American History Now, American Religious History Now

by Carol Faulkner

I first read The New American History (originally published in 1990) in graduate school. Its early 21^st century counterpart, American History Now, edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, is now available from Temple University Press, and perfect for a new generation of graduate students studying for exams. The essays survey the state of the field, emphasizing new historiographic trends across and within chronological periods. In this edition, included among the “Major Themes,” is John T. McGreevy’s essay on “American Religion.”

McGreevy explains the impetus behind this inclusion of American religion with an amazing fact: “more historians now identify themselves as historians of religion than as social historians, cultural historians, or even political historians.” And kudos to our blogmeisters for this site, which, McGreevy observes, “steer[s] the scholarly conversation.” (And, somewhat surprisingly, this may be the only reference to a blog or other internet resource in the entire book).

But McGreevy notes something unusual about American religious history: “The term ‘field’ may be a misnomer. Fields mean coverage, certainly, but at a practical level fields are defined by arguments as much as by the day-to-day trudge of the survey course. And in American religious history courses, and the scholarly literature upon which they rest, arguments are elusive.”

I have been thinking about those lines since I read them. Do others agree? If so, what does this tell us about the study of American religion? Despite its newfound popularity, even centrality, to American history, is it underdeveloped or undertheorized?

McGreevy acknowledges different methodological approaches, dividing those focused on “lived religion” and those attempting to integrate religion into “the main narratives of American history.” But, as McGreevey writes, the “field’s organizing principle is diversity,” the dynamic and vast “marketplace” of religions.

This edition includes a cheering essay for women’s and gender historians. In her article on the field, Rebecca Edwards states that “The real triumph of women’s history, then, can be found elsewhere in this volume: almost every author, whether writing on a specific period or a major themes in American history, incorporates findings in women’s and gender history.” McGreevey’s essay is a good example, mentioning scholarship by Kathleen Cummings, Ann Braude, Catherine Brekus, Victoria Brown, Anthea Butler, Maureen Fitzgerald, Marie Griffith, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Amy Koehlinger.

And, for graduate students searching for a dissertation topic, McGreevy notes that “surprisingly little scholarship has appeared” on “religion and sexuality,” though he praises two studies, Leslie Tentler’s Catholics and Contraception and Cynthia Gorney’s Articles of Faith.

What do you think of McGreevy’s essay on the “field”?

End-of-Summer Beach Read for Religious Historians

by Carol Faulkner

Heaven’s Bride: An End-of-Summer Beach Read for Religious Historians (and everyone else) -- except during the hurricane please don't read it at the beach per se.

I just finished Leigh Eric Schmidt’s thoroughly enjoyable Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr and Madwoman. For more about the book Randall posted about the work last year, including an interview with the author here.

In addition to being a great read, Schmidt offers a useful reminder that evangelicalism is only one part of the religious history of America. Though Anthony Comstock, the inspiration behind federal and state laws suppressing vice, and his evangelical allies presented an almost unstoppable force in the late 19^th-century, Craddock associated with a loosely organized group of transatlantic secularists, religious liberals, Quakers, spiritualists, occultists, and yogis, who rejected evangelical domination of American life."

A brief synopsis: Schmidt views Craddock as a leading example of a time when sexual expression and American religion did not necessarily clash. Craddock and her associates advocated more liberated, pleasurable sex in monogamous heterosexual relationships, preferably marriage. Despite little or no direct experience with intercourse, Craddock set up shop as a pre-marital and marriage counselor, advising husbands how to please their wives (like Oneida Community founder John Humphrey Noyes, she separated sex and procreation, advocating a longer sex act with no male ejaculation) and instructing wives how to please their husbands (move their hips during intercourse). Craddock viewed the sex act as a form of worship, an experience of the divine on earth. In her physical and emotional marriage to a spirit husband, she practiced what she preached. Unsurprisingly, Craddock’s mother placed her in an institution. Comstock charged her with obscenity.

Contextualizing Craddock’s personal religious journey “from Methodist holiness to Unitarian individuality right on through spiritualist séances and South Asian traditions,” Schmidt examines the notices for religious services in the Chicago Tribune. In the 1870s, the announcements were predictably Protestant, calling Chicagoans to services at Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Baptist, and Methodist churches. By 1900, as Schmidt observes, “all hell was breaking loose,” with announcements for Jewish, Spiritualist, Christian Scientist, Ethical Culture, and Hindu services. Craddock advertised her own combination of spiritual and sexual education at her Church of Yoga with a Bible talk titled “Man and Woman as They Were, as They Are, as They ought to Be.”

One aspect of Ida Craddock’s thought naturally caught my attention: she viewed Quaker minister and pioneering feminist Lucretia Mott as a foremother, quoting her famous line “Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth” in her death match with Anthony Comstock. This intellectual connection is not as farfetched as it seems. Craddock attended Friends Central School in Philadelphia, founded in part by Mott’s Cherry Street Meeting. Craddock also served as secretary for the American Secular Union, an offshoot of the Free Religious Association, an organization established in 1867. Before her death, Mott traveled to Boston regularly to attend meetings. In 1900, the Free Religious Association memorialized Mott, along with Roger Williams, Hindu reformers Ram Mohun Roy and Keshub Chunder Sen, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Octavius Brooks Frothingham , as “Prophets of Liberalism.”

Schmidt expands our understanding of this heady religious period through the life of the fascinating Ida Craddock. In her work with the American Secular Union, Craddock urged members to ally with “Free religionists, Quakers, Progressive Jews and Liberal Christians” against religious intolerance. Though she failed in her efforts to rally these groups, it is important to note that Comstock also viewed them as linked in their committed defense of the rights of accused pornographers, sexologists, and free lovers. Under the guise of religion, he argued, liberal Protestants were “champions of obscenity.”

Gender and the American Religious Historian: Seneca Falls Edition

Today please welcome our newest blog contributor Carol Faulkner, who documents the contentious place of religion in first women's rights convention in America at Seneca Falls. She is an Associate Professor and Chair of the History department at Syracuse University. Her most recent book Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in 19^th-Century America evaluates the important place of Mott in both campaigns for women's rights and abolition. Additionally, she was kind enough to take up the call for more posts on gender and religion, so this post is an addition to the Gender and the American Religious Historian series as well. Welcome to Carol, and many happy posts!

Early Women's Rights and Religion
Carol Faulkner

On July 16, Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, NY, held a grand re-opening of the Wesleyan Chapel, the site of the first women's rights convention in American history. The previous structure had been an artistic interpretation of the chapel, based on the two remaining walls of the original building. The new brick building reconstructs the stately yet modest Wesleyan Methodist Church, still retaining the original walls (see views of the old and new structures here). The new Wesleyan Chapel is definitely worth a visit to Seneca Falls (even in winter!), and its rededication offers an opportunity to consider the close yet tumultuous relationship between early women's rights activists and their churches.

Americans engage in a perpetual and vigorous debate over the religious beliefs of the male founders, but, with some important exceptions, such as books by Kathi Kern and Nancy Isenberg, we know little about the religious views of the women who adapted Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence to state that “all men and women are created equal” (the text of the Declaration of Sentiments is available on the Women's Rights Historical Park website). The convention organizers chose the Wesleyan Chapel out of necessity; it was the only building in Seneca Falls open to reform meetings of all persuasions. Still, the Wesleyan Chapel illuminates the close connection between the anti-slavery and early women's rights movements, and, more importantly, the religious non-conformity of those who attended the Seneca Falls Convention.

As Judith Wellman tells us in The Road to Seneca Falls, the Wesleyan Methodist Church was founded in 1843, when the Methodist Church in Seneca Falls split over the issue of slavery. Like many of their abolitionist sisters and brothers, the anti-slavery convictions of sixty Seneca Falls Methodists created conflict with the national church, which welcomed slaveholders into their spiritual fold. As a result, these dissenters left their church to begin one based in shared values, including opposition to slavery, intemperance, and war, part of a larger movement of abolitionist come-outers across the north.

Though none of the five principal organizers of the Seneca Falls convention were Wesleyan Methodists--in fact, all of the women, except for Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had Quaker origins--many of the convention's Quaker participants had just survived a similar schism in the Society of Friends. Approximately one month before the Seneca Falls Convention, a group of reformers, led by Thomas M'Clintock, whose wife Mary Ann M'Clintock helped draft the Declaration of Sentiments, walked out of the Hicksite Genesee Yearly Meeting, outraged that the Quaker leadership had tried to limit their abolitionist activities.

This religious context is hidden in the familiar egalitarian language of the Declaration of Sentiments. Called to discuss the “social, civil, and religious condition of woman,” the declaration contains religious as well as political grievances against the tyranny of man:

“He allows her in Church as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.”

“He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.”

As Nancy Isenberg points out, antebellum feminists viewed the church as an obstacle to equal citizenship, offering ministerial and scriptural justification for women's inequality. These grievances in the Declaration of Sentiments might be interpreted as calls for integration into America's Protestant churches: the right to study theology, train for the ministry, and to interpret the word of God. Certainly, many nineteenth-century women's rights activists embraced these goals. The Congregrational Friends, formed after the schism in Genesee Yearly Meeting, equalized men's and women's meetings. But the women and men at Seneca Falls wanted something more: a revolution in American churches.

Lucretia Mott, the “moving spirit” of the Seneca Falls Convention, a Quaker minister, and one of the “exceptions” mentioned in its Declaration of Sentiments, offers one important example of convention's radical religious views. Though many of her beliefs had their roots in the Society of Friends (for example, she deplored an educated and paid ministry, which she and other Quakers disparaged as “hireling”), other beliefs brought her into conflict with Quakers. Since 1842, her Monthly Meeting had refused to give her a minute to travel (she did anyway). In 1847, one year before the Seneca Falls Convention, normally mild-mannered Indiana Quakers had verbally attacked and shunned her.

What was so offensive about Lucretia Mott? Mott embraced an activist stance that she provocatively named heresy. Invoking the early Quakers, she saw it as a duty to agitate, particularly on the issue of slavery. And she argued that, “ecclesiastical power is always to be opposed, whether it appeared in the Pope of Rome or an Elder of a Quaker meeting” (quoted here). What made her so obnoxious to her Quaker and non-Quaker opponents, however, was that she refused to leave the Society of Friends, no matter how much they wanted her gone. Ironically, then, at the Seneca Falls Convention, held at a come-outer chapel, and attended by many anti-slavery come-outers, Mott was one of the few activists present who had not left her church.

Reflecting on the summer of 1848, Mott celebrated “agitation” in all the churches as well as the “recent movement for the enlargement of Woman's Sphere.” (see Beverly Wilson Palmer ed., Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott). Lucretia Mott, and the women and men at Seneca Falls, prioritized individual conscience over religious hierarchy, doctrine, ritual, and the physical churches that contained them. The plain Wesleyan Chapel, originally built by a faith community dedicated to overthrowing the institution of slavery, and rebuilt by the National Parks Service, is an appropriate way to honor and remember these early women's rights activists.