Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster at OBU

Paul Harvey

From our Department of Self-Promotion, an announcement below which may be of interest to any blog readers we have in the great state of Oklahoma. I don't know for a fact that we have any, but just in case . . .

Celebrating Oklahoma Baptist University's Centennial

The Department of Anthropology, History and Political Science presents

Paul Harvey

1983 OBU Graduate

Professor of History, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

Professor Harvey is a nationally recognized historian of Baptists and evangelicals in the South and commentator on present-day American religion and politics.

Tuesday, September 28

9:30-10:45 a.m. “Baptists and the American South” (Public Presentation; GC 220)

How have Baptists dealt with racial differences and other issues important in the South? Join Professor Harvey to reflect on this major problem in the American experience.

Noon-1:30 p.m. “History, Faith, and the Academy” (Open Lunch; GC 222)

Grab your lunch in the cafeteria and come to GC 222 for a rich

conversation! Cosponsored by the Faith and Disciplines Committee.

7-9 p.m. “Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South”

(Public Lecture; Bailey Business Building, Tulsa Royalties Aud.)

How do we explain the co-existence of the piously sacred and the violently

profane in the history of the American South? Through history, literature, music,

and film, this lecture explores four major archetypes of southern religious culture

from the 18th century to the present: Moses, Jesus, the Trickster, and Absalom.

Literary figures, cultural archetypes, and musical explorations have added layers

of complexity to what other wise might be seen as a solid South of evangelicalism.

On-line Resources

Randall Stephens

Art Remillard and I were talking on the phone today about working at teaching colleges/universities. Part of the responsibility/burden at such institutions, and people either love or hate this, is to teach courses that lie outside one’s bailiwick. So you focused on 19th century evangelical responses to cholera in London? Here’s a course on modern American diplomacy that you’ll need to cover. You wrote your first book on Jewish immigrants to Boston in the early-20th century? Could you offer this course on Medieval history? OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Regardless, I enjoy teaching the occasional course that pulls me outside of my field. Art seems to dig it as well.

I’ve had to be pretty resourceful . . . hunting down sources, trying to get some perspective on secondary literature, confessing to the students now and then that I know only a little more than they do about the topic.

I’m particularly interested in finding on-line materials for new courses I teach. And I enjoy pointing students to the wealth of images, digital archives, and primary sources that float out there on the “internets.”

Wendy Moore, a British trade author, just alerted me to the fabulous on-line collection of the British Museum. A quick search for "Methodists," "John Wesley," “Ranters,” “Quakers,” and "George Whitefield" returned dozens of items: satirical prints, scatological cartoons, bawdy broadsheets, etc. The images can be used for free for "private or non-commercial uses for education, academic study, scholarship or research by individuals or charities, societies, institutions or trusts existing exclusively for public benefit."

There are two other copyright free digital archives, which contain loads of religious prints, I use regularly for Historically Speaking: The Library of Congress, Prints and Photos Division and Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & MS Library.

As for primary source material . . . the list keeps growing longer and longer. Google books is just one of many recent resources I would have loved to have had back in my grad days. Searchable collections of historic newspapers, early American imprints, you name it. And to think that I nearly went blind going through 10,000 miles of microfilm.

This Beautiful City

Paul Harvey

O little town of Colorado Springs/how unstill we see thee lie.

My little town certainly draws its fair share of attention nationally. In just the past few years, documentaries such as Jesus Camp and Friends of God, journalistic works such as The Jesus Machine, pieces by Jeff Sharlet in Harper's featuring Colorado Springs as "the new Jerusalem," Ted Haggard's recent appearances on Larry King and elsewhere, and many other cultural productions have featured the city's religious landscape, and I don't mean Pike's Peak or our great rock formations, Garden of the Gods. And the freewheeling village that blends into us just to our west, Manitou Springs, remains blissfully off the national radar, its citizens free to attend Wicca meetings without encountering many "prayer walkers." Remarkably, a number of these documentaries and films arrived here just at the very end of Ted Haggard's reign at New Life Church, and so there's a "before" and "after" aspect that runs through many of them -- or perhaps better put, let's do the time warp again.

Theater hasn't ignored us either. Today's New York Times features a review of "This Beautiful City," a sort of oral history/theater piece put together by "The Civilians," a New York troupe who came to Colorado Springs for ten weeks and conducted numerous interviews with locals on the religious scene here. Like Jesus Camp and Friends of God, the troupe timed its stay with uncanny good fortune, perfectly to coincide with the Haggard scandal. Not surprisingly, then, the production focuses on issues of religion and sexuality.

Based just on the review, it appears the troupe has left behind obvious chances for snark and, to its credit, given full voice to a range of characters not normally associated with my new Jerusalem, including a black minister who comes out to his congregation and a transgendered ex-New Life member. (Pictured is Marsha Stephanie Blake, who plays a preacher who comes out to his congregation in the Civilians’ “This Beautiful City").

Here's an excerpt:

The glazed, slightly crazed smile of Ted Haggard, the leader of a megachurch in Colorado who was ousted in a jiffy after a sex and drugs scandal, makes a cameo appearance in “This Beautiful City,” the latest work of cultural anthropology from the Civilians, which opened Sunday night at the Vineyard Theater. But Pastor Ted’s supersize fall from grace is a story no stranger than many others in this engaging, inquisitive and evenhanded work of theater about the transformation of an American city and many American lives.

The burg of the title is Colorado Springs, just at the foot of Pikes Peak, home both to Mr. Haggard’s former empire, the New Life Church, with thousands of members, and Focus on the Family, the conservative organization run by James Dobson that has been a leader of the charge against gay rights initiatives for years. The Civilians, a troupe of theater artists who construct much of their work from interviews, spent 10 weeks in the city before and after the Haggard scandal broke, collecting impressions from citizens ranging across the social and religious spectrum, from church leaders to embattled atheists in full bunker mode.

You might assume that members of a hip New York theater company would descend on the country’s epicenter of evangelism like a swarm of junior Michael Moores, wielding tape recorders like rapiers, backpacks stuffed full of snark. But the Civilians, known for the long-running revue “Gone Missing” and other documentary shows, have generally used humor to illuminate our follies rather than to sneer at our frailties. And that is certainly the case in “This Beautiful City,” which presents its collage of human experience without commentary, with a loose focus on the clash between religious orthodoxy and freedom of sexual expression.

Now of course, if this goes to a movie version, the obvious question that everyone will be asking is: who is going to play Paul Harvey? And so, I will ask for you: who is going to play ME? As you know, college religious history professors are hot stuff for theater and movie productions. So, I'm thinking Johnny Depp, or George Cloony, or perhaps Matt Damon. Any other ideas?

[NO, CAPTAIN KANGAROO, MICKEY ROURKE, AND SHELDON FROM "BIG BANG THEORY" HAVE ALREADY TURNED DOWN THE ROLE!].

Body Art Religion in Historical Perspective

Editor's Note: I'm delighted to post a contribution from my former student Sue Ann Marasco, who has recently completed her PhD at Vanderbilt and been a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University. Sue was one a group, including some of our own contributing editors here, who participated in a Roundtable On Religions Along the Mississippi River: Region and Space in American Religious History, which we blogged about below; Sue's paper there was entitled "Mapping the Gods and Monsters of the River: Sovereignty, Cosmology, and Contact along the Mississippi, 1680-1743." Sue also contributed the article "Cosmology" to the textbook that Phil Goff and I put together, Themes in Religion and American Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Here, Sue describes and analyzes some eighteenth-century body art that she encountered in doing her research. I expect ya'll to demand further contributions from Sue in the future.
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Tattoo You
Sue Marasco

I had the opportunity to research a project that brought the religious aspects of tattooing to my attention. In this case, it was French descriptions of tattooing practices of Native Americans along the lower Mississippi River c1700. In particular, I was intrigued by the description of the Akansa (also know as Arkansas or Quapaw) people tattooing a French soldier Jean-Bernard Bossu in the 1750s.

He wrote:

The Akanza have adopted me; they have acknowledged me as a warrior and a chief, and have given me the mark of it, which is the figure of a roebuck imprinted on my thigh. I have willingly undergone this painful operation, which was performed in the following manner: I was seated on a tyger’s skin; an Indian burnt some straw, the ashes of which he diluted with water; he made use of this simple mixture to draw the roe-buck; he then followed the drawing with great needles, pricking them deep into the flesh, till the blood comes out; this blood mixing with the ashes of the straw, forms a figure which can never be effaced. I smoked the calumet after that…they danced before me crying out for joy; they told me afterwards, that I could go to all the people who were their allies, present the calumet and show my mark, and I would be well received; that I was their brother and that if any one killed me, they would kill him; now I am a noble Akanza. (M. Bossu, Travels through the part of North America… 1 vol of 2 vols, [London: T. Davies 1771], 107-108.)

I read this process as very carnal and visceral. It is a painful ceremony that results in Bossu’s irrevocable and very public connection to the Acansa. It was a ceremony literally, “of the flesh.” Yet, there is a less tangible aspect of this ceremony that suggests a religious dimension to this tattooing. The smoking of the calumet can be read as a signaling of the Frenchmen’s adoption to the Acansa’s deities. There is arguably an aspect of the associated pain and mingling of ash that suggests a mortification of the flesh that is seeking for a transcendent state of being or consciousness.

There is also the permanent marker of belonging to a specific group. In his recent article, “Tattooing and Its Role in French-Native American Relations,” Arnaud Balvay describes a tattoo given to French officer Dumont de Montigny’s tattoo as a cross of St. Louis. An essentially French symbol delivered by Native American technique that tied de Montigny to the French monarchy rather than any North American tribe. Like Bossu, de Montigny’s tattoo is a marker of group identity, but I wondered if the experience of the tattoo created a bond with the group that marked him. Is it the experience or the symbol that makes the tattoo significant? (French Colonial History, Vol. 9, (2008)).

These descriptions of tattooing along the early Mississippi necessarily evoke a larger question about tattoos and religion. In her article on contemporary tattooing practices among Native Americans, Maureen Trudelle Schwarz interviewed Native Americans and non-natives about their tattoos and found that both groups, “ Find their tattoos a suitable medium for marking and expressing spirituality. It is worth noting, however, that the spirituality of non-Natives tends to be more individualistic and self-defined than that of Native American consultants, which tended to be firmly grounded in the established religious cosmology of the Native Nation from which they descend.” (Visual Anthropology, 19, 2006)

I am not arguing that all tattoos have a religious connotation, but when they are religious in nature, are tattoos earthly practices, marking the body to an earthly community? Or, are tattoos a signposting to some larger cosmology? Is a cross tattoo a commitment to the community of a church on earth or an individual relationship with God in heaven? Do they link the corporeal with the supernatural or the eternal? Are they infusing the body with some other power through the experience of pain, and the mixing of ink with skin? I continue to seek a means of interrogating tattooing in my present work because tattoos were an important marker of identity along the Mississippi River. However, their persistence throughout history and their prominence in popular American culture makes me pause and wonder if I am not missing a larger narrative about their significance to the person and the world(s) around them.

Picturing Faith at the AAR

Paul Harvey

I'm live-blogging the AAR! Not really. More like, on the train from O'Hare into Chicago for the American Academy of Religion, I had the good fortune to run into my colleague Colleen McDannell, of the University of Utah. As I wrote in a blog entry below, Colleen was a mentor in teaching me more successfully to integrate the visual into my thinking and teaching on American religious history, which I've tried to incorporate into my upcoming Lamar lectures.

Some years ago, I brought to my campus Colleen's wonderful exhibition Picturing Faith, an exhibit of Farm Security Administration photographs from 1935-1943 which accompanies her book Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression. She introduced me to some photographs that I included in my book Freedom's Coming. She also showed me some ways to think about the relationship of the religious and the visual, both in her work Material Christianity and in the book on photography.

A nice web compilation of photographs that are included in Picturing Faith may be found here. A review of Colleen's exhibition is here. The reviewer states:

The exhibit's multiple functions speak not only to McDannell's skill in the integration of material objects and texts but also to the broader issues in historical method she has been pursuing for some time. There is a palpable tension between observing the photographs on their own terms and reading them along with McDannell. Just entering the exhibit presents one with the dilemma of what to do first—read or look? In this way the exhibit serves to break up our casual habits of historical thinking and asks us to reconsider our assumptions about the disparities between reading and looking.

Coming Home to Outsider Religious Art

Paul Harvey

Preparing my Lamar Lectures has brought me back to a little project I was involved with a few years ago, mainly just to write a short introduction for one chapter in Coming Home: Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South. I've been going through this work again looking for images to go along with one of the lectures, "Jesus of the South." Of course there are many; one of my favorites, "There is Only One King," is to the right. These artists are eccentrics and visionaries; one of them, Anderson Johnson (1907-1998), now has his own gallery of work he did while running a Faith Mission Church in Newport News, Virginia, over several decades.

Some well-known names, especially Howard Finster, are in this work. Many others you will not have heard of. The book is a wonderful catalog of the exhibition that traveled the country a few years back, reviewed here in the New York Times when it appeared at the Museum of Biblical Art (the article comes with a very nice slide show of some of the works, too).

Scholars such as Colleen McDannell, among others, have led the way in showing how religious historians may incorporate the visual into their work. I'm but a novice at this, but plan to try my hand a bit at it in these lectures. We'll see how it goes. David Morgan's Protestants and Pictures is a classic in analyzing how an allegedly "pure" church free of Romish superstititions of images and icons in fact created an entire world of their own imagery. And, just as anyone can read the Bible, the (mostly) Protestants in this collection freely interpreted biblical passages through their wildly diverse and often apocalyptic imagery. Moreover, the black artists exhibited here weren't waiting around for the advent of "black theology" to experiment with images of Jesuses of color. Black crucified Christs appear frequently in the exhibition and range through the course of the twentieth century.

Here's a description of Coming Home.

In the works of many famous self-taught artists, such as Howard Finster and Sister Gertrude Morgan, Biblical themes and imagery abound. How has the Bible inspired these southern creators?

Examining 125 works of art by seventy contemporary folk artists, Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South accompanies a traveling exhibition organized by the Art Museum of the University of Memphis. The exhibition features painters and sculptors of wide acclaim, including Finster, Sister Morgan, William Edmondson, Clementine Hunter, Joe Minter, Elijah Pierce, Robert Roberg, William Thomas Thompson, and Myrtice West.

In the South, Evangelical Christianity is predominant. Essays in this catalog explore this particular religious influence on the work of southern self-taught artists. The artwork is considered within the context of contemporary American art and history, literature, and music.

Also included are brief essays on thirty-two of the artists along with biographical sketches of each, identifying denominational ties and providing relevant religious information.

Coming Home! offers new ways of understanding the rich meaning, theology, and history of this art and its stylistic approaches and various purposes. Essayists also forward a fresh appreciation of the cultural influence of Evangelical Christianity. They include Carol Crown, Erika Lee Doss, Hal Fulmer, Norman Girardot, Paul Harvey, Babatunde Lawal, Leslie Luebbers, Cheryl Rivers, and Charles Reagan Wilson.

Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Paul Harvey

As some of you know, I'm giving the Lamar Lectures in Southern History at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, next month. The lectures will later be published by the University of Georgia Press. Many thanks to my friend Sarah Gardner for inviting me to be part of this series.

(Note to self, if you're actually going to give these lectures you better sit your butt down and write like a maniac!!)

At some point in the near future I hope to post some kind of better publicity material, but in the meantime, here are the lecture titles and the schedule. Hope some of ya'll in the great state of Georgia might be able to mozy down for one of the lectures. The lectures will have fun movie clips, music, and art interspersed, so it won't all be boring monologue from me.

Series Title: Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Lecture I: Jesus of the South - Monday, November 3, 10:00 AM

Lecure II: Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the Trickster: Southern Evangelical Culture in History and Literature - Monday, November 3, 7:30 PM

Lecture III: Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom - Tuesday, November 4, 7:30 PM

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Here's a list of the last several Lamar Lectures, which should give you some idea of why I'm excited to be part of this tradition.

2000: Adam Fairclough (University of East Anglia) – Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow

2001: Edward Ayers (UVA), Thadious M. Davis (Vanderbilt), Linda Wagner-Martin (UNC), Joel Williamson (UNC) – South To the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-first Century

2002: Theda Purdue (UNC) – “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South

2003: Peter H. Wood (Duke) – Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream

2004: Michael O’Brien (Cambridge) – Henry Adams and the Southern Question

2005: James C. Cobb (UGA) – Before and After Brown: Jim Crow, the Brown Decision, and the Changing Face of Southern Identity

2006: Barbara J. Fields (Columbia) – Teach About the South (unpublished)

2007: Richard Gray (Essex) – A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature

Bridget McBruiser and American Religious Prejudice -- From our New Contributing Editor!

WELOME TO OUR NEW CONTRIBUTING EDITOR KATHLEEN SPROWS CUMMINGS!

Kathleen Sprows Cummings is an assistant professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is also the Associate Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and she holds concurrent appointments in the departments of history and theology. Her teaching and research interests include the history of women and American religion and the study of U.S. Catholicism.

Her first book, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era, will be published by University of North Carolina Press in January 2009. Other recent publications include “The ‘New Woman’ at the ‘University’: Gender and American Catholic Identity in the Progressive Era,” which appears in The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, edited by Catherine A. Brekus (University of North Carolina, 2007). She is a regular contributor to Commonweal, America, and American Catholic Studies.She has also written an essay about teaching at the intersection of gender and American Catholic studies, which will appear in Passing on the Faith, Passing on the Church, edited by Margaret McGuinness and James T. Fisher, and under contract with Fordham University Press. At present Cummings is working on a book-length study of women and American Catholicism.
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Remembering “Bridget McBruiser”: Racial and Religious Prejudice in American History

Kathleen Sprows Cummings
University of Notre Dame

In his op-ed piece in last Sunday’s New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof referenced a recent Pew survey that indicated only fifty percent of Americans are certain that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March. Kristof argues, convincingly I think, that this data signifies that religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. “In public at least,” he writes, “it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian. The result is this campaign to ‘otherize’ Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.”

Kristof’s piece prompted me to reflect anew on the ways racial and religious prejudices have been intertwined in American history. In my Gender and American Catholicism class today, we analyzed several anti-Catholic and anti-Irish cartoons originally published in the mid to late 19th century. My students, many of whom are Irish American Catholics, were astonished to learn that Notre Dame’s beloved mascot, “the fighting Irish” leprechaun, bears a striking resemblance to the depictions of “Paddy” that regularly appeared in newspapers and periodicals. Like the campaign to “otherize” Obama, the efforts to emphasize the racial and religious differences of Irish Americans were profoundly political in purpose. As Irish politicians began to wield more political power, cartoonists such as Thomas Nast raised fears about how their preponderance would threaten the American ideals of democracy. (In one of his most famous cartoons, “The American River Ganges,” Nast conflates Tammany Hall with St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome).

Aside from political considerations, these cartoons were also designed to evoke the racial inferiority of the Irish. Paddy’s simian features—prominent chin, hairy face, ape-like expression—were tied to the emerging science of physiognomy, whose adherents claimed that facial features provided clues to character. The implications were obvious: among their other liabilities, the violent and underdeveloped Irish were racially unfit to be good Americans.
Most U.S. history textbooks include a reprint of at least one “Paddy” cartoon. Lesser known but equally revealing are the depictions of Paddy’s female counterpart, Bridget. In “Bridget McBruiser,” which originally appeared in 1866, the contrast between the womanly Florence Nightingale and the decidedly unfeminine—indeed inhuman—“Bridget” underscored the “otherness” of Irish Catholic women.[1]

It is no coincidence that Florence Nightingale became popular in the United States at precisely the same time that Catholic women religious, many of whom were of Irish descent, were becoming more visible as nurses (during the Civil War, twenty percent of Army nurses were Catholic nuns). As was the case with Paddy, fears about Bridget’s influence were inextricably tied up in political concerns. When the crusade for women suffrage gained steam after 1890, the specter of both Paddy and Bridget figured prominently in the arguments advanced on both sides of the debate. White, middle-class suffragists argued that if African-American, uneducated, or “foreign” men were able to vote, than their votes were urgently needed as a counterbalance. (Although the racial and class biases of suffragists are now widely recognized by historians, few scholars have paid attention to the significance of the fact that the majority of the foreign and uneducated “undesirables” were Roman Catholic). Meanwhile, anti-suffragists pointed out that enfranchising women would only double the Irish Catholic vote. According to Margaret Deland, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1910, suffragists wanted “to multiply by two the present and unconscientious vote which many thoughtful persons, anxiously doubting democracy, believe is already threatening our national existence….we have suffered many things at the hands of Patrick; the New Woman would add Bridget also.”[2]

I explore the significance of these themes in the American past in my forthcoming book, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era, University of North Carolina Press. But I wonder whether the legacy of Bridget McBruiser suggests it might be worthwhile to explore more fully the gender dimensions of contemporary racial and religious biases, especially considering the variety of ways in which both Obama and Palin are challenging societal definitions of masculinity and femininity.

[1] (James Redfield, "New Physiognomy, or Signs of Character," New York, 1866. In Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1986, following p. 156).

[2]Margaret Deland, “The Change in the Feminine Ideal,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1910, 299.

God, Guns, and . . . Whatever

Paul Harvey

A friend sent this photo of a tattoo, which he wants to use as a cover for his book. And, it's just pretty dang awesome, so I'm sharing it.

Updated: see the comments section for more explanation behind the image.

Graphic Therapy for the Religiously Afflicted

In our ongoing effort to go interdisciplinary here at Religion in American History, welcome to our new contributing editor Everett Hamner. Everett is a just-minted Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa, and this fall will be teaching in English and Religious Studies at Western Illinois University. Everett's dissertation topic, Spectacles of Faith, will interest many of you; here's a brief description:

This project examines intersections of science and religion via twentieth century American fictions. Starting with the Scopes trial and the satires of Sinclair Lewis, it considers objectivism and scapegoating in Ralph Ellison, technological transcendence in Walker Percy, intuition and quantum physics in Ursula K. Le Guin, and memory in U.S. and Latin American science fiction film. Showing how literature and cinema illuminate the science-religion nexus, and vice versa, it reveals an expansion beyond early-century oppositions of fundamentalism and scientism toward the conflations of Cold War era civil religion, and from there toward postmodern efforts to integrate faith and reason.

As you can see, it's another of those small-and-narrow topic dissertations :)

Welcome to Everett, who inaugurates his contributing editorship with a post on religion, comics, and popular culture.
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Graphic Therapy for the Religiously Afflicted

Confession: I am not a historian. I’m a newly minted assistant professor of English and an incurably interdisciplinary former seminarian. Still, I owe this blog. For the past two years, the majority of my working hours (and a few others) have been devoted to completing my dissertation, Spectacles of Faith: Technology, Religion, and American Fiction. Such isolating endeavors necessitate edifying and entertaining respites, and Religion and American History has regularly provided both. Time to start paying up. I could start with a review of some recent critical study, but I’ll save that. For now, a tale of how I faced life once the diss was done, the grad college was happy, and I no longer needed to spend 10-hour days cuddling with Microsoft Word. I turned to comics.

Defy the assumption for a moment that I am discussing male superheroes winning the hearts of two-dimensional women by defeating equally flat bad guys. You will still find plenty of that at your local comics retailer, and some of it is probably better than I think. What I can pass on, though, is a set of recommendations for those who, for one reason or another, occasionally find themselves tired of academic tomes, but still needing more mental stimulus than that provided by the average television show. And admittedly, this is particularly aimed at those fascinated by intersections of religion, race, and popular culture.

If you are new to the serious reading of serious comics (or “sequential art,” as Will Eisner defines it), a great place to start is Hillary Chute’s “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative” in the March 2008 PMLA (123.2). Chute provides a clear overview of basic definitions, references many of the best works in the field, and offers sharp insights into comics’ nonsynchronous presentation of the visual and the verbal. Less recently but more entertainingly, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993) guides neophytes and experienced readers alike through the complexities of graphic narrative via the form itself. A gifted artist, writer, and aesthetician, McCloud further hones Eisner’s definition (“juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer”), and in the process delighted and instructed this reader at once.

Enough on the how-to: you want to know why historians of American religion should care (or at least how to convince your chair that this is scholarly research). Please turn immediately to Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003) and Kevin Huizenga’s Curses (2006). Thompson’s 582-page autobiography of first love, adolescent sexuality, and Midwestern, Protestant fundamentalism is achingly good. The narrative’s power derives not only from obvious depths of personal experience and reflection, but also from its self-conscious dramatization of the author’s reconciliation (and potentially the reader’s) with his religious and romantic past. Huizenga’s work is shorter (as an interrelated collection rather than a graphic novel), but his “Glenn Ganges stories” seek a slightly more erudite audience, fictionalizing philosophy of religion and American consumerism with equal ease. As in Blankets, the setting is suburbia, but readers will find themselves wrestling with Origen and Neibuhr before it’s over.

One last set of leads for those with a particular interest in race and religion (this is for you, Ed). First, if you haven’t read Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1973-91), do it—enough said. This uncanny rendering of the Holocaust via mice and kitties is far from the only significant work in the area, though. James Sturm’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing (2001) powerfully blends baseball and anti-Semitism, while his similar work alongside Rich Tommaso, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow (2007), throws a similar pitch to African-American history. Graphic narrative about black racial and religious experience is particularly on the rise: see Matt Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro (2008) and Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo’s Bluesman (2006) and The Castaways (2007). Similarly poignant reflections on immigration and class-based injustice may be found in Will Eisner’s Invisible People (1992) and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006).

There is much more, of course, but consider these recommended starting points, and do drop me a line if you find yourself moved. I work principally on religion, science, and American literature and film, but there may be a course and/or an article on this material in my future, and I’d enjoy hearing from you … even if you are a historian.

God's Hunky Bodies

Kelly Baker

In my Religions in the U.S. class, I use images of Jesus to demonstrate different theological movements: the feminized Jesus, Warner Salman's Jesus, an African American Jesus, etc. I also use an image of Jesus from the Book of Mormon in which Jesus is preaching to Native American peoples. What I point out to students is that this rendition of Jesus is always so muscular. He's got huge biceps, a chiseled chin, and flowing hair. I pass around my copy of the Book of Mormon, so that they can see that the other figures depicted in the sacred text are also sufficiently muscled. Moroni buries the golden plates as his forearms and biceps ripple and bulge. The images make it clear that these religious men are manly men with the strength to prove it. Masculinity exudes from them.

Recent agitation over a calendar of shirtless Mormon missionaries made me reflect on the above images and why glorifying male bodies proved inflammatory in this particular context. Steve Freiss, in an article entitled "Mormon Beefcake," explored the controversy over the calendar and the excommunication of the calendar's creator, Chad Hardy. For the author, the fusion of religion and sexuality that appeared in the calendar led to Hardy's punishment. "Men on a Mission," after all, juxtaposed pictures of smiling Mormon men in their missionary attire (white shirt, tie, black pants, and name tag) with images of the men shirtless in various poses with smoldering gazes. Freiss writes:

Hardy says the church has accused him of using religion to sell sex. But he prefers to think of it as the other way around: he's using eye-catching and unexpected images of usually buttoned-up men to draw attention to the charitable and civic contributions of the faith. Until his excommunication, Hardy was a sixth-generation Mormon who some six years ago stopped attending church, tithing or wearing the requisite sacred undergarments, but he insisted he still admires the church and wanted to use the calendar a form of outreach. "I have my own feelings about the church; they're personal," he said. "I don't want to make the church look bad. I want this to be a positive thing for these guys."

...

The calendar also features a biography of each model, mentioning the place where he served his mission and some thoughts on his faith. None are particularly provocative poses by beefcake calendar standards, although Mr. October 2008 does have a finger tugging down his belt and exposing the elastic of his underwear.

Interestingly, one of the participants for the 2009 calendar, Christopher Hayes, thought the calendar might demonstrate that Mormons were part of the mainstream. Freiss noted:

Hayes's mother, in fact, urged him on after the 2008 edition was cited as the "Hot Calendar" of the year by Rolling Stone magazine. Hayes's mother and grandparents even attended the photo shoot in Las Vegas in March. "What we're doing is showing people that Mormons aren't the weird, sheltered people that people think we are. It was more of an acceptance of us as people."

On Hardy's website, Mormons Exposed, one can buy the calendar, declare a secret crush on the models, buy a t-shirt with your favorite model, and learn about auditions for new models. Additionally, the FAQ section addresses questions about the purpose of the calendar and the larger project of Mormons Exposed. The website echoes Hayes's sentiments:

Behind the eye-candy, this calendar has a deeper story - one that can reshape perceptions, heighten awareness, and perhaps encourage and inspire a broadened acceptance of human and religious diversity. The fact that twelve young returned missionaries are posing shirtless will certainly raise eyebrows, but may also help to sort out some common misconceptions about Mormons. The shock value of what these traditionally conservative young men have helped to create has the power to build a dialogue that encourages people across every belief system and walk of life to defy stereotypes, step out of judgment and embrace tolerance.
...
The twelve former missionaries who "bare their testimony" on the pages of the Men on a Mission calendar were hand-selected for their striking good looks and powerful spiritual devotion. They are men who were comfortable enough in their own beliefs, and independent and brave enough to take a stand for what they believe in regardless of what others may think. By slightly stepping away from the Mormon traditions of modest dress, these missionaries show the world they can have a strong faith and be proud of who they are, both with a sense of individualism and a sense humor at the same time.

The message is by showing Mormon "eye-candy," the website hopes to counter stereotypes of Mormons in larger culture. Muscled bodies demonstrate that these young men are no different than other half-dressed religious people? Baring their chests lays bare their devotion to their faith as well as highlights their virility. Folks who scoff at Mormon missionaries on bikes have missed the sheer prowess of their masculinity, and the calendar serves as a corrective to show that Mormons, just like other religious Americans, are willing to showcase their bodies (for their faith in this instance). Undressing for tolerance is not an idea I have encountered before, but it could work if hard bodies distract folks from their religious prejudices. (If this catches on, please let me know.) However, I think the paean to tolerance and supposed humor of the calendar were lost on LDS officials.

Hardy claims that his excommunication was due to his personal behavior not the calendar, but not all agree with his claims. Richard Bushman, noted Mormon scholar, chalked the issue up to the combination of the erotic with imagery of the missionaries.This fusion suggested that missionaries are more than chaste evangelists for the faith but rather are sexual creatures as well. The glorification of male bodies and sexuality seems to be problematic because the calendar makes it obvious that missionaries are sexual beings despite the uniform. Moreover, the conception that gazing on these men builds religious commitment might prove to be a bit of a stretch. Lust might not be the approved way to become more faithful. (See Gary Laderman's Ecstatic Sex on the complicated relationship of religion and sexuality at Religion Dispatches.)

Yet muscled Mormon bodies have presence in Mormon visual imagery. However, muscled angels and religious figures are tucked safely away in sacred text. They also have their shirts on. (Editor's note: I stand corrected most have their shirts on. Please see the comments section.) Their muscles signal virility and strength of the tradition rather than sexual objectification. The calendar lacks the sacred legitimacy despite Hardy's commitment to using sexuality to sell religion. This falls outside the bounds of previous masculine representation. Muscled religious figures promoted the faith, but how do shirtless missionaries contribute?

Moreover, the issue of who consumes the calendar also adds to the controversy. Hardy noted that "Men on a Mission" was quite popular among gay men. The issue of eroticism proves tricky, but the possibility of homoeroticism is more difficult for the leadership of LDS because gay members must remain chaste. Hardy, however, is not discouraged by the commotion over "Men on a Mission" because his next calendar entitled "Hot Muffins" will contain images of Mormon mothers and their recipes. Risque pictures of Mormon moms might prove even more controversial than the barely clad missionaries.

Sideburns, Cassocks, Capes, and Bird Nests

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

I come across quite a few pictures of Roman Catholic priests in my line of work. I’m an historian of American Catholicism who specializes in the history of the priesthood during the nineteenth century, so I guess it makes sense that I’ve seen my fair share of sallow faces resting atop all sorts of outfits, from fancy fringed cassocks to austere woolen sacks. But after all these years of rushing through dusty archives and scanning illegible texts for “the good stuff,” I guess I’ve forgotten how to stop and smell the roses, or, in this case, stare at some old guy.

Pick up any book about Catholicism written over forty years ago and you’ll find that almost all of the illustrations bear the faces of pope after cardinal after bishop after priest after deacon after brother after alter boy. Collared men in robes were all the rage. And then everything changed when Pope John XXIII had the bright idea of giving his church a fresh haircut in the form of a Second Vatican Council. All I’ve got to say is, “what does a bald man know about haircuts, anyways?” Apparently quite a bit, because Catholic historian after Catholic historian systematically cut the clergy out of their new social histories of “the people,” culminating in 1985 when Jay Dolan and Robert Orsi changed the field of American Catholic studies forever with their two groundbreaking books The American Catholic Experience and The Madonna of 115th Street. The nail in the coffin of old Father Frowny Face came when nuns and sisters started to let down their hair and Catholic historians started to pay attention to the incredible lives of women who used to wear habits.

And the rest, as they say, is historiography. But what if historians decided to retrain their eyes toward the old institutional histories of Catholicism, only this time looking through the theoretical and methodological lenses of recent scholarship? Of course, I don’t mean to say that the study of the Catholic priesthood is dead (Leslie Tentler’s Catholics and Contraception comes to mind); it’s just that there are a lot of dead men who could use a makeover.

To get you started on the road to rewriting the rewritten history of American Catholicism, I thought I’d introduce you to a few men in my life. Mind you, these are all relatively well-known clergy. I find that some of the most fascinating, flawed, heroic, pathetic, human priests are usually the ones without photos or paintings to go along with their stories told in maybe one or two letters to a local bishop.




Antonio de Sedella (1748-1829), a.k.a. Pére Antoine. Spanish Capuchin friar and pastor of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans. Rejected the authority of the Spanish governor when he established the inquisition. Rejected the authority of the first bishop of Baltimore and the pope when he refused to relinquish his pastorship of the cathedral. Lover of women and father of children. Owner and baptizer of enslaved Africans. Freemason. Subject of recent archeological dig. Popularized side-Antoines until a guy named Burns came along and ripped off his style.








Abram Ryan (1838-1886), a.k.a. The Poet-Priest of the South. Son of Irish immigrants and Old Virginny. Member of Vincentian Order. Confederate chaplain and brother of killed Confederate soldier. Author of some the Lost Cause’s favorite poems “The Conquered Banner” and “The Sword of Robert E. Lee.” Subject of a recent biography. Suffered from catoptrophobia (fear of mirrors).








Augustine Tolton (1854-1897), "mistaken" a.k.a. The First Black Priest of the United States (see James Augustine Healy, ordained in 1854, second bishop of Maine). Born into slavery in Missouri. Believed to have fled with mother to the free state of Illinois during Civil War. Forbidden to enter American seminaries. Studied for the priesthood in Rome. Considered missionary vocation in Africa. Pastor of black congregation in basement of white church. Died in Chicago. Subject of republished biography. Dressed in his Sunday best.








Fulton Sheen (1895-1979), a.k.a. The First Great Catholic Televangelist. Small-town Illinois boy trained at the Leuven. Host of the syndicated T.V. hits “Life is Worth Living” and “The Fulton Sheen Program” from 1951 to 1968. Currently under consideration for canonization. Argued that people who don’t believe in angels are Communists. Wore capes, for crying out loud! Definitely DID NOT suffer from catoptrophobia.

Religious Roadtripping

Kelly Baker

In the summer of the staycation or a summer of piled up deadlines, journeying to the religious sites of Americana might not be our top priority. I already blogged on my deep desire to go the Holy Land Experience, but I thought I might highlight Timothy Beal's Roadside Religion:In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (2005). Beal does a roadtrip to explore what he calls "outsider religion" in America, and he takes his family along for the ride. I have toyed with assigning this book to my Religions in the U.S. class to make them think about classifications like "mainstream" and "outsider" as well as to problematize visions of American religious history that focus on the immateriality of faith. The faith(s) Beal finds are decidedly material, creative (gardens, signs proclaiming the end of times, a massive recreation of the Ten Commandments, etc.), and evangelizing.

So, here's my review of the work from the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture:

Beal, Timothy K. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005. 216 pp., $14.00 (USD). ISBN: 0-8070-1063-4 (paper).

[1] Timothy Beal does something that I have always yearned to do; he packs his loved ones in a motor home and travels the country to examine what he calls “roadside religion,” allowing me to live vicariously through his encounter with the land of religious kitsch in his fascinating work. Beal’s family traverses the American countryside to explore Holy Land USA, the Holy Land Experience, a recreation of Noah’s ark, biblical mini-golf, Precious Moments Inspiration Park, a miniature grotto, a cabinet of rosaries, and multiple gardens devoted to crosses and messages about salvation and damnation. This roadside approach to American religion uncovers the novelty and complexity of religion in America, and adds to the already colourful landscape of “mainstream” religions in the United States. Beal classifies these material expressions of faith as “outsider religion,” which he derives from understandings of “outsider art” as art by the untrained. Thus, outsider religion becomes his term for those untrained in the realms of theology or denominational doctrine. He wants to present the marginality of the creators as well as their creativity and devotion. “Paradoxically,” he writes, “it is precisely in their marginality that they open avenues for exploring themes and issues that are central to American religious life, such as pilgrimage, the nostalgia for lost origins, the desire to create sacred time and space, creativity as religious devotion, apocalypticism, spectacle, exile, and the relation between religious vision and social marginality” (7).

[2] Roadside Religion is Beal’s documentation of various religious spaces and the people who inhabit them—which he mostly accomplishes with empathy and tact—and the reader is a tag-along in motor home as he makes stops at these exotic yet mundane places. Beal also interrogates the nostalgia that is part and parcel of creating these spaces, and the attempts by various creators to get to something original and real, even while using artifice. At Holy Land USA, the author presents the park as a pilgrimage that moves pilgrims through the biblical story in a natural setting. He is a bit more conflicted at the Holy Land Experience; the park seems like a religious Disneyland, and is conveniently located in Orlando. Moreover, Beals feels ambivalent about the subtext of the religious amusement park. He writes, “Beneath the explicit aim of giving guests a glimpse of life during biblical times is a far more zealous ideological interest in promoting a very specific biblical theology of the end of times” (63). He dislikes the Holy Land Experience because it appears to uplift Christian Zionism, and seems more ideological than experiential. What is fascinating about Beal’s work is that he seems to appreciate some sites more because of their authenticity as opposed to their ideology. He is most critical of sites that are created by organizations rather than individuals; he feels more at home in Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens than at the Disney-similar Holy Land Experience. Throughout the descriptions of journeys to golf courses, a proposed site for the new Noah’s ark, and even the Precious Moments Chapel, this work is really about highlighting the religious experiences of individuals in gardens, sculptures, or miniaturized grottoes.

[3] As a result, this work was interesting to me as an American religious historian as well as someone who dabbles in ethnographic method. Roadside Religion demonstrates how exotic religious expression can be on American soil. I have toyed with the idea of providing it to my “Religion in the U.S.” classes as a conversation starter for how diverse religion can be at the individual level; it would also be a good primer in how fascinating popular religion is as a field of study. What proved most interesting and thought provoking was a comment that Beal makes early on in his work about his daughter’s perception of what religious studies scholars actually do. He writes, “My daughter, Sophie, recently told me what she thinks of my work as a religion scholar. She said it seems like what I like to do is make creepy things interesting” (12). The creepy things with which Beal enchants the reader are the careful and caring analyses of the various religious peoples he encounters. Beal wants his informants to be taken seriously in their unique practices and experiences, and he opens up their worldviews for the reader to see and understand. His renderings present these folks as they see themselves, which is good ethnographic praxis. He shows that practices that appear as absurd are really not absurd at all, but committed expressions of faith.

[4] Yet, questions remain: Are his informants really outsiders? Does the term “outsider religion” help or hinder this study? I would agree that these folks cannot be placed firmly in the mainstream, but some of their practices might. Signs made of scrap wood and metal with messages of damnation and repentance remind me of paid, roadside advertisements in my local Florida. Gardens with religious iconography and signage remind me of previous neighbours, whose front lawn was covered with a decent-sized statue of the Virgin Mary, a permanent Nativity scene, and angels of all sizes including one firmly planted in bird fountain. Are the outsiders he documents more committed to their cause than my neighbours? Or are these elements of the materiality of religious experience hiding under our noses? Beal’s informants produce more elaborate material presentations of religious belief, but I think some who we could classify as part of the mainstream practice their faith in a similar way. Beal’s informants might be marginalized, but people come to play biblical rounds of golf and see the largest Ten Commandments. This terminology limits the study. Beal’s informants show the strange and often appealing renderings of religious faith and practice, and the term “outsider religion” limits his larger presentation of these people and their understandings of religion.

[5] Despite this, Beal’s Roadside Religion was an interesting venue into an often-occluded piece of America’s religious landscape, and I would recommend the book for undergraduates, anyone interested in a religious road trip, and scholars of American religious history who would like to show the diversity and materiality of religious practice.

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.

Children, Mormons, and Renderings of African American Religion: American Religious History in _Church History_

BY KELLY BAKER

In the December 2007 (print) issue of Church History, there are three articles on interest for our blog. First is E. Brook Holifield's "Let the Children Come: The Religion of the Protestant Child in Early America." Holifield noted that there have been many quality studies of adult understandings of children, and he, instead, looks to the voices of children and how they understand their religious world views. It is delightful to see how Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher (Stowe), and Charlotte Grimke grappled with religion as younger selves. Drawing from diaries of children, who lived between 1770-1861, he describes their poignant concerns over death, living a good life, and their focus on sermons.

Next, Thomas W. Simpson's "Mormons Study 'Abroad': Brigham Young's Romance with American Higher Education, 1867-1877" examines the how American Mormons were sent to American universities for specialized training in law, medicine, and other fields. Mormons believed that higher education would help them maintain their civilization as well as make non-Mormons envious of their advances.

The third essay, "Urbanization and the End of Black Churches in the Modern World," is by Curtis Evans (two mentions in one day!). This essay tackles the historiographical understandings of African American religion, and Evans argues, "What strikes me about the history of interpretations of African American religion is the way in which interpreters have asserted that peoples of African descent were 'naturally religious,' which meant that their religion was a product of biology and nature rather than of the 'supernatural'" (p.799). Evans presents the fascination of with 'natural' religiosity as well as calls for the end of "the Negro or Black Church as it has been historically constructed" (p. 822)

The Devil in 1965

BY KATHRYN LOFTON

1965 has always been a critical year for students of U.S. religion, including as it does the beating of James J. Reeb (March 11), the first SDS march against Vietnam (April 17) and the passage of the Immigration Act (October 3). 1965 is a chronologic crucible for students of American plurality.

Such a historical wreath insufficiently conveys the traumas of that year, the traumas supplied by supremacist fire hoses and Bob Dylan’s electric guitar, traumas caused by Hurricane Betsy and the sight of Hickock and Smith’s hangings In Cold Blood. Whatever histories write of the affirmative aftereffects of LBJ’s immigration gateway, they must also recall how absurd and awful it was if only to imagine, briefly, how all good things come at cost.

I’ve been thinking about 1965 a lot since I read that it was then that Evel Knievel began his daredevil career. “Evel Knievel’s Motorcycle Daredevils” offered a touring show that included riding through fire walls, jumping over mammals and reptiles, and nascent attempts by the show’s eponymous star to cross unbelievable space from atop a bike branded the “American Eagle.”

On December 10 a predicted 20,000 will attend Knievel’s funeral in Butte, Montana, a town host to one of America’s largest Superfund sites. Evel will be honored for many things: his jingoistic bicentennial costumes, his grandfathering of extreme sports, his Guinness record for most bones broken in a single stunt.

Religionists may find a way to work Evel’s 1965 emergence into their narratives. Few men embody better the combination of acrobatic charisma and bumpy biopic so familiar to students of evangelical leadership. He had a resume that was the story of a nation, including (prior to his motorbike hijinks) bank robbery and insurance sales, diamond drilling and alcoholism. Despite much sinful soil, it wasn’t until this year, at the age of 68, that he asked to be baptized at (no less than) Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral. “I rose up in bed and, I was by myself, and I said, ‘Devil, Devil, you bastard you, get away from me. I cast you out of my life.’ I just got on my knees and prayed that God would put his arms around me and never, ever, ever let me go.”

That a daredevil could renounce the Devil (while still engraving his tombstone: “MOTORCYCLIST AND DAREDEVIL”) is no surprise to any of us, anymore. It’s all just the world we live in, a world without Selma demonstrations yet overloaded with electric guitars, traumatizing hurricanes, and counter-insurgency. “This country is hard on people,” explains No Country For Old Men, “Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it yet folks never seem to hold it to account.” Only in such a country could such a year, such a devil, be made:

Sacred Places, Evangelical Crackups, and Religion in the News

BY ART REMILLARD

Here’s some notes from the news world…

First, check out the series “Sacred Places” in U.S. News and World Report. Articles examine the sacred features of Karnak, the Dome of the Rock, and the Golden Temple, just to name a few locations. An article on the Cathedral of Sandiago de Compestela caught my attention because I’m temporarily overseeing a study abroad program that is located southwestern France, near one of the principal pilgrimage routes to Compestela. Pilgrimages were all the rage in the Middle Ages, and Compestela became one of the “big three” destinations, alongside Rome and Jerusalem. In the years following the Protestant Reformation, travel to Compestela decreased; but in recent decades, due in large part to a vigorous tourism industry, pilgrims have returned, seeking everything from spiritual renewal to physical exercise.
In my program, students take a course on religious pilgrimages. Nancy Louise Frey’s ethnographic study of the Compestela pilgrimage, Pilgrim Stories, is required reading. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested. Another article from “Sacred Places” discusses the evolution of American worship centers, and shows an image of a prototypical New England Puritan church. Seeing this prompted me to recall a conversation with a colleague about religious aesthetics. He speculated that the Puritan attention to visual sterility is something of a funhouse mirror image of the Catholic fascination with grandeur. He may have had a point. Ken Burns’s documentary on the Shakers convinced me that simplicity is hard work. Their spiral staircases reveal the complicated nature of plain design. And Shaker chairs, while a far cry from a La-Z-Boy, are, as Thomas Merton wrote, “made by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.” I’m no angel (just a lowly demigod), but I wouldn’t mind having a Shaker chair on my porch.

Second, in light of recent posts on the “evangelical crackup,” blog readers may be interested in Jim Wallis’s appearance on NPR’s Speaking of Faith. Here’s the description…

“The first in a two-part series on influential leaders who are reshaping Evangelical Christianity from within progressive and conservative circles. Jim Wallis founded Sojourners and now advises presidential candidates and world leaders in what he calls the ‘post-Religious Right’ era. He is determined to put poverty at the top of America's ‘moral values’ agenda.”

Finally, I just noticed that a new issue of Religion in the News is available.

For those who don’t know, the journal is edited by Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College. From Atheism to South Park, this issue promises to be another good one. Here’s the table of contents…

Beating Up on the New Atheists Journalists are skeptical of the atheist offensive. by Bernard Lightman

DOUBLE ISSUE WITH A SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT:
Science Education & Secular Values

Potterdämmerung by Mark Silk

Romney and the Mormon Moment Mitt Romney's candidacy puts pressure on the church to open up. by Jan Shipps

The Democrats Get Religion But, journalists ask, are the candidates religious enough? by Mark Silk

No More Mr. Nice Pope Pope Benedict's conservative proclivities emerge. by Andrew Walsh

Establishing Religion by Executive Order The Supreme Court defends the Bush faith-based initiative. by John Cosgriff

The Gospel According to South Park A cartoon series takes on religion in America. by Abe Silk

People Who Loved Tammy Faye In the end, the gay community returned her embrace. by Christine McCarthy McMorris