Joseph Smith Journals

John Turner

One of the great frustrations and blessings of Mormon History is operating within a remarkably deep well of sources and evidence. Thus, new discoveries regularly remind one of one's own relative ignorance. Depending on the day, I refer to this as the curse or blessing of D&C 21:1 ("Behold, there shall be a record kept among you..."), which adorns the wall above the entrance into the Church History Library in Salt Lake City.

Recently, the Church History Department published the second of three annotated volumes of journals kept by Joseph Smith, his clerks, and -- in this case -- Eliza R. Snow, a teacher living in Smith's home who became one of the prophet's plural wives in June 1842.

Much of the discussion of this volume has centered around Joseph Smith's practice of polygamy, first firmly documented with his marriage to Louisa Beaman (one of my favorite women in LDS History) in April 1841. That marriage came slightly before the first journal in this volume; Smith married approximately fifteen additional women by April 1843, when this volume ends. The pages of Smiths' journals provide precious little information about these marriages, but the subject comprises the heart of the editors' introduction to this volume. Those pages do not constitute what most scholars would consider a frank examination of polygamy, but they do affirm that some of the marriages were consummated and that some of the women involved were already married. Most notably, the editors document that Smith married Marinda Hyde, already the wife of Mormon apostle Orson Hyde. The editors (Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, and Richard Lloyd Anderson) conclude that the "polyandrous marriages ... were primarily a means of binding other families to his [Smith's] for the spiritual benefit and mutual salvation of all involved." While Smith's practice of plural marriage certainly involved more than lust and sex, in my mind that conclusion (which rests on Richard Bushman's analysis in Rough Stone Rolling) reaches beyond the very fragmentary and contested evidence. Despite a small mountain of scholarship on Mormon polygamy, we know relatively little about how most of its earliest practitioners -- including Joseph Smith -- understood it at the time.

Readers interested in such matters can readily find full treatments elsewhere. The value of this volume lies in the journals themselves, the annotations, and the remaining scholarly apparatus. All reflect the resources and talent that the Church History Department continues to devote to this venture.

I was quickly struck by the passage for December 27, 1841: "Joseph. was with. Brigham [Young], Heber C [Kimball], Willard [Richards]. & John [Taylor] of the twelve, at his office. instructing them in the principles of the kingdom." The annotation for that sentence references Wilford Woodruff's journal: "I had the privilege of seeing for the first time in my day the URIM & THUMMIM," the seer stones that Joseph Smith used during his translation of the Book of Mormon. I had never put those passages together, but I found it noteworthy that Brigham Young probably saw them for the first time on that date as well. Any student of Mormon History will encounter such nuggets throughout the volume.

The chronology, outstanding maps, biographical directory, complex charts of church officers, and bibliography will all also be of great use to anyone active in Mormon Studies. Any instructor with students who might write research papers on Mormon topics should have their libraries buy the (not inexpensive) volumes of the JSP. At this point, it is frustrating not to have access to the index, but it evidently will be available on the JSP website in teh near future. The JSP website also has a number of high-resolution scans of sources available on its website.

The Bible Belt Blues

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

Hal Crowther—essayist, journalist, southerner—is upset with his co-regionalists. Indeed, he’s been distressed for some time (see his previous books Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South [2005] and Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South [2000]). “Evangelical religion of an extreme stripe—fire and brimstone, biblical inerrancy—thrives in many far corners of the republic,” he writes in a recent edition of the Oxford American, “but the South is its wellspring and its homeland.” He continues, “Feral religion has been the South’s second greatest embarrassment, after race. Unfortunately, they’ve been closely linked.” Terry Jones, the Gainesville preacher who promoted “International Burn a Koran Day,” is just the latest example of southern humiliation that Crowther associates with “[t]he unctuous, nausea-inducing Pat Robertson” and the “Southern fundamentalists [who] have bonded with the Tea party and politicized their pulpits.” Like I said, he’s not happy.

While singing what he calls the “Bible Belt Blues,” Crowther is also searching for “rays of light” that might signal the unbuckling of southern bucklehood. He looks to the Baylor graduate Edwin Gaustad for reassurance that the Virginian Thomas Jefferson had “an undying anxiety of anything that would bring church and state together.” He calls on the UNC biblical scholar Bart Ehrman to explain how “the Bible is a deceptive literary grabbag authored by just about everyone except God.” He wishes that the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s conception “of a God inseparable from Nature, from Creation,” would replace the “hellfire Christianity” of today’s mainstream white South. And he finds in his own universalist/pantheist beliefs a model for southerners to keep their religion to themselves. “The important part of religion,” Crowther concludes, “is what you believe when you’re in your room alone, not what you profess to believe in a crowd of believers.”

After reading Crowther’s essay a few months ago, the cynical-me wanted to tell Crowther, “Good luck with that, Hal. Good luck making southerners into Emersonians, much less Spinozans. Hell, good luck getting folks to read Spinoza.” The political-me wanted to give Crowther a high-five. And the religious studies/historian-me just had to calm down and appreciate some fine writing.

As someone who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about religion in the American South, I like to go to the Oxford American (the self-described “Southern Magazine of Good Writing”) for perspectives on southern culture that manage to avoid the sappiness of Southern Living and the scholarliness of the Journal of Southern History. I like to ask myself, as Crowther does in his introduction to Gather at the River, “Why, then, are libraries bursting with dissertations on the metaphysics of Southernness, why are panels convened, sages summoned, centers dedicated to the study of the Tao of Dixie? Why is Southern separateness—among the reflective class no less than the belligerent—an enduring strain of separateness no other American region can approach or comprehend?” It’s an old, some might say tired question, but I love asking it and trying to answer it.

In the next week or so, Luke Harlow and I will be releasing the latest edition of the Journal of Southern Religion. The JSR started in 1998 under the editorship of Rodger Payne, now chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Asheville. Its first issue included Ted Ownby’s review of Paul Harvey’s Redeeming the South and a review forum on Christine Heyrman’s Southern Cross (with reviews by E. Brooks Holifield and Ann Taves). R. Marie Griffith and Joel Martin commented on the film The Apostle and Sam Hill wrote an article called “Fundamentalism in Recent Southern Culture.” Check it out; it’s kinda fun.

Last year, Luke and I relieved Randall Stephens of his editorial duties. If you know Randall, then you know we’ve got big shoes to fill. We’ll be sure to announce the JSR release on the blog.

Exorcising America's Demons: Reflections on Possession and Class

Kelly Baker

This summer, I decided to test out some of my new research interests in the paranormal, monsters, horror, and religion on my poor-unsuspecting-can't-I-just-graduate-already? students. We read Joseph Laycock's "The Folk Piety of William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist in the Context of Secularization" to discuss how an artifact of popular culture emerged as folk religion/piety. Laycock smartly uses the reaction to the film by movie-goers, the press, and religious movements and individuals to problematize narratives of secularization. He poses the question: Why there is a supernatural turn at the supposed height of secularization theory? What follows then is a profile of Blatty, the reception of the film, and discussions about the American practice of exorcism. Laycock documents the "very conscious fear of demons and the supernatural" (5) that emerges as well as the increasing interest/belief in the paranormal.

Much like other works on religion and horror, Laycock attempts to get to the root of cultural fear and the fervent belief in the paranormal. Why do Americans purport belief in ghosts, demons, and other supernatural agents? What does our research look like if we apply Robert Orsi's "abundant empiricism" to this supernaturalism? Or apply Orsi's critique of religion-as-belief to the studies of the paranormal? How are Americans enacting, embodying, and engaging the paranormal?

While the students were reading about The Exorcist, I was reading sociologist Michael Cuneo's American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (2001). Though this book is now a decade old, the interest in exorcism might not be as obvious, but lurks still in American culture. Cuneo's fascinating book examines the origins of American exorcisms in the 1970s and the increase in popularity of the practice after the release of The Exorcist. He interviews Catholic exorcists, Protestant deliverance ministries, and lay exorcists, and he attends deliverance services in which demons of lust, procrastination, and pride are expelled. Moreover, Cuneo aptly assesses the romanticization of the priest/exorcist as hero in both the religious and popular imagination. In film and pulpy fiction, priests save the day by taxing their bodies and souls in attempts to rid people of demons. The masculine hero might even sacrifice himself to save a poor demon possessed girl. While I was reading I pondered the fascination with demons, the unsatisfying nature of Cuneo's (among others) "the devil made me do it" defense. American Exorcism was at its best in the heady descriptions of deliverance services and in the interviews with practicing exorcists. The cacophony of possessed souls screaming curses and moaning, the physicality of possession with (high) arching bodies and contortion, and the often calm assurance of those who battled with demons make for a rich tale of what deliverance and exorcism *feel* like. The fluidity of possessed and deliverer becomes apparent too: sometimes one must deliver others from demons, and sometimes one must be delivered. The possessed gnash, moan, and writhe on the floor, and then, get up and calmly deliver others. The change-up signals the fluidity of roles as well as a clear understanding possession is not a static state of being.

For me, Cuneo as interlocutor proved to be an interesting commentary on ethnographic practice and the relationship one has with subjects. Clearly, some of Cuneo's conversants wanted him to be delivered/exorcised too. Observation was not enough for them; they craved his participation as legitimacy of their action. To participate would signal the reality of possession, and his refusal unnerved some. In his descriptions of the services and his role as observer, it is clear the complexity of the scholar's position. The question that Cuneo doesn't answer purposefully is the question of authenticity: Are demons "real"? Do demonic forces exist? Cuneo admits that this question is the one he encounters the most, and it is a strategic move to not answer the question of whether possession or demons are *real* but rather to report the reality of demons for the possessed, the deliverance ministries, and the exorcists. Rather than debunk the presence of supernatural, this interlocutor attempts to document this extraordinary religious expression. These are clearly "abundant events"; social networks and relationships abound. Exorcism is surely real.

A larger question lingers: Why do demons become popular and present in a period of wealth and so-called secularization in the U.S.? Cuneo wonders about the presence of demons in suburbia and the practice of deliverance and exorcism among middle class white Protestants and Catholics. Much of the book is an attempt to showcase how mainstream this supernaturalism is by emphasizing who expels demons and who wants to be exorcised/delivered. Cuneo describes polo shirts, khakis, twin sets, understated jewelry, good purses and loafers that leader and members of these ministries wear. Their hair is coiffed and maintained. They are generally polite, when not demon possessed. They work at banks and in schools. They are white collar and firmly middle class.

At first, I nodded accordingly as any good reader should, but as I continued to read I wondered how class status becomes configured as a legitimator of religious experience. Are demons less real when the working class reports them? Is skepticism acceptable when the lower classes, the impoverished, report the supernatural? Why does class status authenticate demons (or not)? This seems to reflect earlier trends in religious studies scholarship, deprivation theories and familiar class stereotypes attached to religious adherence, that Sean McCloud aptly documents in Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religions & Religious Studies (2007), which I blogged on long, long ago. McCloud notes, "Those who wield less social, cultural, and economic power usually also have less control over how they are represented. Historically, working-class and minority groups and individuals have been imagined in ways that satisfied the desires and fantasies of dominant classes" (21). Religious movements of these groups, then, faced derision, skepticism, and critique both because of class status but also because of the class sentiments/stereotypes of the scholars discussing them. While reading American Exorcism, it became clear that there was something at stake in showcasing the mainstream nature of exorcism/deliverance and its deep atttachments to the American middle class. Documenting the middle class presence in exorcism functions to legitimate its presence and practice. Of course, the question of authenticity doesn't matter because (white) middle class Americans are involved. Favored class status authenticates, and thus exorcism is real because of its class status.

[Cross-posted at www.kellyjbaker.com]

Rob Bell, Emergence, the Past, and the Future

After news this week of Mark Driscoll's homophobic facebook status, the emergent church again pops into the news cycle. For those of you not in the an emergent hotbed like Knoxville, the term might be unfamiliar. RiAH mentioned the emergent church while pointing to the controversy over Rob Bell's Love Wins back in May, so today's guest post tackles the label "emerging church." Our guest poster, Charlie McCrary, interviewed Bell for his thesis on Bell's evangelical anti-intellectualism. Charlie received his BA in religion from the University of North Dakota in May and begins the MA program in American Religious History at my alma mater Florida State University in the fall. His post reflects on Rob Bell, emergence, and the ambiguity of this very label. Charlie makes an excellent case for why scholars should be paying attention to the emergent church and their appeal as method to understand shifts in American evangelicalism.

Rob Bell, Emergence, the Past, and the Future

Charlie McCrary

The release of Rob Bell’s latest book, Love Wins, and the accompanying evangelical controversy thrust Bell into the broader American consciousness. CNN ran multiple stories about him, and Good Morning America hurried to book him. However, most media outlets, made suddenly aware of Bell, struggled to contextualize him. Most Christian media chose either to condemn or celebrate the book, and thus the “secular” media reported primarily on the theological brouhaha. Measured attempts to understand and analyze Bell and his context were almost completely absent.

Most categorizations of Bell associate him with the “emerging church” (or, sometimes used synonymously, the “postmodern church.”) This term is potentially useful, but it lacks a consistently helpful definition. This is due in part to the fact that many who use the term do so in order to stigmatize certain theological positions and not to analyze evenhandedly. In addition, many figures to whom the label is often applied tend to resist the label. The emerging church movement—or, “conversation,” as many would have it—is necessarily amorphous, as most within it recoil at “dogmatic” epistemological certainties and tend toward apophatic (de)constructions of theology. Also, a main feature of the movement is “cultural relevance,” and thus emerging folks tend to reinvent themselves fluidly.

Granted, it can be difficult to come up with some useful analysis for a group so diverse it includes Bell, Peter Rollins, Mark Driscoll, Brian McLaren, and Scot McKnight. That being said, I think there are two foundational points we should be able to use as our bases for inquiry about the emerging church. First, the word “emerging” itself implies a sort of protest, naturally prompting the question, “emerging from what?” The emerging movement should be seen as a self-conscious reform movement. Most emerging leaders’ books take the form of a response, a correction or expansion of the ideas with which his/her target audience is familiar. This leads to the second point: the emerging church is an evangelical movement. While the term “evangelicalism” is not easily defined and carries a variety of connotations, enough literature and use has been devoted to it that we at least have a sense of what it means. Emerging churches, by and large, function in typically evangelical ways, from the styles of worship music and preaching to the pastors’ book deals with Zondervan. The structure of an emerging church service or the layout of the sanctuary is usually much closer to an average Southern Baptist gathering than a liturgy- and doxology-infused Presbyterian service or a Catholic mass.

Furthermore, the form of Christianity from which emerging folks seek to emerge is usually some version of conservative evangelicalism. Emerging leaders have taken issue with prudish views of sex, a lack of care for the poor, the arrogance of systematic theology, the non-tenability of biblical literalism and young-earth creationism, and more. Given the above description, one might be tempted to characterize the emerging church as simply liberal Protestantism (and some critics have done this.) However, this characterization elevates the theological above all else and ignores the style, the aesthetic, the language, and all the other elements of the evangelical habitus, most of which remain alive and well in emerging churches. In this somewhat paradoxical way, the movement exists as a sort of protest against certain aspects of evangelicalism yet staged by individuals and communities who seek to do so within a steadfastly evangelical context. This is why emergence tends to be popular among college students and in cities with significant young-adult populations; students from evangelical backgrounds go to college and inevitably read Derrida or take a course on biblical literature/history or biology and experience cognitive dissonance. Rather than the two older options, covering one’s ears and claiming that “the world” is out to destroy one’s faith or abandoning religious belief (or at least evangelicalism) altogether, the emerging church represents for many a middle path, so to speak.

So why should scholars care about the emerging church? There are many reasons, but I think the significance of the movement can be summed up with temporal tropes: when we think of the emerging church, we are thinking of a group (or groups) of evangelicals who seek to emerge from the past and shape a new reality for themselves in the present. In turn, this will shape the future of American evangelicalism.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to conduct a mini-interview with Rob Bell via email. In his response to one of the questions he wrote, “People are desperate for narrative — a big story, something large enough to live for. That’s the question right now for millions — is there a story? One we can trust? I say yes. The other stories have failed, which, of course, creates all sorts of new opportunities.” The task for scholars is to identify and analyze what those “other stories” are, why they have failed Bell and his audience, and what “new opportunities” will be seized and what they mean for the future of American evangelicalism.

Only St. Jude Can Prevent Forest Fires

Emily Clark

This morning in Tallahassee was wonderfully pleasant in temperature due to storms passing through the area last night. However, the air quality was horrible, as smoke from nearby wildfires covered the city in a smelly haze. The Florida Division of Forestry has deemed wildfires an area hot topic, and a big part of the problem is a drought. Raised in south Texas, I view droughts not as occasional; they’re the normal environmental state of being. But isn’t Florida supposed to get enough rain? I mean, the Everglades and swamps are here. And Florida isn't the only state in a drought. The majority of Texas has been in a severe drought for months, with many places ranking at the highest severity level (exceptional).

When in need of rain, what can mere humans do? Apparently, pray. Just two months ago in April, Texas governor Rick Perry declared “the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas,” and “Texans of all faiths and traditions” were “to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.” Crop failure and wildfires are plaguing the state, and since (according to Perry) “Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer,” it only made sense to pray for rain. In the wake of a hopeless exceptional-ranking drought, prayer would be the answer. Move over Smokey Bear, enter St. Jude.


Perhaps it’s fitting that today I read Robert Orsi’s Thank You St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes as I prepare to take my doctoral comprehensive exams this December. I may not have been in Indy for the RAAC that I have so jealously read reports on from fellow bloggers, but Orsi has been on my mind too. If you haven’t read Thank You St. Jude, I highly recommend it. Personally, I like it better than Madonna of 115^th Street. In it, Orsi investigates the devotional worlds of women who have called upon St. Jude. In doing so, Catholic women (“the immigrants’ daughters”) have appropriated the saint, and Orsi explores how they use their devotions to regain their voices and how their appeals to Jude can also push them further into their state of hopeless despair. In analyzing the functions, results, and workings of the women’s devotions, Orsi in the end embraces the ambivalence of it all. Jude and the women who ask for his intercession live in unstable and “in-between” worlds. The questions of bracketing belief and passing judgments that seem to have come up again at this June’s RAAC (and reminiscent of the famous “Orsi-Prothero Smack-down” in the HDB) permeate the pages of Thank You St. Jude as well. When he laments how a woman asked Jude to keep her husband faithful instead of confronting the husband, is Orsi passing judgment on the oppressive nature of this woman’s devotion or he is simply embracing the “in-between ground” he endorses in Between Heaven and Earth? Truly, the intersubjectivity beloved by anthropologist Michael Jackson remains a blurry area hard to define when deployed in religious studies and American religious history – though it is a task and goal that I love and applaud Orsi and others for engaging.

After finishing Thank You St. Jude, I visited the website for the National Shrine of St. Jude in Chicago that begins Orsi’s narrative, and the shrine is in need of help. In his book, Orsi argues that Jude needs the devotion and sustenance of the women who call on him, just as the women who ask for his help need him. Both the women and Jude inhabit a space of vulnerability – the women at the edge of hopeless despair and Jude the long-forgotten saint who could slip back into obscurity. It seems Jude needs help more than ever right now. Upon opening the shrine’s website, one immediately learns that the shrine is $60,000 under budget and is in need of donations. The shrine is once again selling the healing St. Jude's oil, a product that was not available when Orsi was writing. Another possible way to donate is to electronically purchase a “virtual prayer candle,” which comes complete with a 3, 9, or 30 day novena. Though I am an immigrants’ great-great-granddaughter of German and Czech Catholic heritage, I haven’t purchased one yet. But, perhaps come late fall with a hopelessly large pile of comps reading still to tackle, I might take Jude up on that offer.

"The change is not in itself, but in them"

BY MICHAEL PASQUIER

“Look out at that ocean, that sky, the fish, the birds, wild and wicked out in the chaos. Is there a god that can deliver us from the chaos of nature?”

--Reverend Carlton in the film Glory at Sea

This is an appropriate question to ask on a day when the Army Corps of Engineers opens a floodway that will displace at least 2,500 people, devastate thousands of acres of farmland, and destroy hundreds of homes and businesses in order to avoid the same tragedy in more populated areas like Baton Rouge (my home) and New Orleans.

Morganza Floodway (under normal conditions)

Morganza Floodway (1973)

Glory at Sea, according to its creators, is a 30-minute film about "a group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades [who] build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea."

Glory At Sea! from Court 13 on Vimeo.

From my perspective, Glory at Sea is a film about religion. It is about living in a broken world, seeking order in chaos, and finding meaning in suffering. It is about a people in exile, a people lost at sea, a people without a home. Recently, students in my “Religion in Louisiana” course watched the film and wrote an essay relating its themes to several other books about life in Louisiana and the Mississippi River Delta, including Brenda Marie Osbey's collection of poems All Saints, Tennessee Williams’ play Vieux Carré, and William Alexander Percy’s autobiography Lanterns on the Levee. They hated me for it. But they also got it.

What we’re watching along the Mississippi River is indeed about the chaos of nature, but it’s the kind that comes when we engineer nature in order to delivery us from chaos. William Alexander Percy knew a little something about the Mississippi River when he wrote, “The gods on their thrones are shaken and changed, but it abides, aloof and unappeasable, with no heart except for its own task, under the unbroken and immense arch of the lighted sky where the sun, too, goes a lonely journey. As a thing used by men it has changed: the change is not in itself, but in them.”

Gender and American Religious Historian, Part III

By Kelly Baker

And the beat goes on (and on and on). As I continue to put together the list of my favorite scholarship/scholars on gender, women's history, and masculinity for NWHM, I find that hesitate more and more about my choices, their inclusivity/exclusivity, and what they say about me as a scholar: What have I read? What do I need to read? What do I leave out? Why do I like Protestants so much? (That one has an easy answer). What is my lingering fascination with American Catholics? How might I find the good gender scholarship beyond my own research interests?

As commentators have noted, my list is primarily filled with scholarship about white Protestants and Catholics, which is certainly true. I write primarily about white Protestant men and women, so my list does skew that way. This does not give me a free pass, but our readers should know that the list is my favorite hits in gendering American religious history, and thus, it is not a universal, or even close to canonical, list nor should it be viewed as such. These are works that I have deeply respect, admire and even love. They urge me to be a better gender historian. Their questions become my lingering questions. As I write about masculinity and femininity, I reflect on these as lessons on how to do gender analysis, as models for emulation, and as nourishment and encouragement in my own attempts to make gender a primary category of analysis within my religious studies training. Overall, the series functions for me to highlight what I consider to be good work on gender and religion (often Christianity) and encourage you to enjoy the scholarship I list.

What this means is that I hope our readers will continue to list their choices in the comments section. Several folks have already contributed via comments and email, so THANK YOU! I will post your suggestions as an addendum to the Gender and the American religious historian series (available here and here). Please continue to list your favorites or email me your picks.

11. Tracy Fessenden is one of my favorite American religious historians, hands down. Her Culture and Redemption was an inspiring work that challenged the secularization thesis by showcasing how secular can functions as “stealth” Protestantism. She is also the co-editor of the The Puritan Origins of American Sex. In my classes, I assign her “The Convent, the Brothel, and the Protestant Woman’s Sphere,” from Signs, in she argues that anti-Catholicism functioned as tool to maintain the Protestant domestic sphere, so enforcing boundaries on nuns and prostitutes became a way to preserve pure, white womanhood.

12. Marie Pagliarini’s “The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America,” from Religion and American Culture documents how analyzing gender helps us understand historical practices of intolerance. Moreover, religious intolerance works best when historical actors seek to protect innocent womanhood from some dangerous, religious threat. I cannot wait to read her article entitled, 'And the Word was Made Flesh': Divining the Female Body in Nineteenth-Century American and Catholic Culture" in the same journal.

13. Julie Byrne’s O God of Players is a cultural history of Catholic women’s basketball, which emphasizes the physicality and joy of play for these Catholic girls. The Immaculate Mighty Macs negotiated their identities as young Catholic women in the physicality of the sport but also understood the game as a Catholic enterprise. Byrne’s work showcases the fluidity of religious identity as well as the ways in which basketball problematized as well as reinforced notion of Catholic womanhood. I’ve blogged about the book previously here.

14. Heather Hendershot’s Shaking the World for Jesus is not only a good primer for those of you interested in evangelical use of media, but also contains one of the best interrogations of evangelical chastity programs for teens. Using Focus on the Family’s teen magazines for boys and girls, Hendershot shows the dangers of “eruptive” male bodies and “contained” female bodies, and importantly, documents how teens negotiate chastity in their own lives. Chastity events prove to be some of the only co-ed excursions, but the emphasis on purity for teenage women is a larger burden to bear than their male counterparts.

15. Kristy Nabhan-Warren’s The Virgin of El Barrio appears often of my Religions in the U.S. syllabus. It is an ethnography of Estela Ruiz, her vision of the Virgin Mary, and her activism and missionizing. Nabhan-Warren documents Ruiz to showcase not only her life and her visions, but also the blending of Catholicism and evangelicalism in Ruiz’s ministry. Moreover, Nabhan-Warren doesn’t shy away from gender dynamics of the ministry, and she illuminates the complicated relationship between Ruiz, the Virgin Mary, and her family.

16. Margaret Bendroth’s Fundamentalism and Gender was one of my earliest endeavors into understanding the relationship between Christian women and fundamentalism. Her work traces the idea of female subordination in fundamentalist practice, and she demonstrates how the idea of subordination, which seems so necessary to fundamentalism, oscillates between a mandate placed upon all women to loosely enforced dictate, especially when women are needed to fulfill quasi-leadership roles. Moreover, she stresses the fundamentalist attachment to masculinity as necessary to the Christian doctrine as well as the masculine nature of recruiting. This book was one of the first to make me realize how gender is a necessary category of analysis in religious studies. In addition to this work, she is also the co-editor of Women in Twentieth Century Protestantism and the author “Why Women Loved Billy Sunday: Urban Revivalism and Popular Entertainment in Early Twentieth Century America” in Religion in American Culture.

17. Janet Moore Lindman’s “Acting the Manly Christian: White Evangelical Masculinity in Revolutionary Virginia” in William and Mary Quarterly is an excellent discussion of how white evangelical men in the South redefined masculinity in Christian terms. Southern manhood did not necessarily fit with the evangelical norms of piety, and thus, these evangelical men redefined themselves as suffering saints rather than gambling toughs. Evangelical manhood was defined in negative terms, in the ability to abstain rather than give in to worldly pleasures. Moreover, Lindman documents how evangelicalism, however, embraced the hegemonic power of white manhood despite the emphasis on suffering and Christian soldiers.

Also, on another NWHM note, go check Historiann's review of Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower. Here's an excerpt:

White and her contributors explain the many struggles that black women faced as they began to enter the profession in the 1960s and 1970s–the obligation placed on many to serve their communities rather than their intellectual ambitions; the scoffing and disbelief they faced in white and black male mentors who were mostly hostile to their interest in women’s history; the stresses of entering work environments in which the other people who look like them are all secretaries or janitorial staff; the racism and sexism of students who walk out of their classes and refuse to recognize their intellectual and professional authority; the cluelessness or plain old racism of overwhelmingly white feminist scholarly communities; and the never-ending suspicion of other historians that black women’s history can never be “objective” if it’s written by black women.

David Sehat on National Women's History Month

by Kelly Baker

The Oxford University Press blog has a two-part interview with David Sehat, author of The Myth of Religious Freedom (which we have blogged about here, here, and here), entitled, "Is God woman's greatest nemesis?" Michelle Rafferty poses the question, and Sehat discusses his chapter on religion and the women's right movement as well as Sarah Palin.

Here's a snippet:

Me: So while reading your chapter on the beginnings of the women’s rights movement, I was surprised to learn that there was actually a split in ideology when it came to religion…

Sehat: Exactly. The women’s movement was not monolithic. Henry Ward Beecher, who was the most famous preacher in the last half of the nineteenth century, was in the branch that thought that God had created women to be more inherently moral. So women needed the vote and greater participation in public life in order to increase the moral tone of public life. Beecher thought that women were crucial to upholding communal moral standards.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on the other hand, believed that the notion of women’s inherent moral superiority was a ruse to keep them isolated and in the home. She thought it excused a lot of philandering on the part of men (because their moral deviance didn’t matter as much as women’s). She concluded that women needed first to be seen as individuals, rather than matrons or mothers or ciphers of morality to society at large, in order to reform society in a just way.

Me: Which is why she also took on marriage?

Sehat: Right. She thought marriage law was the linchpin that held together Christian patriarchy. When a woman married, she lost control of nearly everything when women surrendered her legal identity and then couldn’t get out of the marriage because it would upset society’s morals.

The Myth and/or Impossibility of Religious Freedom

Emily Clark

Though I bought it hot off the presses, I didn’t get around to reading David Sehat’s The Myth of Religious Freedom until two months later. Though I know we posted about this book a while back (including a great two part interview with Sehat by Paul Harvey), it’s back on the blog again. This past week, I read Sehat’s book in tandem with Winnifred Sullivan’s The Impossibility of Religious Freedom.

Sehat tracks the “moral establishmentarians” and the dissenters from this moral establishment through post-Revolution American history. These “moral establishmentarians,” though foiled from having explicit state support for religion, found ways to police American society by making their brand of Protestantism the grounds for morality. If you wanted to cultivate moral, upstanding citizens – religion offered the template for doing so. Blasphemers and Sabbath-breakers were culpable before the Revolution (check out Susan Juster’s essay “Heretics, Blasphemers, and Sabbath Breakers” in The First Prejudice for more), and they would continue to find themselves in court long into the 19^th century. While the liberal justices in Supreme Court of the mid- and later-20^th century would argue for a historically based strict separation between church and state, Sehat offers a history that suggests otherwise. In Sehat’s engaging and persuasive narrative, religious freedom in the US is a historical myth.

The moral establishmentarians of Sehat’s account reminded me of the “evangelical epistemology” Sullivan identifies in her 2005 book on the Warner v. Boca Raton case (in the Warner trial, a handful of plaintiffs claimed the city impinged on their free exercise of religion by removing religious grave decorations in the city cemetery). Those ascribing to the evangelical epistemology of Sullivan’s book understand religion, or “true religion” as they would argue, to be something “private, voluntary, individual, textual, and believed.” Sullivan notes the Protestant bias to this type of definition and nicely contrasts it with the lived religion-style grave décor constructed by the plaintiffs. Statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Mary, a large upright cross, and a vertical Star of David statue – though not officially required on graves by their formal religious institutions – were religious to the family members who used them as grave markers. Ultimately, the judge ruled in favor of the city. Since horizontal, flat religious markers (in moderation) were allowed by city cemetery regulations, the judge didn’t see any intrusion on the plaintiffs’ religious freedoms. Part of the sophistication of Sullivan’s book is her development of the “evangelical epistemology” that seemed to dominate the way the city defined religion. Sullivan herself served as an expert in religion for this case, and the definition of religion she described to the court was different. She noted how in America, religion often exists outside of official institutions and has changed over time in light of lived experiences and practices. The city’s definition of religion evoked an image of people sitting in church pews listing to a preacher, while the plaintiffs’ religion suggested a religious street feste complete with sights, sensations, smells, and sounds.

The notion of religious freedom is much beloved in American society. Its appeal is so strong that it long downplayed narratives of religious intolerance both inside and (still) outside the academy (a concept succinctly and nicely outlined in John Corrigan and Lynn Neal’s documentary history, Religious Intolerance in America). I have become more and more interested in bringing legal issues into my projects. Be it black codes, the Sunday blue laws, or suffrage restrictions - recognizing the role legal issues play in American religious history offers another way to analyze the past. Furthermore, it provides an additional way to argue for our relevance to wider readerships and support our position in the changing collegiate institutional system. American religious history is far from irrelevant. Myth, impossibility, or both – books and arguments like Sullivan’s and Sehat’s further develop our narratives of American religious history by highlighting the complex relationship between American law and American religions.

New Books on Religion in Postwar America

Randall Stephens

A recent email from Darren Dochuk about work on postwar American religious history got me thinking about what has been rolling off the presses in recent years. Judging from this year's AHA program--which Michael Atlman reflects on below--there's much good work being done on 20th-century American religion. So, with little effort, and with the knowledge that there are too many good books out there, I paste here some recent-ish and forthcoming titles that deserve attention. (For what it's worth, I completely nerded out on the last day of the AHA book exhibit. I think I did permanent damage to what passes for muscles in my arms. So many books, so little time to read them!) Some of the books below range over a wider period of time, but cover the 20th century nonetheless. Quite a few of these have been covered in some fashion on this site. Please add more . . .

Fay Botham, Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law (UNC, 2009)

Peter Goodwin Heltzel, Jesus & Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics (Yale, 2009)

Gary R. Bunt, iMuslims: Rewiring the House of Islam (UNC, 2009)

Paul D. Numrich, The Faith Next Door: American Christians and Their New Religious Neighbors (Oxford, 2009)

Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton, 2010)

Bryan N. Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Orbis, 2010).

Philip Goff, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America (Blackwell, 2010)

David S. Bovée, The Church and the Land: The National Catholic Rural Life Conference and American Society, 1923–2007 (Catholic University of America, 2010)

Charles W. Dunn, The Future of Religion in American Politics (Kentucky, 2009)

Randall Balmer, The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond (Baylor, 2010)

Kathryn Lofton, Oprah:The Gospel of an Icon (California, 2011)

Andrew Finstuen, Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety (UNC, 2009)

Mark Noll, God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, 2008)

Timothy Stanley, Kennedy vs. Carter: The 1980 Battle For the Democratic Party’s Soul (Kansas, 2010)

David Edwin Harrell, Jr., Pat Robertson: A Life and Legacy (Eerdmans, 2010)

Gary S. Selby, Martin Luther King and the Rhetoric of Freedom: The Exodus Narrative in America's Struggle for Civil Rights (Baylor, 2008)

Daniel Williams, God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford, 2010)

David P. Gushee, Jillian Hickman Zimmer, and J. Drew Zimmer, eds., Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul (Mercer, 2010)

Monica Weis, The Environmental Vision of Thomas Merton (Kentucky, 2011)

Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War (Harvard, 2010)

Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (UPenn, 2009)

David W. Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (UNC, 2011)

Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (Cambridge, 2009)

Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford, 2010)

Books and their Covers

Randall Stephens

Some of you are strolling the book exhibit at the AAR today. Bold jacket designs and interesting typography will catch your eye. Can you judge a book by a cover? No. But you can certainly judge a cover by a cover.

A couple weeks back the Harvard University Press blog featured a post on "Talking Book Design: Introducing 'HUP Jackets.'" Ever wonder how graphic wizards work their design magic? (BTW, the design for the new Jill Lepore book is superb. The bright red. The bold type. The little toy soldiers. Excellent. See Linford Fisher's interview with Lepore below.)

This short HUP video gives an insider's look at the craft of book design:

Of Tea Parties, Historical Fundamentalism, and Antihistory

Linford D. Fisher

It’s always nice when academic and pleasure reading coincide. Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, 2010) is a bit like that—fun to read, informative, insanely timely, and likely to generate excitement in certain circles for a variety of reasons.

The book is essentially a commentary on the twenty-first century Tea Party by way of the 1970s and the 1770s and is—by Lepore’s own admission—a strong argument against “historical fundamentalism,” which, as she describes it, is "marked by the belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past—'the founding'—is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; that certain historical texts—'the founding documents'—are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments; that the Founding Fathers were divinely inspired; that the academic study of history (whose standards of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism) is a conspiracy and, furthermore, blasphemy; and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible."

The Tea Party folks, she contends, promote not just “kooky history” in their appropriation of Revolutionary themes and employment of Founding rhetoric; they practice antihistory, that is, they conflate the then and the now. The Founders are not just in the eighteenth century, they are here with us now; their struggles are our struggles. “In antihistory,” Lepore muses, “time is an illusion.”

The core of the book is a lively retelling of the Revolutionary Era from the 1760s through the late 1790s. The 1773 Boston Tea Party, ironically, gets precious little play; ditto for the 1775 Battle of Bunker Hill (invoked in her title; for the Tea Party proper, you’d have to turn to Ben Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America [Yale, 2010]). Juxtaposing the messy, contested, exhilarating world of the late eighteenth century with the projection of an idealized past created by the Tea Party is both jarring and effective. Framed this way, the story almost tells itself, or so it seems. Regular readers of Lepore’s New Yorker essays will find familiar discussions of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Phillis Wheatley, although there is loads of new material, too, like the delightful sections on Jane (Franklin) Mecom (on whom a biography is forthcoming at some point). Along the way, the reader learns a great deal about the rise of the present Tea Party and how its antihistory came to be in the first place, namely, the historical profession's failure in the wake of the bicentennial of the 1970s to craft a responsible and satisfying historical narrative for the American populace to call their own. Into this lacuna, the Tea Party gladly stepped. In a sense, then, the Tea Party’s (mis)use of history is partially our fault.

As is the case with most books like this, those who should read it, won’t. The book is clearly pitched toward the reading “public”—however defined—who may, in the end, be convinced by the pleasant mix of first-person narrative, historical storytelling, and trenchant analysis, all while hopscotching Lepore-ishly between the eighteenth century and the present. Most obviously, the book is bound be dismissed by the Tea Partiers and their sympathizers as yet another blathering rant by the liberal elites who not only drink the Kool-Aid but help to mix it as they conspire against the American people. The Whites of Their Eyes, however, is hardly that. In many ways it is rather a plea for a particular kind of public discourse and a more accurate use of history. And—in surprising ways—Lepore has spent far more time than you or I with Tea Party folks, trying to understand their rhetoric, concerns, and use of history. Each chapter opens with a fascinating first-person account of attending a Tea Party meeting or rally, before zipping to the eighteenth century and back again.

This book provoked all kinds of questions for me: about the use of history; the decision to write a book like this; and—most of all—what it was like hanging with Tea Party folks. I had to know. And so, over steak salads by the open windows of the Grafton Street Pub perched on the corner of the unseasonably humid Harvard Square, I hijacked the final minutes of a previously-scheduled luncheon with Jill to talk about her book.

LF: In a sense, portions of this book read like an ethnography of the Tea Party. How did—if at all—the experience of attending rallies and meetings in pubs affect your perspective (positively or negatively) of the Tea Party folks and their aims?

JL: My ideas definitely shifted as a result of spending time with the Tea Party people. From the beginning, I always outed myself as a Harvard historian who was writing an article (for The New Yorker; the book idea grew over time) and that I was interested in how people view the Revolution. Most people at the Tea Party meetings didn’t ask more about me. They wanted to talk about themselves. So I listened. Most people felt misrepresented by the mainstream media; everyone I talked to said this. Everyone in the left-wing press was saying the Tea Party was all about race; but for these people I talked to it was not about race. People were upset about that. Austin Hess was offended at being called a racist; he said we lived in a post-racial world. I took him at his word and wanted to be sympathetic with him. I’m not saying it has nothing to do with race. But that’s why they love the American Revolution, because they see it as a white, pre-racial movement, which of course it wasn’t. But that’s sort of the point of the book, and why I gave it the title it has [The Whites of Their Eyes].

LF: This must have taken a lot of intellectual discipline to go and only listen.

JL: I had a lot of fun, actually. Like with the Egan brothers; they were hilarious—exactly like my family. Being at the meetings was pretty much like every family dinner I’ve had since I was eight—was never a Thanksgiving dinner without a pitched political battle. We were family and yet we disagreed. So rather than these meetings being a foreign experience, it was familiar. I never tried to persuade people; I always wanted them to persuade me. People called me “Jane Goodall” because I took notes furiously and furrowed my brow. It’s not a move that a lot of scholars would make, to go and just listen. I did come to think that I understood better, but I still disagreed. For example, I was really trying to figure out people’s position on healthcare. I pressed George Egan on this point, and he told me this heartbreaking story of his three-year-old daughter who was sick and hospitalized and the hospital sent him a bill for ten thousand dollars. He had no insurance, but he got a second job and paid it off over time. And then—this is what surprised me—at the end he said something like, “That’s why I’m against Obamacare. Because I had to pay for it and others should, too.” The same story could be used as an argument for universal healthcare, but that’s not how he was using it. In the end, I think I did become more sympathetic to what they were about. I got to know them. I found myself in the position of defending the Tea Party to my colleagues and friends. I grew to like these people; I didn’t think they were crazy, even though I still disagree with them.

LF: What do you hope that people take away from this book? And have you felt that people are “getting” what you are trying to do?

JL: I’d like people to have a different vision for what political discourse could be like in this country, one that is based on historical evidence and respectful dialog. Argument and evidence are important. Often I need to preface my talks around the country with a plea for restraining emotions and practicing a more evidence-based, measured discourse that is generally lacking in political life today.

I have gotten a lot of positive feedback from various people—schoolteachers, politicians. My colleagues have been uniformly supportive. Same with people I see at events. I was at an event in Washington D.C., on a panel at the National Press Club with Dick Armey (Freedom Works), someone from Fox News, and a person from the New York Times. And a whole group of Freedom Works folks walked in holding—to a man, each woman—color photocopies of my New Yorker essay on the Tea Party. They came to fight. But after the session, a lot of the Freedom Works people came up and said they appreciated what I said. These people really wanted to talk to a real history professor who was taking them seriously. I met a guy in Texas who told me: “You’re the first liberal I’ve talked to that made any sense.” After one talk, a conservative Christian couple approached me and wanted to convince me that the Constitution grants only god-given rights. Neither of us convinced the other, but they appreciated that I was willing to talk. I’m not sure those people “get” me or will like the book, but they are willing to talk to me.

LF: Is this a new direction for you—tackling present issues, arguing for a particular kind of public engagement in the historical profession?

JL: I’ve always thought there should be places to talk about shared concerns, which is why I started Common-Place with Jane Kamensky. It is a place where academics, librarians, teachers, can all share ideas. I appreciate all kinds of historians—we need both Gary Nash and Gordon Wood, for example. I think debate is important; recently in my seminars I’ve set up a series of debates where students read historical speeches and essays and spend time making the case for the historical person they have been assigned. And it works. Students get all animated and put on southern accents or whatever. But of course the next day they are slouched back in their chairs. But it is still worth it.

"Pre-History" of Protestant Debates About Abortion

This guest post comes from my colleague and fellow University of Tennessee American religious historian, Mark Hulsether. Mark's work focuses upon the intersection of religion, culture and politics post-1945 in the U.S., and his most recent book, Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States considers the new religious right, religious aspects of ethnic and sexual diversity, and the impact of media on popular religion. Hopefully, we will see more from Mark in the future.

A Comment on the “Pre-History” of Protestant Debates About Abortion Before Roe V. Wade

Mark Hulsether

Reading the thread below about Dan Williams’ new book, God’s Own Party, I was interested in the discussion about abortion—that is, about rethinking how much the issue of abortion was important for traditions of politicized evangelicals prior to the mid-1970s. When I wrote on this issue years ago, I drew on Robert Booth Fowler’s book, A New Engagement, which was based largely on a content analysis of Christianity Today (CT) from 1966 to 1976. Abortion doesn’t stand out there all that much—although it is in the mix—and in Fowler’s brief section about it, most of the citations are from 1973 forward.

But I’ve done little primary research on this and I look forward to being instructed by Williams.

The reason I am writing is to mention a possible similar dynamic—if we hypothesize that evangelicals presupposed opposition to abortion before the 1970s and simply didn’t talk about it too much until after 1973—on the leftward side of the coin constituted by Protestant right on one side, in dialog with Protestant left-liberals on the other.

In my book on Christianity and Crisis magazine (C&C), I have a section about its evolving views on abortion, along with its exceedingly bitter debate about Roe V. Wade and successor policies. If you like vivid and intense conflict in your reading material, this section has it, for example one scholar who said that his colleague’s work was like “giving dum-dum bullets to the Mafia.”

Anyway, C&C (which I’m using as a rough-and-ready barometer of left-liberal debates, somewhat like Fowler used CT) said little about abortion before 1973, although there was a dust-up in 1967.

What the debate after Roe V. Wade did was in large part to bring to the surface fault lines and submerged disagreements that had been there for some time, although evolving in complicated ways by the 1970s.

The pattern at C&C about LGBT rights has interesting family resemblances, too.

So I’m saying that it might be useful to learn from the patterns and to think about trends on both “sides of the coin” in explicit or implicit dialog with each other.