Survey Says . . . . . You Southernists Still have a Job!

Paul Harvey

Once again, it has happened, and I am happy. Every time I think my field of study (religion in the South) is disappearing as a distinctive entity -- every time I start assuming that regional homogeneity is the order of the day, that immigration has fundamentally changed religious patterns, that the Journal of Southern Religion will have to close up shop -- Gallup or somebody does a survey and finds plus ça change, and all that.

Here's the latest one from Gallup:

Man, I knew Mississippi was religious, but 85% -- wow. And yes, I know there are all sorts of conceptual issues that come with these kinds of surveys, and they can be considered questionable on a number of grounds (like, for example, how they define "religion"). I know all that, but I still love them anyway, because I see them giving me job security. Religion in the South evidently ain't going anywhere.

Where's Utah, you ask? In 14th place, at 69%, just 4 percentage points over the national mean. Hey Utahans, Mississippi has totally kicked your butt.

Just as interesting is the list of "least religious" states, meaning those which polled low on the question "Is religion an important part of your daily life." Heading the pack there is Vermont, at 42% I would have guessed Oregon, but it's not even in the top ten of least religious states (Alaska, however, is -- take that, Gov. Palin).

The "bottom ten" list is interesting in another way as well -- the high rate of perceived self-reported religiosity even among Vermonters, New Hampshire-ites (whatever they are called), Maine-liners, Bay Staters, etc. I mean, I've never met a single person from Vermont who has expressed the slightest interest (except maybe in a New-Agey or environmental-y kind of way) in religion as part of their everyday life. Why bother when you have such natural beauty, wonderful college towns, the fall foliage, family dairies, and great ice cream. But apparently, a lot bother.

The national figure remains remarkably high -- a median of 65%. As the survey article shows,

And, although there is a wide range in the self-reported importance of religion, from a high of 85% for residents of Mississippi to a low of 42% for residents of Vermont, the distribution of religiosity by state takes the shape of a bell-shaped curve, clustered around the overall nationwide mean of 65%. Twenty-three of the 50 states and District of Columbia are in the range of 60% to 70% saying religion is important.

There's a lot out there for us to study, folks! Especially Southern folks, but even you Vermonters have plenty on your plate besides Ben and Jerry's.

Here's a map graphing the Gallup survey:

Kip Kosek's Acts of Conscience Wins AAR Award!

Paul Harvey

Congratulations to our friend and Young Scholar in American Religion Kip Kosek, whose book Acts of Concience: Christian Nonviolence and American Democracy has won the Best First Book in the History of Religions Prize from the American Academy of Religion. Blog readers will recall we had some extensive discussions of this book last year (see the links for that below). Below is the announcement from the publisher, Columbia University Press.

Joseph Kip Kosek Wins Best First Book in the History of Religion for Acts of Conscience.

We are pleased to announce that the American Academy of Religion named Joseph Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience: Christian Nonviolence and Modern American Democracy was named the Best First Book in the History of Religions prize.

For more on the book you can watch a video of Kosek discussing the book at the Library of Congress, a review from Religion in American History, read Kip Kosek’s post on the CUP blog The Power of Nonviolence, or read the book’s introduction.

Here is an excerpt from the book on Richard Gregg, an important figure in the history of the non-violent movement in the United States:

Everyone admires nonviolence when it remains safely in the past, but it looks a little too exotic, too effete, and perhaps even too religious to be much help in our present moment. Does nonviolence really have anything to offer amid the violent crises exploding around the world today? Seventy-five years ago, an American pacifist named Richard Gregg confronted an essentially similar question. His 1934 book The Power of Non-Violence was the first substantial attempt by an American to imagine nonviolence as a formidable strategy in the modern world, not simply as a virtuous allegiance to high-minded ideals. Many years after its initial publication, Martin Luther King, Jr. read The Power of Non-Violence and brought its central ideas into the nascent civil rights movement. King frequently cited the book as one of his most important intellectual influences, alongside the writings of Mohandas Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau. Gregg forced King, as he forces us, to realize that nonviolence is not merely admirable or historically interesting, but fundamentally necessary.

A Pilgrimage of Faith for a Midwesterner

Randall Stephens

Check out an article by Krista Tippett, of Speaking of Faith fame, on her conservative, Southern Baptist grandfather. The Christian Century essay powerfully deals with her changing views about her Oklahoma family's faith. Many who have migrated from the South or Midwest--geographically and/or ideologically--have undergone similar changes in outlook. For Tippett, the dictates of strident, exclusivist Christianity made less and less sense.

Garry Wills wrote about another Midwesterner who started to rethink his religious upbrining after he made the exodus. Gary Hart graduated from Bethany Nazarene College (Oklahoma City) in 1958. In Under God: Religion and American Politics (1990) Wills described the metamorphosis of the young holiness student from Kansas. "When Hart went to the Yale Divinity School after graduating from Bethany," writes Wills, "it was with a desire to become a Christian scholar, like Prescott Johnson," a college mentor.

[Hart and other] Bethany graduates had all married fellow Nazarenes (as was the pattern at Bethany), but they were intellectually restless young people. The barriers that Holiness doctrine reared against the world stood in the way of their sampling the cultural explosion of the 1960s. These questing Nazarenes risked such "existential" acts, for them, as going to the movies. . . .

Already at Bethany, according to Professor Johnson, Hart thought the Nazarene scheme of life an imprisoning one. As the 1960s began, Hart told his Bethany classmate Tom Boyd, "My life is slipping away from me." He was twenty-three, and he still had the young years to live that he had lost among the Nazarenes. (Wills, 47, 49)

Reading about Tippett's more mellow pilgrimage I wondered if there are some commonalities in stories of a loss of faith or a faith remade by new experiences. (Of course, there are real limits to comparison. And, certainly, Tippett is not Hart, and vice versa.)

Krista Tippett, "My grandfather's Faith: Contradictions and Mysteries," Christian Century, 27 July 2010.

My grandfather was the Reverend Calvin Titus Perkins, known by all as C.T. He was a Southern Baptist evangelist—a traveling preacher in Oklahoma, the former Indian Territory. He arrived, when he was a very young boy and it was a very young state, in a covered wagon. That famous dry Oklahoma dust seems embedded in the few black-and-white photos I've seen of him and his unkempt, unsmiling siblings. Several of them went on to drink and divorce. He was a man of passion but also a lover of order, a believer in rules. The bare bones Calvinism that flourished on the frontier offered him not only a faith but a way beyond the chaos and poverty he knew as a child. . . .

I saw with my own brand of judgment that there were questions that he would not ask—contradictions too frightening to name. I would leave. I would ask. read on >>>

Religion and Economics, Puritan Style

On Sunday, the Boston Globe published Michael Fizgerald's interview with Mark Valeri on Puritanism and capitalism. Here's part of the intro. The full piece, including the interview, is here.

Michael Fitzgerald, "How Puritans became capitalists: A historian traces the moment when Boston’s dour preachers embraced the market," Boston Globe, 1 August 2010.

Even in down times like these, America’s economy remains remarkably productive, by far the world’s largest. At its base is a distinctive form of market-driven capitalism that was championed and shaped in Puritan era Boston.

But the rise of Boston’s economy contains a deep contradiction: The Puritans whose ethic dominated New England hated worldly things. Market pricing was considered sinful, and church communities kept a watchful, often vengeful eye on merchants.

How could people who loathed market principles birth a modern market economy? That question captivated Mark Valeri after he read sermons by the fiery revivalist Jonathan Edwards that included detailed discussions of economic policy. Edwards turned out to be part of a progression of ministers who led their dour and frugal flocks down a road that would bring fabulous riches, and ultimately give rise to a culture seen as a symbol of material excess.

In his new book, "Heavenly Merchandize,” Valeri, professor of church history at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, finds that the American economy as we know it emerged from a series of important shifts in the relationship between the Colonies and England, fomented by church leaders in both London and early Boston. In the 1630s, religious leaders often condemned basic moneymaking practices like lending money at interest; but by the 1720s, Valeri found, church leaders themselves were lauding market economics. Valeri says the shift wasn’t a case of clergymen adapting to societal changes--he found society changed after the ministers did, sometimes even decades later. read on >>>

A Conference on America’s First Sponsor of Overseas Christian Missions

The Boston Theological Institute together with Bentley University, the Congregational Library and Park Street Church: Commemorating the Bicentennial of the ABCFM*

“A Conference on America’s First Sponsor of Overseas Christian Missions”

The Congregational Library and Park Street Church
Saturday, September 25, 2010

– Day-long Program Includes –

8:30 AM Academic Symposium
The Congregational Library, 14 Beacon Street, Boston

2:00 PM Historic Trolley Tour of Boston Mission Sites
5:00 PM Gala Reception and Dinner, Park Street Church
0 Park Street, Boston

7:00 PM Keynote Address:
“From 1810 – 2010”
Todd Johnson, Editor, The Atlas of Global Christianity

Registration covering costs of materials, luncheon, trolley tour and banquet ($50)
For details & deadline for registration, contact the Boston Theological Institute
210 Herrick Road, Newton Center, MA 02459 – T: 617-527-4880

Email: btioffice@bostontheological.org

* American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

This Land is My Land, You Got That?

Randall Stephens

Peter Marshall has long kept an active commentary page on his petermarshallministries.com site. He's mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more! (He seems to have been mad as hell for a for some time now, so this is not a news flash.)

Marhsall is the author of The Light and the Glory, now revised, a Christian bookstore bestseller and a staple of homeschooling curriculum. (John Fea has written a cogent essay and several posts on Marshall and his career.) Marshall, along with another popular Christian historian David Barton, served as a history curriculum adviser for the Texas State Board of Education. Of that development, Fea wrote: "Someone on the Texas Board of Education must really like Marshall. This is the only way to explain how a Presbyterian pastor from New England with no formal training in history became an expert reviewer for the Social Studies standards for one of the largest states in the Union."

So, I paste here part of Marshall's recent post on Islam. (Could Marshall and Diana L. Eck have a beer summit to talk over the nature of American religion?)

Peter Marshall, "Islam's War with the West: The Need for Reality -- Part Two," 7/22/2010.

This week's commentary begins, then, with this question: When it comes to the reality of Islam in America, can a good or devout Muslim be a good American?

No. The answer, my friends, is a flat "no!" The only Muslim that could possibly be a good American is a Muslim that is non-practicing, or one that is in the process of repudiating Islam. Why? Because Islam is completely incompatible with either Christianity or patriotic Americanism. read on>>>

Religion in the Early South, Redux

Paul Harvey

Randall beat me to the punch with his post on religion in the colonial South, and its relative importance as portrayed in recent scholarship as compared with its conventional role in older works as a foil for Yankee Puritanism.

Just a couple of notes on that, on the new issue of Historically Speaking, and on other recent and forthcoming works on this subject. First, Randall didn’t mention this, but bears noting that the new issue of HS includes a full forum reflecting on Charles Joyner’s 25-year old book Down by the Riverside: An African American Slave Community. I’ll blog more about this forum once I have a chance to look at it. Sylvia Frey, Stephanie Shaw, and other noted historians weigh in with their reflections on Joyner’s influential book. In the meantime, here's a bit from the website for the 25th anniversary edition of the book:

In Down by the Riverside, Charles Joyner takes readers on a journey back in time, up the Waccamaw River through the Lowcountry of South Carolina, past abandoned rice fields once made productive by the labor of enslaved Africans, past rice mills and forest clearings into the antebellum world of All Saints Parish. In this slave community, and many others like it, the slaves created a new language, a new religion--indeed, a new culture--from African traditions and American circumstances.

From the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the plantation whites and their guests, from quantitative analysis of census and probate records, and above all from slave folklore and oral history, Joyner has recovered an entire society and its way of life. His careful reconstruction of daily life in All Saints Parish is an inspiring testimony to the ingenuity and solidarity of a people who endured in the face of adversity.

Second, I was about to post on a new work, which I just saw reviewed in the Journal of Southern History (I had not heard of the book until I just saw this review), which appears to support strengthening the role religious ritual played for Virginia’s colonists as discussed in the HS article: Nicholas Beasley, Christian Ritual and the Creation of British Slave Societies, 1650-1780 (University of Georgia Press, 2009). The reviewer in the Journal of Southern History summarizes the themes of the book:

Exploring the worship practices of settles in the early Slouth and the Caribbean island colonies, Nicholas M. Beasley presents three main arguments in this thoroughly revisionist study, which focuses mostly on the Church of Englnad. First, white minorities in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina created a lively and meaningful religiou culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Second, this culture gave whites unequaled opportunities to assert their power over slaves and free persons of color. Third, Christian ritual afforded whites comfrt, enabling them “to maintain their claims to Englishness in the face of clear evidence that their colonies were not settler societies that faithfully reproduced English culture.

The English settlers “observed a bewildering array of holy days and state holidays, attached great significance to days of fasting and humiliation, and held to a long tradition of weekday prayer..” Whites used the Eucharist to define their Christianity and exclude nearly all Africans and African Americasns, moreover, they celebrated marriages and baptisms at home, meaning that “public baptisms and marriages became lesser events, associated with lower-status whites and persons of color.” All this emphasis on liturgy meant that “the white minorities of the plantation world sought to maintain cultural connections to the metropole.”

Third, this new work appears to complement that of Lauren Winner, which Randall alluded to in his post. Lauren’s book will be coming out next month I believe. Here’s the full reference and link: Lauren Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia.

This enlightening book examines the physical objects found in elite Virginia households of the eighteenth century to discover what they can tell us about their owners’ lives and religious practices. Lauren F. Winner looks closely at punch bowls, needlework, mourning jewelry, baptismal gowns, biscuit molds, cookbooks, and many other items, illuminating the ways Anglicanism influenced daily activities and attitudes in colonial Virginia, particularly in the households of the gentry.

Of Lauren’s book, Richard Bushman writes the following: How do you capture the nature of Anglican piety in colonial Virginia? Lauren Winner does it by linking household objects to theological and devotional books and religious practice. Her astute analysis takes us to the heart of eighteenth-century Anglican religion—in Virginia's houses where the needlework, walnut tables, prayer books, and silver bowls she examines once resided. The result is a landmark work in material culture and religious studies scholarship.

My favorite part of her work is the section on cooking, where, in a sort of Giada de Laurentiis meets Laurel Thatcher Ulrich section, she takes us on a kind of liturgical calendar of recipes and cooking rituals which produced the appropriate foods for the ritual seasons. Lauren cooked her way through those books, and found some of the recipes pretty excruciating – just a side note on some material culture research.

By institutional measures, the early South certainly lacked by conventional forms of religious piety. By invoking religion as practice rather than as belief or institutional form, these scholars are showing how to rewrite religious history.