Do Religion Scholars Read the Bible?

I'm happy today to guest post a dispatch from Elesha Coffman. Elesha is assistant professor of history at Waynesburg University, and in 2011-2012 she will be a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. Her dispatch concerns one session at the just-concluded 2nd Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture. We'll have some other posts about the conference in the days to come.

Do Religion Scholars Read the Bible? (A dispatch from Indianapolis)

Elesha Coffman

Next time you’re trying to get religion scholars’ blood pumping during a post-lunch session deep into an academic conference, try this: Ask them if they have actually read the Bible.

This challenge arose at the penultimate session of the Second Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture in Indianapolis last weekend, a roundtable on “Changes in the understanding and uses of scripture.” Scheduled to give a nod to the 400^th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible and to introduce a new project at IUPUI on Scriptures in America, the session included presentations by Charles Cohen, Kathleen Flake, and Charles Hambrick-Stowe. Following their brief comments, the audience was invited to jump into the discussion—except, initially, no one did. Whereas previous sessions had produced a pileup of voices vying for the microphone, this one seemed to have fallen flat.

I cannot explain what happened next. I do not remember who spoke first or what was said, but suddenly a gauntlet was thrown: All of the religion scholars in the room who had read the Bible cover-to-cover should raise their hands.

There was a collective gasp, a few tentative hands raised, and then a barrage of responses flying much faster than the microphone could travel. Old jokes about Catholics and liberal Protestants never reading the Bible mingled with personal reflections on Sunday school and the lectionary. One contributor insisted that you couldn’t learn anything by reading the Bible “cover-to-cover,” though she would not suggest an alternate reading plan. Attention to the uniquely Protestant concern behind the question was countered by the assertion that scholars of non-Christian traditions (especially New Religious Movements) consider grounding in those groups’ texts essential, yet some scholars of Christianity feel they can skip that step. Conversation eventually drifted to other topics, including boutique Bibles and scriptural tattoos, and the proposed straw poll never happened.

Struck nerves expose anxieties, and there were at least two types in play here. One is the anxiety that contributed to the separation of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, which was initiated by the AAR in 2003. If the AAR were a ship unfurling its sails to catch the winds of new methodologies and religious expressions, the SBL seemed like the ballast in the hull, bearing the weight of (mostly) Christian traditions and texts and reminding religious studies of its divinity school past. Of course, ballast comes in awfully handy in a storm, and the economic crisis buffeting academic publishing and university budgets helped change some minds among the AAR leadership. The reunification of the two groups’ annual meetings will hardly erase the unease, however. The religion scholars in Indy still seemed very jittery about the Bible.

Another type of anxiety exposed by the show-of-hands kerfuffle concerns the relationship between religion scholars and the subjects they study. Versions of the insider/outsider discussion arose frequently throughout the weekend, beginning with the first session’s extended debate about Richard Lyman Bushman (who wasn’t present) and culminating with Julie Byrne’s meditation on an “ethnographic uncertainty principle,” by which a scholar inevitably changes and might inadvertently destroy that which she seeks to understand. In the context of the Bible session, asking who reads what not only raised questions of scholarly preparation but also of identification with religious subjects—or, to put it in moral terms, humility.

Tacitly, the straw poll suggested, “Are religion scholars so arrogant as to think they can make pronouncements about American religion without even reading the Bible?” I think that’s the part that really raised hackles. And while it would be nice to relegate that strain of interrogation to the heat of a strange moment, it’s the kind of question that creates distance between scholars and the large, biblically inclined segment of the American public. The panelists’ calls to take scriptures more seriously, along with the upcoming IUPUI project and renewed conversations between AAR and SBL, could build some needed bridges.

Foxed Paper and the Slight Smell of Mold: Reading, Browsing Actual Print Periodicals

Randall Stephens

Last week I visited the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Library in Gladstone, Mo, just north of Kansas City. The staff was terrific and a bonus was an enormous collection of discarded books for sale--$1 or 50 cents/ea. I picked up Tim LaHaye's Battle for the Mind, and, oddly enough, a copy of Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty.

Ideally, I hoped to browse through some denominational magazines and periodicals from the 1950s and 1960s for my next project on Christianity and rock/anti-rock. I was pleasantly surprised. The library had loads of Baptist and SBC serials dating back to the early years of the Cold War. Some of the titles I browsed through: Baptist Quarterly Review; Home Life; Baptist Training Union Magazine; The Student (A Baptist-style Jesus People-ish magazine, which Sam Hill actually wrote in). In addition to all that there were extensive runs of Christianity Today and Christian Century, along with quite a few other gems.

The Southern Baptist Periodical Index was a real help. But blast the indexers for not cataloging what I wish they had! (Page after page after page on "Missions.") I have seldom used the Index to Religious Periodical Literature (Chicago : American Theological Library Association.) But it's a tremendous resource for work on post-war American religion. And it gives a pretty good indication of the more popular magazines and journals that circulated at the time. See below the first page of the edition for 1971, listing a range of publications. (Click to enlarge.)


So, here are a few questions for all the RiAH research nerds and archive troglodytes out there: What do you suppose were the largest circulating and/or most influential denominational periodicals of the 1950s and 1960s? Which ones are the best for getting a sense of what men, women, and children in the pews were thinking? Why?

Rejoice and Shout: A Journey through Gospel Music History

Paul Harvey

The new documentary Rejoice and Shout premieres this week. It’s a documentary featuring black gospel performances over a full century, from the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet in 1902 to some contemporary stars. The film has gotten a lot of nice write-ups; the link takes you to the film's website, where you can learn more about it. Here in flyover land probably will have to wait until it moves from the “save” to the “queue” part of my Netflix list. A little bit from the NPR segment on the documentary:

Director Don McGlynn, a veteran of the music documentary genre, wanted to trace gospel from its earliest roots to its current incarnation in the music world. The film even plays the first known recording of gospel music, a record made in 1902 by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet.

The New York Times published a substantial review of the film here; a little excerpt:

This historical survey of the genre draws heavily on the extensive archives of its producer, Joe Lauro, and is grounded in the work of two experts: Anthony Heilbut, who wrote the classic book “The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times,” and Bil Carpenter, whose “Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia” chronicles the lives and careers of more than 650 gospel figures. Their analyses are supplemented by the observations of Jacquie Gales Webb, the host of a popular radio program. Mr. Heilbut’s approach is primarily scholarly and historical, and Mr. Carpenter’s is more sociological and political. Smokey Robinson, who introduces the film and offers its closing observations, sets its praiseworthy tone

If anyone wants to read the whole review but is shout out by the Times firewall, let me know and I’ll send to you.

I will be interested to see how it compares to my recent favorite in the genre of gospel documentaries, How Sweet It Was: The Sights and Sounds of Gospel’s Golden Age. This one comes as a documentary and a CD, and it features some astounding older clips; the DVD is basically a strung-together version of those full clips, so not really a “documentary” but more of a compilation. Anyway, I’m looking forward to Rejoice and Shout; if anyone reading this living around a real city gets a chance to watch it, feel free to post your thoughts here.

While you're waiting to see Rejoice and Shout, here's a great clip on Youtube that can be seen in its entirety on How Sweet it Was, for your enjoyment: The Meditation Singers doing "Sanctified Lord."

The Beautiful Mind and Life of Jen Lindell

by Edward J. Blum

You’ve never heard of her, but you would have. She had earned a doctoral fellowship to the Religious Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania and in the fall would have begun her apprenticeship under Anthea Butler and Sarah Barringer Gordon. She had just finished a Master’s Thesis on Mormon-Indian interactions beginning with the initial publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830 and ending with the Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857. She was my star student who taught me so much about race and religion, helped with my own projects even amid her own routine trips to the hospital, and died far too earlier

.Jen Lindell wrote a Master’s Thesis that easily could have been expanded into an award-winning dissertation. Her broad interest was in the dynamic ways religion influenced the lives of everyday people and on how religious ideas influenced racial perceptions and vise-versa. She fixated on early Mormons and their conceptions of and interactions with Native Americans. She wanted to understand how white people who weren’t considered white by others (in large part because of their distinct faith) at first reached out to non-white people (Native Americans) as potential brothers and sisters, but then years later treated those people with disdain and violence. Lindell refused to take a “top down” approach – which would focus principally on Joseph Smith and Bringham Young – and instead looked to the laity. Reading deeply and widely through diaries, letters, memoirs, and local newspapers, she found epic encounters and love and betrayal, missions and murder, friendship and violence.

Soon, Lindell’s thesis will be deposited in the San Diego State University library and will be available online. I hope scholars interested in Mormonism and race will check it out. She’s got some rich material and fascinating insights. Even more, anyone who reads it will get to know in a small way the brilliant mind that I had the pleasure of learning from for a season. We miss you, Jen, and we’re so glad we got to be a part of your beautiful life.

Faith of the Founders (My Review of John Fea in the Christian Century)

Paul Harvey

I was very happy that the Christian Century asked me to review John Fea's Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction -- and even more glad they gave me relatively ample space (over 1200 words anyway, better than the average review) to develop some thoughts on John's book. The review is here. Here is an excerpt, and then continue at the jump:

BOOKS

Faith of the founders

Jun 03, 2011 by Paul Harvey

Was America founded as a Christian nation? No, is John Fea's answer to the question posed in his title. But the answer is yes if we consider how Americans (especially from 1789 to 1865) understood themselves as a Christian nation. And then again, maybe it's just a bad question, Fea concludes, because it arises not from a rich understanding of the past but from present-day polemics. Only when we remove it from that context can we begin to make sense of it.

Continue <<<

Richard Bushman, Robert Orsi, and Mormonism's "Abundant History"

Christopher Jones

(cross-posted at Juvenile Instructor)

Over at the website for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the editors have posted a discussion (moderated by Susanna Morrill, associate professor of religious studies at Lewis and Clark College) between noted historians and scholars of religion Richard Lyman Bushman and Robert Orsi. Bushman and Orsi reflect on the potential Orsi's approach to "supernatural presence" and "abundant events" in modern Catholicism holds for scholars of Mormonism.

The conversation between these two seasoned scholars, which touches on the relationship between the scholar and her subjects, how to make sense of revelatory visions and the writing of the Book of Mormon, and the vocabulary used to describe such occurrences, deserves to be read in its entirety, but I'm including a brief excerpt below:

Richard: You also speak of the routes of influence radiating from such events. That’s a nice way of putting it; the word “routes” suggests an approach to what happens in consequence. Where do the abundant events lead? But it occurs to me that some of the responses of the Marian groups, which taken together could be thought of as a morphology of an abundant event, take a different form in the case of Joseph Smith. Rather than the abundant event dissolving the boundaries of subjectivity and establishing intimacies, in Joseph Smith’s case it leads to structure and organization. The people who are converted take on priesthood offices and go on missions; they have council meetings. As the influence radiates still further, you get minutes of the meetings and letters and all the paraphernalia of organization. I thought it would be interesting to talk about how events that are so similar at the core lead in different directions in the aftermath.

Robert: I appreciate the difference. I was thinking about that concept as I read the very powerful final chapter of Rough Stone Rolling, in which the people left behind at Nauvoo after Joseph’s murder continued to work on building the temple, though they knew they weren’t going to be using it after it was done because they would be leaving Nauvoo. It seemed to me that we needed some word to get at what happens between Max Weber’s idea of initial charismatic leadership of a new religion and its eventual institutionalization. It seems as if something else is going on there, almost as if the stones themselves were charismatic–the stones of this sacred building that would otherwise signify the routinization of Mormonism. So I take your point. It does lead in different directions, which might have to do with the specific peculiarities of modern Catholicism and modern Mormonism. I was struck by–as you want to put it–the radiation outwards of Joseph’s spirit and his vision through the organization.

Go here to read the rest of the interview.

Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity

Paul Harvey

It's a slow news week at the blog -- no Rapture, no David Barton sightings, politics as usual in Washington, the religious left arguing about Jim Wallis, etc. -- and some of you know what that means. Yes, it's time for the time-honored self-promotional post here at RiAH.

Later this summer, August I hope but by September for sure, my new book Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity, will be out with Rowman & Littlefield. It's part of the "African American History" series put out by Rowman & Littlefield. And it's out just in time for your fall course text assignment!

I'm proud to have it standing there with very recent books by some tremendous historians in the same series, including Chris Waldrep's African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era, my old friend Burton Peretti's Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music, and Edward Countryman's forthcoming Enjoy the Same Liberty: African Americans and the Revolutionary Era.

I'm also posting this now because some of you -- and you know who you are! -- are (if you're like me) now facing up to the fact that you've put off your fall book selections (which were due a month or two ago, remember that) long enough, and it's time to pick your texts for the fall. And for a select number of you, maybe this one will be right for you.

The text is short, about 140 pp., and written with the "general reader" and undergraduate reader in mind. I start with the diversity of religious expressions in West and Central Africa in the 14th/15th century, and end with Mama Lola and Kanye West, if that is a far enough chronological reach for you. And trust me, when drafts of this book failed to meet the aim of reaching the general audience and undergraduate reader, the tireless editors for this series, Jacqueline Moore and Nina Mkjagkij, were ever-ready with fierce and sometimes sarcastic pencils, rumbling through my prose like Sherman rumbled through Georgia, leaving a lot of detritus lying around but cleaning up the landscape considerably. Only, unlike Sherman, they rumbled through my landscape four times, Sherman as you recall having only moved through once. Kidding aside, it was a great experience to have a manuscript put through its paces so many times. I'm sure my other books would have been better with a similar full frontal attack on flabby prose.

In addition, the book comes with a "documents" section, about 60 pages, ranging from Virginia laws on baptism and freedom from the 1660s, to an account of the Stono Rebellion in 1739, to Daniel Payne's famous tour attempting to stamp out "ring shouts" in the 1870s, to Mahalia Jackson's reminiscences of growing up in New Orleans, to John Lewis reflecting on the meaning of non-violence, to Vincent Harding's great essay on the white Christ and Black Power, to Kanye West's "Jesus Walks." There is also a bibliographic essay, broken up by chapter, a Glossary, a Chronology section, and a timeline and some brief footnotes (brief enough not to scare off any freshman reader).

If any of ya'll want to preview it for possible purchase or course use, I'd by happy to send pdfs of the page proofs, or a sample chapter or something if you just want to briefly survey. Just email me, and I'll be there.

Table of contents and more info. below. And now after this brief commercial interruption, back to our usual programming. We'll have some blog posts up soon reflecting on the good times coming up at the Religion and American Culture Conference in Indianapolis starting tomorrow evening; I look forward to many great conversations there! Also, my co-blogmeisters Kelly Baker and the ubiquitous Randall Stephens have books coming out very soon, so we'll have some posts up about those soon.

And we won't even mention yet Phillip Luke Sinitiere's work on Joel Osteen, due up next year with NYU Press, and Linford Fisher's astonishing feat of research and analysis, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of New England Indian Cultures in Early America, out I believe next year with Oxford Univ. Press, and sure to shape the study of colonial American religious encounters for the next generation to come. Of course, all these works will be featured here at RiAH in days and months to come.

But, enough about you, let's talk about me -- more on my book below.

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Book description (from book website):

Paul Harvey illustrates how black Christian traditions provided theological, institutional, and personal strategies for cultural survival during bondage and into an era of partial freedom. At the same time, he covers the ongoing tug-of-war between themes of "respectability" versus practices derived from an African heritage; the adoption of Christianity by the majority; and the critique of the adoption of the "white man's religion" from the eighteenth century to the present. The book also covers internal cultural, gendered, and class divisions in churches that attracted congregants of widely disparate educational levels, incomes, and worship styles.

Through the Storm, Through the Night provides a lively overview to the history of African American religion, beginning with the birth of African Christianity amidst the Transatlantic slave trade, and tracing the story through its growth in America. Paul Harvey successfully uses the history of African American religion to portray the complexity and humanity of the African American experience.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Themes in African American Religious History
• Middle Passage for the Gods: African and African American Religions from the Middle Passage to the Great Awakening
• The Birth of Afro-Christianity in the Slave Quarters and the Urban North, 1740-1831
• Through the Night: African Amerian Religion in the Antebellum Era
• Day of Jubilee: Black Churches from Emancipation to the Era of Jim Crow
• Jesus on the Mainline: Black Christianity from the Great Migration through World War II
• Freedom's Main Line: Black Christianity, Civil Rights, and Religious Pluralism
• Epilogue: Righteous Anger and Visionary Dreams: Contemporary Black Politics, Religion, and Culture
  
• Documents Section
• Glossary
• Bibliographic Essay

Advance reviews:

"If you teach, study, practice, or care about African American religion, then this is the book for you. Paul Harvey provides an indispensable overview of black Christianity from the age of slavery to the ascendance of Obama. With it, Harvey offers a bevy of fascinating primary documents that range from Nat Turner's righteous rage to Mahalia Jackson's soulful songs. Through the Storm, Through the Night does it all with such clarity that even the most complex concepts make sense."—Edward J. Blum, Author, W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet

"Harvey provides an elegant and engaging introduction to the history of African American Christianity that charts the diversity of experience and expression among black Christians and illuminates the complex relationship between religion and race in American life."—Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University