarly book per se, the subject may interest some readers of this blog, and some of you may want to get this for your school libraries. Hope this is of interest to some --

Ruben E. Archuleta, Manifesting Hope: Penitente Renaissance (Pueblo West, CO: El Jefe, 2007).

Such a labor of love as Ruben E. Archuleta's Manifesting Hope: Penitente Renaissance could only have been accomplished by an insider to a religious tradition famous, and sometimes infamous, for its secretiveness and insularity. Author Ruben Archuleta, formerly the Chief of Police in Pueblo and now an author and santero, writes that “the Hermanos of Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico are as fine men as anywhere to be found. They are holy, endowed, by an age-old spirituality, especially the spirituality of the orders of begging friars. As Fray Angelico Chavez taught in My Penitente Land, the Brotherhoods live in the lands of sheep and shepherds, living in the rough, dry barren uplands similar to those of Palestine and Extremadura” (27). The abundant and extravagantly produced color photographs in this volume lie as testament both to the rugged and isolated rural conditions in the New Mexico/Colorado highlands that rural and largely Hispanic residents have faced, as well as the remarkable durability of religious practices in these depopulated counties that stand about as far (not geographically, but culturally) from megachurches and pop “praise music” as one could get.

Archuleta’s work on the Penitentes makes a nice accompaniment to scholarly works in this area, notably including Marta Weigle’s Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood, originally a University of Pennsylvania dissertation in 1971 which still stands as the most thorough and complete documentation of the history and cultures of the La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno (The Pious Fraternity of Our Father Jesus the Nazarene), popularly known as “The Penitentes.” Established, in all likelihood, sometime in the early nineteenth century, the Society is based in northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado in Hispanic communities largely removed from the major arteries of American life. The Penitentes are known for organized yearly processions commemorating Christ’s suffering. In years past, sometimes those commemorations featured acts of penance such as self-flagellation, from which the Penitentes gained a bit of dark renown.

Historically, the Penitentes were hardly viewed so favorably as they appear in books such as this one specifically designed to honor them. From their earlier days in the nineteenth century, Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy expressed his displeasure with Hispano practices, mostly by attempting to ban them. Of course, Lamy faced a formidable opponent in Fray Antonio Jose Martinez, who had been a defender of Hispano rights in Mexican territory prior to the North American conquest. Lamy attempted to institute a regime of European Tridentine Catholic practices, which forbade practices not specifically sanctioned by centralized church authorities. Much later, in the twentieth century, the Church finally recognized the Brothers as a legitimate part of church tradition. By that time, it appeared the Penitentes could die out entirely; that did not happen, as this book testifies, but the numerous photographs of older men, eroding walls and roofs on the moradas, and counties facing significant economic and social challenges suggest that the Penitente renaissance remains a work in progress, and the brotherhood a legacy of southwestern Hispano Catholicism whose future is both promising (due, in part, to outsider interest in the santos and other artistic monuments to southwestern Latino devotion) and imperiled (due to an aging population and struggling local branches of the brotherhood).

For years, I have assigned to American religious history students a classic of the field: Robert Orsi’s Madonna of 115th St., a work which studies the practice of penitential Catholicism among (mostly female) Italian Catholics in uptown New York, East Harlem, from the late nineteenth century and down through much of the twentieth century. In the case of the devotions paid to this apparition of the Madonna, women control virtually everything about the practice. Italian-American men, largely anticlerical in sentiment, serve at most as auxiliaries to a set of practices which enshrine female suffering and sacrifice. After discussing this book with students, I often ask them, why are Catholic devotional and penitential practices so largely contained with the worlds of women, while parallel practices in the Latino Catholic world are defined and regulated by men? In asking this question, I am thinking primarily of the Brothers of Light and the Brothers of Blood, the orders which have carried on the practices so colorfully documented in this book. Someday, maybe, a scholar in American religious studies will suggest why the Penitentes, so unusually for American Catholic devotional practice, remain a world of men, with women primarily serving as auxiliaries and helpmeets. In the meantime, this book will provide both information and visual pleasure to its readers.

Dispatches from Zion

by John G. Turner

Particularly if arriving in May from an already oppressive Gulf Coast summer, one can easily see why Brigham Young and his fellow pioneers adopted Utah as their Zion (at least pending the anticipated return to Jackson County, Missouri).

I'm in the midst of two weeks of digging through archives in Salt Lake City, Provo, and Logan. While the manuscripts take me to the middle of the nineteenth century, being in Utah also encourages me to find opportunities to learn more about contemporary Mormonism as well.

I haven't gotten to everything on my list: the Temple Square Welcome Center, Brigham Young's Lion House, and the Humanitarian Center will all have to wait for next time. There are canyons and wildlife refuges to explore in Utah, after all.

I did, however, accomplish one major item on my Mormonism "to-do list" by finding a Mormon family to take me to church. It was a priceless experience. I could have gone by myself anywhere, but it was easier being escorted. I attended the Priesthood meeting (for the men -- women attend a Relief Society hour), a Sunday school lesson, and sacrament meeting. Three hours altogether. Most wards begin with the sacrament meeting, but it's left up to the individual ward.

Overall, I was surprised at both the commonalities with Protestantism and the differences. Much of the discussion on topics such as prayer and Jesus would have resonated with most Protestant Christians. There was discussion of the Mormon understanding of the Godhead -- Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ as two distinct personages (with bodies). The Sunday school lesson was on the Book of Mormon (the entire church rotates through the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Book of Mormon, and Doctrine & Covenants). It mostly sailed over my head. Zarahemla!

The sacrament meeting was noteworthy first of all for the boisterous children present. It featured an older couple who had recently completed a two-year mission outreach to Hispanic families in the area. I was surprised that the sacrament itself featured bread and water (rather than, say, grape juice). The closing hymn seemed very appropriate: "Families Can Be Together Forever."

There were several other highlights, including lunch with two of the Juvenile Instructor guys at BYU. See that blog's recent discussion of Randall's The Fire Spreads. I also sat in on a BYU Book of Mormon class.

A few miscellaneous thoughts:

- As poor as I would be at observing the hot beverage portion of the Word of Wisdom, I find it a troubling sign of declension that Starbucks has made it to Logan, Utah. Still, quite a few establishments advertise "cocoa."

- The affordability and quality of the cafeteria in the Church Office Building (that also houses the church archives) alone would be a major impetus to researching Mormon History. After hours of looking at microfilm, though, it is a shame there's no coffee available at least for gentiles.

- Hearing about the intolerance that most Mormons have encountered from evangelicals makes me wince. I met one man who served a mission in Alabama, definitely hostile territory. Even if you believe certain groups of people are going to hell, a more winsome approach would go further to rescue them from it.

- I learned that movers cringe when discovering a Mormon family's Emergency Food Storage is part of their load.

Getting to spend two weeks in the heart of Mormondom is a reminder of how much there is for us to learn about religion in America that we can't learn through books alone. Regardless of the faith tradition, there are opportunities to visit historical sites, worship services, and other concrete manifestations of those traditions. Not to mention just talking with folks! Iwish I seized those opportunities more often.

Anyone desperate to learn about the dwindling Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is welcome at our church in Alabama any Sunday.

The Religious Marketplace -- From New Contributing Editor Phillip Sinitiere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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