Jesus Made in America

Paul Harvey

To the literature on Jesus in America, represented most notably and recently by Stephen Prothero's pithy and readable American Jesus and Richard Wightman Fox's lengthier and more scholarly Jesus in America, one may now add Stephen Nichols, Jesus Made in America.

Unlike Fox and Prothero, Nichols writes from an overtly confessional, evangelical viewpoint. Nonetheless, there's a good deal here for readers from various persuasions; in particular, Nichols provides an interesting exploration of Jesus in the movies, and acidly surveys as well Jesus in Contemporary Christian Gospel (no theologians need apply) and in the contemporary religious right.

Matthew Hall has a nice short blog review of the work here, which concludes:

The final chapter is sure to be the most provocative of the book. There will be many conservative evangelicals who will share Nichols’ discomfort with seeing Jesus branded on t-shirts and “Jesus is my girlfriend” Christian pop tunes. But Nichols argues that the Religious Right has just as easily appropriated (co-opted?) an “American Jesus” that suits its commitments to fiscal conservatism and a particular brand of neocon foreign policy. Here he commends Darryl Hart’s proposal in A Secular State: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State, one that has a lot of merit to it. As Nichols notes (following Hart), evangelicals on both the right and the left have exhibited a tendency to co-opt Jesus as a medium for their political ideologies and policies. In the end, however, the otherworldly nature of historic Protestantism is largely subsumed.

One suspects that evangelicals of every stripe will find something that makes them squeamish. But then again, perhaps that’s just what Nichols is going for here. If American evangelicals are to recover any cultural capital and religious credibility, they will likely have to dispense with their penchant for sentimentalized caricatures of Jesus and mass-marketed religion. Whether or not that will happen is hard to say. After all, America is a religious marketplace where supply and demand are in play just as strongly as on Wall Street.

This work, like others in the genre (with the exception of one fine chapter in Prothero), has little to say about how Jesus has been received and represented among African Americans and Native Americans, nor how Jesus has been racialized in American history. For that story, stay tuned for Ed Blum and Paul Harvey's Jesus in Red, White and Black, which we hope to complete by the end of this year.

Take Back the System

Oki Niksokowa -

Todays sharing is done with regard to the political climate in this country!

In all things political I always look first at what is happening to our People the Original People of this land.

Then I look at the Economic, Societal and Foreign issues in that order.

I would consider it a favor if each one of you were to look at the following websites as a learning tool to determine how you  will decide what is best for this land and all the people in it.

I am not afraid to admit that I am not liberal and not conservative (with the idea of maintaining the current status quo of our governmental policies)! I am in theory a conservative in the view of maintaining our cultural histories and following those lessons as a guide line in the process of changing what is necessary to change but not so radically changed that the end result has lost all of the energy of that which guided the change.

Today we are faced with the extension of the destructive power that has already begun to destabilize us as a nation. High home prices, high  heating prices, high food prices and high gas prices. All spiraling upward out of control.  I consider this a priority over everything else we as a nation have on our table.

Remember this year as predicted by the Mayan Culture - 2012 - It is now 2008 and one can readily see destruction trying to get a foot hold. It will - unless we stop it. That's the reason for predictions, to give us an opportunity to change.

I don't usually endorse a Liberal view point in my decision making process but because of what is happening and because of what your are about to see, I do not have a choice but to  support Barack Obama! McCain is not who I want to see in power. He is old school conservative who does not seem to support any Native American agenda and in fact in the past has been very destructive of it.

I never thought I would say this - but in order for this country to survive the Chaos that it is in we need radical change that won't wait till after the election. NOW IS THE TIME.....

I am not in any way recommending to you who to vote for! That should be your choice alone but I am saying we cannot survive the Status Quo! We need Change now! I just heard someone say that in their home they use Oil heat to the tune of 992 gallons per year. They just got a qoute from their Oil company of $5.00 / Gallon. That's $4960 per heating season. Who the HELL can afford that outside of high paid politicians?

The time to take back control of our Country is now and we cannot count on our politicians to come to our rescue.

I advocate a 1960's protest environment that will shake the very walls of the White House.

Please look at these two sites as a small example of why I choose this way.


http://www.cain2008.org/

http://www.wyomingnews.com/articles/2008/06/08/ap/headlines/d915qsk01.txt


Waatowa Pistoto, Two Feathers - Kainaiwa - Blackfoot Nation

Pentecostals and Sexy-Time

Pentecostals and Sexy-Time
Matt Sutton

John Steinbeck opened his 1939 classic Grapes of Wrath with a pentecostal evangelist who explained, “I use ta get the people jumpin’ an’ talkin’ in tongues, an’ glory-shoutin’ till they just fell down an’ passed out….An’ then-you know what I’d do? I’d take one of them girls out in the grass, an’ I’d lay with her.” Representations of pentecostals in popular culture throughout the twentieth century, from Upton Sinclair’s Eli Watkins to Sinclair Lewis’ Sister Sharon Falconer to Steinbeck’s Jim Casey have all blended faith with fornication.

And, of course, these novelists have not been far from the mark. Pentecostal/charismatic leaders Charles Parham, Aimee Semple McPherson, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Ted Haggard were all involved in highly publicized sex scandals. How should we understand this phenomenon? For years I have been trying to understand if there is a relationship between pentecostal/charismatic faith and sex. So far I have three theories:

Unlike many other evangelical groups, pentecostals/charismatics are much more affirming of the body. Their holistic worship and embrace of the physical makes them more susceptible to physical temptation than more ascetic, body-denying groups.

Pentecostal/charismatic leaders are no more prone to sexual indiscretions than any other leaders. However, they have been better at using mass media to create celebrity ministers who thrive in the spotlight. Although all religious movements have occasional errant leaders, because so many pentecostal ministers are in the limelight, their foibles receive a disproportionate amount of attention.

Pentecostals are notoriously independent and they generally refuse to submit to any outside authority or oversight. When you combine their independent streak with the power and money that comes with the kinds of religious empires that they have been so good at building, trouble may be inevitable. Sex certainly seems to come with power and money in many other parts of American culture.

But I am still not sure that I buy any of my own theories. Why do pentecostal leaders have so much trouble with sex????

More Whales, Less Fleas?

Randall J. Stephens

We recently published a forum in Historically Speaking on the differences between academic and popular history: "Do You Need a License to Practice History?" Adam Hochschild's lead essay is a wonderful piece, filled with insight into the profession and the audience historians do and do not reach. Donald Yerxa gathered a stellar cast of authors to comment on Hochschild's remarks. Here's Hochschild:

“To produce a mighty book,” Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “you must
choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” Too often, the pressures in the academic world train historians in writing books about fleas, rather than in trying to harpoon a whale.

I've posted a few of the responses--by Joyce Seltzer, John Demos, and Joseph J. Ellis--in addition to Hochschild's essay on the Historically Speaking web site. Food for thought.

Could some of the same arguments and counterarguments be made concerning American religious history? Is their a significant difference between historians like Robert Orsi, Leigh Eric Schmidt, and Marie Griffith on one hand and Gary Wills, Diana L. Eck, and Stephen Prothero on the other? What sort of readers do historians of American religion write for? Who should they write for?

Blum's Prayer

Ed Blum

A Prayer for the Democratic Party – from W. E. B. Du Bois (ca. 1910):

“It is never too late to mend. Nothing is so bad that good may not be put into it and make it better and save it from utter loss. Strengthen in us this knowledge and faith and hope, O God, in these last days. Amen.”

With the imminent delegate victory for Barack Obama, it appears that a time of healing is necessary for the Democratic Party. Last summer, I penned an article for History News Network about what the Democratic Party could learn about religion from the life and writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. I hope that the party, especially the more energetic followers of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, will heed these words. Du Bois prayed with his students at Atlanta University in the early twentieth century. I think they give us hope not only in the struggle against racism and misogyny, but also in the efforts for political alliance. Once again, we have so much to learn from the supposedly agnostic left.

Jesus Made Me (and McCain) Puke

Paul Harvey

While the media obsesses over religious figures vaguely linked to Obama, the story of McCain's alternate courting of and then distancing from some of the more bizarre figures on the religious right's lunatic fringe remains relatively underplayed.

Here are a couple of good places to start. First, Matt Taibbi's amusing "Jesus Made Me Puke: Undcover with the Religious Right," tells his story of going native at the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio. Never fear, Jesus will cast out those ACLU liberals.

More seriously, and ominously, our contributing editor Matt Sutton's "McCain's Ministers of Doom," drawn in part from his excellent ongoing work in the history of Christian evangelical apocalypticism through the twentieth century, explains the perils of McCain's alternate flirtations with and then public denunciations of these current-day eschatological theorists. Sutton concludes:

The firestorm that the candidate’s embrace of Hagee and Parsley incited was inevitable. That McCain didn’t see it coming reveals what terrible advice he is getting and how truly out-of-touch he is with religious conservatives. In picking some of the most extreme agents of intolerance to buddy up to in an effort to mend fences with the Religious Right, and then having to publicly denounce them, McCain has done the unthinkable—he has simultaneously lost face with the moderates who liked his independent streak and the religious conservatives that he so badly needs.

After these warning signs, time for a more cheery piece, so check out "Taking Their Faith, But Not Their Politics, to the People," from the NY Times, which reports this of "The Journey," described as a "megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals" in St. Louis:

They say they are tired of the culture wars. They say they do not want the test of their faith to be the fight against gay rights. They say they want to broaden the traditional evangelical anti-abortion agenda to include care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.I.V., according to experts on younger evangelicals and the young people themselves.

Doubtless the recent gay marriage decision in California will re-energize the culture wars, so it will be interesting to see what these younger green evangelicals will do, and how successfully the older warriors of the religious right will be in mobilizing the anti-"gay agenda" vote as was so brilliantly executed in Ohio in 2004.

Meanwhile, all those San Antonians getting their demons excised should be required to watch Samuel Jackson's quoting from the book of Ezekiel in Pulp Fiction; I don't recall him reading anything in there about the ACLU.

Catholics and Political Endorsements

Art Remillard

Over on the Spiritual Politics blog, Mark Silk's recent post on Father Pfleger, Catholics, and political endorsements includes this invocation given by Monsignor Jim Silante at a recent New York GOP fundraiser.



Will this make the news cycle? Probably not. Despite the partisanship, Silante isn't nearly as animated as Pfleger, who fed the media narrative on Obama's questionable religious connections. And the competing narrative--that Catholics favor Republicans--just isn't that new or interesting.