Origins of Proslavery Christianity

PAUL HARVEY

My friend Charles Irons of Elon University is about to publish his long-awaited The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia; it's supposed to be out later next month, so get your post-Easter pre-Memorial Day book sale shopping list ready. Here's the description from Amazon:

In the colonial and antebellum South, black and white evangelicals frequently prayed, sang, and worshipped together. Even though white evangelicals claimed spiritual fellowship with those of African descent, they nonetheless emerged as the most effective defenders of race-based slavery.

As Charles Irons persuasively argues, white evangelicals' ideas about slavery grew directly out of their interactions with black evangelicals. Set in Virginia, the largest slaveholding state and the hearth of the southern evangelical movement, this book draws from church records, denominational newspapers, slave narratives, and private letters and diaries to illuminate the dynamic relationship between whites and blacks within the evangelical fold. Irons reveals that when whites theorized about their moral responsibilities toward slaves, they thought first of their relationships with bondmen in their own churches. Thus, African American evangelicals inadvertently shaped the nature of the proslavery argument. When they chose which churches to join, used the procedures set up for church discipline, rejected colonization, or built quasi-independent congregations, for example, black churchgoers spurred their white coreligionists to further develop the religious defense of slavery.

More on Steven Waldman, Founding Faith

PAUL HARVEY

John Fea gave our blog an extensive and thoughtful review of STeven Waldman's Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America here (or just scroll down).

Terry Gross's interview on Fresh Air with Waldman is linked here. An introductory blurb:

Fresh Air from WHYY, March 11, 2008 · Was America meant to be a Christian nation? Author Steven Waldman attempts to answer this and other questions related to America's religious history in his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America.

Waldman is the co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a website devoted to spirituality and faith issues. In tandem with his book, Beliefnet has opened an online archive of historical documents related to the separation of church and state, and religious freedom in America.

There's also a short excerpt from the volume linked to the Fresh Air site.

Omnivorous American Religion

BY JOHN TURNER

I've been reading a book with only a very tangential connection to American Religious History: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, whom the NYT describes as "a professor of journalism at Berkeley, and therefore by definition a liberal foodie intellectual."

This is the tangential connection: Pollan introduces us to Joel Salatin, a Bob Jones University graduate and alternative farmer in Virginia who describes himself as a "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer." Salatin has opted out of "industrial agriculture" and instead practices intensive-grazing grass management, enabling him to grow chickens that taste like Chicken. Salatin turns off some liberal reporters with a Jesus fish on his door, but Pollan admirably perseveres. He even survives a "strikingly non-generic version of grace, [in which Salatin] offer[ed] a fairly detailed summary of the day's doings to a lord who ... was present and keenly interested."

The Omnivore's Dilemma made me feel intensely guilty about eating blueberries from Chile and suspicious that everything I eat might really be corn.

Pollan reaches this conclusion about American styles of eating:

Consuming these neo-pseudo-foods alone in our cars, we have become a nation of antinomian eaters, each of us struggling to work out our dietary salvation on our own.

The American diet sounds strikingly like American religion. We eat like we worship!

Visions of Progress

PAUL HARVEY

I recently returned from a Humanities Symposium in Boulder, where (among others), Wendy Brown, the Berkeley political theorist and contributor to the blog Immanent Frame, gave a brilliant analysis of Marx and religion, and the profaning nature of market culture, which is still buzzing in my head. Along the way, she discussed the religious iconography of the "Obama phenomenon." The gist of her paper can be found in her blog entry on Charles Taylor's new book on secularism, here (as she puts the discussion with Taylor there: He [Taylor] wants to think about who a secularist is and what secularism achieves and sacrifices in relation to belief, and I want to think about the subtle violences of the forces that we might call secularizing.

We've entertained considerable speculation on the blog about the fate of the so-called religious center/left, its possible (or mythical) resurgence, where Catholics fit in, etc.

Now for some excellent historical grounding for these speculations: The historian Doug Rossinow, author of The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (Columbia, 1998), which we've blogged about here before in our conversations with John Wilson about the historiography of the 1960s, is featured on HNN's "Outstanding Young Historians" page.

His new book may not get noticed by religious historians, but should be: Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America. He writes the following, of this new work:

I'm an historian of American politics. I never expected to be an historian of religion.

Actually, I never really did become an historian of religion, in any conventional sense. But I did acquire a lasting interest in the intersection of religion and political dissent-a connection I might have expected to encounter if I had undertaken a study of political radicalism in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century America, but one I did not anticipate exploring so deeply while investigating the political left in post-1945 America. Eventually I managed to compress about one-hundred pages on Christian existentialism down to a single chapter. I decided that was about what the topic deserved in the context of a study of white youth radicalism in Austin, Texas, which eventually took the form of a book, The Politics of Authenticity.

However, religion is something that pops up in unexpected places when studying American history. I have continued to explore what I call the prophetic dimension of American political radicalism in twentieth-century America-radical politics typically directed toward very nonreligious ends. And I still teach a course on religion and politics in American history.
In my new book, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America, I've moved (for now) away from monographic research and toward a synthetic perspective. One of the things I learned in researching my first book is that radical and reform politics in U.S. history have sometimes had more in common than is usually recalled. The left and liberalism are neither mutually exclusive categories nor (as a Fox News viewer might think) identical categories; they are overlapping categories.

I emphasize that American radicals, between 1880 and the present, frequently have done the work of liberalism, trying to realize the liberal ideals of constitutional government, natural rights, and other things, while, during at least some of that period, plenty of liberal reformers took a more critical stance toward American capitalism than recent history would lead us to believe. The prophetic stance is visible, too, but in ironic fashion: consciously religious social criticism was pervasive within American reform as well as among radicals in the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and even later; but it became the more exclusive province of radicals during the cold war and after, even though recent American radicals have usually been ardently secular people. Go figure.

I recently got a message from a student at a seminary in Austin, saying that some folks there are interested in establishing an intentional religious study community. He had read about another such community in the 1950s in The Politics of Authenticity, and wondered if I could send him some documents I had cited in my book. Now I'm glad I held onto those dissertation research files.

Holy Hills, Holy Hegemony, and Holey Reviews

Editor's note: Today's guest post comes from Matt Sutton, author of the outstanding work Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Matt currently teaches at Oakland University in Michigan, but will soon be a professor at Washington State University. Matt takes on a recent review of Aaron Ketchell's Holy Hills of the Ozarks.

Holey Reviews
by Matt Sutton

Jerry Falwell is dead, and James Dobson may be increasingly irrelevant, but the culture wars are still alive and well on the pages of Christianity Today’s Books and Culture. This was evident most recently in Frederica Mathewes-Green’s ridiculous review of Aaron K. Ketchell’s Holy Hills of the Ozarks: Religion and Tourism in Branson, Missouri (Johns Hopkins University Press). She entitles the review “Holy Hegemony.” Although she assumes that we all know that this refers to Ketchell’s book, it is not so clear once the article begins. Who is really practicing hegemony here? The young scholar publishing his first book and trying to begin a career, or a popular writer and veteran of the evangelical lecture circuit who felt it necessary to write a scathing, distorted review of his book, a review that entirely misses the point?

Mathewes-Green begins her article by poking fun at Branson, explaining that by “11:00 pm . . . everyone is snug in bed at the Red Roof Inn or the Best Western.” Once she establishes that she doesn’t take Branson too seriously herself, she opens her tirade against Ketchell. “It's hard for him to see the ways Branson has changed,” she writes, because “he finds Branson baffling to start with. He recognizes it as representing one side of a culture war (the other side, it appears) and focuses on that to the exclusion of anything else.” She then takes shots at him for his acknowledgements (which is always an easy target for those who can’t mount a legitimate challenge at an author’s evidence), and tells us that Ketchell is—wait for it—a Catholic(!), implying that he obviously doesn’t get Protestants. She accuses him of basing his analysis on “sociological texts rather than by talking to Christians directly.” Mathewes-Green totally ignores the fact that the book is chock full of interviews with Branson Christians and tourists. Why let the evidence get in the way of a good skewering? Her biggest problem is that “A good deal of Ketchell's hand-wringing is provoked by culture-war bogeys from thirty years ago. . . All through the book he is caught between, on the one hand, his perception that Christian faith is oppressively forced on Branson visitors, and, on the other hand, the evidence.”

No, it is Mathewes-Green who is ignoring the evidence. Holy Hills is a careful, balanced, and sophisticated analysis of Branson that incorporates the latest religious and culture studies theory. That Mathewes-Green read this book through the lens of the culture wars tells us a whole lot more about her than it does about Ketchell’s brilliant and engaging book. For a different view of Holy Hills, see my review in Christian Century.

Matthew Avery Sutton

A Sure Fire Way to Distinguish an Evangelical Christian From a Non-Evangelical Christian

BY JOHN FEA

In his book Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, Randall Balmer suggests that one way to distinguish an evangelical from someone who is not an evangelical is by the way they pronounce the word "evangelical." Balmer writes:

Although the rule is not universal, people who call themselves "evangelical" generally pronounce the word with a short "e" (the first two syllables rhyme with "leaven"), while people who are not evangelicals use a long "e" (ee-van-gel-i-cal).

Religion watchers, sociologists, and political pollsters have tried to identify evangelicals in all kinds of ways. What distinguishes them from other Christians? Is it their theology? Is it a born-again experience? Is it church attendance or denominational (or non-denominational) affiliation? While all of these are good means of thinking about how to define an evangelical, I want to offer a more Balmeresque suggestion, one that I came up with today while leaving the parking lot of an evangelical church. Here it is:

EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS USUALLY BRING THEIR BIBLES TO CHURCH, WHILE NON-EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS USUALLY DO NOT

What do you think? Am I on to something here?

DuBois Reviewed

PAUL HARVEY

Pastor Robert Cornwall reviews Ed Blum's W. E. B. DuBois: American Prophet, here in Christian Century. He writes:

. . . it's Du Bois's critique of white American religion that makes this an important read for the nonspecialist. What we discover is a deeply spiritual man, influenced by the Social Gospel and religious modernist traditions, who is repelled by the hypocrisy of Christ's white followers. Du Bois's critique of white Christianity is hostile, but he doesn't reject religion or Christianity—only its distortions.