Teaching, Playing, and Praying: Evangelical Networking and Community Building in Modern America

Paul Harvey

One more AHA/ASCH session for you all to consider, especially for those of you interested in contemporary evangelical subcultures, home schoolers, and prayer warriors:

Teaching, Playing, and Praying: Evangelical Networking and Community Building in Modern America

AHA Session 48

Friday, January 6, 2012: 9:30 AM-11:30 AM

Chicago Ballroom D (Chicago Marriott Downtown)

Chair:

Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University

Papers:

Community Building and Networking among Homeschoolers in Delaware County, Indiana, 1980–2010
Rachel E. Coleman, Indiana University

Love and Spiritual War: Prayer and Community in Modern America
David W. McConeghy, University of California, Santa Barbara

Comment:

Randall Balmer, Barnard College, Columbia University

Session Abstract
Violence in public schools, anonymous neighborhoods that lack a sense of community, and legalized abortion all represent social, economic, spatial, and demographic changes that threatened the evangelical ideal of Christian schools, Christian neighborhoods, and Christian nation in the late twentieth century. Rather than attacking these problems head-on, many evangelicals built dynamic networks in an effort to realize their ideals outside the mainstream. In this effort evangelicals participated in a paradoxically mainstream American tradition of self-identifying as “outsiders” while endeavoring to create utopias. This panel addresses three such networks in the form of homeschooling, megachurches, and prayer marches. Yet even as evangelicals’ attempts to construct ideal communities are part of a longstanding American tradition, the three papers presented here also reveal the innovative ways in which evangelicals are building networks and communities today.    
            First, Rachel Coleman’s study of Christian homeschoolers in Delaware County, Indiana, demonstrates the successes and challenges of local evangelical networking in an era of technology. While Coleman’s homeschool subjects, eager to protect their children from ungodly influences, originally created a “homeschool community” that shut out non-Christian homeschoolers, the Internet soon served to decentralize and democratize homeschooling, offering greater opportunities but less social control. By focusing on the mechanics of this local network’s evolution, Coleman reveals a pattern that sheds light on national homeschooling’s creative solution to the isolation of the digital age.
            Second, and in contrast to the democratizing forces at work in Coleman’s homeschoolers, Lauren Beaupre’s study of Bellevue Baptist Church reveals the increasingly insular communities of modern megachurches. Replacing intimate neighborhoods with religious centers that provided education, recreation, and entertainment, Bellevue and other megachurches holistically attended to a dispersed Christian community. In response to large-scale reorganizations of metropolitan space, community became a religious product for sale in enormous religious complexes that were more like small towns than traditional parishes.  Buying into the product was easy, but Beaupre also reveals the challenges created by one-stop shopping for the broader local community.
            Finally, where Coleman sees a Christian alternative to public education and Beaupre highlights a Christian alternative to restoring residential neighborhoods, David McConeghy shows how prayer became a Christian alternative to public policy or legislation. Prayer was both a weapon to be wielded in the “culture war” against secularism and the olive branch shared among divided Christian churches. American communities could be redeemed if they could either be purged of sin or united by revival, and new spatial and geographic prayer techniques emerged to facilitate God’s intercession for spiritual breakthroughs on secular obstacles.
            The three networks examined here affirm the creativity and resourcefulness of evangelicals in attempting to recreate their ideal of Christian schools, Christian neighborhoods, and Christian nation. Yet while education, church, and prayer had long been important to evangelicals, the alternative communities they formed in the late twentieth century differed from previous efforts in their use of communications technologies, economies of scale, and critical geographies. Together these networks show evangelicals adeptly balancing the past and present in order to save American communities.

AHA/ASCH Sessions of Interest

Paul Harvey

In addition to our session "Reassessing the Significance of Religion in the Twentieth Century United States"  this Saturday afternoon at the American Historical Association, which I blogged about previously, here are a few more sessions for you to consider, ranging from a reconsideration of Harry Stout's New England Soul to papers on religious networks in the early modern Atlantic world. See some of you in Chicago! If you have a session that you particularly want to promote here, contact me and we should be able to put it up.

Also, and by the way, if you need something to do Saturday morning but you figure going to our session Saturday afternoon will suffice for your religious history needs, here's a cool session on digital history (follow the link for info), featuring some of the leading lights in presenting history in new ways, including Philip Ethington (who will be talking about geo-historical visualization), Katrina Gulliver (who will discuss her podcasts "Cities in History"), and Jennifer Serventi from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Harry Stout’s The New England Soul after 25 Years

American Society of Church History 9

Friday, January 6, 2012: 9:30 AM-11:30 AM

Promenade Ballroom A (Westin Chicago River North)

Chair:

Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame

Catherine A. Brekus, University of Chicago , James Byrd, Vanderbilt University , Thomas Kidd,Baylor University and Kenneth P. Minkema, Yale University

Comment: Harry S. Stout, Yale University
_______________________________________________

A Place for Grace: Religion and Contests of Identity in theMississippi River Valley, 1812–45

American Society ofChurch History 13

Friday, January 6,2012: 2:30 PM-4:30 PM

Jackson Park Room (Westin Chicago River North)

Chair:

Amanda Porterfield, FloridaState University

Papers:

Not Just "ALamp to Their Feet": Identity and Christian Print in the MississippiValley in the 1810s
Christine Alice Croxall, University of Delaware

"Electricityto the Churches of the East": Home Missions and the Mississippi Valley,1814–45
Brian Franklin, Texas A&M University

"Go Downinto Jordan: No, Mississippi": Mormon Nauvoo and the Rhetoric of Place
Seth Perry, University of Chicago

Comment:

Comment: Amanda Porterfield, Florida StateUniversity
___________________________________________________________

Religious Networks, Alliances, and Friendship in the EarlyModern Atlantic World
AHA Session 109
Saturday, January 7,2012: 9:00 AM-11:00 AM

Los Angeles Room (Chicago Marriott Downtown)

Chair:

Ned C. Landsman, StonyBrook University

Papers:

Catalogues ofFriends: The Meaning of Friendship for Early Modern Religious Seekers
Rosalind J. Beiler, University of Central Florida

Godparents andSocial Networks in Schenectady, New York, 1680–1800
Edward Tebbenhoff, Luther College

"A Part ofOne's Soul": Spiritual Friendship and Evangelical Networks in EarlyAmerica
Janet M. Lindman, Rowan University

Comment: John Fea, Messiah College

Reappraising the Significance of Religion in the Modern U.S.: 2012 AHA Session

Paul Harvey

Some of you blog readers may be getting ready for the 2012 American Historical Association meeting in sunny Chicago Jan. 5-8 2012. Because the AHA meets in conjunction with the American Society of Church History and the Catholic Historical Association, there are really too many sessions on American religion to list usefully. So instead I'll feature a few sessions of interest that particularly catch my eye in the coming days here, and invite the rest of you to promote sessions of interest to you, either in the comments section or by sending me a guest post.

To start with, here's hoping you'll drop by our session, pasted in below, on "The Evangelical Century: Reappraising the Significance of Religion in the Modern United States." Details below.

Saturday, January 7,2012: 2:30 PM-4:30 PM

Kansas City Room (Chicago Marriott Downtown)

Chair:

Anthea Butler, Universityof Pennsylvania

Papers:

A Reversal ofFortunes: Economic Crisis, Protestant Decline, and the Rise of a NewEvangelical Era
Alison Collis Greene, Mississippi State University

World War II andthe Birth of Modern American Evangelicalism
Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University

The Naked PublicSquare and the Culture War: Why Evangelicalism Mattered in Reagan's America
Steven P. Miller, Webster University

Comment:

Paul W. Harvey, Universityof Colorado Colorado Springs

Session Abstract

The twentieth century United States, according to the standardnarratives, was defined by growing secularism and pluralism. Heavy immigrationof Jews and Catholics in the progressive era, and of Hindus, Buddhists, andMuslims since the 1960s, created what scholar Diana Eck calls “a new religiousAmerica,” one in which no single group has a monopoly on power. The members ofthis panel are not so sure. While there is no doubt that the United States isfar more diverse today than it was in 1900, American evangelicals havenevertheless managed to shape the nation’s trajectory in important ways in thelast one hundred years. Building on new archival research, these papers seek toreappraise the significance of American evangelicalism in the modern UnitedStates.

Alison Greene focuses on an important shift that began in the1930s. Until the Great Depression, the nation’s established churches were on anupward trajectory in both numbers and influence. But the Great Depressioncrippled the Protestant establishment. At the same time, the economic crisismade room for evangelical and pentecostal churches that emphasized individualsalvation and authentic religious experience. While the established churchesstruggled to maintain programming and participation, upstart evangelicals andpentecostals employed creative techniques and a core of committed volunteers tokeep church operations afloat and expand membership. While it would be decadesbefore evangelicals and pentecostals rivaled their established counterparts in numbersand national influence, the Great Depression marked the beginning of a gradualtransition of power from the mainline to its upstart rivals.

Matthew Sutton's paper (revised since the original proposal) discusses the reaction of fundamentalists to World War One, tracing that era as one of the creation of a religious movement that grew to be hyper-patriotic and suspicious of government at the same time.

Steven Miller examines more recent expressions of evangelism. Heargues that the growing prominence of Reagan-era evangelicalism produced twometaphors that profoundly informed subsequent discussions of faith and publiclife: Richard John Neuhaus’ “naked public square” and James Davison Hunter’s“culture war.” Neuhaus argued that secular elites had “systemically excludedfrom policy consideration the operative values of the American people, valuesthat are overwhelmingly grounded in religious belief,” while Hunter described aconflict between “progressive” and “orthodox” forces in American society. Inthe end, neither metaphor could transcend a defining characteristic of latetwentieth-century America: the complex, often ironic influences ofevangelicalism on U.S. politics and culture.

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

Kelly Baker

Beefsteaks when I'm hungry

Something tall and cool when I'm dry

Give me greenbacks when the times are hard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Anointed, the Cross, and the Lynching Tree

by Edward J. Blum

When W. E. B. Du Bois remembered his time as a student at Harvard University in the late nineteenth century, he recalled an unsettled feeling toward science. It was there than he “began to face scientific race dogma” in the form of “evolution and the ‘Survival of the Fittest.’” Beyond the classroom, he walked into a museum and stood before a demonstration of humankind’s supposed development. He witnessed, “a series of skeletons arranged from a little monkey to a tall well-developed white man, with a Negro barely outranking a chimpanzee.” Needless to say, Du Bois wasn’t happy with what he saw. He spent the rest of his career trying to undermine the “scientific” evidence that placed people of color below whites, and Du Bois saw it as his religion to destroy white supremacy.

I was reminded of Du Bois’s museum experience at the American Academy of Religion. On the way there and then home, I read two new books on the power and place of religion in twentieth and twenty-first century America, beginning with The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age by Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson. Although for very different reasons, the characters studied here shared Du Bois’s displeasure with modern science and especially its focus on evolution. Evangelical experts hate The Anointed, even though many of them haven’t even read the book yet. Some who did thought Stephens and Giberson should have published with another press, one that evangelicals would pay attention to and respect. Liberals seem to love it, even though many of them acknowledge having only read the New York Times piece on it and not the entire book.

Having actually read each page, I can say that this is a terrific book of American religious history. Stephens and Giberson take the reader through the “parallel culture” of many contemporary evangelicals. We tour Ken Ham’s creation museum in Kentucky; we read primary sources with David Barton as he searches for any and all connections between the founding generation and Christianity. We struggle with James Dobson on how to raise children in a multicultural, pluralistic, media-driven world that seems to accept homosexuality as never before. And we rambunctiously and anxiously await Christ’s return with Hal Lindsey and Tim La Haye. We search with Paul Miller, an earnest Christian in New England, to find the right kind of ideas to satisfy evangelical souls.

Sure, evangelical readers won’t like the tone of the book. Stephens and Giberson don’t pull punches. They think Creation Science is “weak science”; they think David Barton is an “amateur.” They think Dobson is “strangely obsessed with homosexuality.” And they wonder about the credibility of some Christian colleges. It strikes me that there is a problem with the tone of the book, but not for the same reason that evangelicals dislike it.

I think the tone issue could have been transformed by a more sophisticated analysis. Stephens and Giberson seem so intent to pull the curtain back from these so-called experts that they miss when and where their expertise becomes a civic problem: their parallel cultures are fine, interesting, indeed even fascinating, until they run into the public, civic, and legal spheres of classrooms and courtrooms. If Stephens and Giberson had clarified when and where “experts” become social problems, then perhaps the authors could have embraced the ingenuity of many of these “evangelical entrepreneurs” or "holy mavericks" (as Shayne Lee and Phil Sinitiere refer to some other leading evangelicals) on their own terms but then challenged them when the issue became the “common good.”

Let me give one farcical example, but other, more realistic ones, are easily imaginable. As scholars, we can think deeply about the meaning of bumper stickers that read: “In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned.” On one hand, this is an inventive commodification of theology; it is a humorous display of one’s faith – a kind of missionary effort that subtly cajoles others to consider that at any moment Jesus could come back. This theology becomes a problem, though, if this individual is so certain of his end times theology that he doesn’t pay taxes, that he refuses to vaccinate his child yet sends her to public schools, or that he refuses to wear a condom when having sex with an individual and hides his knowledge that he has a sexually transmitted disease. At this point, his claim, “trust me, the end is near” is a major problem. It directly impacts the lives and well beings of others. It would have been nice if Stephens and Giberson worked out how and why the distinct contexts where “expertise” is deployed matter.

The Anointed may not convince a lot of evangelicals to abandon their experts, but I fully expect it to work well in US religious history classrooms. Each chapter could be the focus of a particular historical theme: David Barton could be used to discuss how historians have characterized the place of religion and the role of God; Ken Ham could be used to discuss the intersections of religion and science that would include the Scopes trial; James Dobson could get a class into religion, family, and sexuality; and Hal Lindsey can bring us into notions of prophecy, millennialism, and the end times. I imagine teaching this book by developing historical narratives to get to each chapter’s character, have students locate documents in the genre, and then debate the histories, what students found, and what they think of the folks Stephens and Giberson discuss. I think it will lead to a vigorous dialogue, where hopefully no evangelical in the class would feel threatened or discriminated.

After a wonderful time at the AAR, which each year should commission a team of ethnographers to detail the enigmatic people, events, and performances that make it the New Orleans of conferences, I flew home with a treasure in hand: James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree. It’s a book I’ve been long waiting for, since Professor Cone and I had many e-conversations about how to consider lynching as a fundamental religious problem in American history. The book is simply marvelous. Part autobiography, part history, and all cutting theology, The Cross and the Lynching Tree argues that in the United States neither the cross, nor the lynching tree can be understood independent of one another. Individual chapters detail the centrality of lynching to the spiritual core of black American faiths, the failure of Reinhold Niebuhr and his Christian realism to deal with lynching and racial violence, the brilliance of King’s theological vision for his ability to live his theology of the cross, the creative renderings from African American writers and artists of black lynch victims as Christ figures, and some particular ways black women have grappled spiritually with racial violence. Cone concludes that the lynching tree “is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land.”

The Cross and the Lynching Tree is terrific book. Readable, short, and to the point, it re-paints our thinking about race, religion, violence, and theology in the twentieth century. When it came to racial violence, Reinhold Niebuhr stands out neither as ideologically prophetic nor as intellectually powerful. He stood by as his former church in Detroit refused to integrate; he wallowed in self and group pity when African Americans died. Black writers and artists, in contrast, take on the “wild beast” of white supremacy and “fight it” with poetry, paintings, and prose. I couldn’t agree more with the wonderful theologian Shawn Copeland’s endorsement of the book: “At the heart of Cone’s critique lies a passionate quest and challenge for the beloved community. James Cone teaches us still. Will we finally learn?”

After finishing Cone’s wonderful book, I felt grateful that I had learned so much from him over the years. And then I looked back at The Anointed and I thought about all the fuss and fury it has and will evoke. I thought about the earnest Paul Miller and his search for a “secular” friend. I wondered if he had any African American friends. I thought about evangelicals pouring millions of dollars into a Creation Museum, but bristling at any reference to reparations for past wrongs. I thought about end-times theology and how it so often justified white “realism." Billy Graham responded to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech by saying that only after Jesus returned would white and black children play together. Almost a century earlier, Dwight Moody told revival stories of African Americans knowing that their “freedom” and “liberty” would only be true in heaven. Given the other forces evangelicals have been willing to fight with fiery speeches, bloody battles, and billions of dollars – Communism, secular humanism, abortion – why they were so unwilling to put power and military might to work against racism makes them sound either as cowards or as liars.

The white evangelicals in The Anointed and those who so militantly attack Stephens and Giberson for analyzing them without kid gloves may be blind to the world Cone discusses and the work race does. Evangelicals can obsess over issues of museums, child-rearing manuals, and the Founders relationship to religion because they have not and do not suffer as African Americans have or as gays, lesbians, and transgendered individuals have. All individuals suffer – to be alive is to suffer at some point. But white evangelicals don’t suffer from structures; they don’t suffer from systems. They may not like certain venues in American society, but no water fountains have been designated “liberal only” and no evangelical has been murdered in the United States because he or she was evangelical. Cone ends where white evangelicals refuse to begin, the places where they never have to go: racial realities of everyday life.

Where is “the gospel of Jesus’ cross revealed today”? Cone asks at the end of his work. His answer is specific and off the radar of the anointed evangelicals: “the criminal justice system where nearly 1/3 of black men between ages of 18 and 28 are in prisons, jails, on parole, or waiting for their day in court.” If one really believes that the age of the dinosaurs, or the private letters of the founders, or the possibility of their sons coming out as gay, or the possibility that Obama may be the Antichrist, are the most pressing moral problems of our age, then a bunch of black men in prison will concern them about as much as the history of enslavement, the plethora of violated land treaties, the brutal past and present of American colonialism, and the lynching of black America. They probably won’t read Cone’s book, but we can wonder. Why do they cry so loudly about The Anointed when they could sob softly and humbly about The Cross and the Lynching Tree?

Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism and the Evangelical Tradition in America

Today I'm posting Part II of Rachel Wheeler's "Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism in America Today," presented originally as a paper at a conference and shortened slightly here for blog format. Part I introduced some of Rachel's basic ideas; Part II below draws out the parallels she sees between evangelical thought and locavore practice; Part III, posted on Sunday December 4th, concludes the series. Thanks for Rachel for these provocative explorations!

Part II of Locavangelism in America
by Rachel Wheeler

History and Definitions

I would like to suggest that aspects of the contemporary environmental movement draw heavily – and largely unconsciously—from the deeply rooted American tradition of evangelicalism. Evangelicalism has been a powerful force in American culture from the revivals of the First Great Awakening in the 1740s to today when upwards of 40% of Americans identify themselves as “born again.” So just what is evangelicalism? Scholars generally agree on three basic elements of evangelicalism (or four depending on how you divide them up): the importance of the “born again” experience and a personal relationship with Jesus; Biblicism; and the importance of spreading the word. I’ll tackle these one by one, giving a brief explanation of each before considering how various environmentalists and locavores embody these qualities.

The Born Again Experience

The hallmark of evangelical piety – the born again experience – was the defining feature of the First Great Awakening in the colonies, itself part of a larger transatlantic Protestant evangelical awakening. The born again experience essentially speeded up the conversion process that 17^th century New England Puritans had made the basis of church membership. Early Puritan leaders faced the challenge of establishing ecclesiastical structures in a radically different religious and physical environment from what they had known in England. If church membership was not to be a matter of birth to Christian parents, but conferred upon the visible saints of God, then the church needed a means of establishing who was among the elect. Full church membership was thus granted to those who were able to deliver in front of their minister and other church members a compelling account of spiritual journey toward Christ. A pattern soon emerged, termed by Edmund Morgan the “morphology of conversion” marked by the stages of “knowledge, conviction, faith, combat, and true, imperfect assurance. . . .

A number of prominent environmentalists were raised in evangelical and fundamentalist traditions: John Muir, often credited as being the grandfather of the American environmental movement in the 19^th century, was raised in a strict Calvinist household; Dave Foreman, who founded the radical environmentalist movement EarthFirst! in 1979, was raised in a fundamentalist church and had once considered becoming a preacher. (Although, I won’t go into it much here, Foreman’s philosophy is fascinating as a sort of Calvinist environmentalist apocalyptic millennialism – Foreman is deeply convinced of human depravity and that our environmental sins are leading us quickly toward an apocalypse in which Mother Nature will meet out justice). . . .

All of these environmentalists, as different as they are, have in common that they renounced the Christian gospel of their upbringing and became ministers of the green gospel. But it is not only those who have evangelicalism in their family tree that become environmental evangelists. Below, I’d like to look at various shades of environmental evangelism, from current and former evangelical Christians and to those with no direct link to evangelicalism.

The lecture by the Mad Vegetarian Cowboy I mentioned at the beginning conforms perfectly to the form, if not the substance, of the evangelical conversion narrative: the Christian content has been vacated and an alternate model of righteous living substituted in its place. I have not been able to find out about Lyman’s religious background, but odds are good that someone raised in ranching country in the 1950s belonged to an evangelical church. Like Lyman, Julia Hill was set on the path toward environmental by a medical disaster. When she was 22, the car she was driving was struck by a drunk driver and she was nearly killed. During her recovery, which took nearly a year, she came to realize, “that my whole life had been out of balance…The crash woke me up to the importance of the moment, and doing whatever I could to make a positive impact on the future.”

Like Lyman, the trauma didn’t prompt an immediate conversion, but set her on the path toward a new life. It would be some years before she found her “Jesus,” but writing in retrospect, she felt she was being called by the one true power, the power of Creation. On a whim Hill headed west, scarcely recovered from the accident, and when she first sets foot in a redwood forest, she feels: “these majestic ancient places.. are the holiest of temples, [and] hous[e] more spirituality than any church…”

She stumbles upon a disorganized activist camp trying to save the ancient forests from the chainsaws. In her depiction, the would-be activists are too caught up in petty bickering to do the work of activism. Hill volunteers and one night becomes more than two years. During that time, Hill is transformed by the tree she comes to call Luna.

Hill’s description of her transformative moment sounds for all the world like a born-again experience, the moment of justification by grace that only comes after being laid low in one’s own sinfulness and helplessness: “I had to be broken until I saw no hope, until I went crazy, until I finally let go. Only then could I be rebuilt; only then could I be filled back up with who I am meant to be. Only then could I become my higher self.” In his Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Dave Foreman sounds like a modern day Gilbert Tennant when he argues for the importance of grace: “breaking free from the gilded chains of civilized banality is not easy. One cannot achieve a state of wilderness grace through books, through intellectualization, through rational argument. Our passion comes from our connection to the Earth and it is only through direct interaction with the wilderness that we can unite our minds and our bodies with the land, realizing that there is no separation.”. . .

Political conservative and Christian author Rod Dreher admits that he used to mock lefty eating habits until a friend offered his family their week’s share from a CSA (explain Community Supported Agriculture) and he was converted by the cauliflower. Presbyterian pastor Craig Goodwin’s conversion was prompted by his purchase of a “Spa Factory Color Sparkle Custom Nail Mix Studio” as a present for his 7 y.o. daughter to bring to a friend’s birthday. It was the height of meaningless consumption, and came in the aftermath of the Christmas season, and in the midst of the 2008 financial meltdown. After the crisis, he and his wife resolved to spend a year living by four rules: local, used, and homemade (the fourth rules was Thailand – they would buy goods from Thailand, which enabled them to keep their coffee).

Colin Beavan, the child of a-religious, hippy, liberals has no direct connections with evangelical Christianity, yet his memoir of a year of living lightly on the earth has all the hallmarks of the classic conversion narrative. Beavan announces in the introduction to No Impact Man: “I’m going to tell a story that is more confession, a pre-changing of my ways stocktaking, a prodigal son, mea culpa sort of thing.” He then recounts his sinful ways, in his case, his prideful tendency to see the faults in others but not himself: “It’s true, that I had occasionally tried to make a difference in the world, but I was coming to think my political views had too often been about changing other people and too seldom about changing myself.” On an unnaturally warm January day in New York City, Beavan finds himself aghast at the impact of global warming, the complacency he sees all around him and his sense of helplessness. “Back on that summery day in the middle of winter,” he writes, “I seemed to be hitting bottom.” His epiphany was that he must change himself: “I wasn’t sick of the world, I was sick of myself.”

Beavan came to speak at my university in Indiana last year, and in a lecture hall packed with about 500 students, I had the same feeling I’d had hearing Lyman years earlier: here is a modern day itinerant minister of the environmental gospel. In his chatty, self deprecating hipster way, Beavan exhorted his listeners to change their lives. While Beavan did not invoke a higher power directly, his message implied a faith that individual actions do matter, and that individuals can find the power to do the seemingly impossible. He also implied that the way to righteous living is a matter of common sense apprehension of “truth,” and this raises a second feature of evangelicalism: the belief that there is a source of truth and that it is available to all.

Biblicism/common sense

Famed American religious historians George Marsden and Mark Noll have both explored the fusion of evangelical Christianity with a popularized form of Enlightenment philosophy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, resulting in a common sense reading of the bible among evangelicals, and later, fundamentalists: the bible means what it says, and says what it means, and its eternal, enduring truth can be perceived by anyone, not just seminary trained clergy.

This approach to the Bible is readily apparent in the writings of Christian environmentalists, even though conservative Christianity and environmentalism have long been seen as antithetical. For example, Joel Salatin grounds his farming philosophy in his religion: he finds in the Bible a clear account of God’s order of creation, and the charge to humans to steward His creation. In an interview, Salatin explained: “I am a Christian, and I think that the Judeo-Christian ethic calls us to realize that we are stewards of creation – that we are not to just rape it, pillage it, whatever, we are to steward it – and lays down certain principles of growth.” He continued to explain, “When God made [the earth] in Genesis, the plants were to reproduce after their own kind. And genetic modification doesn’t make plants produce after their own kind. So, you know, even to that point, [there is a] template there to live by.” Salatin’s farming philosophy is rooted in his reading of the Bible: farming practices must enhance, not hinder, animals’ and plants’ ability to express their God-given nature. In this view, corn fed beef is heretical, and even sinful.

Don Colbert, a graduate of Oral Roberts University (Pentecostal), and a practicing doctor, draws even more directly on the Bible in encouraging his readers to reform their diets. Colbert begins his 2002 book with the question from the title: What Would Jesus Eat? He expects that his readers as Christians have attempted to model their lives on Jesus’s, but rarely when it comes to food: “we seek to follow Jesus in every other area of our lives, why not in our eating habits?” The bible, believes Colbert, offers a clear path that will lead to physical and spiritual health and so when we eat, we should ask ourselves: “Why am I eating this? And “Would Jesus eat this?” If we ask these questions, he suggests, we will have to face two truths about the way we live: “most of what we eat flows from ill-founded, unwise, and mostly unconscious food choices” and 2) “Most of what we eat in a given day may not be what Jesus would have eaten if He were walking in our shoes.”

Secular environmental evangelists also proclaim a truth that is plain for all to see, often turning to nature itself as source of wisdom and truth. Among contemporary environmentalists, Julia Butterfly Hill expresses this idea most clearly in her resolve: “ I was no longer going to live my life out of fear..I was going to live my life guided from the higher source, the Creation source.” Through her relationship with Luna (the tree), Hill comes to realize: “that what I was feeling was the love of the Earth, the love of Creation. Every day we, as a species, do so much to destroy Creation’s ability to give us life. But that Creation continues to do everything in its power to give us life anyway. And that’s true love.” Hill had accepted Luna as her personal savior and guide for her life.

One could hardly imagine anyone farther apart culturally and ideologically than Don Colbert, a politically conservative Pentecostal, and Michael Pollan, a politically liberal secular Jew, yet in his 2008 book, In Defense of Food, Pollan sounds a note remarkably like Colbert’s. Instead of Jesus, however, Pollan invokes the wisdom of grandmothers: “Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.”[9] Pollan’s prescription?: “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”[10] Pollan’s truth is a common-sensical truth.

Spreading the word:

Having found salvation, and a new gospel, the enviro-evangelists all feel compelled to spread the word. Here I’d like to start with the seemingly most un-evangelical of the group: Michael Pollan. Pollan is of Jewish background, but apparently non-practicing. His writing is the epitome of rational discourse, hardly the fire and brimstone of the evangelist. But yet, his works are in fact exhortatory and not entirely unlike that most famed example of fire and brimstone preaching: Jonathan Edwards’ infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a sermon more often despised (or praised) than it is read. Edwards was a careful student of the Enlightenment, and the power of the sermon comes from the clinical, precise dissection of sin and its consequences. Likewise, Michael Pollan’s work dissects our environmental (food) sins and the consequences to individual, communal, global, and environmental health. Pollan’s equivalent to “Sinners in the Hands…” is his “Letter to the Farmer in Chief,” a letter to the newly elected President Obama published in the New York Times in January 2008, in which he argues that arguing that Obama must make “reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration.” If we continue on our current path, Pollan argues, our destruction is assured. And just as Edwards spelled out the precariousness of the sinner’s state, as a spider dangling above the pit of hell, held up only by the slenderest thread of God’s grace, yet deserving of damnation unless the sinner reforms, Pollan describes in great detail the ways that our food choices are clogging arteries, polluting the environment, driving up health care costs, and destabilizing our economy. His program of reform includes everything from supporting farmer’s markets, doing away with agricultural subsidies to big business, establishing a grain reserve, establishing mandatory gardens at primary schools and creating a new School Lunch Corps whose mission would be to change children’s “food culture.”

Joel Salatin, the Christian libertarian capitalist lunatic farmer, was spreading the word of redemption through agriculture long before he was discovered by Pollan. Salatin devotes much of his time to spreading the green gospel. The farm’s website announces: “Believing that the Creator’s design is still the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatin family invites like-minded folks to join in the farm’s mission: to develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.” . . .

Ragan Sutterfield makes a similar point in his book, Farming as Christian Discipline, “My hope is that Christians will come to see one of their tasks as staking out claims for God's Kingdom by redeeming land from the margins and using that land to create gardens that offer not only good food but also community development and hope.”[12] While Barbara Kingsolver has moved on from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle to other writing projects, her website continues to serve as a site of almost religious witness: there is a page filled with reader-submitted pictures of lush gardens and happy children accompanied by testimony of the transformative power of communion with home-grown (or at least locally grown) tomatoes.

Like the temperance and bible tract societies of the nineteenth century the locavangelist movement tends to operate on the conviction that the path to the millennium will be paved by the conversion of individuals: if enough people make the choice for salvation the Kingdom of God will be achieved. And for this, the movement, especially Pollan, have come in for criticism. One reviewer, Laura Shapiro, criticizes Pollan for preaching a doctrine of “individual dietary purity,” which reflects “his religion – the holy, catholic, and apostolic church of food, where only martyrs and lost souls have to shop at Safeway.” According to Shapiro, Pollan alienates the unconverted, because, she write, “he can’t quite bring himself to take us seriously unless we can prove we’ve been born again.” Only time will tell if Shapiro’s critique proves justified, or if the movement gains the momentum and organization to seek systemic change.

Opening of the Evangelical Mind?

Paul Harvey

My co-blogmeister and most excellent historian Randall Stephens and his co-author Karl Giberson have recently been called (among other things), wolves in sheep's clothing, dangerous menaces to evangelicalism, and, best of all, unethical attack-dog researchers and writers -- the later from famed ethicist Charles Colson, in a matchless self-parody of old-time fundamentalist fury. As John Turner noted here recently, after Randall and Karl's book The Anointed, some have felt there is no hope left for America. (It bears mentioning that most of the above noted did not actually read the book but scanned, and that inaccurately, Randall and Karl's New York Times editorial). As a writer for the always thoughtful and temperate National Review opined, "once left-wing values enter the evangelical bloodstream, there is almost no hope for America."

You might have noticed that some of these initial reactions are an eensy-weensy bit overwrought. Fortunately, we have a good antidote today in Scott McLemee's Inside Higher Ed column. As McLemee points out, "Neither an expose nor a screed, The Anointed is the work of educated evangelical Christians who reject the kitsch and anti-intellectualism that outsiders tend to equate with faith itself." Read the rest here.

Adventures in Christian Retail: A Response -- Part II

by Darren Grem 

As promised, here's my follow-up to my first post in response to Charity Carney's recent "Adventures in Christian Retail." 
Why “Christian” at all?  

So, if we’re going to ask about their experiences, the experiences of those at CC and other Christian businesses, how do we start? The intersection of religion and capitalism is a pretty well-trod one, so we have plenty of guides. Marx, Weber, and dozens of lesser mortals have unpacked religion – especially a Western-derived version of Christianity – in the marketplace. You can certainly read Dr. Carney’s experience at CC with those models and come to fine conclusions. 

With CC and other CC’s, however, I think it’s also instructive to think about historical context before moving on to an analysis of why -- or in what way -- this particular site is “religious” at all. In other words, first focus not on what a CC is doing to mark itself as “Christian” or “religious.” Focus instead on what it cannot do at this particular historical moment. Companies cannot hire/fire/promote/demote employees based on religion as per the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII. Of course, they can get around this or create a wink-wink, nudge-nudge "cultural gatekeeper" that signals it’s only accepting applications from like-minded job seekers. And, if they are operating stores in areas where, say, 95% of the people in their local community are of some religious group, then there are powerful cultural pressures for folks not to raise a legal stink. Still, at the end of the day, ignoring or doing an end-run around Title VII is taking a risk of the most fearsome four-letter word in corporate America -- tort. 

Yet, many business owners feel compelled to do something. Why is that the case? It depends and ranges widely based on race, gender, political leanings (which are, admittedly, conservative in general), industry, mass vs. niche market, place, type of Christianity, and other factors. But one thing, at least as far as I can tell, does unite their various impulses for bringing Christianity into the workplace and marketplace. For the most part, they share a sense that the workplace and marketplace are spheres of influence and, therefore, places for cultural activism, a way of shaping the world in their own image.  

Indeed, the ideological and cultural fights of the past thirty years have made an impression on many Christian business owners. This is not to say that the cultural issues of previous decades have not, but that the recent ones over race (such as affirmative action), gender (such as abortion or the "feminization of work"), and class (such as the disconnect between work, identity, and community) are the most prominent -- and they have been wrestled with in the midst of drastic restructurings in American capitalism that have left many without a row to hoe, a line to work, or a mouse to click -- or worried about the said row, line, or mouse. As scholars, we like to focus on the "big" arenas, big-name politicians, and, unfortunately, all too often on the biggest blowhards in these fights. But I would argue that the reflective decision by a small business owner -- or an attendant or a cashier or line worker -- to bring "faith," however they conceive of it, to play in their personal crusade in and against whatever the imagine as the dominant culture to be -- that is worthy of attention as well because it illustrates the very work of identity construction, cultural construction, class construction, and political construction. It's the very place where religion hits the road. And, as Dr. Carney's dispatches noted, it's a decision with multiple and often complicated implications. 

Ok, so, given those historical considerations, how might we interpret what’s going on religiously at CC or other companies? What's a company that wants to be “Christian” to do?

It can create an unmistakably “Christian” internal culture. But there are legal risks involved with that, at noted above.  

It can encourage or allow a “soft culture” of Christianity in the company. I think this is where the “Christian muzak” that Dr. Carney heard comes in. I’ve been to many CC's and seen it in countless other forms. Evangelistic tracts sitting next to the candy rack. An ichthys on the registers or on stationary. Bible verses on the bottom of Big Gulps. Tattoos on a tattoo artist (my favorite). It

all seems to work off the same impetus -- toss a little Christianity into the pot as spiritual spice, thereby making the company just a little "different." To attenuate charges of sectarianism or intolerance, especially if its not selling goods or services“by Christians for Christians,” a company can be somewhat flexible with its language, imagery, rituals, and terms of consent. I think of it as custom-fitting a Christian business for a “spiritual but not religious”America. Playing “Imagine” in the midst of a CCM-tilting playlist is another way to do this. So is putting “God’s Glory Auto Sales” up instead of “JesusChrist is the Only Savior of MANkind’s Auto Sales." 

It can also encourage an operationally“Christian”culture in the company, one that accords to whatever managers and workers are willing to accept as “Christian.” This is extremely difficult to observe and generalize about, even though it is certainly the part that sympathetic observers of Christian business like to talk about. In much of the Christian business/self-help/leadership literature (which is a growing genre), this is everywhere and it's usually framed in us vs. them terms, sometimes with culture war flourishes, sometimes not. In short, it's the infusion of "faith at work" that creates the presumed “difference” that Christian business owners see between themselves and their “secular” competitors, especially in how“moral” or “ethical” their business practices are. Higher wages, better customer service, "Christian" leadership, "character"-based decisions not to cheat an unknowing customer – these are all practices that can fall under this category and advance the evangelical-style "world changing" that CC's often cast themselves as partaking in. As Dr. Carney notes, this also opens the company up to charges of hypocrisy on religious grounds. Someone might say, “I’m a Christian. To my mind, Christians don’t do what you're doing to folks. You’re doing that to folks. Are you really Christian?” I've already written about when or where such questions might be appropriate to ask. But as scholars, I think one of the more interesting lines of inquiry might be why those religiously-based criticisms do or don’t often stick to Christian companies (or companies in general). I’m sure those conducting research into the history of anti-corporate Christianity right now might have something to say about that. (See Heath Carter's post as well as Janine Giordano Drake's forthcoming dissertation.)  

It can use “Christian” in branding, promotion, and networking. Some companies explicitly advertise themselves as “Christian." Maybe they put it in their ads, mission statements, or name (e.g., ServiceMaster, as in "Service Thy Master"). Others do it through corporate policies like – as Dr. Carney notes –closing on Sunday. This certainly advertises to customers who might share the company's religious affiliation or sensibilities. In the past, this has also been a way of creating anti-secularist solidarity between Christian businesses and consumers, as witnessed by the uptick in "Christian" business directories in the 1970s and 1980s. The placement of company franchises in church-saturated or notably dual parent, heterosexual, evangelical environs can also create links between a company’s brand and a “base” of Christian consumers. Joining Christian business owners or workers in non-profit, non-competitive associations (e.g., Fellowship of Christian Companies International) can do the same, encouraging sacred "fellowship" and the creation of social capital between members of the same business class or niche market.  

It can incorporate “Christianity” or “Christian”tenets in its social engagements, CSR, philanthropic endeavors, and political interests. Not every Christian company does this, but many do. It takes various forms – sponsoring “character-building” camps for kids, donating to Christian service or missionary agencies, giving money to local Christian charities, giving personal wealth to like-minded candidates. Publicly-traded companies, of course, generally hold back on using corporate profits or encouraging religious donations by executives, for obvious reasons. For that reason, a decent number (probably about half) of businesses with Christian owners or managers are privately-owned, thereby freeing them up to be freer with their money (or with their “stewardship”as they often call it). Trust me –political donations are down the list. For these folks, at least, there’s not much ROI in theocracy.

All of this should give the sense that what Dr. Carney observed did not happen by accident. If we are to take religion seriously in the marketplace, we need to think seriously about what folks are deciding to bring into the workplace, when and why they are deciding to do that, and how and why certain manifestations of religion appear there. This can be highly specific and custom-made, particular to a given store in a given area in a given state at a given point of time. It might even be limited to a given shift.

We should also recognize that, for as much as the appearance of religion in the marketplace is intentional, it is not always as well-thought out by our subjects as we might think or expect. Best-laid incentive-chasing does not explain it all, no matter what the Freakonomicists say. This does not mean that our subjects are not religiously self-reflective or collectively so. It certainly does not mean that they are dumb. To be sure, those running Dr. Carney’s CC might be behind the times in terms of tag-gun pricing and finger-counting bookkeeping. But many of CC’s counterparts are not Luddites, primarily because they have never been or can’t afford to be.  Many founded hi-tech companies or work for engineering firms. A few run or work for design firms and programming shops; others depend on government contracts and more than a few work for the DOD. As Darren Dochuk is currently researching, a lot of them founded or work for extractive companies– hardly a profession for the empty headed. Others created retail chains and work for large-scale corporations that depend on “just in time” coordination, top-shelf mathematical models,and multivariate problem-solving. All that, in my opinion, is more instructive and important to consider than the low-fi traditionalism observed at CC. Evangelicals have been often noted for their technological prowess in media production from the printed page to the Internet age. I wonder if that they’ve been even more technologically-inclined and savvy in corporate America, a place that evangelicals have been comfortable working in and through for much of the twentieth century and especially for the past fifty years.

And yet, to be sure, just because they can get a precision, laser-cut sprocket delivered to Toledo by Tuesday does not mean that they dotting every "i' and crossing every "t" when they pull or push religion into the marketplace. There are incongruities caused by religion's presence in the marketplace that fit oddly even within our received models of how it should work -- and sometimes quite oddly with how our subjects imagine a given religious practice should work. 

Take, for instance, Sunday closing. Sunday closing is incongruous with the very capitalism it's embedded within. Capitalism does not close on Sunday. The goods that are on CC’s shelves might have been made by Christians in another time zone, where it was actually Sunday there but Saturday here. The cargo ships and tractor trailers transporting these goods to the loading dock behind the store did not stop running on Sunday. As Dr. Carney reports, folks worked on Sunday putting those goods on the shelves because of the pressures and demands of their boss, who is certainly aware of the pushes and pulls of the system. The only point in the capitalist system that can be closed on Sunday at CC is the consumptive point– the doors letting customers in and the people behind the cash register checking them out. And all that is primarily because it is in retail. Can you imagine a Christian hotel closing on Sunday? A Christian electric company? Or worse yet, a Christian coffee company? 

Sunday closing is, therefore, an odd thing. But I think it's at those points of incongruity and inconsistency are where the richest analysis can and should happen, at the very points too many journalists, scholars, and many others like to leave uncomplicated, poke fun, or dismiss. It's at those points when religious sites like CC push us to consider the in-betweens of culture and capitalism in contemporary life, as well as push us to think hard about those who work every day in the midst of those in-betweens. 

Thanks again to Dr. Carney for telling us all about her time at CC and inviting us to think about it. And, in case you're dying to know, "CC" is a pseudonym for [intentionally left blank].