God in America and Voices in the Classroom

Emily Clark

Like most in our discipline, I watched the God in America series on PBS. There are many elements of the series that have been discussed here and on other blogs, such as events, figures, or themes left out of the series, overly represented in the series, or given an unexpected portrayal. While listening to the commentators and following the story they mapped, I thought about American religious history narratives and how particular events can make all the difference to the story.

As a Ph.D. student at Florida State University, I get the opportunity to teach a section of the Religion in US History survey course. Each time I have taught it or assisted a professor, the narrative is different. Given our varied research interests, what we know best and what we most enjoy exploring seeps into our courses. I most enjoy teaching when pushing my students to think about the role race has played in our nation’s history and how its influence in American religion has never been neutral. And I know this leaves less time for other topics, but like all teachers, I try to negotiate it best I can. For a survey course, I find the most frustrating planning part to be: what to cut and who to leave out. Course organization varies as we decide whether to cover the history chronologically or thematically. For example, God in America chose chronologically and devoted one-third of the airtime for the latter half of the twentieth century to the present. Over six hours or fifteen short weeks, preparation decisions whittle down the story to fit the time allotted, and all the deities in the world know I wish for more time.

At the 2008 National American Academy of Religion meeting in Chicago, the Q&A during a panel on violence in American religious history brought survey course organization into the discussion. Not entirely surprising, it was a graduate student working on teaching her own undergraduate course who raised it. One of the audience members who offered guidance was Thomas Tweed, whose 1997 edited volume Retelling U.S. Religious History called the academy’s attention to the way we narrate our field. Recognizing our own voices in our work and their impact on our (hi)stories force a scholastic self-reflexivity that is also applicable to our teaching style and our relationship as a field with the public. God in America told a particular story that encourages me to reflect upon what I impart onto the undergraduates I teach.

God in America Alongside the Myth of American Religous Freedom

Paul Harvey

I'm working up a more coherent response to the God in America series, and hope to have that up soon. Over at Killling the Buddha, Nathan Schneider is live-blogging the series (last part is tonight), with Stephen Prothero (a major commentator on the series) and others joining in the fun, so check that out if you want to chat about the show while watching it.

For those of you (I'm talking to you pesky scholars here, especially, but others will be interested) annoyed at something of fundamental importance missing in the series, or of the treatment given to some individual or episode, make sure to check out the full website accompanying the series. It's full of detail, and presents a more complex and satisfying narrative than is possible in a documentary that, of necessity, has to distill and narrate in very broad strokes. For those of you wanting to use clips from the film for class, the author interviews, background stories, and further narrative provided in the "study guide" available at the website will be indispensable in enriching students' understanding. As some have noted here, this is basically a series about religion and public life (that's the subtitle to the series, in fact), but it could certainly be used as a springboard to lead students to explore other avenues of religious expression (music, art, interior experiences, religion and the body, and numerous others) that the film does not attempt to cover at the same level it devotes to the "intersections" of religion and public life.

As it happens, I'm watching the series while having just finished David Sehat's forthcoming book (out this January from Oxford) The Myth of American Religious Freedom, and Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America. If God in America is basically a story of religious liberty and freedom and their effects on religion in public life (and is at times, as John Fea writes below, a pretty Whiggish version of that story), Sehat's and Gordon's books taken together tell a story of the coercive nature of what Sehat calls the "moral establishment," and the struggles of religious dissenters (including in David's book the abolitionists, Stanton and early feminists, Mormons, progressive intellectuals, and others; and in Gordon's book everyone from the Jehovah's Witnesses to Elijah Muhammad to Beverely LaHaye and the Concerned Women of America to gay religious activists arguing on behalf of same-sex marriage) to articulate a fundamentally different vision of freedom than that establishment wanted to allow. Taken together, both of them present a kind of intellectual and social history of how people dealt with the abstract concept of religious freedom from the Founders down to the 2000s. They are both dealing with a basic contrast in what Gordon calls legal (or "technical") constitutionalism versus popular constitutionalism, and with the broad forces that have fundamentally altered constitutional "regimes" in different periods of American history. I hope in the future to post here an author interview with Sehat, and further thoughts of my own on the social history of what "religious freedom" has meant in American history, a subject I aim to write a book about one of these days.

I've blogged a bit before about Gordon's work, which is out and available from Harvard (having now read the book, I commend it to you wholeheartedly; apart from the intellectual content, it's really a fun read, and to say that it covers a "big tent" of fascinating and often ornery and cantankerous characters is putting it mildly).

As for Sehat's book, he's been producing a series of blog posts over at U.S. Intellectual History, where he outlines and develops some of his themes. His posts are a real intellectual treat, so check them out as a preview of the book; here's a brief description from Oxford:

In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom , Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.

It's been a fascinating exercise comparing and contrasting the vision presented in these two wonderful books alongside the (mostly) more optimistic story spun out in the film. It's sort of an exercise in narrative and counter-narrative. More on that in the coming days.

God In America, Part One: An Exercise in the Evangelical Whig View of Early American Religious History

 By John Fea

Cross-posted at The Way of Improvement Leads Home

I just got done watching Part 1 of the PBS series "God in America." I know I am behind (Part 2 aired tonight), but such is the life of a blogger, professor, and a new department chair.

The series begins with the Franciscan attempts to convert the Pueblo Indians to Christianity in the 17th century.  This, of course, is a sad chapter in American history.  The Spanish friars were militant.  Their evangelistic zeal led to the destruction of Pueblo sacred sites and all sorts of brutality.  The high point of this story is the Pueblo revolt of 1680, the Indian rebellion that put an end to the Spanish presence in the west and proved that Christianity would not come to America unchanged.

This is a nice way to begin, but it has absolutely no connection to the rest of Part One's narrative.  One gets the impression that this was just tacked on to the beginning of the program because SOMETHING needed to be said about native Americans.  The story line of the native Americans, and the Spanish for that matter, are quickly dropped in favor of what I call in the title of this post the "evangelical Whig view" of American history.  This script could have been written by George Bancroft.

And where is slave religion?  (Let's hope it is discussed later in the series).

The Puritans are next. Steven Prothero of Boston University establishes himself as our guide through this history, but we also hear from a star-studded lineup of historians that include Michael Winship, Frank Lambert, Mary Beth Norton, Stephen Marini

Much time is spent on Anne Hutchinson. Too much time.  Prothero is very good at showing the Protestant individualism of the Puritans and how Hutchinson, in some ways, seemed more Protestant than the Puritans.  Hutchinson is clearly the star.  There is more time spent on her story than on the Puritans who removed her from the colony.  Was the Hutchinson trial really the most important moment in 17th century New England history? Would the people living in Puritan New England have seen it this way?  Absolutely not. The Halfway Covenant, King Philips War, the Salem Witch Trials, and a host of other events would have been more important to the Puritan "city on a hill," but these events do not fit easily into the Whig narrative.

The portrayal of the Hutchinson trial is well-acted and the trial transcript is used as the script.  Winship claims that during this trial Hutchinson "rips him (John Winthrop) to shreds."  Norton celebrates the rebellious spirit of Hutchinson.  Prothero concludes that Hutchinson is the future of America--she represents liberty of conscience and religious freedom.

The documentary then jumps to George Whitefield. Marini stresses the individualism of evangelical religion. (By the way, I would love to take a class with Marini--so much passion and energy!)  Harry Stout mentions Whitefield's appeal to the emotions and the imagination.  Lambert connects Whitefield's evangelical, individualistic Protestantism to that of Hutchinson.  A clear intellectual and spiritual genealogy is developing here.

The discussion of the First Great Awakening does a great job of explaining evangelicalism as a real and powerful religious movement that impacted people's lives.  The documentary uses a host of quotes from the diaries of Whitefield converts to make this point.  Very well done.

But overall the treatment of the Great Awakening is blatantly Whig. One is left with the impression that the Great Awakening was more of a political movement than it was a religious movement. Stout talks about the way Whitefield's evangelicalism challenged "the old aristocratic order" and even suggests that the Great Awakening led to the popular idea that "we are the people."  Then Daniel Driesbach talks about the way that the Great Awakening brought the colonies together.  One clearly gets the impression that these historians are setting us up for the American Revolution.  I tell my students that the Great Awakening created a transatlantic religious network that made the colonies more British and Protestant.  "God in America" would prefer to see it as the seedbed of individual liberty, revolution, and American identity.

And then, in the last three minutes of Part One, we get the triumph of the evangelical Whig narrative or, what Jon Butler has called "Born Again History."

The narrator states that people began to insist that it was their right to worship in the church of their choice.  Evangelical religion is said to have provided the American Revolution with a sense of "moral" urgency. Prothero says that following the First Great Awakening, the Revolution was "inevitable" and "perfectly logical."

In the end, the story of "God in America"--at least early America-- is best told by following a direct line between Hutchinson and Whitefield, culminating in the American Revolution.  At times I thought I was sitting in a lecture at Glenn Beck University.

Leigh Eric Schmidt on Ida C. Craddock and Late-Victorian America

Randall Stephens

On October 18, 1902, the New York Times ran this curious obituary. Readers must have done a morning coffee spit-take:

"Chose Death Before Prison. Ida C. Craddock 'High Priestess,' Was to Have Been Sentenced for Circulating Improper Books"

Ida C. Craddock, 'High Priestess of the

Church of Yoga' in Chicago, and an exponent also of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other creeds, committed suicide in her room, on the top floor of 134 West Twenty-third Street, yesterday, by inhaling illuminating gas and slashing her wrist. It was the day upon which she was to be sentenced again, as she had been several times before, for circulating books and pamphlets explaining her peculiar beliefs, built up from a conglomeration of Oriental religions. . . . Miss or Mrs. Craddock was forty-five years old. She was rather handsome, and was usually well gowned. She was born in Philadelphia, her parents being Quakers.

Leigh Eric Schmidt takes up Craddock's strange, fascinating story in his forthcoming Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic Books). Much of it is startling, to say the least. In an era of buttoned down formality and Protestant prudery Craddock broke more rules than one could shake a ruler at. She dabbled in all manner of fringe-ish religion. The one-time Methodist moved with some ease into Quaker circles, Spiritualism, Free Thought, Eastern Mysticism, amateur biblical studies, Sexology . . . .

For some time she lectured as a self-proclaimed expert on phallic cults. Not a typical Chautauqua circuit subject.

Schmidt, with narrative skill and analytical insight, draws on Craddock's life to tell a broader tale of American religion in this age as well. (It's made me wonder about what we can learn about the whole from unusual subjects.) Says Schmidt: "The retrieval of Craddock's life from the vaults of vice suppression offers an entryway into major social and political issues of her day--and, often enough, of our own as well" (xi). She tested the country's Christian identity and it's moral certainty. In small ways, her exotic religious and secular outlook foreshadowed later developments: religious seeking, experimentation, new age dabbling, secular crusading. ". . . Craddoock floats only occasionally into view as a feminist," precursor, Schmidt observes, "a tragic free-speech martyr, a steamy occultist, or a sexologist ahead of her time. The diaphanous quality of those memories should not dissolve the grainy roughness of her life, the audacity and disrepute of it" (273-74).

In the interviews embedded here, I ask Schmidt about Craddock's career and her higgledy-piggledy path from Methodist to sexologist. Schmidt reflects on the larger meaning of religious dissent in these years and discusses the shape of American religion in the late-Victorian age. In part two of the interview he also comments on a couple of his current projects.

Thomas Kidd Lecture, Fri, Oct 15, Eastern Nazarene College

Randall Stephens

A note for any of y'all who live near Boston.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15, at 3:00pm, Shrader Lecture Hall, Eastern Nazarene College, Quincy, Mass: Thomas S. Kidd (Baylor University), "God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution." The Donald S. Metz Lecture in American Christian History.

Thomas Kidd is the author of a variety of books and article on American religion in the colonial and revolutionary eras. His The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America was published by Yale in 2007. University of Notre Dame historian Mark Noll described the book as “Well researched, clearly written and authoritatively argued. There is no book of comparable breadth, either chronologically or geographically.” Kidd also published The Great Awakening: A Brief History with Documents, with Bedford Books in 2007. His American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism was published by Princeton University Press in 2008. Walter Russell Mead thus praised American Christians and Islam in Foreign Affairs: “This concise and well-organized study offers readers an excellent summary of American popular attitudes toward Islam from the eighteenth century onward.”

Kidd will be speaking on his new book God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution (Basic Books, 2010), which Harry Stout described as "a history of religion and the American Revolution that addresses the revolutionary war in substantial detail. Thomas Kidd brilliantly examines the role of religion in the Revolution, and explores the intersection of religion and the Republic, neither of which can be fully understood without reference to the other. Kidd demonstrates in persuasive detail how the idea of religious liberty informed the meaning of the Republic at its deepest level."

The lecture is part of a series on colonial America. Gordon Wood and Jill Lepore will speak on campus in November.

How Faith Transformed America: Blum on God in America

Paul Harvey

Your final reminder for God in America, to be shown starting tonight on your local PBS station. I've posted a few early press reviews of it in recent posts here. But for the most substantive review and critique to date, check out Ed Blum's take on the series over at Patheos. Ed summarizes some of the major themes, characters, and scholarly trends represented in the series, and then imagines what a series of this sort would look like if done ten or twenty years from now -- in other words, what scholarly work is emerging that will find its way into synthetic narratives meant for a more general audience. He finds three in particular:

1) The West will be more of a primary site in the narrative (as in, the western regions of the United States)

2) race will not be relegated as much to the Civil War and Civil rights eras

3 "the body and bodies will become an important place of telling and examining religion in America" -- in other words, "the body" as a site of religious expression will be more central.

While you're enjoying the series, make sure to go over and check out Ed's extensive post.

Psalm 109:8: Trivia or Conspiracy

By Michael Utzinger

With all of the discussion of the midterm elections, I would like to rewind the clock to a bizarre little incident from the ghost of news cycles past. Last November there was a short-lived furor about a bumper sticker that read:

Pray for Obama
Psalm 109:8

When I first saw this bumper sticker, while driving, I naturally went home and looked up the passage in the Bible: “May his days be few, let another assume his office.”

Because I found it moderately clever, I was surprised when the news broke that the websites selling Psalm 109:8 bumper stickers and T-shirts had stopped peddling these wares because the message may have been against the law, a law that bans threatening the President of the United States

The guilty speech in this case was not the verse printed on the bumper sticker (Psalm 109:8) but the verse that follows it in the Bible which reads: “May his children become fatherless, and his wife a widow” (v. 9).

Speaking with some colleagues about this, I admitted that I thought it odd that “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8” would be construed as a threat against the President. One colleague disagreed. “You have the read the next verse,” he insisted. “This is clearly a threat.” The implicit argument of my colleague was based upon the claim that the bumper sticker must be interpreted contextually. In other words, Psalm 109:8 can only be understood if it is read with Psalm 109:9. My colleague pressed that these people know their Bible, so they know what they meant.

I have no doubt that they knew what they meant. The problem is: how do “we” know what they meant? For example, what about verse 6? “Appoint an evil man to oppose him; let an accuser stand at his right hand.” (So much for the newest Republican revolution or the Tea Party.) Better yet, in the full context of the Psalm, it appears that verses 6-19 represent the voice of those that oppose the anointed of God, the king, the messiah. Perhaps, the bumper stickers implies those that paste it to their cars are the “accusers” (Satans) mentioned in verse 6? Perhaps, Obama was God’s anointed?

And this, of course, is the rub. Bible verses can be de-contextualized and re-contextualized on a bumper sticker or a shirt or a sign. On what grounds does one verse printed on a bumper sticker carry some or all of the rest of the meaning of the literature from which it was decontextualized?

For example, it is cliché to use John 3:16 in a decontextualized manner: For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall perish but have everlasting life. My experience, however, has been that those that use the verse are completely unaware of verses that follow that speak of the condemnation of those that do not believe. How do I know if the fan in the rainbow wig is inviting me to accept Jesus as my personal savior, warning me that I am potentially hell bound, just an eccentric, or all of the above?

“Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8” on a bumper sticker, it seems to me, was clearly a bible-believing version of “throw the bum out.” Further, our current president was not the first to be targeted by this Bible verse as Arlen Specter, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton would certainly attest. So, why did this verse attached to Obama make the idea that it constituted a threat seems credible? Perhaps it seemed plausible because the media bombarded us the previous summer with images of the raw anger manifested by individuals within the emerging Tea Party movement and assumed that tea partiers were really populist remnants of the religious right. However, we now know (if little else) that the tea party movements are not primarily a cloaked religious movement of potentially violent evangelicals.

Claims about what the verse meant and why a certain interpretation seems credible at a particular historical moment requires argument and evidence if it is to have validity. This, of course, usually takes more time than a new cycle. However, well after the event is news, it becomes our job as students of American religion to determine if this was simply a trivial misunderstanding or a religious conspiracy to threaten the president.