God's Country

Randall Stephens

A new Purdue University study shows that as America becomes more religiously diverse, views of America as a Christian Nation gain in strength as well. According to the Purdue University News Service: "[Jeremy Brooke] Straughn and co-author Scott L. Feld, a professor of sociology, looked at two waves of public opinion data from the General Social Survey, which was collected by the National Opinion Research Center. They found that between 1996 and 2004 the percentage of people who said Christian faith was a very important attribute of being 'truly American' rose by more than 11 percentage points, from about 38 percent to 50 percent. The findings are published in the current issue of the journal Sociology of Religion."

This shift in thinking has gone hand-in-hand with a rise in religious diversity. Christians make up 78% of the population, though the number of Protestants has steadily decreased. I'd like to know more about what accounts for the rise in the "Christian Nation" view. Readers: Any thoughts about that?

Here's the paper's abstract:

"America as a 'Christian Nation?' Understanding Religious Boundaries of National Identity in the United States"

Jeremy Brooke Straughn and Scott L. Feld

Though predominantly Christian since the time of its founding, the United States has become more religiously diverse in recent decades. Yet since the mid-1990s, the proportion of Americans who see their country as a "Christian nation" has reportedly increased. Though initially paradoxical, these trends are less mysterious if the idea of a "Christian America" (CA) is understood, not as a description of religious demography, but as a discursive practice that seeks to align the symbolic boundaries of national belonging with the boundaries of the dominant faith community. Using data from 1996 and 2004 General Social Survey, it is shown that the growing prevalence of CA was restricted to Americans of Christian faith, thereby widening an existing religious divide over the meaning of American identity.

All that I can say is . . . I'm happy to plug this in to my current co-authored book project!

American Religious History at the AAR

Paul Harvey

The below is from the Historical Society blog; Randall there has helpfully summarized some of the main sessions on American religious history at the upcoming AAR in Atlanta, including my session I blogged on before, "The Future of Southern Religious History."

The first morning, Saturday, is the main panel presenting new research in African American religious history. Monday afternoon, for those of you who can stay around until then (regrettably, not including me), is a dream team scholarly lineup discussing how Robert Orsi's Madonna of 115th St has affected (or not) the study of religion. Saturday afternoon at 1:00 features a panel discussion of our friend Tisa Wenger's work We Have a Religion, which we blogged about before here featuring an interview with the author.

The full program is searchable here.

Saturday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L405-406
Missionary Innovation: African-American Religion and the New South

Presiding
* Josef Sorett, Columbia University

Presenters
* Lerone Martin, Emory University
Selling to the Souls of Black Folk: Atlanta, the Phonograph, and the Transformation of American Religion and Culture, 1920–1941

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing and Righting Race: Women’s Interracial Cooperation in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church, South

* Brandi Hughes, University of Michigan
(En)Gendering the Trans-Nation: The Missionary Sojourns of Black Womanhood from Atlanta through Monrovia

* Brandon Winstead, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
“We are Responsible to God”: Black Nazarene Women’s Theology of Evangelistic Responsibility and Its Relationship to Their Contributions to the Church of the Nazarene’s Gulf Central District, 1953–1969

Responding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover E
Author Meets Critics: Thomas A. Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling (Harvard University Press, 2008)

Presiding
* Daniel Ramírez, University of Michigan

Panelists
* Richard Callahan, University of Missouri
* Marie Marquardt, Agnes Scott College
* Grant Wacker, Duke University

Responding
* Thomas A. Tweed, University of Texas

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover FG
Defining Religious Freedom: Reading Tisa Wenger’s We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

Presiding
* Ines M. Talamantez, University of California, Santa Barbara

Panelists
* Quincy Newell, University of Wyoming
* Greg Johnson, University of Colorado
* Kenneth Mello, Southwestern University

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover C
The Lutheran Tradition: New Theological and Global Perspectives
Presiding
* Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg

Presenters
* Farisani Elelwani, University of South Africa
The Challenges Facing Lutherans in South Africa

* John Reynolds, Union Theological Seminary
The Heart in Sixteenth Century Physiology and the Role of Luther’s Theology in the Life of the Believer

* Hans Schwarz, University of Regensburg
Martin Luther’s Reception in Korea

* Cecilia Nahnfeldt, Karlstad University, Sweden
Lutheran Vocation and Gender Relations

Saturday 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L507
Seminar on Religion in the American West

Presiding
* Jane Naomi Iwamura, University of Southern California

Presenters
* Travis Ross, University of Nevada, Reno
Sectionalism in California’s Religious Periodicals: Place in Religious Rhetoric

* Jonathan William Olson, Florida State University
“Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan”: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West

* Barry Joyce, University of Delaware
Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science, and the Sacred at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park

* Brett Hendrickson, Arizona State University
Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University


Sunday 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover AB
Keywords in the Study of North American Religion: Anthropomorphism, Agency, and Vernacular

Presiding
* Gary M. Laderman, Emory University

Presenters
* W. Clark Gilpin, University of Chicago
Anthropomorphism: Human Connection to a Universal Society

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing Agency: Reconsidering Agency in the Study of American Religion

* Rachel Lindsey, Princeton University
The Light of the World: Vernacular Photography and American Religion, 1839–1910

Monday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M101
The Future of Southern Religious History

Presiding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Panelists
* Alison Greene, Yale University
* Michael Pasquier, Louisiana State University
* Randall Stephens, Eastern Nazarene College
* Curtis Evans, University of Chicago
* Ted Ownby, University of Mississippi

Responding
* Lauren Winner, Duke University

Monday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M103-104
How Has Orsi’s Madonna of 115th Street Affected the Way We Think about Religion?

Presiding
* David Harrington Watt, Temple University

Panelists
* Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University
* Stephen J. Stein, Indiana University
* Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
* Leigh E. Schmidt, Harvard University

Responding
* Robert Orsi, Northwestern University

The Lost Soul of Higher Education

by Michael Utzinger

There is a really nice interview with Ellen Schrecker, author of The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University (The New Press, 2010) by Serena Golden at Inside Higher Ed.

Schrecker highlights, it seems to me, some of the key issues facing higher education today. The questions remain: how can faculty articulate their vocational goals and how do these goals dovetail with their institution’s mission in the current climate? I wonder if Schrecker’s final hopes (quoted below) are possible in a world in which “re-branding” has become the tool of survival, especially at small tuition-driven schools, to reach our potential students, who act and are treated like consumers. The pressures to mold one’s institutional mission in new directions may be especially acute if you are at a small church-related institution, especially if being, say, Methodist does not appear to be a brand that potential students initially find appealing. As colleges and universities increasingly retool their identities and missions in a tough economy, we may need to speak now or forever hold our peace.

Here is a short excerpt from the interview:

For the past 40 years, professors have been abandoning their collective responsibility for maintaining the quality of higher education. Some have been careerist or lazy, but most, I think, are just overwhelmed …

This situation must be reversed; faculty members must return to their traditional role at the heart of the university. They must explain to the public – and to their students and their administrators as well – why their input is essential if American higher education is to meet its current challenges. This reversal will not be accomplished easily; the nation’s faculties face a legacy of more than forty years of demonization by the media and marginalization on their campuses. Collective action – through unions, faculty senates, and organizations like the American Association of University Professors – is crucial. Fortunately, the situation is not yet hopeless. As many administrators admit, faculty members still have considerable clout within their institutions, even if they do not always exercise it. At the same time, as the failure of David Horowitz’s recent campaign against academic freedom revealed, once politicians and the general public understand the real issues involved, they do support the intellectual openness and faculty autonomy that American higher education requires. And, who knows, they might even pay for it.

Seneca Possessed

Paul Harvey

From Choice, a quick hit review of a new book that should be of interest to many:

Dennis, Matthew. Seneca possessed: Indians, witchcraft, and power in the early American republic. Pennsylvania, 2010. 313p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780812242263, $45.00. Reviewed in 2010nov CHOICE.

This fascinating study examines how the Senecas struggled to maintain their community, autonomy, and land between 1780 and 1825. Dennis begins by describing the dangerous chaos that shook western New York in the wake of the Revolutionary War. He then analyzes the message and effects of the Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, including connections to the Second Great Awakening, and provides a nuanced view of how witch hunting before, during, and after served as "a unified defense of Seneca integrity and sovereignty." Next, the author examines the connections that the tribe developed with Quaker missionaries, who proved useful partly by providing needed technology and education and partly by acting as a "firebreak" against other, less compliant missionaries, but mostly by supporting the Senecas in their fight against efforts by the Ogden Land Company and the State of New York to take their land and autonomy. The book seems disjointed because of the separate Handsome Lake and Quaker-focused sections, but that is outweighed by its analysis of Seneca social and cultural change and continuity, and its examination of the connections between the tribe and the surrounding US culture. Summing Up:Recommended. All levels/libraries. -- D. R. Mandell, Truman State University

From the Underside of the Millennium: My Take on God in America

Paul Harvey

Today's Religion Dispatches features a few of my thoughts on the God in America series which premiered last week: "The Brutality of the American Eden: From the Underside of the Millennium." As the post makes clear, I enjoyed and appreciated the series, but wanted to raise some questions about freedom and authority in American history:

But I do want to ask what this series would look like if we also understand American religious history to be about coercion and authority? Most of God in America is about the white Protestant majority in American history. In a series on religion and public life, that is fair enough; they have dominated religion and public life. But what if we make coercion,establishment, and repression as central to our narrative as freedom, disestablishment, and expression? What if this is a show in which Americans’ self-understanding as derived from Exodus is more critically examined than celebrated?

Read the full post here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts either at Religion Dispatches or here.

Oh, and while you're at it, catch Matt Sutton's take on the series here, also at Religion Dispatches. Matt defends the series against professorial carping, praises its success in reaching a broader public, and points out how much we all engage in our own forms of condensation and simplifying to get across a few basic points.

Christianity and Scholarship in the Public Square, the Guild, and the Church

Paul Harvey

My blog contributors John Fea, Gerardo Marti, and Michael Utzinger joined me last weekend at a really wonderful event, the 20th anniversary conference and celebration of the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University. John, Mike, and I were postdoctoral fellows there (1993-95 for me, 99-00 for Mike, 2000-02 for John), and Gerardo was there giving a keynote address this weekend to an assembled group of representatives from various church-related colleges and institutions across the country. I was able to catch up with some old friends, meet some new ones (including some rising younger stars in American religious history), and enjoy hearing a variety of papers in Humanities and the Arts around the theme of "Finding One's Place." John Fea has blogged more about the program here. Graduate students who read this blog, make sure and check out the opportunities provided by this 2-year postdoctoral fellowship by clicking here.

Below is some more on a book of reflections on "Christianity in the Public Square" of higher education, based on talks given at the last Lilly Fellows reunion conference in 2007. I'm pasting the below in from John Fea's Way of Improvement Leads Home blog (hope you don't mind, John) -- it includes information on the short book as well as authors, titles, and descriptions of the contents:

_____________________________________

This weekend I just received my copy of For the Whole of Creation: Christianity and Scholarship in the Public Square, the Guild, and the Church, ed. John Steven Paul and James Paul Old (Valparaiso University Press, 2010).

If you are interested in church-related higher education this may be a book worth reading. (I am not sure how to order a copy. Perhaps the best way to obtain one is to contact the Lilly Fellows Program at Valparaiso University--www.lillyfellows.org).

The book includes sections on "The Christian Academic and the Public Square," "The Christian Academic and the Academic Guild," and the "Christian Academic and the Church."

Here is the table of contents:

Foreword: Joe Creech

Tal Howard, "On Plausability, Post-Secularism, and Evangelicalism."

Jeffrey Zalar, "The Roots of Public Virtue in Christian Intellectual Practice."

Colleen Seguin, "Classrooms as Public Spaces."

Paul Harvey, "Exile from Valpo: On Being a Religious Scholar in the Historical Guild at the Public University Amidst a Charged Atmosphere of Religion, Politics, and War."

Maria LaMonaca: "My Teaching Load is None of Your Business, and Don't Steal My Desk: Seeking an Identity Among Academic Guilds."

Heath White: "The Profession is the World: Some Thoughts on Being in the Guild But Not of It."

J. Michael Utzinger, "Faith That Kills?: Reflections on Religion after 9/11."

Kathleen Sprows Cummings, "Have Women Souls?: The Council of Macon and the Dilemma of a Catholic Feminist Scholar."

Martha Greene Eads, "The Professor in the Parish: Beyong Gourmet Coffee and High-Quality Handouts."

John Fea, "Worshipping with 'Christian America': A Historian's Search for a Spiritual Home in Mainstream Evangelicalism."

Scott Huelin: "Dual Citizenship: The Politics of Belonging to Church and Academy."

The Future of Southern Religious History

Paul Harvey

Alright, ya'll going to the American Academy of Religion meeting in Atlanta, time to make your plans for "The Future of Southern Religious History," coming up the last morning of the conference, Monday morning, Nov. 1 in the Marriot Marquis in Atlanta. We'll have more to say about that here later, as the conference session will feed into an upcoming Journal of Southern Religion. Here's the lineup for the morning. I'm on the panel, but don't let that scare you away, as I'm just chairing, which means I just introduce everyone and then observe the proceedings. This will be a roundtable format, meaning we'll have informal presentations and then a lot of time for discussion and interaction. It's going to be fun, hope to see you there, Marriott Marquis M101 in Atlanta, Monday, Nov. 1, 9:00 - 11:00 a.m.

A1-105

• North American Religions Section

Monday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Location: Marriott Marquis - M101

The Future of Southern Religious History

In the 1960s and 1970s, a group of scholars began to rewrite our understanding of the religious history of the South. Samuel Hill, Donald Mathews, Albert Raboteau, and Mechal Sobel examined white and black religious traditions in the region, setting them in new contexts and reopening what had seemed to be a “closed” history of white evangelical dominance and black suppression. Since then, employing tools from a variety of disciplines, scholars have opened up numerous research avenues in a quest to understand both historically and in the present this most religiously Protestant of American regions.

Our roundtable panel will assess, critique, and chart a future path for studies of religion in the South. We have chosen the panel/roundtable format to make our session one of dialogue between panelists and audience. To facilitate this dialogue, the comments from the panelists will be published via a blog which will both publicize the panel and get the panel “going” prior to the actual meeting itself.

Presiding

• Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Panelists

• Alison Greene, Yale University
• Michael Pasquier, Louisiana State University
• Randall Stephens, Eastern Nazarene College
• Curtis Evans, University of Chicago
• Ted Ownby, University of Mississippi

Responding

• Lauren Winner, Duke University

Business Meeting

• Rudy V. Busto, University of California, Santa Barbara
• Kathleen Flake, Vanderbilt University