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).

The Tea Party and Catholic Schools

Michael J. Atman

In case you missed them, here are two posts that our readers might find interesting.

The first comes from Thomas Kidd over at Patheos. He offers a brief review of Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. He writes:

To be fair, there's a lot of interesting history interspersed with these gratuitous fulminations. But Lepore's rant against the Tea Party is at once predictable and ironic. Predictable because Lepore fulfills the stereotypical reaction that one would expect from a liberal (I do not say "far left") Harvard professor, who cannot fathom what could motivate these Tea Partiers other than racism and religious fanaticism. The Whites of Their Eyes is ironic because it perpetuates exactly the sort of angry political feuding that Lepore ostensibly deplores. Because of the book's tone, there's no chance that anyone affiliated with the Tea Party will read this book and be chastened by it. About the only thing this kind of book is guaranteed to do is to make left-wing readers feel good about themselves.

The second comes from Religion Dispatches, where Marian Ronan discusses Timothy Dolan, John Hughes, and Catholic schools in New York.

Commie Pinko Pilgrims and Peaceful (?) Puritans

Paul Harvey

A little Thanksgiving history blogging for you. I hadn't quite realized how much of a cottage industry peddling the anachronistic "Socialist Pilgrims" thesis had become, but this piece from the New York Times explores the spread of this myth. I was shocked -- SHOCKED -- to learn how much of a role Glenn Beck and his historical henchman W. Cleon Skousen have played in marketing this story, My favorite part: the time when Rush Limbaugh added in the bit about how they grew organic vegetables, after they had learned that capitalism worked and produced an abundance which they could share with the Indians.

In "Peace, Love, and Puritanism," David Hall, of Harvard Divinity School, defends the Puritans against generations of Hawthornian and Menckenian scorn (and adds that, yes, wild turkeys probably appeared on the original menu). He writes:

Why does it matter whether we get the Puritans right or not? The simple answer is that it matters because our civil society depends, as theirs did, on linking an ethics of the common good with the uses of power. In our society, liberty has become deeply problematic: more a matter of entitlement than of obligation to the whole. Everywhere, we see power abused, the common good scanted. Getting the Puritans right won’t change what we eat on Thanksgiving, but it might change what we can be thankful for and how we imagine a better America.

Historiann has no problem with Hall's conclusion, but points out some of the darker underside to the history of feasting and fasting in America -- in particular, its long connection to war and tribalism:

Both fasts and feasts were opportunities to reaffirm tribalism, of a world view of us versus them. The history of fasting and feasting in the English communities of New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should be written in blood–both blood in the sense of kinship ties, and in the sense of the shedding of outsiders’ blood in war.

The history of fasting and feasting is "more complicated and much darker than Americans would like to remember," she reminds us. Reading the many pages on this subject in George C. Rable's God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War, reinforces this point. About every five pages, it seems, someone from North or South is calling for a fast day, or preaching a fast day sermon. There was a lot of ostensible bowing, scraping, and humility, but ultimately it was all about killing. With all these fast days during the war, it's a wonder anyone ever ate.

John Fea reflects on what he would teach about the original Thanksgiving here, at his new column over at Patheos, and what it meant for the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, who both had been through some brutal times, to share a brief celebration together. I hope your celebration goes well.

Transatlantic Tea Party Time?

Hilde Løvdal

Central figures in the right wing Christian media in Norway have expressed a deep admiration for conservative American Christians. Now, they want to put on the Tea Party mantel.

“We won America, now we must win in Norway.” So said a writer in Norge IDAG, a right wing Christian newspaper, in the aftermath of the American election earlier this month. Editor Finn Jarle Sæle has time and again stated his admiration for Sarah Palin, and the editorial from the November 8, 2010 on the election clearly expressed his admiration for Tea Partiers:

. . . They won America.

Now we must do the same in Norway. We must, like them, say that Jesus is the foundation of our laws. That’s what Norway’s first national legislation stated at Moster in 1024 and repeated in the Constitution at Eidsvoll in 1814.

The time has come to bring Norway back to the precious principles of our Constitution. Our nation needs a change based on the rule of law, which our fathers gave us. This is how they think in America. They quote George Washington. He said nobody can rule a nation with justice without God and the Bible. They quote the man who abolished slavery, the great Christian president Abraham Lincoln, who said the Bible is the foundation for the law of the land.

The Tea Party says no to socialism and no to secularization. They have said a strong yes to liberty. They elected a libertarian, Rand Paul, to the Senate. Because they know that ultimate freedom, or libertarianism, comes with finding Jesus Christ.

We know that only good, old Jesusland has freedom and prosperity. And we think that those who take away the philosophy of Christ and remove Jesus from our schools, kindergartens, and Constitution, take away our freedom and our prosperity. They surrender us to a controlling state unequipped to give us either freedom or benefits. As a last resort, the state tries to save itself with more and more taxes and more and more control.

So let’s stand up in the spirit of Henrik Wergeland. Norge IDAG wishes to inspire extra-parlamentarian opposition, small and big tea parties. Soon, we too will win elections. We cannot follow the traditional methods that, for a long time, have led to losses for Christians. We win because we no longer just sit on the sofa. We win when we understand our possibilities as Christians. We are the largest people’s movement besides those that have formed around organized sports.

Our first task is to turn each pessimist into an optimist. We will claim God’s blessings over Norway. As before, Deut. 27 and 28 shall be fulfilled. When we follow God’s laws, we are the richest nation in the world. Then, we will start winning Nobel Prizes just as Israelis do. He puts us higher than any other nation, the Bible says, when we keep the covenant from Moster and Eidsvoll, which built Norway. It has helped our country so far, despite the infiltration of socialism and secularization . . .

This is just an excerpt, but you get the picture.

At a time when the more moderate Christian Democratic Party (est. 1933) struggles with massive loss of popular support and strives to find its way back to political power, right wing groups are networking heavily and taking cues from conservative American Protestantism.

Kristenfolket (The Christian People, or just The Christians), a coalition inspired by the Moral Majority, tries to encourage Norwegian Christians to vote for conservative political parties based on a nice bouquet of issues such as support for Israel, defense of traditional marriage, and Islamophobia. In 2009, Kristenfolket and other conservative Christians gathered at Moster, where the first national law based on Christianity was signed, to reclaim Norway for Christ and pray for God’s blessings over Norway. (If God really listened to their prayers, he must be a left wing social democrat.)

Whether they have actual political power or not is hard to estimate. But judging from their economy, they’re on the rise. While the Norwegian State Church, to which about 80% Norwegians belong, struggles to raise enough funds to create a reality show about the life of an ordinary minister, Visjon Norge, a charismatic right wing TV station has a record high offerings and a loyal base of viewers who donate money to the station.

As American style historical fundamentalism seems to seep into Norwegian fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and charismatic wings of Norwegian Christianity, I cling to the fact that Norway is a nation of coffee drinkers. I hope that keeps most of us sober.

Of Tea Parties, Historical Fundamentalism, and Antihistory

Linford D. Fisher

It’s always nice when academic and pleasure reading coincide. Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, 2010) is a bit like that—fun to read, informative, insanely timely, and likely to generate excitement in certain circles for a variety of reasons.

The book is essentially a commentary on the twenty-first century Tea Party by way of the 1970s and the 1770s and is—by Lepore’s own admission—a strong argument against “historical fundamentalism,” which, as she describes it, is "marked by the belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past—'the founding'—is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; that certain historical texts—'the founding documents'—are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments; that the Founding Fathers were divinely inspired; that the academic study of history (whose standards of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism) is a conspiracy and, furthermore, blasphemy; and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible."

The Tea Party folks, she contends, promote not just “kooky history” in their appropriation of Revolutionary themes and employment of Founding rhetoric; they practice antihistory, that is, they conflate the then and the now. The Founders are not just in the eighteenth century, they are here with us now; their struggles are our struggles. “In antihistory,” Lepore muses, “time is an illusion.”

The core of the book is a lively retelling of the Revolutionary Era from the 1760s through the late 1790s. The 1773 Boston Tea Party, ironically, gets precious little play; ditto for the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill (invoked in her title; for the Tea Party proper, you’d have to turn to Ben Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America [Yale, 2010]). Juxtaposing the messy, contested, exhilarating world of the late eighteenth century with the projection of an idealized past created by the Tea Party is both jarring and effective. Framed this way, the story almost tells itself, or so it seems. Regular readers of Lepore’s New Yorker essays will find familiar discussions of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Phillis Wheatley, although there is loads of new material, too, like the delightful sections on Jane (Franklin) Mecom (on whom a biography is forthcoming at some point). Along the way, the reader learns a great deal about the rise of the present Tea Party and how its antihistory came to be in the first place, namely, the historical profession's failure in the wake of the bicentennial of the 1970s to craft a responsible and satisfying historical narrative for the American populace to call their own. Into this lacuna, the Tea Party gladly stepped. In a sense, then, the Tea Party’s (mis)use of history is partially our fault.

As is the case with most books like this, those who should read it, won’t. The book is clearly pitched toward the reading “public”—however defined—who may, in the end, be convinced by the pleasant mix of first-person narrative, historical storytelling, and trenchant analysis, all while hopscotching Lepore-ishly between the eighteenth century and the present. Most obviously, the book is bound be dismissed by the Tea Partiers and their sympathizers as yet another blathering rant by the liberal elites who not only drink the Kool-Aid but help to mix it as they conspire against the American people. The Whites of Their Eyes, however, is hardly that. In many ways it is rather a plea for a particular kind of public discourse and a more accurate use of history. And—in surprising ways—Lepore has spent far more time than you or I with Tea Party folks, trying to understand their rhetoric, concerns, and use of history. Each chapter opens with a fascinating first-person account of attending a Tea Party meeting or rally, before zipping to the eighteenth century and back again.

This book provoked all kinds of questions for me: about the use of history; the decision to write a book like this; and—most of all—what it was like hanging with Tea Party folks. I had to know. And so, over steak salads by the open windows of the Grafton Street Pub perched on the corner of the unseasonably humid Harvard Square, I hijacked the final minutes of a previously-scheduled luncheon with Jill to talk about her book.

LF: In a sense, portions of this book read like an ethnography of the Tea Party. How did—if at all—the experience of attending rallies and meetings in pubs affect your perspective (positively or negatively) of the Tea Party folks and their aims?

JL: My ideas definitely shifted as a result of spending time with the Tea Party people. From the beginning, I always outed myself as a Harvard historian who was writing an article (for The New Yorker; the book idea grew over time) and that I was interested in how people view the Revolution. Most people at the Tea Party meetings didn’t ask more about me. They wanted to talk about themselves. So I listened. Most people felt misrepresented by the mainstream media; everyone I talked to said this. Everyone in the left-wing press was saying the Tea Party was all about race; but for these people I talked to it was not about race. People were upset about that. Austin Hess was offended at being called a racist; he said we lived in a post-racial world. I took him at his word and wanted to be sympathetic with him. I’m not saying it has nothing to do with race. But that’s why they love the American Revolution, because they see it as a white, pre-racial movement, which of course it wasn’t. But that’s sort of the point of the book, and why I gave it the title it has [The Whites of Their Eyes].

LF: This must have taken a lot of intellectual discipline to go and only listen.

JL: I had a lot of fun, actually. Like with the Egan brothers; they were hilarious—exactly like my family. Being at the meetings was pretty much like every family dinner I’ve had since I was eight—was never a Thanksgiving dinner without a pitched political battle. We were family and yet we disagreed. So rather than these meetings being a foreign experience, it was familiar. I never tried to persuade people; I always wanted them to persuade me. People called me “Jane Goodall” because I took notes furiously and furrowed my brow. It’s not a move that a lot of scholars would make, to go and just listen. I did come to think that I understood better, but I still disagreed. For example, I was really trying to figure out people’s position on healthcare. I pressed George Egan on this point, and he told me this heartbreaking story of his three-year-old daughter who was sick and hospitalized and the hospital sent him a bill for ten thousand dollars. He had no insurance, but he got a second job and paid it off over time. And then—this is what surprised me—at the end he said something like, “That’s why I’m against Obamacare. Because I had to pay for it and others should, too.” The same story could be used as an argument for universal healthcare, but that’s not how he was using it. In the end, I think I did become more sympathetic to what they were about. I got to know them. I found myself in the position of defending the Tea Party to my colleagues and friends. I grew to like these people; I didn’t think they were crazy, even though I still disagree with them.

LF: What do you hope that people take away from this book? And have you felt that people are “getting” what you are trying to do?

JL: I’d like people to have a different vision for what political discourse could be like in this country, one that is based on historical evidence and respectful dialog. Argument and evidence are important. Often I need to preface my talks around the country with a plea for restraining emotions and practicing a more evidence-based, measured discourse that is generally lacking in political life today.

I have gotten a lot of positive feedback from various people—schoolteachers, politicians. My colleagues have been uniformly supportive. Same with people I see at events. I was at an event in Washington D.C., on a panel at the National Press Club with Dick Armey (Freedom Works), someone from Fox News, and a person from the New York Times. And a whole group of Freedom Works folks walked in holding—to a man, each woman—color photocopies of my New Yorker essay on the Tea Party. They came to fight. But after the session, a lot of the Freedom Works people came up and said they appreciated what I said. These people really wanted to talk to a real history professor who was taking them seriously. I met a guy in Texas who told me: “You’re the first liberal I’ve talked to that made any sense.” After one talk, a conservative Christian couple approached me and wanted to convince me that the Constitution grants only god-given rights. Neither of us convinced the other, but they appreciated that I was willing to talk. I’m not sure those people “get” me or will like the book, but they are willing to talk to me.

LF: Is this a new direction for you—tackling present issues, arguing for a particular kind of public engagement in the historical profession?

JL: I’ve always thought there should be places to talk about shared concerns, which is why I started Common-Place with Jane Kamensky. It is a place where academics, librarians, teachers, can all share ideas. I appreciate all kinds of historians—we need both Gary Nash and Gordon Wood, for example. I think debate is important; recently in my seminars I’ve set up a series of debates where students read historical speeches and essays and spend time making the case for the historical person they have been assigned. And it works. Students get all animated and put on southern accents or whatever. But of course the next day they are slouched back in their chairs. But it is still worth it.

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

Kelly Baker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Luther King on Barry Goldwater: Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, Part IX

Randall Stephens

Martin Luther King, Jr., reflected on the career and influence of Barry Goldwater several years after LBJ's landslide victory. (With all the media attention to King's legacy and uses of the past, a look at King's own views might shed some much needed light.)

King observed the rightward turn of the Republican Party in 1964, the intense anti-government polices of Goldwater, and the Radical Right presence at the GOP convention. "It was both unfortunate and disastrous that the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater as its candidate for President of the United States," lamented King. "In foreign policy Mr. Goldwater advocated a narrow nationalism, a crippling isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude that could plunge the whole world into the dark abyss of annihilation."

But what bothered King more was Goldwater's domestic policies. He offered a stinging critique of what he considered the Arizona Senator's antiquated, out-of-touch ideology:

On social and economic issues, Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century. The issue of poverty compelled the attention of all citizens of our country. Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated. On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.*

*From The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, ed., Clayborne Carson (Time Warner, 1998), 247. See also, Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper & Row, 1967).

Anthony Stevens-Arroyo on Catholics and the Tea Party

Randall Stephens

Over at the Washington Post's On Faith blog Anthony Stevens-Arroyo offers an interesting historical take on Catholicism and contemporary politics. For those faithful who are ready to pitch their tent with the Tea Party, he points to a 16th-century counter example: Jesuit priest Juan de Mariana (1536-1624). Stevens-Arroyo contrasts the radicalism of Mariana with Tea Party anti-statism. He also asks Catholics to consider whether the Tea Party "contributes to a culture of violence." I don't think Stevens-Arroyo's guilt-by-innuendo works here. Still the article is food for thought.

Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, "Taxes, tyranny and a Catholic Tea Party," On Faith, July 28, 2010.

Can a Catholic be a member of today's Tea Party? There are many versions of the Tea Party in the United States today but what they have in common is how they link taxation and tyranny. It may surprise some that the justification to rebel against taxation and tyranny is found in the writings of the 16th century Jesuit priest, Juan de Mariana (1536-1624). This first of the Catholic Tea Partyers, however, could teach the current movement a thing or two. read on >>>

The Strange Career of Thomas Paine

I'm pleased today to guest post another contribution from Benjamin Park, a graduate student at the University of Edinburgh who normally blogs at Juvenile Instructor. Ben's post concerns material he had researched for his master's thesis, about reactions/responses to Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason to Christopher Hitchens to the Tea Party Movement. Ben's previous guest post for us may be found here.

Thomas Paine in American Memory
by Benjamin Park

I recently visited the American Philosophical Society’s library in Philadelphia, PA. Besides housing a treasure-trove of early American documents, and being housed in a beautiful building across the street from Independence hall, the APS Library also offers tourist-friendly exhibits in its front lobby. I was excited to see a showcase dedicated to Thomas Paine—the focus of my research trip and center figure of my master’s thesis. Further, I was intrigued to notice that while the display exhibited numerous items—first editions Common Sense, The Crisis, The Rights of Man, and several letters or cartoons exemplifying Paine as a heroic American revolutionary—it did not include the one pamphlet that is the focus of my study: his deistical, anti-institutional religion tract, The Age of Reason. Whether this was a conscious decision or not, it merely continues the long and ambiguous relationship between Thomas Paine and American culture.

The importance of Paine’s writings in influencing the creation of a new American persona in the 1770s would be difficult to overstate: his pamphlets and editorials forged a national identity based in opposition to the British monarchy and as a starting point for a worldwide democratic revolution; “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” he declared in Common Sense. Indeed, Paine became the prototype figure for the young republic as he continued his defense of radical democratic principles, later taking his show on the road to England and, when unsuccessful there, France, just in time for the boiling point of the French Revolution.

But it was his years in France that altered his position in the American pantheon. Not only did he become associated in the public mind as the face of an increasingly unpopular revolution—at least at the federal and elite level—but he had finally gained the gusto to publish on what he felt was the second of a two-part revolution for American society: that the political revolution would “be followed by a revolution in the system of religion.” “All national institutions of churches,” he declared in Age of Reason, “appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” Paine had confidence that, just as the American colonists embraced his message two decades before, the American citizens would now recognize the frailty of Christian logic, reject the oppression of organized religion, and welcome a society based on natural religion and anti-biblical morality.

Of course, Paine’s prediction proved not only to be wrong, but drastically wrong, and his reputation suffered deeply as a result. While the first edition of his Age of Reason sold remarkably well, the backlash against his deistic views were as numerous as they were vehement (and only increased after Paine published a second volume of diatribe). Pamphlets responding to Paine were published from every region of the young nation as well as every denomination of the increasingly competitive religious marketplace; respondents ranged from Congregationalist Timothy Dwight to Unitarian Joseph Priestley, and from Baptist Daniel Humphreys to Universalist Elhanan Winchester. These responses—the focus of my master’s thesis—number over one hundred and offer an important glimpse into 1790s America. However, while each individual text represented a different outlook for the future of America to the extent that they shatter the idea of a homogenous view of American society during the period, they unite in an important way: not only was Paine wrong, they argued, but his views were un-American. Paine, once at the crux of the American identity, was now the antitype for a nation increasingly drawn to morality based on revealed religion, an epistemology based on biblical common sense, and an exceptionalist culture pitted against Paine’s cosmopolitan milieu.

Paine’s reputation would only get worse over the next few decades, especially after a puzzling decision in 1796 to publish an open letter lashing out against then-President George Washington. Even the Jeffersonian Democrats who synthesized with Paine’s radical republican views felt a need to distance themselves from the perceived “atheist” who soon became the bogeyman for the Evangelical culture. Paine’s previous role in the revolution diminished as well: when Mercy Otis Warren wrote the popular history of the American Revolution—a job Thomas Paine was originally assigned to write—Paine’s influence was literally relegated to nothing more than a footnote. When monuments and plaques were raised in honor of the nation’s founders within the next century, anything remembering Paine was conspicuously absent, all because his deistical tracts overshadowed his revolutionary propaganda. “It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read ‘The Age of Reason,’” Mark Twain fittingly wrote toward the end of the following century.

This does not mean that Paine has forever remained in the shadows, however; far from it. The controversial writer has had several resurgences in the twentieth century, from FDR’s use of The Crisis at the start of World War II to Ronald Reagan’s invoking of Paine to prophesy the greatness of America’s future. The largest—and perhaps most ironic—revival, though, has been the use of Paine by the Tea Party movement. Attracted to his views of limited government, Glenn Beck assigned a man identified as Thomas Paine to announce Beck’s 9/12 project last year; then, perceivably inspired by Paine, Beck published his own Common Sense as the manifesto for the right-wing movement, even republishing the entirety of Paine’s same-titled classic within its covers as a way to seemingly validate his message. Paine’s works are perhaps being printed in more editions today than ever before, and his simple yet powerful voice thunders throughout many Tea Party rallies.

Of course, what is absent is any mention of the other half of Paine’s revolutionary argument: the evolution away from Christianity. This is, of course, no surprise given the religious underpinnings of much of the movement. (Also amusingly missing is Paine’s critiques of the US Constitution.) Paine is only useful to today’s pundits for his political commentary, while the religious portion of his message is conveniently swept under the rug. Just as with any historic figure in modern times, though, it’s the pliability of his persona that makes Paine so relevant to today’s world—pliable enough to be used by Glenn Beck to critique big government on the one hand, and by Christopher Hitchens to critique modern-day society and religion on the other.

In the end, Glenn Beck, modern-day Tea Party Protestors, political commentators on both ends of the spectrum, cultural critics arguing from either side of many debates, and even the esteemed American Philosophical Society are only continuing a national tradition of choosing what parts of our history to emphasize and what parts to ignore. In a sense, many echo the resolution a New York Republican Society pronounced two centuries ago: “May [Paine’s] Right’s of Man be handed down to our latest posterity, but may his Age of Reason never live to see the rising generation.” Such is the malleable nature of national memory, especially when religion is predominantly involved. Perhaps, however, Paine would be pleased to receive any acknowledgement in today’s world, no matter how disjointedly it comes.

Review of Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade Against the New Deal

Randall Stephens

I'm out in San Diego finishing one more week of a research fellowship at Point Loma Nazarene University. It might just be one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. (Sorry about that Northwest Central Kansas Community College, Industrial Training Institute, and Manure Recycling Plant.) PLNU's history and political science department looks right out onto the Pacific. Amazing.

Have not posted on RiAH of late, so I thought I'd post part of my Christian Century review of Kim Phillips-Fein's Invisible Hands. Lazy? Perhaps. Paul has been rocking it, as have others. (I have some interviews in the pipeline, but need to get those in proper order.)

The old new right

Long before the shouting contests over national health care and decades before Tea Partiers raised a collective ARGHHH!, a conservative, antigovernment movement was forged. The problem with government, these activists said, is that there is too much of it. When taxes and regulation go down, happiness and good will go up. For decades American conservatives have called for the market to do its magic work without interference. . . .

Phillips-Fein tells the full story of the right, with all its weird turns, quite well. Her discussion of the group Spiritual Mobilization, "which took as its mission a theological justification for capitalism," is captivating. It was just one of many similar crusading groups in the 1950s and the years following. Christianity, its spokespeople warned, had too long been associated with "pink" seminarians, leftist theologians, and intrusive progressives of all stripes. According to the members of Spiritual Mobilization, Christ promoted self-interest and never advocated "disinterested altruism." It was the sort of faith that might have suited even Ayn Rand. The organization disintegrated in the early 1960s in a stranger-than-fiction twist, writes Phillips-Fein, when leaders gravitated to a British guru who championed psychotropic drugs and higher-consciousness hokum. >>>

The Tea Party as a Religious Movement: A Response

(Cross-posted at Juvenile Instructor)

Over at Religion Dispatches, Joanna Brooks has a two-part post asking “Who Says the Tea Party isn’t a Religious Movement?” In challenging Lou Ruprecht’s answer of “no,” Brooks notes that “for the Mormon sector of the movement (including Tea Party icon Glenn Beck), … the Tea Party taps into a powerful and distinctive complex of Mormon beliefs about the divinity of the U.S. Constitution and the last-days role of righteous souls from the Rocky Mountains in saving it from destruction.”

It seems to me that Brooks is spot-on in highlighting the religious dimensions of the Tea Party movement in the Jello Belt (that’s the Mormon Corridor in the intermountain West for those unfamiliar). And others have stepped forward to back her up, noting not only the distinctly Mormon characteristics of Tea Partiers in Utah, Idaho, and Arizona, but also the role religion plays in the minds of Tea Partiers elsewhere. Writing at the recently launched Religion in the American West blog, Brandi Denison explored the legacy bequeathed to Tea Partiers in western Colorado as a result of “the entanglement of land, religion, and capitalism in the American West.” “[T]he connections among land, Christianity as a justification for capitalism, and Christianity as site of refuge are strong and powerful ‘assemblages’” among Tea Party activists today.

While readily agreeing with those conclusions then, I’d like to take issue with the interpretation offered by Doe Daughtrey, a graduate student in Religious Studies at Arizona State whose research focuses on the intersections of Mormonism and New Age Paganism. As quoted in the second half of Brooks’s post at RD, Daughtrey suggests that

In a secularized, routinized, or demythologized Mormonism (which looks more like mainline Protestantism than the mystical tradition established by Joseph Smith), the religion is missing that distinctiveness, that tension of persecuted otherness. Beck and the Tea Party movement reenchant the experience of being Mormon . . . or at least they reawaken the Mormon cultural memory of prophetic millennialism.

Beck, a convert to Mormonism, recalls the strident prophetic voice that distinguished Mormonism from 19th-century Protestant groups. Many Mormons have a long cultural memory of persecution. Though they may welcome their church’s modern emphasis on their similarities to other religionists, I believe there remains a longing in them for the 'peculiar people' identity conveyed by the divisive prophetic voice and the historical experience of conspiracy.

While I fully agree (and was indeed among the very first to argue) that Beck is tapping into Mormon folk millennialism of yesteryear, I’m afraid Daughtrey has otherwise missed the boat on this one. To begin with, Mormonism today can hardly be accurately characterized as “secularized” in any meaningful sense and looks little like mainline Protestantism. As Matt Bowman notes in a comment left on the RD post:

Contemporary Mormonism looks far more like evangelical Protestantism than mainline Protestantism, in nearly every way possible. Iannacconne's work on strict churches is relevant here, as is the recent Pew Survey of American religions, which demonstrates that Mormons have _not_ actually 'disenchanted' in the way Daughtrey argues. Rather, Mormons engage in devotional practices like scripture study and prayer at rates more comparable to sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses and conservative evangelicals than to mainline Protestants or Roman Catholics. Consequently, Mormons experience things like personal answers to prayers, divine healings, and other spiritual experiences at much higher rates than almost any other religion in America.

Furthermore, while Beck (and his fellow Latter-day Saint Tea Partiers) are recalling a prophetic voice from an earlier era, that voice belongs to Ezra Taft Benson, who served as Secretary of Agriculture to Dwight Eisenhower while contemporaneously serving as an LDS apostle (and later in the 1980s and 90s as Church President), and not Joseph Smith or Brigham Young. It is Benson’s unique combination of politics and religion that combines scriptural teachings concerning moral agency and the Latter-day Saint “plan of salvation” with intense fears of socialist subversion here and now that Glenn Beck has echoed time and time again. It is Benson quotes and youtube clips that dot the pages of Mormon Tea Partiers’ blogs across the internet, and it is him who all of my conservative facebook friends in Utah quote as their status update anytime President Obama does something else with which they disagree.

But perhaps even more striking to me is Daughtrey’s claim that the Tea Party represents for Mormons a chance to “reenchant the experience of being Mormon.” Glenn Beck has done nothing to “recall the strident prophetic voice that distinguished Mormonism from 19th century Protestant groups.” And politically-far right Mormons, of course, are joining with other like-minded folks from a variety of faiths in organizing for their unique brand of activism. In fact, it seems to me that Glenn Beck has consciously (veiled references and sometimes subtle allusions to folk Mormon doctrines notwithstanding) attempted to market himself and his message as one that appeals not only to Mormons, but also to other politically conservative Christians. And it his utter success in accomplishing this---to the point of soliciting the willing assistance of David Barton on his show and managing to secure an invite to speak at Liberty University's commencement exercise---that has confused me since the beginning. Why hasn’t Beck’s Mormonism been the divisive wedge for evangelicals and others who generally refuse Mormonism (and Mormons) a seat at the table of orthodoxy?

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):

The Tea-Partying of American Religion

by Steven P. Miller

Thomas Frank made easy sport today of a recent piece by Glenn Harlan Reynolds (the ur-blogger of popular conservatism) in which Reynolds touted the Tea Party movement as “America’s Third Great Awakening.” Upon reading the article in question, I realized that Reynolds did indeed have Whitefield, Finney, et al, in mind when referring to those earlier awakenings, which he does concede “were religious in nature.” Now, he writes, “it’s different. It’s not America’s churches and seminaries that are in trouble: It’s America’s politicians and parties.”

Without giving Reynolds the dignity of too much attention, he does point to the creative means by which Americans will “whig” just about anything—in this case, rolling the conventional narrative of American Protestantism into a tale of continuous liberty tree watering. Moreover, he pulled off an interesting historigraphical reversal. Normally, it’s the proverbial liberal academy that secularizes religious history. From camp meetings to town hall screaming, the Lord works in mysterious ways . . .