"The song lifted her up high": Jeff Sharlet on Faith and Faithlessness

Kelly Baker

Beefsteaks when I'm hungry

Something tall and cool when I'm dry

Give me greenbacks when the times are hard

Sweet heaven when I die--Blue Dogs, "Sweet Heaven When I Die"

While reading and re-reading Jeff Sharlet's Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country in Between, a couple of songs replayed over and over in my head. His lovely and haunting collections of essays made my thinking musical. Perhaps, it is the beauty of his language, the lyrical quality of his descriptions, that direct me to hymns and pop songs (which is on my taste, not Sharlet's). Perhaps, it is because his reflections on religion, trauma, belief, unbelief, practice and loss feel like poetry. I cannot read his book without music, so songs emerged as the beginnings of my analysis. Every time I started to review this book, the music came to me first. Music evoked spaces I once inhabited as well as spaces in which I currently reside. Thus, I cannot review his book without referring to the accompaniment of music (and please note that John D. Boy at the Immanent Frame also feels this way). Hopefully, Sharlet will not mind since music appears in his work from Cornel West as "blues man" to a club named "the Church" to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Dock Boggs' "Down South Blues" to the songs playing at Sweet Fanny Adams, the motel and bar. Maybe the music even puzzles him a bit too.

The first song starts playing as soon as I see the title, Sweet Heaven When I Die, which my brain somehow translates into "When I die, Hallelujah, by and by" from the Christian hymn, "I'll Fly Away." I misread his title every time I puzzle over the image on the cover. Somehow humming this tune seemed to fit with Sharlet's explorations and excavations of the religious lives of Americans from his college sweetheart's continual return to the Bible to make meaning to the martyrdom of an anarchist to militarization of Christian youth in BattleCry to worship with German evangelicals and the construction of purity. Sharlet, as Brent Plate puts it, catalogs "weird religion." Sharlet's approach both deeply personal and documentary showcases individuals trying to make sense of their lives, their traumas, as well as attempts to create meaning out of chaos. His interlocutors try to find justice, try to heal themselves and others and try to navigate expected and unexpected losses.

Sharlet gives us glimpses into American religions writ small, individuals navigating worlds of faith. He writes about Molly Knott Chilson, his college girlfriend, "Her liberalism became Christian, and her Christianity was gentle and yet thick with the blood of scripture: the darkest passages of the prophets to which she's always been drawn..." (12). Or Cornel West: "His religion is that of the night side of scripture, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible and a Christ story as awful as it is redeeming" (50). Or Chava Rosenburg's writing about the Holocaust: "Beauty, not God, sustained her" (132). Vera Schnabel, his interpreter at the German Church of the Way, embraced both Jesus and America via music (and she also hums "I'll Fly Away). Sharlet writes about her conversion:

The song lifted her up high, and up there in the sky she was an angel, just like her black brothers and sisters. She wasn't an America, she wasn't German, she was nothing: She disappeared into the clouds and came out the other side a believer (153).

Moreover, Sharlet catalogs the development of American fundamentalism from the perspective of not only Ron Luce, the founder of BattleCry, but also the young adults at his Honor Academy as they struggle with sin, sexuality and "secularism." The specters of gender loom large in "She Said Yes," as Honor Academy attendees confront limited gender norms as sexuality becomes the language for and of sin. Moreover, Sharlet does not shy away from issues that make religious people and scholars of religion nervous. He tries to figure out the "price tag" of religious movements without turning to discussions of charlatanism or inautheniticity. While following a New Age healer, he notes, "You get what you pay for" (198) without snark. Capitalism resides in religion and spirituality (just ask Darren Grem or Richard King).

The second, likely more trite, song is a pop song. Sharlet cajoles, "Pop is religion, a source of stories and a conduit for myths, the smoke and mirrors by which large groups of people get together and...get 'vulnerable'" (225-226). I heard it on the radio (it stuck with me, haunted me, maybe). "If I Die Young" by the Band Perry reflects on loss, trauma and the "sharp knife of a short life" in a slightly off-kilter melody that reverberates. Sharlet also navigates loss, trauma and the lack of meaning (see also John Corrigan on meaninglessness). Many of the essays circle the trauma of every day life, unintended hurt and the loss of loved ones. In "Bad Moon Rising," the memory of the author's dead mother and uncle haunts while accompanied to the CCR song of the title. Cornel West discusses "death shudders," despair and coming to terms with the "reality of death, ordinary life--waiting to die, living as you never will" (60). In the last essay of the collection, "Born, Again," the life of Dock Boggs is juxtaposed with the loss of a friend's infant and a meditation on "quitting." Sharlet pens:

An input of energy results in motion. Simple math, nothing more than 2+2=4. Pages pile up and become books; babies grow up and become children.

The belief that either will necessarily prosper...that "things will work out," is grotesque: tragic and comic at the same time, funny because it's sad, sad because it's funny, awful because it just might be true. Seen from a distance, through a telescope or at the far remove of "art," a story or a painting or a poem or a song [or scholarship?], both the most mundane of expectations...are the painful spectacle, grievous mismatches of desire and power, of want and the ability to make it so (248-249).

All of Sharlet's interlocutors, his conversants, his interviewees, seek to manage trauma. How do we manage when ordinary life is about wounds rather than hope? How do we make sense of hurt, trauma, death, quitting, capitalism, consumerism, spirituality, music, art, or religion? (Or do we?) What do we do in the grips of a "death shudder"? Sharlet's Sweet Heaven When I Die flirts with old questions of suffering and meaning while suggesting that folks are just "trying to become human" but "not there yet" (259).

But this also proves useful to those of us who "write" religion as our scholarship. Sharlet's work pushes me to think about how we write the lives of our contemporaries or those long dead. How do we write trauma? How are scholars making meaning out of the messiness of individual lives? Or should we embrace the meaningless as an analytic frame too? What happens when we pay attention to religion writ small? What kinds of stories do we gain? And what kind of stories do we lose? The work evokes, and songs become my analysis, which makes me wonder how art can be helpful in our interpretations (Jason Bivins and Julie Bryne likely have much more to say about this). Why does this book come to me in song?

AAR 2011: Religion in America Round Up

Kelly Baker

For those of you headed to San Francisco later in the week, here's a guide to AAR sessions (and NAASR sessions) about religion(s) in American history, life, and culture. My list is likely not exhaustive, though I tried to be. So, please panels that I might have missed in the comments section. Additionally, Mike Altman (@MichaelJAltman), Ben Brazil (@bbrazil), and I (@kelly_j_baker)will be live-tweeting the conference (under the hashtag #sblaar) as well as posting a discussion after the conference similar to the ASA discussion. AAR has a mobile app this year that might come to good use for those of you (like me!) who don't want to lug around a program book.

(Editor update 11/17: Also, for the owners of the brand new Kindle Fire, my tech savvy spouse made the AAR mobile app downloadable for you too. There's a quick note about installation in the comments section.)

We welcome any guest blog posts about AAR. Please feel free to send them to Paul or me, and we'll post them. As you can tell from the list, any help to cover AAR this year would be more than helpful.

Happy conferencing!

Saturday, November 19, 9:00-11:30 am

A19-109, Religion and the Social Sciences Section

Marie Marquardt, Agnes Scott College, Presiding

Theme: Rematerializing Religion: Critical Applications of Manuel A. Vásquez’s More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2010)

Chad Seales, University of Texas

Keep Clean, and Sweet, and Pure: From Material Religion to Material Morality

Sean McCloud, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Toward a Materialist Theory of Metanoia: Reconsidering an "Impoverished Theory of Religious Change"

Elaine Peña, George Washington University

The Materiality of Guadalupan Devotion: Micropractices, Embodied Action, and Space Production

Responding: Manuel A. Vasquez, University of Florida

A19-123, African Diaspora Religions Group

Maha Marouan, University of Alabama, Presiding

Theme: From "Double Consciousness" to the "Black Atlantic": Theorizing the African Diaspora and African Diaspora Subjectivities

Torin Alexander, Saint Olaf College

African Diaspora Subjectivities and Religious Experience: The Pursuit of Wholeness

Karyna Do Monte, Boston University

Brazilian Candomble Meets Ecology: A Samba Plot in the Rio de Janeiro Carnival

Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado, University of Miami

Translator of the Afro-Cuban Religious World: Lydia Cabrera

Mary Diggin, Pacifica Graduate Institute

Damballah and Maman Brigitte: The Irish Influence on Vodou Lwas

Responding: Charles H. Long, Chapel Hill, NC

A19-129 Latina/o Critical and Comparative Studies Group

Lara Medina, California State University, Northridge, Presiding

Theme: Religion at the Corner of Bliss and Nirvana: Politics, Identity, and Faith in New Migrant Communities (Duke University Press, 2009), Authors Meet Critics

Panelists: Carolyn Chen, Northwestern University

Rudy V. Busto, University of California, Santa Barbara

Responding: Lois Ann Lorentzen, University of San Francisco

Kevin Chun, University of San Francisco

Jay Gonzalez, University of San Francisco

Luis Leon, University of Denver

A19-130 Mormon Studies Group

Colleen McDannell, University of Utah, Presiding

Theme: Mormon Women and Modernity

Ann Duncan, Goucher College

The Mommy Wars, Mormonism, and the "Choices" of American Motherhood

Jennifer Meredith, University of Utah

Western Pioneer Mythos in the Negotiation of Mormon Feminism and Faith

Jill Peterfeso, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Scripting, Performing, Testifying: Giving Faithful "Seximony" through The Mormon Vagina Monologues

Doe Daughtrey, Arizona State University

"Further Light and Knowledge": Ways of Knowing in Mormonism and the New Spirituality

Responding: R. Marie Griffith, Washington University, St. Louis

NAASR Panel 3

Saturday, November 19, 9-11:30 a.m. Room: Hilton Union Square-Yosemite A

Thomas Tweed, University of Texas at Austin, Presiding

Theme: The ‘Evidence’ of Religion in North America: A Round Table

Kelly J. Baker, University of Tennessee, Knoxville: “The Good, the Bad, the (Un)Dead: The Klan, Zombies and the Problem of Legitimate Evidence”

Lauren F. Winner, Duke Divinity School: “Reading Recipes for Religion: Cookbooks and the Sensory History of American Religion”

Jennifer Hughes, University of California, Riverside: “The Object as Evidence in American Religion”

Laura Levitt, Temple University: “Juridical Evidence and the Question of History, Or Justice and Empiricism”

Saturday, November 19, 11:30 am–1:00 pm

M19-110 Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology

HI-Sutter B

Theme: Mormonism and Peace

James McLachlan, Western Carolina University, Presiding

Patrick Mason, Claremont Graduate University

"Religion, Violence, and the State: A Mormon Argument"

Responding: Robert Rees, Graduate Theological Union

Saturday, November 19, 1:00-3:30pm

A19-205 North American Religions Section

Jon Butler, Yale University, Presiding

Theme: Narrativity in the Study of North American Religions

Panelists: Thomas Tweed, University of Texas, Austin

Janet R. Jakobsen, Barnard College

R. Marie Griffith, Harvard University

Mark Hulsether, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

A19-236 Religion, Food, and Eating in North America Seminar

Reid L. Neilson, Latter-Day Saints Church, Presiding

Theme: Religion, Food, and Eating in North America

Leonard Norman Primiano, Cabrini College

"The Abundance of the Fullness": Mother Divine's Theology of Food

Todd LeVasseur, University of Florida

Koinonia Partners: A "Demonstration Plot" for Food, Fellowship, and Sustainability

Nora L. Rubel, University of Rochester

The Feast at the End of the Fast: The Emergence of a New American Jewish Practice

Benjamin Zeller, Brevard College

Quasireligious American Foodways: The Cases of Vegetarianism and Locavorism

Sarah Robinson, Claremont Graduate University

Refreshing the Concept of Halal Meat in Muslim American Context in Taqwa Ecofood Cooperative

Derek Hicks, Lancaster Theological Seminary

An Unusual Feast: Gumbo and the Complex Brew of Black Religion

Saturday, November 19, 4:00-6:30 pm

A19-305 North American Religions Section

Jeff Wilson, University of Waterloo, Presiding

Theme: Rethinking Key Paradigms in American Religion: "Black Church," "Queering Religion," "Nature Religion," and "Material Culture"

Josef Sorett, Columbia University

The Problem of the "Black Church": Church and Spirit(s) in the American Religious Imaginary, 1923–1940

Megan Goodwin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Captive Bodies, Queer Religions: Scripting North American Religious Difference

Bron Taylor, University of Florida

Gaian Earth Religion: Vanishing Divine Being(s) and the Mod-God of Nature

Jennifer Scheper Hughes, University of California, Riverside

Material Religion: On the Agency of Objects

Responding: Linda L. Barnes, Boston University

A19-307 Religion and the Social Sciences Section Ann B. McClenahan, Washington, D.C., Presiding Theme: Neoliberal Religiosities: Globalization and New Modes of Religious Practice Panelists: Kevin O'Neill, University of Toronto Kathryn Lofton, Yale University Tanya Erzen, Ohio State University Daromir Rudnyckyj, University of Victoria

A19-309 Teaching Religion Section and Native Traditions in the Americas Group

Michael Zogry, University of Kansas, Presiding

Theme: Teaching about Native Traditions: Pedagogical Insights for Specialists and Nonspecialists Alike

Panelists: Michelene Pesantubbee, University of Iowa

Michael McNally, Carleton College

Ines Hernandez-Avila, University of California, Davis

Philip P. Arnold, Syracuse University

Ines M. Talamantez, University of California, Santa Barbara

A19-321 Roman Catholic Studies Group

Amy DeRogatis, Michigan State University, Presiding

Theme: Finding a Place for Spatial Theory in American Catholic Studies

Panelists: Katie Oxx, St Joseph's University

Catherine Osborne, Fordham University

Arthur Remillard, Saint Francis University

Michael Pasquier, Louisiana State University

James Deutsch, Smithsonian Institution

Responding: Vincent J. Miller, University of Dayton

Saturday, November 19, 6:00-8:00 pm

A19-337, Special Topics Forum

Steven Barrie-Anthony, University of California, Santa Barbara, Presiding

Theme: Religion Beyond the Boundaries — American Religious and Spiritual Innovation: Marketing, the Law, and Marriage

Donald Westbrook, Claremont Graduate University

“I am a Mormon” and “I am a Scientologist”: Recent Marketing Efforts in Mormonism and Scientology

Andrew Ventimiglia, University of California, Davis

Circulating Religion, Owning Belief: Intellectual Property in the American Spiritual Marketplace

Erika Seamon, Georgetown University

Redefining Religion through the Lens of Interfaith Marriage

Sunday, November 20, 9:00-11:30

A20-104 North American Religions Section and Body and Religion Group

Ann M. Burlein, Hofstra University, Presiding

Theme: The Past, Present, and Future of Body Studies

Adam Park, Florida State University

Body Studies: A Nature/Culture Problem

Adam Ware, Florida State University

In the Air There’s a Feeling of Christmas: On the Discursive Deafness of Body Studies

Joshua Fleer, Florida State University

Spectator versus Participant: The Gaze of the Historian in the Field of Sports and Religion

Lauren Gray, Florida State University

On Embodiment and Lived Religion

Responding: Martha Finch, Missouri State University

A20-110 Afro-American Religious History Group

Rosemary R. Hicks, Tufts University, Presiding

Theme: New Research in African American Islam

Spencer Dew, Iowa State University

“This Nationalistic Topic”: Internal Debates about the Nationality and Citizenship in the Moorish Science Temple of America, 1925–1935

Andrew Polk, Florida State University

The Best Knower: Mythmaking, Fard Muhammad, and the Lost-Found Nation of Islam

Emily S. Clark, Florida State University

Noble Drew Ali’s “Clean and Pure Nation”: The Moorish Manufacturing Corporation and Identity

Responding: Edward E. Curtis, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis

A20-118 Native Traditions in the Americas Group

Gabrielle Tayac, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Presiding

Theme: Landscapes of Identity: Native Traditions of the Pacific

Suzanne J. Crawford O'Brien, Pacific Lutheran University

"Salmon is Our Sacrament": The Revival of First Salmon Ceremonies in the Pacific Northwest

Regina Pfeiffer, Chaminade University, Honolulu

More than Language: The Similarity of Hawai'ian and Maori Indigenous Religions

Mary Louise Stone, California Institute of Integral Studies

Sacred Female Authority Among the Inkas: Hurin Moiety

Matthew Casey, University of California, Davis

Indigenismo and the "Reindianization" of Cusco, Peru

Responding: Fritz Detwiler, Adrian College

A20-121 Religion in Latin America and the Caribbean Group

Jill DeTemple, Southern Methodist University, Presiding

Theme: Saints, Stones, and Bones: Material Religion in Latin America

Todd Ramón Ochoa, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

A Materiality for Sorcery in Central Cuban Bembé

Karin Velez, Macalester College

“Casas a la Santissima Virgen": The Multiplying and Refracting Seventeenth Century Holy Houses of Loreto Conchó (Baja California) and Loreto Moxos (Bolivia)

Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado, University of Miami

The Quinceañera and the Traje Tipico: Religion, Ritual, and the Mercado

Jalane D. Schmidt, University of Virginia

The Effigy's Emotion: Cuban Interpretations of the Virgin of Charity

Jennifer Scheper Hughes, University of California, Riverside

Cradling and Presentation: Affection and Tenderness for the Object in Meso-American Religion

Responding: Colleen McDannell, University of Utah

A20-125 Religion in the American West Seminar

James B. Bennett, Santa Clara University, Presiding

Seminar attendees are asked to read the four papers in advance; they will be posted on the Seminar’s website (http://www.yale.edu/relwest/) a month before the session convenes.

Theme: Land, Identity, and Transnational Wests

Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University

City Jew, Country Jew: Immigration, Masculinity, and American Zionism

Konden Smith, Arizona State University

Civilizing the American Frontier: Utah, Kansas, Nicaragua, and American Millenarianism 1856–1858

Brandi Denison, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"Playing Indian": Defining American Religion through Ute Land Religion, 1910–1940

Katherine Moran, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point

Faith, Place, and Power: Catholicism and the Making of the United States Pacific

Responding: Greg Johnson, University of Colorado, Boulder

Sunday, November 20, 1:00-2:30

A20-206 History of Christianity Section

Karen Bruhn, Arizona State University, Presiding

Theme: Negotiating Identities in the Early Modern Christian Americas

Adrian Weimer, Providence College

The “Worke of Cain's Offspring": Elizabeth Hooten and Provocation of Identity in Early New England

Brandon Bayne, Harvard University

“The Chalice of His Suffering”: Martyred Identity, Nostalgia, and the Jesuit Expulsion from New Spain

Veronica Gutiérrez, University of California, Los Angeles

“Que me Entierren con el Hábito del Bienaventurado San Francisco": A Nahua Woman Negotiates a Medieval Spanish Death Ritual

Mary Corley Dunn, Saint Louis University

"But an Echo"?: Claude Martin, Marie de l'Incarnation, and Female Religious Identity in Seventeenth Century New France

Responding: Constance Furey, Indiana University

A20-208 Religion and the Social Sciences Section and Afro-American Religious History Group

Jane Naomi Iwamura, University of Southern California, Presiding

Theme: Theory and Method in the Study of Race and Religion in Twentieth Century America

Panelists:Andre Key, Temple University

John L. Jackson, University of Pennsylvania

Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

Responding:Rebecca Alpert, Temple University

Sunday, November 20 3:00 pm-4:30 pm

A20-25 Wildcard Session

Lerone Martin, Eden Theological Seminary, Presiding

Theme: Race, Religion, and the Military

Robert Green, College of the Holy Cross

Black United States Army Chaplains in the Pacific: Race and Religion during the Philippine–American War, 1898–1902

Chih-Yin Chen, Saint Louis University

Soldier–Monks: Vincent Lebbe and His Little Brothers of Saint John the Baptist

Niccole L. Coggins, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Onward Christian Soldiers!”: The United States Military's Religious Identity in the Territory of Hawai’i, 1898–1959

A20-266 Asian North American Religion, Culture, and Society Group

Courtney T. Goto, Boston University, Presiding

Theme: Evangelism, Education, and Leadership: Transnational Strategies and Local Adaptations in Asian North American Religious Communities

Justin Tse, University of British Columbia

Evangelism, Eternity, and the Everyday: Ambivalent Reconciliation in a Chinese Canadian Christian Church in Metro Vancouver, BC

Michele Verma, Rice University

How Transnational Education Shapes Indo-Caribbean Hindu Traditions in the United States

Sharon A. Suh, Seattle University

New Euro-American Dharma Protectors: Jodoshinshu in Transition

Responding: Russell Jeung, San Francisco State University

A20-280 Roman Catholic Studies Group

James McCartin, Seton Hall University, Presiding

Theme: American Catholic Women: Engagement, Resistance, Transformation

Karen Park, Saint Norbert College

"Gather the Children in this Wild Country": Boundaries and Borders at a Frontier Marian Apparition Site

Rebecca Davis, Graduate Theological Union

"More than a Hyphen": The Contributions of E. Charlton Fortune, California Liturgical Artist of the Early Twentieth Century Liturgical Movement

Jennifer Naccarelli, Claremont Graduate University

Crossing Borders: The Triumphs and Trials of Two Catholic Suffragists

Responding: Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University

Sunday, November 20, 5:00 pm-6:30 pm

A20-306 North American Religions Section

S. Brent Plate, Hamilton College, Presiding

Theme: Artifacts of Crisis: Religion and the Material Culture of Cataclysm

Jennifer Graber, College of Wooster

Between Two Worlds: Kiowa Ledger Art and the Narration of Cultural Calamity

Heather D. Curtis, Tufts University

"Famine Horrors": North American Missionary Photographs and the Visual Culture of Cataclysmic Suffering

Jonathan Ebel, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Monumental Failures: Visual Culture, War Memories, and the Limits of American Civil Religion

Responding: Sally M. Promey, Yale University

A20-331 North American Hinduism Group

Shreena Gandhi, Kalamazoo College, Presiding

Theme: Constructions of Hindu Selves and Hindu Others in North America

Michele Verma, Rice University

Indo-Caribbeans in the United States: Cracking the Conflation of “Hindu” and “Indian”

Anya Pokazanyeva, University of California, Santa Barbara

Faith on the Mat: Hindus, Protestants, and the Construction of Yoga

Michael Altman, Emory University

Sightings and Blind Spots: The "Protestant Lens" and the Construction of Hinduism

Responding: Steven W. Ramey, University of Alabama

NAASR Panel 4

Rosalind I. J. Hackett, University of Tennessee, presiding

Theme: Editors Meet Critics: After Secular Law by Winnifred Sullivan, Robert Yelle, and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo” (Stanford U.P. 2011)

Room: Moscone Center 2024.

Panelists: Jason Bivins, North Carolina State University

Elizabeth Castelli, Barnard College

Janet Jakobsen, Barnard College

Randall Styers, University of North Carolina

Response: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, University at Buffalo Law School, and Robert A. Yelle, University of Memphis

Monday, November 21, 9:00 am-11:30 am

A21-107 Religion and the Social Sciences Section

D. Michael Lindsay, Rice University, Presiding

Theme: Responses to Robert D. Putnam's and David E. Campbell's American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon and Schuster, 2010)

Panelists:Jean Bethke Elshtain, University of Chicago

Michael Hout, University of California, Berkeley

Charles Mathewes, University of Virginia

Responding:Robert Putnam, Harvard University

David Campbell, University of Notre Dame

A21-109 Study of Judaism Section

Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University, Presiding

Theme: American Judaisms

Robert Erlewine, Illinois Wesleyan University

From Exclusivity to Partnership: Abraham Joshua Heschel and the Legacy of Liberal Judaism

Rachel Gordan, Harvard University

The Judeo-Christian Tradition In the Post-World War II Years: A Spur to Jewish Distinctiveness

Yaakov Ariel, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

What's in a City?: San Francisco as a Hub of New Jewish Religious Movements

Kristen Tobey, University of Pittsburgh

An Identity Project in Flux: Rhetorical Negotiation of Gentile Involvement in the Nineteenth Century Jewish Agrarian Movement

A21-104 History of Christianity Section

Matthew A. Sutton, Washington State University, Presiding

Theme: State of the Field: Fundamentalism

Panelists: David Harrington Watt, Temple University

Randall Stephens, Eastern Nazarene College

Mary Beth Mathews, University of Mary Washington

Tona Hangen, Worcester State University

Monday, November 21 1:00 pm-3:30 pm

A21-207 History of Christianity Section

Virginia Burrus, Drew University, Presiding

Theme: The Invention of Early Church History in Nineteenth Century America: Elizabeth Clark's Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)

Panelists: Derek Krueger, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Susanna K. Elm, University of California, Berkeley

Sheila Briggs, University of Southern California

Kathryn Lofton, Yale University

Leigh E. Schmidt, Harvard University

Responding: Elizabeth A. Clark, Duke University

A21-208 North American Religions Section

Aaron Hahn Tapper, University of San Francisco, Presiding

Theme: Muslims and Jews in America: Commonalities, Contentions, and Complexities

Panelists: Aysha Hidayatullah, University of San Francisco

Ebrahim Patel, Interfaith Youth Core

Michael Lerner, Beyt Tikkun Synagogue and Tikkun Magazine

Judith Plaskow, Manhattan College

Responding: Reza Aslan, University of California, Riverside

A21-221 Evangelical Theology Group and Religion and Sexuality Group

Amy DeRogatis, Michigan State University, Presiding

Theme: Contemporary Evangelical Sexualities

Erin E. Dufault-Hunter, Fuller Theological Seminary

“Porn Again”: What Pornography Can Teach Christians about Good Sex

Sara Moslener, Augustana College

Saving Civilization: Sexual Purity and American Apocalypse

Emily Linthicum, University of California, Santa Barbara

AIDS and American Evangelicalism: Franklin Graham and the Reshaping of Evangelical Discourse on HIV/AIDS

Elizabeth Young Barstow, Harvard University

“You, Your Friend, and God”: Dating as a Means of Developing Spiritual Maturity for Evangelical Young Adults

Responding: R. Marie Griffith, Washington University, Saint Louis

A21-223 Native Traditions in the Americas Group

Natalie Avalos Cisneros, University of California, Santa Barbara, Presiding

Theme: Resilience and Revitalization in Indigenous California

Cutcha Risling Baldy, University of California, Davis

Xoc-itch’iswhalte (They Will Beat Time with Sticks Over Her): The Hupa Flower Dance Ceremony and Elements of Spirituality in Song

Melissa Leal, University of California, Davis

Asumpa (To Flow): Native American Language and Cultural Revitalization through Hip Hop

Dennis Kelley, University of Missouri

Religion, American Indians, and Ecocriticism: Conceptualizing Indigenous Spirituality through Environmental Activism

Responding: Chris Peters, Seventh Generation Fund for Indian Development

Ines M. Talamantez, University of California, Santa Barbara

A21-232 North American Hinduism Group and Yoga in Theory and Practice Group

Jeffery D. Long, Elizabethtown College, Presiding

Theme: Mother India Meets the Golden State: California Gurus and West Coast Yoga

Panelists:F. X. Charet, Goddard College

Philip Goldberg, Spiritual Wellness and Healing Associates

Donnalee Dox, Texas A & M University

Ann Gleig, Millsaps College

Lola L. Williamson, Millsaps College

Responding: Stefanie Syman, Brooklyn, NY

A21-203 Arts, Literature, and Religion Section

Kelly J. Baker, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Presiding

Theme: Explorations of the Religious in Contemporary Art

Ronald Bernier, Wentworth Institute of Technology

Screening God: Video, Viola, and the Theological Sublime

Leonora Onarheim, University of Oslo

Sites of Memory and Transcendence: Reflections on the Sculptures of Ruins by Anselm Kiefer

Emily S. Clark, Florida State University

New World, New Jerusalem, New Orleans: The Apocalyptic Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan

Brett Potter, Toronto School of Theology

Mystical Embrace: Barnett Newman, Primal Desire, and Apophasis

Monday, November 21, 4:00 pm-6:30 pm

A21-300 Special Topics Forum Religion, Media, and Culture Group

Sarah M. Pike, California State University, Chico, Presiding

Theme: Who Speaks for Us?: Responses to Representations of Islam and Christianity in America

Panelists: Stewart M. Hoover, University of Colorado, Boulder

Jeffrey H. Mahan, Iliff School of Theology

Nabil Echchaibi, University of Colorado, Boulder

John Blake, CNN.com

A21-303 American Religion in the Age of AIDS Cluster

Randall Miller, Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund and Pacific School of Religion, Presiding

Theme: American Religion in the Age of AIDS

Lynne Gerber, University of California, Berkeley

“Is Everyone Healed but Me?”: AIDS at Thirty in a Queer San Francisco Church

Ezer Kang, Wheaton College

Ethnic Churches, Chinese Immigrants, and HIV in New York City: Inconvenient but Necessary Bedfellows

Debra Levine, New York University

The Four Questions and the Disintegrating Glue of Community

Amy Koehlinger, Florida State University

Passionate Play: Catholicism and Damien Ministries

Anthony Petro, New York University

After the Wrath of God: American Christians and the Biopolitics of AIDS

Responding: Mark Jordan, Harvard University

Tuesday, November 22, 9:00 am-11:30 am

A22-106 North American Religions Section

Randall Styers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Presiding

Theme: Industrial Effervescence: Manufacturing Economic Selves and Producing Religious Collectivity in American History

Merinda Simmons, University of Alabama

Colonizing Religion: Faith as Market Force in the American South

Lisle Dalton, Hartwick College

Gilded Age Railroad Brotherhoods as Industrial Religion

Chad Seales, University of Texas, Austin

Mechanics of Communication: Corporate Chaplaincy and the Discursive Formation of Industrial Religion

Evan Berry, American University

Parts of a Whole: Ecological Consumerism in a Global Age

Responding: Jason C. Bivins, North Carolina State University

A22-115 Afro-American Religious History Group

Curtis Evans, University of Chicago, Presiding

Theme: Out of Place: African American Religious Lives in Catholic, Mormon, and Orthodox Spaces

Matthew John Cressler, Northwestern University

Black Priest for a Black Church: Race and Catholicism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Max Mueller, Harvard University

Jane Manning James: Reenacting and Reclaiming the "Black" and "Mormon" Past

Tshepo Morongwa Chéry, University of Pennsylvania

Racial (Un)Belonging and the Ethereal Homeland: South African Coloured Identity, Travel, and the Practices of Black Nationalism in the African Orthodox Church in America

Responding: Marla Frederick, Harvard University

A22-123 North American Hinduism Group

Vijaya Nagarajan, University of San Francisco, Presiding

Theme: California Dreaming: South Asian Religions Encounter the Counterculture

Smriti Srinivas, University of California, Davis

Utopian Settlements, Californian Vedanta, Huxley, Isherwood, and Friends

Michael Stoeber, University of Toronto

The Reception of Kundalini Yoga in California and Its Relation to Sikh Dharma/3H0

Eliza Kent, Colgate University

California Hinduism: The Shiva Lingam of Golden Gate Park, 1989–1994

Responding: Jeffrey J. Kripal, Rice University

Shana Sippy, Carleton College

ASA Religion Redux: Part 2

Here's the second part of our conversation: "What does American Studies reveal to us about religion in America?" Today, Mike and I pick up with discussions of the secular, American studies and religion, and why you all should be going to ASA in the future. Enjoy!

Kelly Baker (KB): Another point that I would like your opinion, Mike, is the emphasis on the secular and its relationship to religion. What do you make of these encounters with this loaded term?

Mike Altman (MA): I found an interesting discussion of secularism in Matt Hedstrom's (University of Virginia) paper analyzing the constitutional reform movement following the Civil War and its work to put God into the Constitution. Hedstrom pointed out that religious liberals stood on the front lines of the fight to keep the Constitution secular and further argued that the dispute over the secularism of the Constitution was actually a theological battle between conservatives and liberals and not a debate between the religious and irreligious. On that same panel Joseph Haker (University of Minnesota) presented a paper on postwar Ten Commandments monuments. Haker argued that these monuments were not religious like their contemporary Christian Right cousins, but instead were symbols for the American Way of Life, in a Protestant-Catholic-Jew sense. He claimed they were secular symbols. Here again we see the limits of contemporary discourse about secularism and its religious/irreligious dyad. In one case religious liberals and conservatives debated the necessity of a secular Constitution to the maintenance of religious freedom and in the other a religious symbol is deployed in the name of nationalism and a secular way of life.

Haker’s presentation included some great photographs of the monuments and the rabbis, pastors, and priests involved in installing them. These photographs pointed out what linked together these 19th and mid 20th century debates about secularism with today--whiteness. Here’s where I asked your “whiteness question” and what came to the fore for me was the ways the debates about seularism are largely white debates due in large part to the long Enlightenment, Protestant, and post-Protestant history of the argument. Talal Asad has pointed this out already but these two papers gave me new images and examples for thinking about it.

Related to this is a paper from another panel on religion and space in America from Nicolas Howe (Williams College). Howe told the story of Native American opposition to developments on the San Francisco Peaks because the peaks were considered sacred to various Native American nations. Specifically, native groups opposed the use of reclaimed sewage water to make snow for a ski area on one of the peaks. They argued that this would desecrate their sacred space. In a smart move, Howe argued that their arguments about desecration of sacred space mirrored secularist arguments about the ways various religious performances or materials “desecrate” secular public spaces. Howe further argues that the law has generally had problems dealing with both of these arguments because of their similar use of ideas of desecration or contamination.

So to answer you question, coming out of the weekend I’ve seen that the usual framing of secularity as secular vs. religious misses the multiple ways that these two discourses overlap, intertwine, and ape one another. They are not just two sides of the same coin. They are, in fact, the whole coin. (KB: yes, yes, they are!)

So, one final question for you: what difference does it make to approach religion in America from American studies instead of from religious studies or history?

KB: This is a good question too. For better (or possibly worse), I attend ASA and AAR as my major conferences each year. At ASA, sometimes I feel like I have to cajole folks into paying attention to religion as a major component of American life. This seems like a silly thing to say, but religion often only pops up at predictable moments in ASA panels on topics like Civil Rights and suspiciously absent at other times. There was a panel a couple years ago at ASA, in which an audience member worried about using religion as a category of study because this might make religion “real.” As a fellow audience member, I wanted to respond that this was the wrong approach rather we should be paying attention to the reality of religion in the lives of Americans rather than getting trapped in this unending debate about autheniticity or reality. It struck me that American studies folks should be talking to religious studies folks more, and vice versa.

The theoretical and multi-disciplinary approach of American studies makes it an excellent pairing with the study of religion in American life, as you can probably tell from all the panels we’ve mentioned. Where else could you find panels like the ones we’ve discussed? The panels that I attended not only presented ethnographic case studies or historical studies but sought to make historiographical interventions and to renarrate religion in public life, past and present. These were bold, smart panels that really interrogated how we understand religion as embodied, artifactual, textual, ideological, and historical. Objects spoke in panels from Ben Brazil’s (Emory) “hippie vans” to Heather Curtis’s (Tufts) visual culture of pain. Fundamentalists were fictional for both myself and Tara McCellan (Mississipppi State) and historical, successful businessmen for our own Darren Grem (Emory).

And there’s an embrace of cultural analysis at ASA that leads to big questions about place of not only religion, but race, gender, sexuality, imperialism, and class (to name only a few) in modern life. What I like about ASA is the embrace of big questions as well as a theoretical eclecticism that I find useful and refreshing. Additionally, it is a nice space for anyone who works as an Americanist because it puts you in contact with other Americanists in fields beyond history and religious studies.

None of this should surprise you since my book is in an American studies series. American studies, and the ASA in particular, offered me the ability to negotiate some thorny issues with religious studies and history about method and a scholar’s positionality in a truly mutli-disciplinary way as I was beginning my work on the Klan (and as I finished it). Additionally, I find American studies very helpful as I begin new projects of cultural and religious history that involve unconventional source material (zombies, anyone?) because of the embrace of pop culture as evidence and plurality of methods.

Now, I wonder what your read on this is: how do you think American studies can benefit those of us working on religion in America?

MA: This was my first time at the ASA meeting whereas I have been to the AAR a handful of times in my graduate career and I have to say that I left the ASA much more motivated to get back to work than I have the AAR. That is not to say I don’t love the AAR, because I do, and but I think the difference comes down to the central categories of each organization and how they regard these categories.. The central category of the AAR is, unsurprisingly, religion, and so the folks at that conference appreciate religion in a very unique way. There are also those at the AAR who seem a bit protective of “religion” either in terms of disciplinary turf or its status as a sui generis category (whatever that may mean). The ASA’s central category is “American” and it seems that it is a bit tougher on the “American” than AAR is on the “religious.” What counts as American is constantly being pushed, stretched, questioned, and even beaten up on a bit. In a senese, “America” gets a lot less deference from research at the ASA than “religion” gets at the AAR. The reasons for this can obviously be found in divergent disciplinary histories.

I say all of that to point out that the ASA was refreshingly irreverent to religion--in a good way. Yes, there were two people in the audience who asked silly “why are American evangelicals so crazy?” questions and yes there are people who have read little in religious studies beyond Marx or Freud, but I’ll take that handful of people in exchange for some of the soft-pedaling that goes on within the AAR (KB: I second that too!). There are some great people at the AAR who are probing race, class, gender, bodies, sexuality, empire, power and all of those other wonderful categories with refreshing irreverence and the kid gloves firmly removed but there were more of them at the ASA--or at least a greater percentage of them among the religion panels this past weekend.

I left the ASA really motivated to get home and get back to work on my own project. The research on religion in America presented at the conference was innovative and inspiring. It made me say “I can do something like that!” I haven’t felt that way after an AAR for whatever reason. I love the AAR because it is a place where religion matters and that is extremely important. But sometimes it’s nice to be somewhere where religion isn’t quite so special.

KB: Ditto everything you said here. I finished my panel on Sunday and thought now I can go turn this into an article, and like you, the conversations I had and the panels I attended were re-energizing because there aren’t “turf wars” you describe over what counts as religion or not. It is nice to sometimes avoid those discussions all together. Perhaps, religion studies folk at ASA find the atmosphere more conducive to this kind of interrogation and pushing boundaries than we might at AAR because the stakes do seem higher. The joy you describe is a feeling I come home with ever year after ASA, and I am glad you found a good space at this conference. Now, if only we can convince Paul Harvey to attend.

ASA Religion Redux: Part 1

Today's post is a conversation between Mike Altman and me (Kelly) about the place of religion at the American Studies Association meeting last week in Baltimore, Maryland. We reflect on the types of panels at ASA on religion as well as the lingering questions from these panels including issues like embodiment, race, science, and the secular. I'll post part two tomorrow.

What does American Studies reveal to us about religion in America?

Kelly Baker (KB): As a long time ASA attendee, I am still struck by the sheer interdisciplinarity of panels: literature, material culture, religious studies, history, media studies, critical race and gender theory, sociology, legal studies, and psychology. This means that discussions of religion in America occurs across a variety of disciplines, so that a term like “fundamentalism” gets analyzed and deployed differently depending on whether a scholar studying literature, history or someone like me trained in religious studies uses it. This variety leads to discussions that I might not be having at AAR.

I attended panels ranging from the production of conservative religious documentaries to discussions of religion and American nationalism to religious visual and material cultures to religion and consumer products to re-evaluation historiographies of race and religion to negotiations and case studies of terms like global religion. What was most striking was the attention to science, embodiment, race, and the “secular,” which emerged again and again in each panel. Sandra Garner (Miami University, Ohio), Rita Trimble (Ohio State University), and John-Charles Duffy (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) showcased how participation in scientific and social scientific discourse allowed conservative Mormon documentarians to present data about population stagnation, previous “lost” peoples in the Americas, and uplifting of traditional families. Participating in secularizing language became a way to legitimate one’s religious position, a mode of verification. Science authenticated religion, which is not often how this relationship is described.

Mike Altman (MA): So, I’ll pick up on a couple of the themes you mentioned because they jumped out to me too. First, the body. All weekend we were drawn back to bodies and while the question "where's the body in your project?" can seem like a theoretical gotcha (or a form of academic snarkenfreuden), nonetheless, bodies were central to much of the research presented on American religions. Our own Emily Clark (Florida State) offered an excellent paper on Moorish Science Temple teas and tonics meant to purify the body, a purity that paralleled the need for racial and religious purity. Jordan Wade (University of Kansas), who appeared on a panel with me focused around “global religions” in America and took us into the world of Bikram Yoga with her ethnography of a yoga center in Lawrence, Kansas. In Wade's telling, yoga emerges as a form of bodily discipline, rather than spa relaxation technique, tied up in a transnational network that spans Europe, India, and America.

All of the focus on the body in some papers prompted me to wonder where the body was in other papers. When we discuss Moorish Science or yoga it seems that we notice the body but in Friday's panel "Getting the Nation Right with God: American Politics in the Conservative Christian Imagination" I realized that we don't tend to think about Christian Right bodies--at least not in the contemporary discourse scholars and journalists are producing. We especially don't tend to think of politician’s bodies--well, unless you pick cover photos at Newsweek. The presentations on this panel from Sarah Posner, Eoin Cannon, and Karen Seat were all very well done but, for me, they highlighted an overarching problem with the way the Christian Right is imagined both in the media and by scholars. It's always about ideas. The GOP candidates are constantly trying to disembody themselves and represent themselves as pure ideology. How can we force them back into bodies? How can we take Christian Right ideas about the body and think through Christian Right bodies? Marie Griffith has offered us some glimpses of Protestant bodies but we need more on contemporary political religions.

KB: Mike, yes! I couldn’t agree more. Ideas become the fundamental evidence of religiosity for some groups, and bodies become the evidence in others. This division of ideas and bodies proves superficial and unhelpful (at least I think so) to our scholarship. Critical analysis of both race and gender necessarily lends itself to discussions of embodiment, so discussions of race and religion like Ed’s panel at 8 am on Thursday interrogate and engage embodiness, the bodily, and practice as well as the ideological and theological ramifications. Much like Emily and Jordan engaged both in their presentations to make clearly how the bodily impacts the more ephemeral renderings of spirit and purity.What becomes telling is where embodiness appears as a legitimate method of describing, documenting, or analyzing religious peoples, movements, and ideas and where embodiment is somehow not considered.

What I liked about Jason Bivins’ (North Carolina Sate) response to the Getting Right with God panel was his attempt to bring up embodiment as a legitimate method to interrogate the Christian Right and other politicitizations of religion. Why don’t we problematize, or heck, even engage, the bodies attached to these ideologies? I think it deeply matters that white male bodies are ignored in favor of their ideas and their rhetoric. They become soley progenitors of words, somehow absent from the fleshy reality that plagues the rest of us (even though there is attention, not analysis, of physical appearances). Embodiment matters, and I want to know why there is still hesitance to press bodily analysis on certain, dominant religious groups. Griffith does lead the way on this, and I think Martha Finch’s work, gets us closer to this kind of analysis. Why aren’t we analyzing white Christian bodies? Is it an assumption of invisibility and dominance? Or is there something more subtle and possibly insidious going on here?

I asked a variation of this question at quite a few panels to get at the question of the invisibility of whiteness as a racial classification. Didn’t you even call it my “whiteness question?” Judith Weisenfeld (Princeton University) pointed out the need for more analysis of assumptions of whiteness in her response to the conservative documentaries panel. By the end of the weekend, I felt a bit like a broken record. We need to think more about race as more than marked by difference but also unmarked categories too.

Continued here.

Mosh If You Love Jesus: Guest Post

The guest post today is from FSU graduate student Charlie McCrary on the anniversary of Stryper's To Hell with the Devil, a controversial Christian metal band. Charlie's most recent post for us reflected on Ron Bell and emergent theology.

Mosh if You Love Jesus: An Introduction to Christian Metal

Charlie McCrary

This October 24^th marks the 25^th anniversary of the release of Christian glam-metal band Stryper’s To Hell with the Devil, an album that sold over one-million copies and controversially toed the line between Jesus’ and the devil’s music. A quarter-century later, aided by the Internet and the rising popularity of heavy music, the Christian hardcore/metal scene has exploded. For young people across the United States and the world, hardcore dancing, screaming, and moshing are considered genuine forms of worship. But what does the Christian metal scene look like—and what can it tell us about American evangelical youth culture? A brief survey of today’s Christian metal scene will bring us to at least one conclusion: it’s come a long way from yellow Spandex.

Metal is intense. Nothing about the music or the environment is relaxed. Members of heavy music scenes subscribe disproportionately to extreme lifestyle choices, such as straight-edge or veganism. Oddly enough, this atmosphere of extremism is ripe for evangelical fervor. The type of Christianity preached at Christian metal shows is not of the “lukewarm” variety. Enthusiastic, emotional, radical conversions and rededications are encouraged. A “Spirit-filled” circle pit isn’t entirely unlike, say, Cane Ridge. The evangelical hotbed that is the Christian metal scene subverts some stylistic tendencies of conservative evangelicals yet zealously champions familiar theological, practical, and ideological foundations.

Militarism, violence, and apocalypticism all have their place in American evangelical communities, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Christian metal scene. While apocalyptic themes are standard fare in metal lyrics in general, many Christian metal bands practically sound the seventh trumpet before every breakdown. Along with this focus on the apocalypse—which may be emphasized for the aesthetic qualities of the violent imagery of battle—comes the urgency to repent, accept Jesus as one’s savior, and not be left behind. Thus, because the end is immanent, evangelic efforts are aggressive and exigent, and bands like For Today not only fervently seek conversions, but then also set up Bible study networks in each tour city to ensure that newly-“saved” people can maintain Christian practice and “stay strong.” This battle imagery applies not just to the end times or apocalypse

For the Christian metal scene, as for many evangelicals, the entire world is understood in dichotomous relationships—between spirit and flesh, God and the devil, the “things of God” and “the world.” Many lyrics employ the sense that life itself is a sort of battle to be won or lost. See, for example, Haste the Day’s “When Everything Falls” (“I will stand when everything falls away. I will fight this war forever or until I die”), War of Ages’ “Battle On” (“Now that our time is near we hold our own until the end/Fight with every breath without doubt and don't look back/We fight for the Truth”), or For Today’s “Infantry” (“This world will do anything to release its demons at all costs. We'll fight back with all we have, making a difference for our God”). Battles and struggles are constant within the lyrics and messages of Christian metal. Though the battles referred to are often the real, cosmic battles that will in fact take place someday at the end of the world, just as often, they are the everyday struggles commonly experienced and discussed by evangelicals. From struggles with lust (see For Today’s “Redemption”) to the difficulty of fully trusting God (see A Plea for Purging’s “The New Born Wonder”), these lyrics express common evangelical frustrations and problems with typical evangelical language.

Christian metal also falls into line with conservative evangelicalism in its biblicism. Bible verses are frequently quoted in lyrics, and biblical themes and characters are often evoked as a way of meaning-making as well as legitimizing authority. Consider a few brief, fascinating examples. For Today’s 2009 album Portraits features a “portrait” of a biblical character in each song—such as Joel (The Watchman) or Ezekiel (The Visionary)—which serves not only as a Bible lesson but as a way of connecting the evangelical goals and mission of the band with biblical justifications and/or imperatives. In this same way, the now-defunct band Blessed is He drew authority from biblical sources, explicitly making this connection in the song, whose title comes from 1 Corinthians, “I Become One to Win One” with these lyrics: “I have become all things to all people—like Paul said—that I may by all means save some.” In doing so, they relate their sense of purpose while simultaneously silencing via proof-text evangelical doubters who may consider their lifestyle or appearance incongruent with Christianity.

The experience of a Christian metal show is in many ways just like that of any other metal or hardcore show: mosh pits, hardcore dancing, stage dives, headbanging, etc. It is violent, sweaty, intense, and male-dominated, yet at the same time fosters a sense of community and trust (see this video). Metal shows encourage audience participation, so much so that the audience becomes part of the performance. This is exactly the function of many rituals in typically “religious” settings. An atmosphere of solidarity is often created, which lends itself brilliantly not only to audience participating (moshing as a form of worship) but also to receptivity to preaching. Many bands, operative as sweaty, tattooed versions of Billy Graham, devote the final minutes of their set to a passionate plea for their audience to “know Christ.” The metal stage can transform to a pulpit, providing a platform for everything from sermons on manhood to personal testimonies to calls to action to corporate prayer. Some bands even blend Contemporary Christian Music and “praise and worship” genres into their set, as demonstrated in this live performance by Sleeping Giant.

As the idea of metal and hardcore as “acceptable” styles of Christian music (or even worship) becomes more widely affirmed, the Christian metal scene will likely continue to grow. Christian metal has been successful because of its fidelity both to the metal scene and to conservative evangelical principles. In doing so, it provides an outlet for evangelical youths who are drawn to metal but seek a “positive” environment. Additionally—and, in the minds of all involved, more importantly—Christian metal functions as an evangelistic tool, an inroad into a somewhat “unreached” community and an opportunity to “shine light” into the “darkest corners” of American youth culture.

NY Times Editorial: The Evangelical Rejection of Reason

Kelly Baker

While John Turner aptly describes "dominionists on the loose" and the media brouhaha over the threat of theocracy via Christian dominionism, our own Randall Stephens, writing with Karl W. Giberson, had a New York Times editorial aptly titled, "The Evangelical Rejection of Reason" published yesterday. Coming on the heels of their book, The Annointed Age: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (reviewed here by Chris Beneke), they argue convincingly about the war on science as "part of a politically monolithic red-state fundamentalism, textbook evidence of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious" as well as map out the anti-intellectualism inherent in these attacks. Randall and Giberson make distinctions between their own evangelicalism and the politicized vision of current Republican nominee hopefuls.

Here's an excerpt:

As one fundamentalist slogan puts it, “The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” But evangelical Christianity need not be defined by the simplistic theology, cultural isolationism and stubborn anti-intellectualism that most of the Republican candidates have embraced....

Fundamentalism appeals to evangelicals who have become convinced that their country has been overrun by a vast secular conspiracy; denial is the simplest and most attractive response to change. They have been scarred by the elimination of prayer in schools; the removal of nativity scenes from public places; the increasing legitimacy of abortion and homosexuality; the persistence of pornography and drug abuse; and acceptance of other religions and of atheism.

In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups. Among evangelical leaders, Ken Ham, David Barton and James C. Dobson have been particularly effective orchestrators — and beneficiaries — of this subculture. (Continue reading here.)

Editor's note: Also check out John Fea's discussion of the editorial here.