Religion, Morality, and History: John Ashworth and David Brion Davis

Paul Harvey

Sitting on a sofa on this Sunday afternoon, I came across this nice sentence from Edward Rugemer, "Explaining the Causes of the American Civil War," a review of the two massive John Ashworth volumes Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum American Republic, a huge project which gives a sophisticated class-based interpretation of the coming of the Civil War:

It must also be mentioned that Ashworth completely ignores religion in his explanation of antislavery. This is like writing maritime history without reference to the sea. 

This piece, from the indispensable (for American historians, anyway) journal Reviews in American History, is appreciative of the synthetic accomplishments of these two volumes, but the second sentence above struck me. The author continues:

Religion was central to antislavery and it cannot be ignored. The need to validate wage labor with the attack on slavery may have been important to the broadening of the antislavery appeal, but it did not 'generate' antislavery; rather, it was a contributing factor in the popularity of antislavery. 

When we get into what generated antislavery and other humanitarian crusades, of course we enter David Brion Davis land, so how appropriate that a personally reflective essay (a reprinted talk, actually) appears as the last piece in this issue (March 2009)  of Reviews in American History. In a Historiography class a couple of years ago, I assigned Davis's then just-published book Inhuman Bondage, a remarkable survey of a huge range of issues regarding slavery and antislavery in world history, and one that probably only could have been authored by Davis. What struck me in reading the book is how much antebellum American antislavery seemed to have been a response to the market revolution generally (quite the opposite of Ashworth's argument, I think). After tracing his experience in Germany after World War II, where he saw the somber results of human evil all around him, Davis reflects on his career as a student in the subsequent years, and his tutelage under the influence of reading Reinhold Niebuhr's books:

. . . in view of Niebuhr's passionate attacks on pride and arrogance, I've often pondered the paradox of his supposed influence on the "Camelot" group that was around JFK -- the "best and the brightest" who were really responsible for the Vietnam War. . . ironically, as Niebuhr points out, the attempt to maintain one's own pride and self-respect by holding others in contempt leads to an uneasy conscience, to the general insecurity, which the attitude of contempt is meanto alleviate. Various religons have nourished this idolatry by feeding delusions of divine saction, holy alliances, . . . The archetype of this sin of pride and contempt for others, I later concluded was human slavery, especially racial slavery.

The central problem Davis grappled with in his multi-volume "Slavery and Western Culture" series was how anti-slavery ever arose in the first place, and why it did when it did. And, how much do structural changes (such as the market revolution and the rise of a free labor economy), over and above any exercise of individual will or morality, account for these fundamental moral shifts? 

I didn't say I had an answer. I'm just asking. Perhaps more to the point, Davis's short piece is a fascinating exploration of how personal biographies interact with what become research interests. 

Wise Blood, and Killing for Coal Dust

Paul Harvey

You Flannery O'Connor fans unite and get on those Netflix accounts -- John Huston's excellent 1980 film adaptation of Wise Blood, based of course on the short O'Connor novel, is now out on DVD. I saw this twenty years ago or so, can't wait to see it again, as I recall it well capturing the astringent O'Connor at her best.

The same summer I saw Wise Blood, I viewed a number of short documentaries about religion and laboring lives in the extractive industries. Religion and labor remains a subject in need of much more exploration. I was pondering this most recently while reading this year's Bancroft prize winner in History, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, a work ostensibly about the Ludlow Massacre of 1914 but, in reality, about the transformational power of coal in Colorado and western history. Coal, the author Thomas Andrews argues, induced a worldwide migration that left the more fabled gold and silver migrations in the dust, literally and figuratively.

Coal was a God which made its presence felt on the environment, in people's lives and lungs, and in the bitterness of a class society which belied the aspirations and ideals of the Quaker founder of the idealistic colony of Colorado Springs, General William Palmer. Coal was essential to his vision, and coal destroyed his vision.

Thomas Andrews has written an astonishingly powerful book. In his synthesis of environmental and labor history, coal is a powerful god-like force, and the relationship of the colliers to their environment was one of respectful fear and awe (best seen in how the colliers used the mice they befriended as their own canaries in the coal mine; when the mice scampered away unexpectedly, the men know something was amiss).

I was hoping for a bit more in Killing for Coal about religion and the multiethnic labor force that descended on the southern Colorado coal fields -- not a criticism of the book, just something I missed. I'm therefore doubly grateful for Richard Callahan's new book Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust, which is featured as the book of the week at Books and Culture (review courtesy of our own K. Lofton).

Here's an excerpt from the review, which shows the promise of combining the forces of religious and labor history in a way that Thomas Andrews accomplishes with his synthesis of environmental and labor history:

Callahan offers a lively picture of everyday life in coal towns populated by a microcosm of early 20th century American demography, including Hungarians, Italians, Slavs, Poles, Mexicans, Russians, Syrians, and Romanians. Within this multicultural panorama a rough peace abided. For instance, according to one miner, "The Jews were very much hated people." Yet Jews managed many of the stores that defined the incoming modernism of that era. "Along with the commodification of labor and the ready availability of consumer items," Callahan writes, "coal towns also introduced new patterns of leisure time that larger company towns tried to structure through organized, often commodified, forms of entertainment." At the same moment when modernism and fundamentalism were embattled elsewhere, southern Appalachian religious leaders sought to civilize their flocks through increased domestic consumption and ritual diminishment. One modernist Baptist pastor, for example, discouraged the ritual of foot-washing. "Doing away with [foot washing]," Callahan explains, "was a sign of the distancing of modern Baptists from closely heeding to their physical body, and the bodies of others in the community, as rich sources of religious experience."

Perhaps in reply to these modernist incursions, Holiness and Pentecostal movements enjoyed rampant success among the mining communities. Chapter 5 of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields supplies a "synthetic and speculative" discussion about Holiness religion's emergence and popularity in the coal fields. Due to the limited documentary material, Callahan relies upon Raymond Williams' cultural theory, along with studies of the Holiness movement where the record was stronger, to explain why Holiness found such a strong footing amidst the horizontal mines of eastern Kentucky. This is a moving chapter, especially in its explanatory reading of healing as a popular ritual among miners. "When I can feel him coming into my body," one southern Appalachian believer said, "I know God is real." The somatic repeatedly appears in Callahan's study as he seeks to recover the palpable and the felt aspects of religious lives. "The event of healing," he writes, "made the power of the Holy Ghost concrete and present to witnesses and the person healed." This was a "somatic form of knowledge of the material reality of divine power and its ability to transform the world physically." In short, the laboring affect may have been particularly conducive to Holiness effects.

Still More on Shields

John G. Turner

Thanks to Paul, we've already discussed Jon Shields's The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.

At the risk of some redundancy, merited by the book's significance, here are my reflections, recently posted at Books & Culture:

Why, then, does the media portray the Christian Right as a threat to American democracy when pro-life activists behave civilly, promote dialogue and debate on meaningful issues, and boost democratic participation? If anything, according to Shields, it is pro-choice activists who disproportionately act boorishly and refuse to participate in meaningful dialogue on the issue—though he acknowledges that, since pro-choice organizations seek to maintain the status quo, they have much less to gain from debating the issues. Why does the media still write about Operation Rescue-type organizations even though pregnancy counseling centers have vastly more support among pro-life activists? ... Most of the activists who appear in Shields' book are anything but incipient theocrats. They are good citizens by any objective measure.

I don't have enough experience among either pro-life or pro-choice activists to intelligently assess Shields's contrast between the respective attitudes of pro-life and pro-choice activists. Any thoughts?

I tried incorporating Shields's book into my teaching this past semester. I imagine most students not already friendly toward the Christian Right were unconvinced of its democratic virtues, but I thought it was important for students to at least encounter an academically iconoclastic view of the subject.

Ultimately, my own sense, contrary to current conventional wisdom, is that the Religious Right has been a great but not unalloyed blessing for the Republican Party. Certainly, the negative image of the Religious Right hurts the Party with moderates and independents, but it is hard for me to conceive of the quasi-ascendancy of the GOP from 1968-2004 without giving substantial credit to diffuse Christian Right movements. At the same time, as I write in Books & Culture, the Religious Right is an "albatross for American evangelicalism" and "a public relations disaster" for American Christianity more generally.

Practical Matters, Prayer Pawns, and A Chat on We Shall Remain

Paul Harvey

Emerging briefly from the depths of senior theses and graduate seminar papers, before taking a deep breath and diving back down. Notes of interest on new opportunities for online explorations.

First, Practical Matters, an online journal of religious practice and practical theology published out of Emory, has just posted its first issue, on the theme "Engaging Imagination." Articles and reviews range from photography to dance to "ritual praxis inside the classroom," and a host of other ways to open up the religious imagination. The editors introduce the journal here, and explain further:

In this journal you will find digital scholarship that utiliz­es the capacities of the internet to ask and provoke new questions about religious prac­tices and practical theology. You will also find here a variety of content: peer-reviewed scholarship in several media and genres, reflections and essays by practitioners and teachers, video and audio interviews with scholars, reviews of current work in religious practices and practical theology, musical performances, photographic essays, and more.

Next, Katie Lofton has emerged from her cubbyhole at Princeton to deconstruct the recent nonsensical tit-for-tat about the "National Day of Prayer":

The irony of debates about national prayer is that they transform the experience of nationalism (worthy, perhaps) into a prescription of nationalism (failed, always). Despite our stories plurality (or perhaps because of them), the landscape of American hope and American need has become stunningly arid, silenced by prayer box sets and by rationalist relativism. What now to say before the dying soldier? What now to do during an epidemic of economic dismay? We reach for prayers, but they have become too precious by half, made by both squabbling sides something to demonstrate that you have done (he in the Oval Office, they on the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue), rather than something that you seek to do. Beyond the glare of this hollow exhibitionism, we stretch for something real, we seek a prayer that isn't a pawn. And so I do what most mothers and fathers, lovers and workers, believers and atheists do: I squeeze the hand harder, and ask what I can do to see you better, to know you better, to serve you better. Then (I promise, I pray, I swear, I stand), I will do it.

Finally, I received this email about the PBS series We Shall Remain, a multi-part exploration of Native American History, which will interest some of you.

We would like to invite you to join us for a live chat with Julianna Brannum, co-producer of “Wounded Knee,” the fifth film in PBS’ “We Shall Remain” series. The films explore pivotal episodes in American Indian history. Tomorrow (Tuesday, May 12) at 2pm EST we’ll host a conversation about the film and Julianna’s behind-the-scenes perspective on this moving film. She'll answer your questions live in our hour-long chat.

Go to www.pbs.org/chat on May 12th at 2pm to join the discussion or leave a question for her today.

God's Work: What Can Faith-Based Activism Do For Labor?

Paul Harvey

A few days ago we put up a couple of posts about Jon Shields's important new book Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right. In the interests of being fair and balanced, and in the spirit of Dorothy Day, today we're moving on to rewnewed hopes for a recognition in public policy of the democratic virtues of the Christian Left.

Nancy MacLean (author of the great book Freedom is Not Enough) has posted a compelling piece at the Boston Review -- "God's Work: What can Faith-Based Activism Do For Labor"? She begins,

“I came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain, common workingmen,” recalled Frances Perkins. And so she did. From 1933 to 1945, Perkins helped create the core features of the New Deal state: minimum wage and maximum hours laws, legal guarantees for workers’ rights to organize and join unions, prohibition of child labor, Social Security, unemployment compensation, and fair labor standards. For all of the New Deal’s limitations, its laws and programs tamed Upton Sinclair’s “Jungle,” encouraged broad economic security and prosperity, and created, in economic terms, the most equitable America in history. And it was promoted and protected not only by strong unions but also by religious leaders, thanks to the prominence of a social gospel in the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish traditions at mid-century. During her twelve years as secretary of labor, Perkins herself spent one day a month in contemplative retreat at a convent. For her, the reference to God was not simply a rhetorical flourish.

Since the 1970s economic inequality has surged to levels not seen since the 1920s, Dickensian abuses of workers have returned, and deregulation has enabled the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. President Obama’s Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, faces challenges not unlike Perkins’s. Yet today, as in the 1930s, crisis also creates the opportunity for a bold new direction—a New New Deal, potentially more inclusive of the nation’s diverse labor force than Perkins could have imagined. Might the nation’s churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples again have a role in rescuing a wayward economy?

In addressing this question, Solis can learn much from Kim Bobo, founder and Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ). Bobo’s goal is to revive America’s justice-seeking prophetic tradition, with a particular focus on economic justice. In her new book, Wage Theft in America, Bobo argues powerfully for the importance of community allies in improving struggling workers’ lives. She aims to rouse believers from all faith traditions to a new sense of social mission. Her starting point, and the focus of her book, is to address a more specific challenge: “why millions of working Americans are not getting paid and what we can do about it.” The charge is not an exaggeration. Using Department of Labor settlements (which her organization has done much to win), Bobo documents how companies steal literally billions of dollars from millions of workers each year.

Bobo, MacLean explains, "understands that wage theft is a strategic issue that could jumpstart an overhaul of the Department of Labor, help to shut down the low road, and importantly, reanimate progressive politics with the social-gospel spirit." Bobo and groups such as IWJ come from a long tradition of

commitment to social justice in the Catholic and Jewish traditions and the Protestant social gospel that drove so much Progressive Era and New Deal reform. . . . 'We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,' FDR noted in 1937, 'we now know that it is bad economics.' ” We have relearned the truth that it is bad economics, but we still await the moral awakening.

Beyond Belief? Secularity and Scholarly Darlings

Paul Harvey

Nathan Schneider, "Beyond Belief: Research in Religion Goes After a New Target, The Secular," takes up a topic we've discussed here some before: the new scholarly research into secularity. We hit this topic before in covering Phil Zuckerman's new book Society Without God, and also in looking at the rise of the "nones" in surveys such as ARIS (that is, those answering "no religion" in surveys about personal religiosity). Recent commentors have noted that most of the growth of the nones took place from 1990 to 2001, and growth has leveled off since then, so the media hype about the recent study has been (surprise) as much hype as substance. Nonetheless, careful studies of un-belief are overdue and welcomed. Schneider surveys a variety of recent studies, the most interesting of which suggest how the boundary between being religious and irreligious is far more permeable than generally assumed:

Phil Zuckerman's study in Scandinavia, in fact, suggests that these distinctions aren't as clear as one might expect. His interviews show the extent to which, even in the absence of traditional supernatural beliefs, the subjects' religious heritage provides them with moral guideposts and cultural habits. Not believing in God doesn't stop most Danes and Swedes from considering themselves Christians.

Religions, we are beginning to learn, can be better understood by paying attention to what irreligion looks like. Probe irreligion, and you encounter not only new insights about how it works in people's lives, but also echoes of the very religions it defines itself against.

Before getting too comfortable with their apparent newfound status, however, the new secularists still have to contend with some fundamental realities, including the (still) remarkably high rates of religiosity in America. In short, other ways of looking at the evidence suggest that we're about as close to being "post-Christian" as we are to being "post-racial." Stephen Prothero addresses this in "Post-Christian: Not Even Close," where he suggests:

What the rise of the "nones" shows us is not how American Christianity is declining but how it is changing. The data tell us that Christians are increasingly likely to describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious, that they are increasingly wary of labels and institutions, and that they identify their faith less and less with "organized religion" and more and more with the personal power of Jesus himself.

What the data do not tell us is that the United States is becoming "post-Christian." If you meet a random American walking down the street, the odds are only one in 62 that he or she will self-identify as atheist or agnostic. . . . Meanwhile, Christianity remains, for good or for ill, a vital political force, not just on the right but also on the left, and the Christian Bible remains the scripture of American politics, invoked thousands of times a year on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

Over the past two decades, I have taught the "Christian America" debate to hundreds of students in my Religious Studies courses. When we finish our discussion, I call the question. My Christian students almost invariably describe the United States as a multicultural nation of religions, but my Jewish students tell me you have to be blind (or Christian) not to see that this is a Christian country. Here Christmas, not Passover, is a national holiday, and the only question about our presidents' religious affiliation seems to be from which Christian denomination they will come.

Prothero and others (including some posts here) have pointed out that the real news of the ARIS survey is the the shift of Catholicism from Northeast to Southwest, and the continuing decline of mainstream Protestantism and rise of evangelical faiths (born-agains now constituting 34% of Americans).

All of which makes me think of the protagonist in my favorite Elvis Costello song "Beyond Belief," from his Imperial Bedroom:

History repeats the old conceits
The glib replies, the same defeats
Keep your finger on important issues
With crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues . . .

I've got a feeling
I'm going to get a lot of grief
Once this seemed so appealing,
Now I am beyond belief.

The New Black Gods

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

Edward Curtis and Danielle Sigler have edited what looks to be a fantastic new collection of essays on Arthur Huff Fauset and African American religious traditions. Titled The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religion, essays cover multiple traditions and explore many issues in the field. Religion in American History's own Kathryn Lofton has an essay. Among many others, this collection of essays might be beneficially read alongside Edward Blum's work on Du Bois, Barbara Savage's new work on Black religion and politics, Wallace Best's study of Black Chicago and religion, and Curtis Evans's book The Burden of Black Religion.




Here's a description from the Indiana University Press web site:
Taking the influential work of Arthur Huff Fauset as a starting point to break down the false dichotomy that exists between mainstream and marginal, a new generation of scholars offers fresh ideas for understanding the religious expressions of African Americans in the United States. Fauset's 1944 classic, Black Gods of the Metropolis, launched original methods and theories for thinking about African American religions as modern, cosmopolitan, and democratic. The essays in this collection show the diversity of African American religion in the wake of the Great Migration and consider the full field of African American religion from Pentecostalism to Black Judaism, Black Islam, and Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement. As a whole, they create a dynamic, humanistic, and thoroughly interdisciplinary understanding of African American religious history and life. This book is essential reading for anyone who studies the African American experience.

Here's the Table of Contents:

Introduction / Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler

Part 1. New Religious Movement(s) of the Great Migration Era
1. Fauset's (Missing) Pentecostals: Church Mothers, Remaking Respectability, and Religious Modernism / Clarence Hardy
2. "Grace Has Given God a Vacation": The History and Development of the Theology of the United House of Prayer of All People / Danielle Brune Sigler
3. "Chased out of Palestine": Prophet Cherry's Church of God and Early Black Judaisms in the United States / Nora L. Rubel
4. Debating the Origins of the Moorish Science Temple: Toward a New Cultural History / Edward E. Curtis IV
5. "The Consciousness of God's Presence Will Keep You Well, Healthy, Happy, and Singing": The Tradition of Innovation in the Music of Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement / Leonard Norman Primiano
6. "A True Moslem Is a True Spiritualist": Black Orientalism and Black Gods of the Metropolis / Jacob S. Dorman

Part 2. Resurrecting Fauset's Vision for African American Religious Studies
7. Religion Proper and Proper Religion: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions / Sylvester A. Johnson
8. The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography / Kathryn Lofton
9. Turning African Americans into Rational Actors: The Important Legacy of Fauset's Functionalism / Carolyn Rouse
10. Defining the "Negro Problem" in Brazil: The Shifting Significance of Brazil's African Heritage from the 1890s to the 1940s / Kelly E. Hayes
11. Fauset and His Black Gods: Intersections with the Herskovits-Frazier Debate / Stephen W. Angell