"Left" Out: Faith and Politics

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere



In July 2007 Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy famously wrote about the Democratic Party and religion, and religion scholars in recent years have started to tell us about the history of the religious left.

So, to use the title of the Gibbs and Duffy article, have Democrats "got religion"? And who are the "party faithful"? Here are some answers.

The award-winning radio program Speaking of Faith aired a show yesterday on the "faith history" of the political left. It is the first in a series on religion and the major political parties during election season. The SOF website states:

This program is the first of a two-part conversation on politics and religion below the surface of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign. The religious right has gotten a fair amount of coverage in recent years, while the political left has rarely been represented with a religious sensibility.


This show is a good conversation piece (pardon the pun) for a number of recent books that examine religion and the Democratic Party and/or political progressives, including Amy Sullivan's book The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats are Closing the God Gap (interviewed on the show), E.J. Dionne's , Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right, and David Gushee's The Future of Faith in American Politics: The Public Witness of the Evangelical Center, among others.

(Paul Harvey also posted on some of these books early this year).

Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Paul Harvey

As some of you know, I'm giving the Lamar Lectures in Southern History at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, next month. The lectures will later be published by the University of Georgia Press. Many thanks to my friend Sarah Gardner for inviting me to be part of this series.

(Note to self, if you're actually going to give these lectures you better sit your butt down and write like a maniac!!)

At some point in the near future I hope to post some kind of better publicity material, but in the meantime, here are the lecture titles and the schedule. Hope some of ya'll in the great state of Georgia might be able to mozy down for one of the lectures. The lectures will have fun movie clips, music, and art interspersed, so it won't all be boring monologue from me.

Series Title: Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South

Lecture I: Jesus of the South - Monday, November 3, 10:00 AM

Lecure II: Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the Trickster: Southern Evangelical Culture in History and Literature - Monday, November 3, 7:30 PM

Lecture III: Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom - Tuesday, November 4, 7:30 PM

_____________________________________________________

Here's a list of the last several Lamar Lectures, which should give you some idea of why I'm excited to be part of this tradition.

2000: Adam Fairclough (University of East Anglia) – Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow

2001: Edward Ayers (UVA), Thadious M. Davis (Vanderbilt), Linda Wagner-Martin (UNC), Joel Williamson (UNC) – South To the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-first Century

2002: Theda Purdue (UNC) – “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South

2003: Peter H. Wood (Duke) – Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer’s Gulf Stream

2004: Michael O’Brien (Cambridge) – Henry Adams and the Southern Question

2005: James C. Cobb (UGA) – Before and After Brown: Jim Crow, the Brown Decision, and the Changing Face of Southern Identity

2006: Barbara J. Fields (Columbia) – Teach About the South (unpublished)

2007: Richard Gray (Essex) – A Web of Words: The Great Dialogue of Southern Literature

Prophesies of Godlessness

Paul Harvey

My friend Kevin Schultz has a chapter in an intriguing-looking new book from Oxford University Press: Prophesies of Godlessness: Prediction of America's Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day, edited by Charles Mathewes (the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion) and Christopher McKnight Nichols.

The book traces the idea that American thinkers have always predicted the imminent secularization of America, from the jeremiad tradition to Thomas Jefferson to Robert Ingersoll to Clarence Darrow to the Fundamentalists to modernization theorists to Pat Robertson. Each chapter focuses on a different era and different thinkers. Kevin's chapter is on the Monkey Scopes trial and the rise of liberal Protestantism in the 1920s. The chapters all are connected by focusing on the various repetitive scripts that predict the imminent death of god in America (either gleefully or woefully). Of the book, Mark Noll writes, The authors reveal much about secularization, but much more about why predictions about the effacement of religion have been so central in American national life.

In a graduate class last night, I rediscovered the problem of having students historicize issues/problems that resonate in contemporary politics; usually what happens is that the students want to discuss the contemporary politics of something, rather than the historical roots of how the issue has come to be conceptualized in the first place (this in reference to a discussion of Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects, a book covering immigration and the creation of the concept of "illegal alien" from 1924 - 1965; inevitably, if somewhat irritatingly, the discussion quickly landed on contemporary immigration controversies, and once there never landed back again on the actual subject of the book). The result can be class discussions that resemble "Crossfire" rather than a graduate seminar. In a number of religious history classes, I've encountered this as well when discussing the kinds of themes discussed in this book. That is to say, concepts of the religiosity or the "declension" of America usually lead students immediately into espousing opinions about whether "we" (whoever that is) are "more" or "less" religious than "we" were at some undefined point in the past. Anyway, I look forward to using this book in some future class, as another experiment in trying to induce historical thinking against the strong undercurrents of presentism.

Islam and American Religious History

by Phillip Luke Sinitiere

As a corollary to Kelly's previous post on Edward Curtis's work on the NOI, in a recent H-AmRel post he announced a new encyclopedia on Muslim-American history.

The post reads:

How have Muslims shaped American religious history and U.S. history
overall? I am looking for writers--professors, graduate students, or
talented undergrads--to contribute my 1000 pp. Encyclopedia of
Muslim-American History, a reference that will show how Muslims have
mattered to American life since the colonial era. I know we are all
pressed for time, but let me appeal to your sense of public outreach.

"Muslim" continues to be read as "foreign" and "unassimilated" not only
in Islamophobic genres (including the recent film "Obsession," 28
million copies of which were distributed for free in swing states [see
further http://www.obsessionwithhate.com/]), but also in mainstream media
outlets. The exotic, overly-religious, first-generation, "fresh off the
boat" Muslim too often stands in for all Muslim Americans in newspapers
such as The New York Times. Such forgetting writes tens of thousands of
Muslims out of the historical record.

We have a chance to correct that by analyzing--not exaggerating--the
presence of Muslims in the Americas. The work will be published by Facts
on File, which has great success marketing their products to high
schools and community libraries. It will have an impact at the
grassroots.

You needn't be an expert to participate in this project. After editing
this project for a year now, I can tell you that there are virtually no
experts on Muslim American history, with the exception of those who are
trained in African American history. Most Islam in America experts are
concerned only with today, or with the history of Muslim America post
1965.

In addition to documenting "religion," this reference will chart Muslim
involvement in U.S. politics, business, music, sports, agriculture, the
military, literature, the visual arts, poetry, social movements, and
more. It will cover the biographies, events, places, themes, and
institutions that have shaped a Muslim-American community diverse by
race, ethnicity, class, and national origin. Five hundred entries will
shed light on everything from Georgia's Sea Island Muslims and the
Muslim sodbusters of the Dakota plain to Ahmet Ertegun's influence on
the music industry and the hundred-year-old legal struggles of Muslims
in U.S. courts.

If you are willing to write even 500 words, that would be a great help.
Please contact me off list, and I will send you the list of entries and
other information. Thanks very much for your consideration.

This will no doubt be an important work, and serve as a great resource for classrooms at all educational levels. I look forward to seeing it in print and using it in the future. As for teaching, readers might also consult Curtis's great article on Islam and the U.S. history survey in the January 2008 issue of the OAH Magazine of History (John Turner posted on this, too).

In other news, Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd's latest work, American Christians and Islam: Evangelical Culture and Muslims from the Colonial Period to the Age of Terrorism, is scheduled for release in November. Here's a brief description:

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, many of America's Christian evangelicals have denounced Islam as a "demonic" and inherently violent religion, provoking frustration among other Christian conservatives who wish to present a more appealing message to the world's Muslims. Yet as Thomas Kidd reveals in this sobering book, the conflicted views expressed by today's evangelicals have deep roots in American history.

Tracing Islam's role in the popular imagination of American Christians from the colonial period to today, Kidd demonstrates that Protestant evangelicals have viewed Islam as a global threat--while also actively seeking to convert Muslims to the Christian faith--since the nation's founding. He shows how accounts of "Mahometan" despotism and lurid stories of European enslavement by Barbary pirates fueled early evangelicals' fears concerning Islam, and describes the growing conservatism of American missions to Muslim lands up through the post-World War II era. Kidd exposes American Christians' anxieties about an internal Islamic threat from groups like the Nation of Islam in the 1960s and America's immigrant Muslim population today, and he demonstrates why Islam has become central to evangelical "end-times" narratives. Pointing to many evangelicals' unwillingness to acknowledge Islam's theological commonalities with Christianity and their continued portrayal of Islam as an "evil" and false religion, Kidd explains why Christians themselves are ironically to blame for the failure of evangelism in the Muslim world.

A brief portion of Chapter 1 and the Table of Contents are available from Princeton University Press.

Both Curtis and Kidd have added and, it appears, will continue to offer much to the collective understanding of Islam and American religious history.

Sweet Land of Liberty

Paul Harvey


Here's an advance note for a book that probably will be the most important work of American history published this year, or near the top anyway: Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. I'm currently reading it and will be doing a full review of it in a few weeks, but just wanted to mention it briefly here in advance of its official publication in November.

This is, of course, not a "religious history" book per se, and I had no plans to blog on it here. As I read, I had expected some sort of contrast between a highly religious, non-violent southern movement and a much more secular northern one. As it turns out, that is not the case at all. Indeed, religion turns out to be a far more central part of the struggle in the North than most understand. Religious figures people this book to a degree that surprised me. Further, Sugrue details an alliance of the religious and secular left, especially in the pre-World War Two years, that is even more important than I had realized.

Keep your eye out for this work; it's going to be a big one, and sure to be much discussed in American history circles.

That Very Old-Time Religion

Randall Stephens

What is religion? American religious history professors spend the first day of class going over that question. Profs round up the usual suspects for quotes: Plato, Thomas Aquinas, the two Ludwigs—Feuerbach and Wittgentsein—Freud, Clifford Geertz, Woody Allen . . . (Finding images of each for the requisite PowerPoint presentation is no trouble.) Religious studies departments offer whole courses that ponder the “what is” question. Of course, you can define religion in many, many ways.

So, I was intrigued when I watched National Geographic’s provocative special, the Neanderthal Code, which shed new light on that old, old question/subject. “Who were the Neanderthals? How human were they?” the program asks. “For 150 years the fate of our closest relatives has been a mystery. But now scientists can start answering these questions—with the help of DNA.” The special looks at how Neanderthals may have interacted with Homo sapiens and considers the possibility of genetic overlap.

What drew my attention more than anything else, though, was a discussion of what may have been the religious beliefs of these now-long-gone human cousins. Reviewing the program in Archeology Zach Zorich comments:

Some of the most interesting parts of the documentary were the insights it provided into the lives of Neanderthals. The placement and preservation of certain Neanderthal remains indicates that they may have buried their dead. If that interpretation holds up it would show they believed in an afterlife. Likewise, chunks of the black pigment manganese dioxide have turned up at some Neanderthal sites showing signs of use. If the Neanderthals were using pigments to make paintings or to adorn themselves, it shows a previously unknown capacity for creating art.

Others have been skeptical about the archeological record, which represent some of the earliest burial sites in the world.

And so that brings me to the little diorama I created with Photoshop (the image posted to the right. Click to enlarge). My friend Bryan Zimmerman and I were talking about the possibility of Neanderthal religion and Neanderthal conceptions of God. Would they have had a Neanderthal-centric view of God or something altogether nebulous? (I went with the former for the diorama because I thought it was funnier.) Does a God or do Gods survive the death of the faithful? Bryan described that as the lower case “g” god. Who/what did the Hittites believe in again?

Randall's Reach (across the pond)

Apparently we aren't the only ones who like Randall Stephens' The Fire Spreads. It just received a nice review in the Times Literary Supplement (UK). The reviewer called it a "strikingly imaginative account of riotous religious competition." Congrats Randall! You can read the full review here.