“Visiting Scholar Kelly Baker is Patient Zero”

Emily Clark

Kelly Baker was all over facebook yesterday. The Florida State University facebook page was full of updates about the “FSU Zombie Apocalypse” in anticipation of Kelly’s public lecture yesterday afternoon hosted by FSU’s Department of Religion entitled “’There’s us and the dead’: The Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture.” One of these updates identified Kelly as “patient zero,” or the origin of the “zombie outbreak.” On our way to the auditorium yesterday to set up Kelly’s lecture, we passed some students filming brief interviews with others who participate in the popular “Humans vs. Zombies” tag-oriented game. The Tallahassee Democrat (city paper) ran a story on the lecture to encourage attendees, and there was even an extra from AMC’s “The Walking Dead” in attendance. This picture was posted live to the FSU facebook page.

Kelly has extensively investigated zombie genre movies, television, and fiction in order to identify the underlying themes of this genre and their ramifications beyond just “zombies are cool” and “blowing up zombies is fun.” Popular culture is not a neutral something that we consume; rather, zombie pop culture reflects larger cultural assumptions, visible, invisible, and everything inbetween. And Kelly has smartly identified how zombies are dangerous is ways far beyond the token zombie bite reference I could make here.

Kelly notes four “distinct thematic moves” in zombie eschatology: “a working through of what it means to be human, an uplift of survival-at-all-cost ethics, a celebration of necessary violence, and a vision of the American nation in which the sweeping social reforms of the 20th century (the Civil Rights movements and the women’s right movement) are swept away by zombies.” In short, she wants to know what is at stake in the recurring tropes of zombie eschatology. Sure, the presence of survivors could denote a hopeful end where humanity has bonded together to survive together. But, Kelly asked, at what costs? And even more importantly, who survives? Some humans do endure the post-apocalyptic world, but they do so surrounded by mounds of mangled human and formerly-human zombie corpses and much of this destruction was done by their own hands.

What particularly struck me about Kelly’s lecture was what race and gender have to do with zombie apocalypses – the “who survives” question. Again and again, the survivors of a zombie apocalypse are white, normatively heterosexual, and perform tired gender roles. The men are protecting, gun-slinging saviors of humanity. Woody Harrelson’s character “Tallahassee” from Zombieland is hardly an oddball is this post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world. The women become damsels in distress whose rescue becomes part of the main action, and even if they fight zombies alongside the men, romantic involvement domesticates them.

Not only do the survivors re-inscribe stereotypical gender roles, they often re-inscribe the disturbing assumed normativity of whiteness. The shambling, moaning zombies typically portray a wide range of racial and gender identities, which draws even more attention to white gun-slinging male and white emotionally-taxing female survivors. Racial and gender diversity defines the attacking force that needs to be dispatched. In a RAAC forum on “American Religion and ‘Whiteness,’” Tracy Fessenden and Edward Blum both identify how whiteness is an “unmarked” category and “taken-for-granted” in American religious history. The same can be said for zombie apocalypses. When the survivors are white, what does this say about the way we envision those who can “save the world?” Furthermore, if the survivors are inevitably the ones who will remake the world, then what does this say about an American popular culture that repeatedly selects whites to construct the post-apocalyptic world? Kelly raised other questions as well – as did attendees in the Q&A – about weapons, commodities, and fetishes; violence, war, and globalization; and the relationship between individualism and what it means to be human. The bottom line, zombies can tell us a lot.

Religion in a Family's History

by Emily Clark

A secret infant baptism orchestrated by a “formerly” Catholic wife who renounced her faith when she married into an anti-Catholic family sounds like a plotline to an early twentieth century soap opera. And it makes me think of my family. Randall’s recent post with David Hall discussing his interest in history got me thinking about my own family’s history. My family may not be Italian, but my great-grandmother Stella Foster Myer was a sort of German version of the“immigrants’ daughters” that Robert Orsi’s earlier work focuses upon, because Stella too was caught between early twentieth century tensions of family and religion.
Stella Foster was born in 1898 to a very Catholic, very German immigrant family on a Midwest farm. As she grew up, she considered becoming a nun – an idea further enforced by remaining single for as long as she did. In 1922 she married my great-grandfather Paul Myer, a 25 year old son of German immigrants who were Lutheran and anti-Catholic. (The picture is of the renovated barn at the farm where Stella and Paul raised their family, circa now). When my mother first told me this story, my immediate question for her and her older sister was: how on earth did Stella and Paul meet, let alone engage in a courtship? The simple answer is that they were neighbors. The Foster family lived on a farm south of Topeka, Kansas down the county road from one of the Myer family’s farms. Stella and Paul’s marriage may have been a bit of one of convenience at its outset – they married “old” for the small-town early 1920s – but my aunt in particular remembers seeing her grandparents engage in light-hearted teasing indicative of a strong bond.

The marriage of these two families was not without conflict. In addition to religious differences, class and education divided the families upon arrival in the US. The Catholic Fosters were from a rural, mountainous region of Germany, without much education, and with little financial stability. The Myers were their opposite in class and education, and they were also Lutheran and anti-Catholic. Stella certainly married up the social ladder and not without notice. The Myer family required Stella to give up being a practicing Catholic, and for a woman who had danced with the idea of convent life, this decision could not have been easy.

Shortly after Stella and Paul’s eldest child, their daughter Roberta (my grandmother), was born, Stella and her Irish, Catholic sister-in-law Ellen Foster decided to have her baptized … secretly. On one Sunday afternoon before Roberta’s first birthday, Stella casually went into town with her to meet up with Ellen while Paul stayed home. Stella and Ellen took Roberta to a Topeka Catholic Church and had her baptized.

Afterwards, Ellen and Stella told no one. Roberta had no idea she was baptized and would later describe to my mother that she was raised in a non-church going but Bible-reading family. Upon her engagement to a Catholic, Roberta began classes to join the Catholic faith and would only now learn of her baptism. Unfortunately for my historical curiosity, neither my mother nor her siblings know how Paul felt about Roberta’s secret baptism. Nor are they sure if Roberta’s younger siblings were baptized, as neither married Catholics. So it’s quite possible that Stella only baptized her first child.

This story makes me think about the lived experiences of immigrant Catholics. In addition to Catholicism, Stella’s story engages issues of immigration, class, intolerance (Kelly Baker’s new book?), practice in private and public spheres, and even married life. If American Catholics created their own Catholic “cocoon” in the wake of 19^th century anti-Catholicism, the Americanist Controversy, and the “brick-and-mortar” Catholicism that followed it as Martin Marty has argued, Stella’s story touches upon the experience of leaving that cocoon publically but remaining tied to it privately at least on one ordinary Sunday afternoon.

"Know that this is divine justice."

Emily Clark



La Familia Michoacana – religiously-inspired drug-traffickers of the Mexican-American borderlands – are back, sort of. La Familia dramatically appeared on the media’s radar in 2006 when they rolled the severed heads of five criminals onto the floor of a discoteca with the note: “The family doesn’t kill for money. It doesn’t kill women. It doesn’t kill innocent people, only those who deserve to die. Know that this is divine justice.” Over on ReligionDispatches, Luis Leon has an article on the re-emergence of La Familia Michoacana, who is now the Knights Templar of Michoacan. I was intrigued to see Leon’s take on the “new” cartel society because this is a regional ethos that Leon knows. I recently flipped back through his book La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands for my upcoming comprehensive exams, and I continue to be struck and intrigued by the narrative Leon tells. Religion in the borderlands, Leon tells us, is “creative and often effective means to manage the crisis of everyday life.” His narrative includes the literature of popular chicana author Sandra Cisneros, Catholicism, the healing traditions of curanderismo, folk traditions of espiritualismo, and born-again evangelicos.

In his essay over on Dispatches, Leon explains how the more Protestant worldview of La Familia has developed into the more Catholic-looking Knights Templar of Michoacan (KTM). Leon takes you through parts of the El Codigo de los Caballeros Templarios de Michocan, or The Code of KTM. Last December, I posted here on La Familia, reflecting both on the then-recent death of leader Nazario Moreno Gonzalez (or El Más Loco) and the integration of his remembrance in celebrations of the feast day of La Virgen de Guadalupe. Just a few days after Moreno’s death, San Antonio law officers attended a workshop exploring “the saints that narcos pray to,” including Santa Muerte, San Simón, and other borderlands icons. When explaining to the local San Antonio paper why the workshop was important, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas John Murphy said “It might seem laughable that someone would have these idols. It's remarkable, but true. There's always an advantage about knowing about this.” I don’t think “laughable” is a good description for this aspect of borderlands religion, but at least law officers are getting interested in learning about it.

The Look of Catholics

Emily Clark

Last month, Paul asked me to review Anthony Burke Smith's recent book The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War. This is an enjoyable book and a really fun read. In particular, for those who teach courses on Catholicism in the US, this book would be a good option for undergraduates since it uses the familiar medium of popular culture.

According to Smith, American popular culture had “gone Catholic crazy at midcentury.” For Smith, popular culture matters because looking at representations by Catholics and of Catholics during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, elucidates “the cultural struggle over national definition.” At first, this may read as yet another rehash of an oversimplified interpretation of Will Herberg’s famous Protestant, Catholic, Jew, but Smith’s book goes deeper than that. Rather than argue that Catholics were merely integrated into the realm of acceptable identity, Smith’s foray into popular culture illustrates how a new American identity was fashioned from the Great Depression to the Cold War and that Catholicism played a significant and formative role in this development. The visual depiction of Catholics offered an embodiment of American values, patriotism, and anxieties. During the 1930s, Catholics represented the necessity of reform pluralism, and afterwards they characterized the conservative focus on religion, home, and family. Catholicism went from symbol of a “socially reformist vision of America” through “Catholic communalism” to “more conservative visions of the nation” through “images of Catholic community and authority,” and this development shows the malleability and flexibility of Catholic identity and imagination in the development of a new national identity.

In the 1930s, the urban parish priest represented the urban, ethnic, working-class Catholic population, and this population was the center of reform politics. Urban savvy and crime fighting, the priests in films like Angels with Dirty Faces reflected Catholicism’s ability to be a voice of moral authority and social reform. However, this image of the priest as “the cultural twin” of “the famed ethnic mobster,” changed with Bing Crosby’s depiction of a youthful and modern parish priest who is also “the hip denizen of the wider world” in 1944’s Going My Way. Father O’Malley is a “cool” priest, accessible and popular because he reflected a changed, modernized, revitalized Catholicism that can relate with outsiders, adversity, youth, and all social challenges and changes. The image of the priest changed again with the popularity of Fulton Sheen’s media shows like television’s Life is Worth Living. Sheen’s appeal came from his ability to connect with the post-immigrant generation searching for their own cultural identity apart from their parents’ enclave (much like the “immigrants’ daughters” in Orsi’s Thank You St. Jude). Sheen highlighted the traditional American values of family and home more generally, and, more specifically “the anti-modern Catholic romance of spiritual rejuvenation and moral adventure.” Anti-communism certainly played a role in Sheen’s message for America was a symbol of virtue, and the soul of the nation was at stake with the epic battle between America and communism. Though these priest examples range from movie characters to an actual auxiliary bishop, they elucidate the evolving “look” of the Catholic clergy in America and how their support of reformist and then consensual visions of America developed alongside the rest of the nation.

Along with this transformation in the depiction of priests, Smith tracks the changing focus of Catholic movie directors. Directors like Leo McCarey and John Ford also illuminate the changing “look” of Catholics from more liberal interests in social reform in the 1930s to traditional consensus in postwar America. The book’s middle chapter focuses on the portrayal of Catholics in Life magazine from that of odd, alien outsiders who practice an exotic religion to a symbol of patriotism, community, and moral strength. In Smith’s words, “voyeuristic treatment of Catholicism in the thirties thus gave way to patriotic and affirmative imagery during the forties.”

Smith’s work raises some interesting questions. The Look of Catholics illustrates how Catholics were portrayed in the products of popular culture, but I still have questions regarding the consumption of that popular culture. Going My Way was a very popular and successful movie, but did it really change the way the general American populace felt about priests? Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life encourages us to focus on the actions of the consumers – what they do with the products they take from the society around them. Though de Certeau largely viewed popular culture through his theoretical lens of strategies and tactics, this focus on how the consumer uses popular culture (as opposed to the notion that they passively receive it) raises questions about the everyday reception of Smith’s movie, television, magazine, and radio examples. His analysis of the way Catholics were portrayed is fascinating and the relationship of their “look” to developing notions of American political identity is illuminating, but what about the everyday non-Catholic consumer of these products? In 1946, one disgruntled Protestant movie go-er asked the Motion Pictures Producers’ Association “How much longer do we have to tolerant Catholic pictures?” Smith uses this letter and the existence of others like it to note “the cultural significance of popular Catholic films,” and while some complained, “many moviegoers liked Hollywood’s Catholics.” Clearly, the success of these films proves that many Americans – Catholic or otherwise – enjoyed them, but I kept wanting Smith to go one step deeper in their reception and consumption.

I also couldn’t help but wonder about American Catholic support for fascism in the 1930s and how that would affect their portrayals in popular culture. Peter D’Agostino’s Rome in America: Transnational Catholic Ideology from the Risorgimento to Fascism counters the progressively assimilationist narrative of American Catholicism by providing a history of “the Roman Question,” or American Catholics’ concern over the loss of the pope’s temporal and geographic sovereignty of the Papal States. When Mussolini supported Catholicism and joined the pope in his struggle against Liberal Italy, he secured Vatican City for the pope and resolved the Roman Question. This encouraged both large sectors of Italian-American Catholics and the Catholic population in general to begin “preaching fascism.” In fact, D’Agostino identifies the anti-Fascist Catholic spokesmen of the 1930s as “lonely.” Smith argues that the “look” of Catholics in popular culture reflected larger issues in national identity and political conflict, but Catholic concerns of papal sovereignty and their support of Fascist Italy – perhaps the most politically pressing issue in American Catholicism for D’Agostino – never surface among Smith’s popular culture sources. Maybe fascism was there, maybe it wasn't, but if D'Agostino is correct, fascism should be part of any conversation regarding national definition, politics, and Catholics in this time period.

Though D’Agostino’s work may ask questions of Smith’s book, the two narratives together provide a new way to look at Catholics and consensus at midcentury. According to D’Agostino, after World War II many Catholics were quick to say that they had always been anti-Fascist. Concurrently, popular culture increasingly portrayed Catholics as the epitome of national identity – an ethnically and religiously plural society that together extolled family, religion, moral character, personal faith, and national pride. In both books, the idea of American identity did not just slowly encapsulate Catholics in an inevitable progressive fashion; rather, the creation of consensus and the inclusion of Catholics in it was a more active process, which Catholics took part in, and in doing so, they helped remake American identity.

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.

Malcolm X: Minister, Trickster, Black America, and Person

Emily Clark
I apologize for the length, but the book took two decades and is 500 pages – not something quickly summarized!

Manning Marable died of health complications just days before the release of his magnum opus Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. I posted about it during the few days between his death and the book’s release, but getting around to reading the book had to wait until the spring semester wrapped up. Marable’s task is clear from the title of the prologue; he sought to discover the “life beyond the legend.” With a particular focus to Malcolm’s religious and political evolution over his short 39 year life, Marable found that reinvention best describes Malcolm’s life. No single stage in Malcolm’s life “ever captured him fully.” Arguing that Malcolm’s personal story “is a brilliant series of reinventions” at first may seem a simple claim. After all, don’t all people undergo changes throughout their lives? The strength of Marable’s book comes from his painstaking contextualization of each reinvention, the main reason why the book runs 487 pages prologue to epilogue. These multiple layers obscure the historical Malcolm, but Marable demonstrates how each reinvention emerged from the previous one and this narrative is able to make sense of all these Malcolms. Malcolm Little, Jack Carlton, Detroit Red, Malik Shabazz, Omowale, Malcolm X – none of these alone can describe Malcolm’s life. The reinventions don’t emerge as abrupt but rather the culmination and intersection of multiple factors – be them economic, familial, racial, religious, political, or often all these at once.

In Marable’s telling, the transitions in Malcolm’s perspective from strict racial separatism to a more humanistic worldview are presented in context with the rest of his life story and the environment around him. His Garveyite parents, the poverty of his childhood, his self-education in prison, his admiration for and later criticism of Elijah Muhammad, his hajj, his respect for Ghana, etc. all shape his reinventions. Marable identifies and explores the increasing instances in Malcolm’s speeches and writings where he becomes more interested in human rights and global unity than radical black separation. His departure with the Nation of Islam does not come as a surprise in Marable’s telling. More than just his hajj experiences praying with Muslims of different races and the resulting epiphany and more than just the possible jealousy Elijah had of his famed minister, Malcolm’s schism with the Nation of Islam fits with his developing political and religious philosophy. Despite their talk about militancy, the Nation of Islam continually failed to act in Malcolm’s view; Malcolm wanted to engage the system around them. Fellow black Americans needed action, and he wanted to be a part of it. His pan-Africanism and pan-Islam perspective and his humanism all develop as his way to respond to the needs of black Americans. While Dr. King wanted America to become blind to race, Malcolm wanted to end all racism.

Along the way, Marable discredits some of the popularly accepted knowledge about Malcolm. Marable calls into question the accuracy of the famous Autobiography. In Marable’s estimation, this book was hardly an autobiography and the “as told to” author Alex Haley took a very active role in its creation. Haley disagreed with Malcolm on many political issues, and their goals for the book differed. According to Marable, Malcolm severely exaggerated his criminal past because this would help present his life as “a tale of moral uplift” – a gangster lifted from his ghetto past by Elijah Muhammad, while Haley wanted to illuminate “the tragedies produced by racial segregation.” In addition to his appraisal of the Autobiography, other provocative elements in Marable’s book involve Malcolm’s sexuality and his death. Marable suggests that Malcolm had a homosexual encounter in his earlier years and that the story about Rudy in the Autobiography was really about Malcolm and wealthy white William Paul Lennon. Adding to this, Marable’s depiction of Betty and Malcolm’s marriage is that of a tenuous one. Malcolm feels obligated as a minister to get married, and he is largely absent from his family’s lives, leaving town shortly after the birth of each child. Marable also believes that the assassination was not only horribly investigated (a cleaning staff mopped up some of Malcolm’s blood four hours after the shooting to prepare for the ballroom’s next reservation), but that most of the assassination conspirators and shooters remain uncharged for their role. He names these Newark Mosque members and attempts to recreate their planning and execution of Malcolm’s murder.

Marable’s book has received largely positive reviews, and I think they are deserved. Marable makes Malcolm human – he isn’t a saint or a demagogue, but a flawed, complex, at times beautiful, and at times troubled human being. Beyond the larger than life image, the powerful speeches, and the political action was a person, and in Marable’s book, you get a sense of that person, his trials, and his triumphs. Marable spent much time reflecting upon and wrestling with his own personal opinion of Malcolm. One can read both disagreement with and admiration for Malcolm in Marable’s biography, and despite his flaws, Marable saw Malcolm as “a representative for hope and human dignity.” But Marable may have stumbled at times with his objectivity in regards to Malcolm and Elijah Muhammad. There is a sense of disappointment laced in Marable’s assessment of Malcolm’s brief 1961 meeting with the KKK – “Malcolm’s uncritical adoption of Elijah Muhammad’s conservative, black separatist polices led him to an ugly dead end” – it is Elijah’s dogma that is the source of Malcolm’s bad choice.

Some reviewers call Marable’s prose bland and at times uninspired and find his depiction of international politics vague. These are fair criticisms, and though some may find Marable’s prose “bland,” it also flows smoothly and hardly seems 500 pages. Most of the negative feedback to Marable’s book focuses on the brief mention of Malcolm’s possible homosexual encounter and his allegations against Malcolm’s uncharged “murderers.” One particular negative review comes from Karl Evanzz, whose review “Paper Tiger: Manning Marable’s poison pen” was rejected by TheRoot.com. Later published on Evanzz’s blog, he calls the book “an abomination” and “a cavalcade of innuendo and logical fallacy, and is largely ‘reinvented’ from previous works on the subject.” Evanzz was most upset with Marable’s speculation on Malcolm’s life – claims he bluntly called “lies.” I am grateful for and I am intrigued by his investigation into Marable’s speculations, but I think Evanzz perhaps downplays Marable’s main point. According to his review, “Marable has two primary arguments: (1) the intelligence community and the New York Police Department deliberately ignored serious threats against Malcolm’s X life, and (2) there is overwhelming evidence that the five assassins came from the Nation of Islam’s Newark mosque. That’s it.” At the risk of sounding like a Marable apologist, I don’t think these were the primary goals or arguments of Marable’s book. Though Marable certainly wants to draw attention to the assassination and its investigation, the point of his book was to identify, contextualize, and explore the reinventions of Malcolm’s life and how they illuminate his developing political and religious views. To focus on just Marable’s depiction of Malcolm’s sexuality and/or the assassination conspiracy misses what this book offers. Zeroing in on these claims would be like only focusing on just brief flashes of Malcolm’s life; both miss the big picture.

Marable calls Malcolm “the embodiment of two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister.” Furthermore, Malcolm “embodied the spirit, vitality, and political mood of an entire population – black urban mid-twentieth-century America.” And answering how Malcolm can embody so much can certainly be found in the pages of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

Manning Marable, Dies at 60, Before His Time and Before His New Book

Emily Clark

Friday evening, I read the saddening news that Columbia professor Manning Marable passed away in Manhattan. His new biography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a project he began in 1987, is set to hit the shelves tomorrow. Marable's new biography will contest many parts of Alex Haley's collaborative work The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and this is one of the main reasons I have been looking forward to his book. Marable questions the accuracy of The Autobiography after uncovering details on the Haley-Malcolm collaboration and never published "missing chapters" from the final Haley text. Marable also consulted with archival sources not yet tapped by other historians of Malcolm X, including a selection of personal letters, transcriptions of certain speeches, and FBI files. Clicking around the website for his Columbia based Malcolm X Project is a great homework assignment for undergrads - not to mention a wonderful resource for anyone interested in Malcolm X. The project's site has government documents, interviews with Marable about his book, footage from some of Malcolm's speeches, and interviews with former acquaintances of Malcolm's. Marable was deeply invested in this project, and it is sad that he won't see the reception of this book.

Particularly since reading Marable's essay, "Rediscovering Malcolm's Life: A Historian's Adventures in Living History," in his recent 2009 co-edited volume Black Routes to Islam, in which Marable discusses the new biography project, I have been excited about this book. The essay discusses the "Americanization of Malcolm X," beginning with the 1965 printing of The Autobiography, which made Malcolm's story the "quintessential story about the ordeal of being black in America." Another significant moment in this "Americanization" process was Spike Lee's 1992 film with Malcolm X doppelganger/actor Denzel Washington. After this film, "X" was everywhere - even on President Clinton's jogging hat. As Marable so well put it, "One of America's sharpest and most unrelenting critics was now being praised and honored by the same government that had once carried out illegal harassment and surveillance against him." Malcolm had become a kind of specter, able to be appropriated by many. This ambiguity about the meaning of Malcolm and unknowns about his own life allow him to become malleable to popular culture. Marable's project aimed to find answers to the unanswered questions about Malcolm's life, his work, his theology, his politics, his appeal, and his death.

Malcolm's "Americanization" and appropriations by various groups and persons is one of the reasons why he is so fascinating to me. In his book Lives of Indian Images, Richard Davis tells the afterlives of various Indian images as they move from site of darsan in a Hindu temple to status symbol in an English colonial home to educational artifact in an American museum. For Davis, the identities and meanings of the images are not fixed, but are rather "repeatedly made and remade through interactions with humans." Malcolm's identity is like these former temple images - something than changes due to its environment and "ownership." His identity is something that has a biography of its own after his death (check out Igor Kopytoff's essay "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process" for more). Malcolm is not alone in this camp. Tecumseh, Shawnee leader and brother to prophet Tenskwatawa, has held different meanings for different groups at different times. He has been a source of pride and often exalted, and the Shawnee, Creek, and Cherokee all claim him as their own.

Complex leaders like Tecumseh and Malcolm X in socially unstable times can take on new, dynamic identities after their death. They can become more like myth than human, which is where scholars like Marable come in. Once the semester is over, I look forward to reading Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention on the Florida beach.

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.

Family Radio, out to "...blow the trumpet ... warn the people"

Emily Clark

When discussing the impending doom of the end of the world, things like "2012," "rapture," and "Tim LaHaye" come into conversation. For us interested in American religious history, William Miller also comes to mind. Using his understanding of doomsday numerology, Miller rendered the symbols and metaphors in the apocalyptic books of the Bible incredibly meaningful. Having identified the day on which Jesus would return, Miller offered assurance in a time period of anxiety. Preaching in the 1840s, Miller was pre-Scofield Reference Bible and and preached before John Nelson Darby's ideas of premillennial dispensationalism would really take hold in America. Although contemporary popular notions of The End are often more in line with Darby than Miller (I'm thinking the Left Behind series here), Miller remains relevant.

A CNN reporting team recently spent time with a contemporary end-times group. In "Road trip to the end of the world," journalist Jessica Ravitz shares her journey following some members of "Project Caravan," the organization of mobile, proselytizing units of Family Radio. Family Radio was founded in 1958 by Harold Camping, and what began as a radio station has become a kind of national organization. For Camping and his listeners, the Bible, which contains no errors, is the religious authority. If you visit the Family Radio website, you cannot miss their end-times message. Judgment Day is May 21, 2011. "THE BIBLE GUARANTEES IT!" Ezekiel 33:3 appears in bold type, "...blow the trumpet ... warn the people." This is where Project Caravan comes in. Launched in October of last year, the volunteers of Project Caravan travel the country in decked-out RVs (a contemporary reinvention of the early 20th century gospel car, complete with light reflecting paint) to warn the American populace of the coming rapture. CNN caught up with a team trekking across the Florida panhandle. And watch out New Orleans Mardi Gras, you're next on their itinerary.

People often ostracize those preaching about the end of the world. Someone will call them "crazy" and continue walking by without taking a pamphlet. And just like preaching "the end is near," this reaction isn't new either. As if divining his own future reputation, Miller himself wrote, "If I have erred in my exposition of the prophecies, the time, being so near at hand, will soon expose my folly; but if I have the truth on the subjects treated on in these pages, how important the era in which we live!" My students are always fascinated to learn how "millerism" became another term for insane in the 1840s. The New York Herald told of a Mr. Shortridge who "had run mad with Millerism, and attempted to ascend to Heaven from an apple-tree, but found the attraction of gravitation too strong for his celestial aspirations, and came to the ground with such momentum as to cause his death." Millerites were the inspiration for jokes and cartoons.

After The Great Disappointment on October 22, 1844 (when Miller's prediction proved inaccurate), his followers left him. A sizable contingent followed Ellen White and founded Seventh-day Adventism. But, it begs the question: What do you do if your prophecy is wrong? Some of the members Family Radio and its Project Caravan team have wondered a similar question: What if I'm still here on May 22, 2011? One member told CNN, "If I'm here on May 22, it simply means I wasn't one of the elect." The CNN take on Family Radio is worth reading, though I can't help but wish our own Kelly Baker was the one asking the questions and taking notes.

Spring Break 1899: Who needs MTV when you have the Battle Creek Sanitarium

Emily Clark

Spring break is upon the Florida State University campus. Many of the undergraduates will embark on journeys of “rest” and “relaxation” to tranquil towns like Panama City Beach. Graduate students like myself will enjoy a quieter Tallahassee and catch up on our reading and grading with a cup of coffee – or when things get real crazy, a refreshing and hoppy pale ale. Taking a break to rejuvenate is not a novel idea. If this were this spring break 1899, I might go cleanse my mind and body at Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. Founded on the ideas of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (of Kellogg's cereals) became the institute’s lead doctor and head-honcho in 1876. Kellogg was a prolific writer, as a simple Google Books author search demonstrates, and his writings center on health and the relationship between health and religion.

Health reform and improving the physical condition of American bodies was a focus of Kellogg’s, as he strove to remedy “the harmony” of “bodily functions.” Kellogg was especially concerned with digestion, noting how “the miracle of digestion” reflected a well-tuned body. He was a big fan of enemas, and the Sanitarium contained a fecal and urine lab which analyzed the waste products of residents as a means to track holistic improvement. If the body worked at the ideal natural state – as God intended – it would show in digestion. In the words of my graduate colleague Adam Park who has studied Kellogg, “poo had theological significance.” In an aptly named book about the body, The Living Temple, Kellogg laments, “Departing from the way of life marked out for him by his Creator, man has sought out many inventions, the soul- and body-destroying influences of which are clearly evident to the thoughtful observer.” The cure for these physical and spiritual ailments was a new way of living, eating, exercising, and sleeping – all of which one could learn during her or his stay at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. This quest for perfection was not neutral however, for Kellogg was a eugenicist who looked unfavorably upon those not white, middle-class, and Protestant.

Always striving for improvement and eventual perfection, Kellogg’s utopian aspirations remained, even after he strayed from the Seventh-day Adventist Church and Ellen White’s direct tutelage. In addition to the fecal lab, Kellogg developed other scientific methods to examine a person’s body and to monitor her or his progress. A calibrating machine, the Universal DynamoMeter, measured the bodies of incoming residents; due to poor lifestyle, many residents failed to maintain the proper angles and proportions of slimness and posture. The Universal DynamoMeter was merely one of Kellogg’s many life-improving inventions. Another key problem of city living (on top of bad nutrition and lack of exercise) was the poor city air. Kellogg believed in the reviving quality of crisp, cold, Michigan air but recognized the foolishness of sleeping outside in the harsh Michigan winters. Problem solved with attaching sleeping hoods to one’s window to funnel the clean air directly to the top of one’s bed. Exercise was another key element to life at the Sanitarium. Kellogg’s instructions reflected the larger emerging fitness culture, and residents took full advantage of the Sanitarium’s large outdoor gymnasium.

Preaching on the relationship between religion and health was not unique to Kellogg. Around when Kellogg took over Battle Creek Sanitarium, Mary Baker Eddy published her classic Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which explains how disease and pain were really just misguided thinking and a false understanding of matter/spirit. This text remains foundational in the Church of Christ, Scientist. Eddy and Kellogg's focus on the body, health, and spirituality are part of a much larger trend in American religion. R. Marie Griffith's Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity elucidates the centrality of the body - its maintenance and discipline - throughout American religious history. Firm bodies and firm souls, Kellogg was not alone.

But back to my dream spring break of 1899, I would have been in interesting company. The list of visitors to the Battle Creek Sanitarium for body and mind rejuvenating is noteworthy. Mary Todd Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, Richard Haliburton, and everyone’s favorite Kingdom of Matthias follower Sojourner Truth all spent time at Battle Creek, righting the wrongs American society had done to their bodies.