Picturing Faith at the AAR

Paul Harvey

I'm live-blogging the AAR! Not really. More like, on the train from O'Hare into Chicago for the American Academy of Religion, I had the good fortune to run into my colleague Colleen McDannell, of the University of Utah. As I wrote in a blog entry below, Colleen was a mentor in teaching me more successfully to integrate the visual into my thinking and teaching on American religious history, which I've tried to incorporate into my upcoming Lamar lectures.

Some years ago, I brought to my campus Colleen's wonderful exhibition Picturing Faith, an exhibit of Farm Security Administration photographs from 1935-1943 which accompanies her book Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression. She introduced me to some photographs that I included in my book Freedom's Coming. She also showed me some ways to think about the relationship of the religious and the visual, both in her work Material Christianity and in the book on photography.

A nice web compilation of photographs that are included in Picturing Faith may be found here. A review of Colleen's exhibition is here. The reviewer states:

The exhibit's multiple functions speak not only to McDannell's skill in the integration of material objects and texts but also to the broader issues in historical method she has been pursuing for some time. There is a palpable tension between observing the photographs on their own terms and reading them along with McDannell. Just entering the exhibit presents one with the dilemma of what to do first—read or look? In this way the exhibit serves to break up our casual habits of historical thinking and asks us to reconsider our assumptions about the disparities between reading and looking.

Coming Home to Outsider Religious Art

Paul Harvey

Preparing my Lamar Lectures has brought me back to a little project I was involved with a few years ago, mainly just to write a short introduction for one chapter in Coming Home: Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South. I've been going through this work again looking for images to go along with one of the lectures, "Jesus of the South." Of course there are many; one of my favorites, "There is Only One King," is to the right. These artists are eccentrics and visionaries; one of them, Anderson Johnson (1907-1998), now has his own gallery of work he did while running a Faith Mission Church in Newport News, Virginia, over several decades.

Some well-known names, especially Howard Finster, are in this work. Many others you will not have heard of. The book is a wonderful catalog of the exhibition that traveled the country a few years back, reviewed here in the New York Times when it appeared at the Museum of Biblical Art (the article comes with a very nice slide show of some of the works, too).

Scholars such as Colleen McDannell, among others, have led the way in showing how religious historians may incorporate the visual into their work. I'm but a novice at this, but plan to try my hand a bit at it in these lectures. We'll see how it goes. David Morgan's Protestants and Pictures is a classic in analyzing how an allegedly "pure" church free of Romish superstititions of images and icons in fact created an entire world of their own imagery. And, just as anyone can read the Bible, the (mostly) Protestants in this collection freely interpreted biblical passages through their wildly diverse and often apocalyptic imagery. Moreover, the black artists exhibited here weren't waiting around for the advent of "black theology" to experiment with images of Jesuses of color. Black crucified Christs appear frequently in the exhibition and range through the course of the twentieth century.

Here's a description of Coming Home.

In the works of many famous self-taught artists, such as Howard Finster and Sister Gertrude Morgan, Biblical themes and imagery abound. How has the Bible inspired these southern creators?

Examining 125 works of art by seventy contemporary folk artists, Coming Home! Self-Taught Artists, the Bible, and the American South accompanies a traveling exhibition organized by the Art Museum of the University of Memphis. The exhibition features painters and sculptors of wide acclaim, including Finster, Sister Morgan, William Edmondson, Clementine Hunter, Joe Minter, Elijah Pierce, Robert Roberg, William Thomas Thompson, and Myrtice West.

In the South, Evangelical Christianity is predominant. Essays in this catalog explore this particular religious influence on the work of southern self-taught artists. The artwork is considered within the context of contemporary American art and history, literature, and music.

Also included are brief essays on thirty-two of the artists along with biographical sketches of each, identifying denominational ties and providing relevant religious information.

Coming Home! offers new ways of understanding the rich meaning, theology, and history of this art and its stylistic approaches and various purposes. Essayists also forward a fresh appreciation of the cultural influence of Evangelical Christianity. They include Carol Crown, Erika Lee Doss, Hal Fulmer, Norman Girardot, Paul Harvey, Babatunde Lawal, Leslie Luebbers, Cheryl Rivers, and Charles Reagan Wilson.

Fires That Would Not Go Out, and Unutterable Separations

Paul Harvey

Going to Macon, Georgia soon for the Lamar Lectures at Mercer University, and corresponding with my esteemed colleague in southern history at Macon State, Andrew Manis, has reminded me to put up a post about Manis's fine work, which has not received the full attention that it deserves, IMHO. So here's a little primer for you on the work of Andrew Manis, essential for anyone interested in race/religion/civil rights history.

Several years ago, Manis's A Fire You Can't Put Out: the Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth gave us a compelling study of this remarkable man. The link takes you to one review of the work, from the Journal of Southern Religion. Another review states,

Shuttlesworth, by contrast [with King], had all the bridging qualities of a sharp stick. He won a reputation in the movement for absolute fearlessness, for reckless and unattractive egotism, for dictatorial leadership. He and Bull Connor seemed made for each other. Yet Shuttlesworth, in his own way, was indispensable to the movement. Without his working-class following, and without Shuttlesworth's insistence on confrontation, the SCLC and King would never have tackled Birmingham.

Shuttlesworth remains a fascinating figure of the movement, and Manis's biography does him justice without engaging in hagiography, always a tenuous balance.

More recently Andy has published Macon Black And White. This was a commissioned book, and the focus on one city could have made this a less compelling work. Instead, the focus drives the work and shows how the general narrative of southern history can look when based on a local history. This is, really, a moral history of a southern city. Below is my review of the work from the Journal of Southern History. Manis's works should be on anybody's reading list for race/civil rights/religion. I look forward to further reflections on Macon after I return!

Macon Black And White: An Unutterable Separation in the American Century. By Andrew M. Manis. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University and the Tubman African American Museum, 2004. Pp. xvi, 432. Paper, $20.00, ISBN 0-86554-958-3; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-86554-761-0.)

Surprisingly enough, few volumes in southern history follow the course of black and white life, separations, and interactions in a single community over an extended period of time; Manis’s work will serve as a template for those that may follow. Home at various times to the black Reconstruction legislator and AME bishop Henry McNeal Turner, a dazzling array of black musical talent, Elijah Poole (the future Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X’s mentor), and to a variety of white leaders ranging from the most reactionary to the most progressive, Macon turns out to be nearly an archetypical southern city in terms of the complexity of race, violence, economics, and political power. Manis moves his story beyond prototype by following the flesh-and-blood stories of myriad figures from Macon’s past, ranging from local Klansmen in the 1920s, to pastors of local churches, to Sam Oni (an African student who desegregated Mercer University in the 1960s), to the recent and controversial black mayor C. Jack Ellis.

From the standpoint of white Maconians for much of the twentieth century, white supremacy was “unutterable,” in the sense of “unuttered because of its taken-for-granted status and its sacred inviolability” (7). . . In more recent years, segregation is an unutterable part of a shameful past, but the existence and reality of “white privilege” remains the unacknowledged reality indelibly shaping the exercise of economic and political power. Finally, “unutterable” refers to “unspeakably evil or tragic” (8). In all these ways, An Unutterable Separation is both a social and a moral history.

Most of the major themes in southern historiography appear here, from progressivism “for whites only,” to the rise and fall and reappearance of the Klan, to the frustrations of black accommodationists, to tentative efforts at interracial cooperation, to the “days of hope” during the New Deal and civil rights awakening during the World War Two era, to civil rights struggles from desegregation to black power, and finally to continued separations and inequalities down to the present day. The patterns of southern racism painfully evident at all points in Macon’s history were moderated and “leavened” at points by the impressive activism of the local NAACP branch, by the presence of a relatively moderate local newspaper (the Telegraph), by the presence of local interracial efforts, and by the influence exercised by white moderates at local educational institutions such as Mercer.

The interest here is not in any new schema of southern history being offered, but rather in the sheer human interest and drama in watching how diverse struggling individuals lived out these themes in politics, culture, economics, and social life over the course of a century. Manis’s work reminds us that even if people do not make history just as they please, they nevertheless make history. And, in a deliberately sermonic epilogue directed particularly at local readers, Manis reminds us that people can still remake history, in this case simply by remembering that “efforts towards reconciliation must go beyond dialogue between individuals to address unequal power relationships” (352). His outstanding work ultimately serves both as a compelling social history as well as an inquiry into the “moral demands of justice” (362).

Passing the Plate

Paul Harvey

A quick new-Monday-of-the-economic-crisis note on a new book of interest from Oxford University Press, about Americans' relatively low church and charitable giving. It comes from the eminent sociologists of religion Michael Emerson, Christian Smith, and Patricia Snell:

Passing the Plate shows that few American Christians donate generously to religious and charitable causes -- a parsimony that seriously undermines the work of churches and ministries. Far from the 10 percent of one's income that tithing requires, American Christians' financial giving typically amounts, by some measures, to less than one percent of annual earnings. And a startling one out of five self-identified Christians gives nothing at all.This eye-opening book explores the reasons behind such ungenerous giving, the potential world-changing benefits of greater financial giving, and what can be done to improve matters. If American Christians gave more generously, say the authors, any number of worthy projects -- from the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS to the promotion of inter-religious understanding to the upgrading of world missions -- could be funded at astounding levels. Analyzing a wide range of social surveys and government and denominational statistical datasets and drawing on in-depth interviews with Christian pastors and church members in seven different states, the book identifies a crucial set of factors that appear to depress religious financial support -- among them the powerful allure of a mass-consumerist culture and its impact on Americans' priorities, parishioners' suspicions of waste and abuse by nonprofit administrators, clergy's hesitations to boldly ask for money, and the lack of structure and routine in the way most American Christians give away money. In their conclusion, the authors suggest practical steps that clergy and lay leaders might take to counteract these tendencies and better educate their congregations about the transformative effects of generous giving.

By illuminating the social and psychological forces that shape charitable giving, Passing the Plate is sure to spark a much-needed debate on a critical issue that is of much interest to church-goers, religious leaders, philanthropists, and social scientists.

Ron Sider has recently recommended the book is Books and Culture, and the book comes with positive responses from Robert Wuthnow and Mark Noll as well. Anyone who has examined the book, feel free to respond here.

Lamar Lecture Announcement

LAMAR LECTURES PRESS RELEASE

October 23, 2008

Prominent Historian to Deliver Lamar Lectures on Religion in The South

MACON — Paul Harvey, Ph.D., will present the 2008 Lamar Memorial Lecture Series of Mercer University, on Monday and Tuesday, Nov. 3 and 4, on the University’s Macon campus. Harvey, a history professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, will present three lectures around the theme: “Moses, Jesus and the Trickster in the Evangelical South.” All lectures are free and open to the public.

At 10 a.m. on Nov. 3 in the Medical School Auditorium, Harvey will present a lecture titled “Jesus of the South."

He will give two evening presentations – “Moses, Jesus, Absalom, and the Trickster: Southern Evangelical Culture in History and Literature” on Nov. 3; and “Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom,” on Nov. 4 – each of which will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Medical School Auditorium.

In its 51 years, the Lamar Lecture Series has become one of the most prominent Lectures series on Southern Culture and History, and has included presentations by renowned historians, sociologists and literary scholars.

“Harvey continues this legacy of engaging Southern culture with an intriguing series of lectures that center on religious experiences in the American South,” said lecture series director Sarah Gardner, Ph.D., associate professor of History at Mercer. “Harvey is the first scholar to address the religious experience of the South since Sam Hill gave the lectures in 1979.”

Dr. Harvey is the author of two books, including: “Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925” and “Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era.” Harvey has two books that are under contract to be published as well: “Jesus in Red, White and Black” (co-authored with Edward J. Blum), and the book “Moses, Jesus and the Trickster in the Evangelical South” based on his Lamar Lectures.

Dr. Harvey has also edited several works, including: “Themes in Religion and American Culture,” “The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America since 1945” and “The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History.”

Dr. Harvey has published numerous papers, articles and book chapters in the areas of Southern history, culture and religion. He earned his Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley, 1992.

About the Lamar Lecture Series:

Made possible by the bequest of the late Eugenia Dorothy Blount Lamar, began in 1957. The series promotes the permanent preservation of Southern culture, history and literature. Given each fall, it is recognized as the most important lecture series on Southern history and literature in the United States. Speakers have included nationally and internationally known scholars, such as Cleanth Brooks, James C. Cobb and Eugene Genovese. All lectures are original and are published as books following the lectures.

About Mercer University:

Founded in 1833, Mercer University is a dynamic and comprehensive center of undergraduate, graduate and professional education. The University has more than 7,500 students; 11 schools and colleges – liberal arts, law, pharmacy, medicine, business, engineering, education, theology, music, nursing and continuing and professional studies; major campuses in Macon, Atlanta and Savannah; three regional academic centers across the state; a university press; two teaching hospitals — Memorial University Medical Center and the Medical Center of Central Georgia; educational partnerships with Warner Robins Air Logistics Center in Warner Robins and Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta; an engineering research center in Warner Robins; a performing arts center in Macon; and a NCAA Division I athletic program. For more information, visit http://www.mercer.edu/.

For More Information:
Media Contact: Mark Vanderhoek (478) 301-4037
Lecture Contact: Bobbie Shipley (478) 301-2357

Ali vs. Patterson: I'm An American Too!

Art Remillard

Muhammad Ali rose to prominence at a time when, similar to now, boxing was a dying sport. Its brutality and disreputable undercurrent offended the senses many. More than this, no boxer really stood out. But Ali stood out—way out. He was brash, boastful, critical of the U.S. government, and, of course, Muslim. The excitement generated by Ali cannot be overstated. He was, as Michael Novak proclaimed, the "redeemer of the boxing world."

Among Ali's most (in)famous moments was his 1965 bout with former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, a recent Catholic convert. The fight assumed posture of a "holy war," not only between Christian and Muslim, but also between "patriotic" America and "un-patriotic" America. Indeed, Patterson pledged to "win back" the title "for America."

Alas, Ali pummeled Patterson, drawing out the match for twelve humiliating rounds. With each blow, Ali crushed the hopes of his detractors and and elevated the hopes of his fans. Among those in the former group was Eldridge Cleaver, who afterward interpreted the broader symbolic quality of the match.

Muhammad Ali is the first "free" black champion ever to confront white America. In the context of boxing, he is a genuine revolutionary, the black Fidel Castro of boxing. To the mind of "white" white America, and "white" black America, the heavyweight crown has fallen into enemy hands, usurped by a pretender to the throne. Muhammad Ali is conceived as "occupying" the heavyweight kingdom in the name of a dark, alien power, in much the same way as Castro was conceived as a temporary interloper, "occupying" Cuba. It made no difference that, when Patterson announced that he would beat Ali and return the crown to America, Ali protested vigorously, asking "What does he mean? I’m an American too!" Floyd Patterson was the symbolic spearhead of a counterrevolutionary host, leader of the mythical legions of faithful darkies who inhabit the white imagination, whose assigned task it was to liberate the crown and restore it to its proper "place" in the Free World. Muhammad Ali, in crushing the Rabbit in twelve—after punishing him at will so there could be no doubt, so that the sport writers could not rob him of his victory on paper—inflicted a psychological chastisement on "white" white America similar in shock value to Fidel Castro's at the Bay of Pigs. If the Bay of Pigs can be seen as a straight right hand to the psychological jaw of white America, then Las Vegas was a perfect left hook to the gut.

Cleaver's provocative words indicate, among other things, that there were competing definitions of America both between and within the races. To be sure, Ali's image transformed over time from a national sinner to national saint. In 1996, Americans of all colors cheered as "the greatest" lit the flame at the Atlanta Olympics. Still, as Ali left the ring that evening in 1965, he became the standard-bearer for a population who stood tall and shouted, "I'm an American too!"

A Religio-Sociological Survey in the Quad Cities Area

A Survey Experiment: Race, Religion, Politics, and Other Comfortable Topics
by Everett Hamner

A few weeks ago I took off my customary literary critic hat and spent nine hours wearing a sociologist costume. During the early stages of an interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar entitled “Ethnic Literatures of the United States: Race, Religion, and Election ’08,” I took my ten students to a weekend multicultural festival in the Quad Cities (IL/IA) and spent an afternoon and evening surveying attendees on Gallup questions ranging from likely choices for president to assessments of local race relations to beliefs about evolution and creation. This is not my usual gig, but after reading autobiographies by Obama and McCain, and before launching into novels about civil rights and Vietnam, I wanted my students to get outside the classroom and into conversations with others of very different racial backgrounds, political persuasions, and religious traditions. 252 such discussions later, we ended up with data that is suggestive if not conclusive, a number of eye-opening personal encounters, a broader appreciation of each other as human beings, and—to my knowledge—not a single sunburn.

I would emphasize up front that our data was drawn entirely from voluntary attendees of a multicultural festival, one which required either a $2 admission fee or two cans of food for donation to a local food bank. Bastion of red-blooded conservatism this was not, so we certainly expected the crowd to favor Obama. Even so, the actual numbers were surprisingly lopsided: 80% for Obama, 13% for McCain, and 7% other/undecided. Granted, the crowd was one-third African American and over half Democratic, but the survey was administered before the stock market lost a couple thousand points over the last few weeks. Curious about factors associated with voters’ choices, I queried our data with the help of a generous sociologist colleague, Dr. David Rohall (also of Western Illinois University).

In the end, the following categories appeared to have the most significant correlations with choice for president:

**gender (Obama drew 62% of his voters from women and 38% from men, while McCain drew 39% of his voters from women and 61% from men);

**educational attainment (McCain drew 36% of his voters from those with a high school degree or less, while only 18% of Obama’s voters fit these categories; conversely, 56% of Obama’s voters had a BA or more, while only 36% of McCain’s voters held college degrees or more); and

**attitudes toward job opportunities available to racial minorities (when asked, “do you feel that racial minorities in this country have equal job opportunities?”, 21% of Obama supporters said yes and 68% said no, but 63% of McCain supporters said yes and only 25% said no). (By comparison, in a national Gallup poll asking the same question this summer, 53% answered yes and 46% said no.)

Enough with the basics. Personally, the answers I found juiciest were those engaging attitudes toward biblical interpretation and evolutionary theory. Here the broader Gallup information is crucial for setting the context. As is regularly lamented by scholars of biology and religion alike, over the last quarter-century, anywhere between 43-47% of Americans have steadily chosen a survey response stating, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” rather than other answers accepting evolutionary theory (one of which even allows for God’s “guidance” of that process). With this in mind, our survey’s lower measurement of only 28% identifying with young earth creationism might seem a significant drop, at least before one considers the liberal-leaning demographics of our sample. However, what fascinates me is the fact that in a crowd that was only 9% Republican, three times that percentage still denied the validity of evolution, a claim upon which modern biology places as much weight as modern physics does the notion of gravity. Not coincidentally, when asked about their views of scripture, a similar 32% of our respondents chose “The Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word,” rather than “The Bible is the inspired word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally” or “The Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man.”

What do these numbers mean? Admittedly, in terms of “quantitative proof,” our survey is rather humble. Nonetheless, as much as I may be “reading into” the data (rather than pretending the strictly neutral, absolutely objective posture that often seems the sacred cow of quantitative analysis), a key insight seems buried beneath these figures. As Katie Lofton emphasized at an ASA panel on fundamentalism we shared last fall, academia desperately needs to counter rather than exacerbate our culture’s all-too-common equations of political conservatism with religious fundamentalism, and vice versa. Recent months have brought greater visibility to relatively liberal Christians like Sojourners founder Jim Wallis and Saddleback Church pastor and author Rick Warren (whose August presidential forum featured questions about environmental stewardship and global poverty, not just abortion and homosexuality), so this error may have become less tempting of late, but one election does not an entrenched assumption erase. Indeed in all of our disciplines, might we not do well to explore the growing number—one in five, this survey would suggest—of Americans who are not necessarily Republican, not necessarily politically conservative, but who still assume the first eleven chapters of Genesis should be read as the introduction to a scientific textbook? Rather than a culturally-mediated ancient Near Eastern effort to interpret reality in light of a God who daringly claimed superiority above all others, the flannel-board image of Genesis is amazingly tenacious. Instead of dividing people into religious believers and enlightened atheists—categories themselves highly dependent on traditional Western, monotheistic assumptions about the nature of “religion”—perhaps we need to spend more energy asking how American culture continues to transmit fundamentalist assumptions, even when individuals and groups appear untouched by groups like Focus on the Family.

A last note about the pedagogical impact of this kind of project: very time-consuming, but very rewarding. Because my students were involved at all stages of the project, from choosing the site and questions to administering surveys and analyzing responses, I think they became more thoughtful critics of the “hard data” and “fast facts” that contemporary media constantly offer. Equally importantly, they got to know me and each other in a setting where we were quite clearly all on the same team, working together toward a common goal and without a large gap between “professor” and “student.” Approximately half of my students observed in their project write-ups that the excuse of completing a survey enabled more extensive and personal conversations with members of other ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious groups than they had ever before experienced, and several even said that these experiences strongly challenged stereotypes they had unconsciously maintained. For these reasons alone—and whether our data “proves” anything or not—I’ll be attempting this kind of project again, and I’d be glad to share more with anyone interested in trying something similar.