Guest Review of Seitz's No Closure and an Invitation

Today's guest review is from Matthew J. Cressler, a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Northwestern University. His work combines African American and Catholic histories as they intersect with conceptions of the American nation. Matt is also the recipient of the American Catholic Historical Association's fourteenth annual John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award. Please join Matt and his colleagues at the round table on Seitz's book at AHA this Saturday, January 7, 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m, Scandal, Resistance, and Practice: A Roundtable on John Seitz’s No Closure, ROUNDTABLE, Chicago Marriott Downtown, Purdue Room.

A Review of John Seitz’s No Closure (2011) and an Invitation to Join the Conversation

Matthew J. Cressler

In May 2004, the Archdiocese of Boston announced that a number of parishes would be closed across the city. The decision to shutdown nearly eighty parishes across the Boston area was a consequence of the immense financial burden of the Catholic sex abuse crisis, as well as longstanding shifts in urban demographics and church attendance. However, by August, it became clear that some groups of Catholics refused to accept the process of parish shutdown. Parishioners across Boston moved into their closed churches and occupied them in “perpetual vigil” – “with their physical and, they repeatedly insisted, 'prayerful' presence they were going to keep the church open despite the decree against it" (10). John Seitz's No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns is an ethnographic study of those resisting communities that sets out to answer two fundamental questions: why did Catholics resist the closure of their parishes and what does this resistance tell us about contemporary American Catholicism? In the course of answering these questions, Seitz illustrates the contours of what many resistors experienced as a “spiritual abuse” that followed, and was a continuation of, the sexual abuse of the Church. Resisting Catholics were forced to reexamine the lines and limits of their engagement with the Church, to reconsider the Catholic past and its meanings in their lives, and to take up the responsibilities of everyday church management and theology.

But if No Closure is specifically about this small community of Boston Catholics resisting church shutdowns in the wake of scandal, I’m much more interested in how it also serves as an incisive exploration into American Catholicism at the turn of the 21st century. Though the decision to occupy parishes certainly wasn't the norm amidst parish shutdowns, religious life in the liminal space of occupied churches sheds light on contemporary American Catholic life in ways oftentimes invisible to scholars. To name just two of the broader theoretical interventions of Seitz’s work, No Closure examines the particularity of the Catholic parish in American religious history and the problem of modernity in the narratives of American Catholic history.

By considering what happens when a diocese takes away a parish – effectively an exploration of the unmaking of sacred space – Seitz illuminates the peculiar relationship Catholics have with religious places. The pain felt by parishioners at the loss of their spiritual home indicates the distinctive significance of the parish in American religious history, wherein the parish served as a site for the creation of a particular kind of American religious subject with a particular orientation toward places and the sacred presences that populate them. Calling attention to the habituation of the ways Catholics experience sacred spaces and presences – he talks about the ways Catholics “practice” the parish and presence – Seitz powerfully argues that “inherited and internalized narratives of sacred presence, not simply unreflective attachment, kept these Catholics in their parishes” (160).

Though narratives of American Catholic history often assume that Catholics progressively modernized over the course of the twentieth century, moving more and more toward a lay-led democratic style of congregational Catholicism, Seitz suggests an alternative model of American Catholic modernity. Far from having shed their attachments to specific sacred spaces and the real presence of the supernatural – things presumed passé to the modern religious subject – resisting Catholics struggled over the sacredness of their own parish spaces against an institutional Church that argued churches were merely brick and mortar. Resistors adopted the postconciliar image of themselves as the "living stones" of the Church at the same time that they defended the physicality of the sacred contained in the stone walls of their parish. No Closure thus breaks down the binary map of American Catholicism after Vatican II, demonstrating that many Catholics continued to experience the upheavals of the conciliar era and developed their own interpretations of the Catholic past that do not map neatly onto the postconciliar liberal-conservative map.

Early on in the book Seitz says "this book is not the end of a conversation, but the opening of one" (20). In the spirit of this invitation, I want to invite everyone interested not only to read this compelling book, but also to literally join the conversation this January. Those of you planning on attending the American Historical Association’s winter meeting this January in Chicago, or any of the various related groups like the American Society of Church History or the American Catholic Historical Association, are invited to “Scandal, Resistance, and Practice: A Roundtable on John Seitz’s No Closure.” John McGreevy, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, John Seitz, and my fellow Northwestern doctoral candidate Brian Clites, will join me in a discussion that will use Seitz’s book to open a conversation on themes such as power dynamics between laity and clergy, the construction of Catholic identities, the sacralization of place, and the many ways Catholics have related to their own past at the turn of the twenty-first century.

AAR Redux (Part 2) from Jeremy Rapport!

Here's part two of Jeremy's reflections on AAR, in which he discusses legitimation, spirituality, individuals, nature, appropriation and so much more. Part 1 is available here.

“Individuals, Communities, and Religious Authenticity: An AAR Redux”

Jeremy Rapport

The process by which adherents and potential adherents judge religious claims credible is of great interest to new religions scholars. The three papers on Sunday afternoon’s “Strategies of Legitimation in New Religions” focused on authoritative claims-making in three different new religions: a Chinese Buddhist new religion, Erik Hammerstom’s “The Heart of Mind Method”; a neo-pagan Asatru group, Carrie Dohe’s “Jungian Archetypes, Metagentics, and Kenniwick Man”; and a Christian new religion, Spencer Allen’s “Tony Alamo and His New Testament Brand of Christian Polygyny.” The issues these presenters discussed and the questions they raised about the ways discourses of legitimacy function are critical to understanding new religions as well as to thinking through the ways religions work in people’s lives. A community becomes credible and possesses religious legitimacy, all three of the presenters at least implicitly insisted, through a complex mix of appeals to cultural norms, religious traditions, and charismatic claims.

Monday morning I presided at “Religious Appropriations of Secular Culture.” In many ways, this was a fun-filled panel. Highlights included Darryl Victor Caterine’s paper, “Haunted Ground,” based on his recent book of the same name, which examined the role of nature in the gatherings of several metaphysical religions; Ann Duncan’s research on an Edgar Cayce inspired summer camp, “Summer Camp and New Paradigms of Sacred Space in New Religious Movements”; Shannon Harvey’s paper, “Eat Your Way Back to the Godhead” looked at ISKCON cookbooks; and Martha Smith Roberts’ and Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand’s “Hoop Spiritualities,” described their research on hula hoopers who believe the exercise inspires spiritual experiences. Despite the variety of the topics, it would have been impossible to miss the theme of people using conventionally secular forms to facilitate experiences they believe to be religious. Spiritual experiences are everywhere, if you know where to look.

The Sunday afternoon panel on Frequencies, an experimental project on spirituality developed by Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern, was jam packed, despite starting late due to room arrangement problems. The project solicits short pieces on the diverse subjects that the authors think of when they think of the term, “spirituality,” and publishes them on its web site. For me, Frequencies is fascinating in much the same way that AAR is—as way to indulge rapidly one’s varied interests in sometimes ill-defined and/or poorly understood phenomena. Many of the essays on the web site are thought provoking examinations of their topics, and Sunday afternoon’s speakers, all contributors to the project, took to the spirit of the event and the project with full gusto. Julie Byrne performed her remarks on the project in an entirely appropriate, funny, confusing, and thoughtful spoken word piece. Susan Hardin spoke about the genealogy of Frequencies itself. Jeffrey Kripal pointed out the cool factor in the project and in the people involved in it. But what really struck me were Ari Kelman’s remarks. Kelman discussed the project’s apparent lack of the overtly religious (at least to date, contributions are still coming in). Kelman’s comments struck a chord. As much as I enjoy what I have seen of it, I worry that Frequencies is doing nothing to address an overly simplistic dichotomy in popular discussions of the religious and the spiritual, a dichotomy that misrepresents the complex relations among individuals, institutional religions, and cultures. In fairness, Martin Marty’s recent contribution to Frequencies addresses this exact concern, and pieces on more conventionally religious topics are now more commonly appearing. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Frequencies is in danger of metaphorically recreating the tropes and practices of a particular form of spiritual seeking in vogue right now and in the process also risks ignoring a vital reality of the more conventionally religious world, namely that many religious people do not think their lives are devoid of the immediacy and presence of something they understand to be spirituality. I really do not want a project that strikes me as both innovative and insightful to pigeon-hole spirituality as a concept limited to people who understand it to indicate the primary authority of individuals to mediate and create their worlds.

Our investigations of religion have been moving toward a greater interest in the individual’s expression of religious life for the past several decades, with the lived religion approach exemplifying the trend. While that shift toward focusing on the individual as the primary mediator of authentic religious life reflects previously overlooked factors in our study of religion and recent developments in American religious life and thought, scholars must remain cognizant of the vital role of community in religious life. Individuals may indeed be the primary mediators of religious authenticity, but they learn to do that mediation in the context of communities that shape them and how they understand the world.

AAR Redux (Part 1) from Guest Poster Jeremy Rapport

Today's guest post on the recent AAR meeting in November comes Jeremy Rapport, a visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at The College of Wooster. Jeremy's most recent publications are on New and Alternative Religious Movements in America and American Metaphysical Religions, specifically Christian Science and the Unity School of Christianity. Other attendees of AAR are welcome to send me (Kelly) posts detailing the conference too. The more, the merrrier!

“Individuals, Communities, and Religious Authenticity: An AAR Redux”

Jeremy Rapport

For me, as I suspect is the case for many in our guild, one of the most satisfying parts of AAR is the chance to be intellectually promiscuous for a few days. Briskly and purposively walking from panel to panel belies the strolling and staring my mind is doing as I hear new ideas, interpretations, and accounts of the religious life and thought of people from vastly different times and places. This academic flitting and sipping is reinforced for me because as a member of the New Religious Movements steering committee, I attend the diverse panels our group sponsors. New Religious Movements is a sub-discipline that engages ethnographic, historical, and sociological approaches to studying religion as well as examining religious phenomena from across time and cultures. I can satisfy my intellectual curiosity while also fulfilling my committee obligations.

This year in San Francisco, I attended panels on the Japanese new religion Shinnyo-en, the concept of legitimizing new religions, and a panel discussion with Jonestown survivors. A meeting of the seminar on food and eating and the panel on the experimental project Frequencies were on my agenda. I also presided at a panel on religious appropriations of secular culture. All of the meetings were fascinating and engaging, and many of the papers would be of interest to scholars of religion in America. However, as I thought about the experience over Thanksgiving what really struck me was the emphasis on the authority of the individual in many of the papers. Religion may be a community endeavor, but at least as scholars in contemporary America, we seem to be more and more interested in how individuals shape religious groups and in how groups are trying to satisfy individuals.

Saturday morning began with a session co-sponsored by the Japanese Religions Group and the New Religious Movements Group. Shinnyo-en is a Japanese Buddhist movement that uses a form of medium-guided meditation. With several temples outside of Japan, including in Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York state, it is now both an international and American movement. What grabbed my attention here was Victoria Rose Pinto’s paper, “Floating Prayer: Syncretism, Symbolism, and Ritual in the Lantern Floating Ceremony in Hawai’i.” Shinnyo-en introduced this version of an Obon ancestor ceremony to Hawai’i. People write personal messages and decorate floating lanterns to send out to sea as memorials to significant people and events in their lives. Shinnyo-en still sponsors the event, but as Pinto pointed out, the ceremony has grown well beyond the confines of the single Japanese Buddhist movement that introduced it, and it is now one of the most popular public religious rites in the state. Most of the participants have no formal affiliation with Shinnyo-en. Yet the movement, by creating and facilitating a rite that allows individual expressions of faith, feeling, and connection to a larger world, now has an important role in Hawai’ian public religious life.

It is certainly not news that the complex relationship of food and eating with religion is of great interest to scholars. Meeting now for its fourth year, Saturday afternoon’s seminar “Religion, Food, and Eating in North America” has been discussing papers on this wide-ranging topic with goal of producing an edited volume aimed primarily at undergraduates. I contributed a paper to the seminar at the 2010 meeting in Atlanta. Studies of food and religion invite the inspection of the public and the private, the individual and the community. Looking at how a person’s diet helps to structure his or her religious life shows us that the material has never been as far removed from the spiritual as many Protestants wish it were. Moreover, food is perhaps the most accessible of the roads to teaching undergraduates lived religion, thus this is welcome work on many levels, including as a potential teaching resource and as work that systematically examines how food mediates between individuals and communities, creates identities, structures group practices, and reflects religious principles.

For me, the most powerful event of the AAR was the panel discussion featuring Jonestown survivors on Sunday morning. The terrible and tragic events at Jonestown continue to inspire thoughtful and important work on religion, and justly so since the predominant stereotypes about alternative religions today owe a great deal to those 914 deaths in Guyana in 1978. Tropes about the power of brainwashing administered by a diabolical cult leader developed largely in response to the horrific end of the Peoples Temple. Yet the individual human stories are frequently overlooked, so this panel where survivors shared their stories served as a useful addition to thinking about the meaning and significance of the events. Among the many emotionally moving and fascinating stories, I could not help but be struck by how many of the survivors insisted on the idea that reclaiming their humanity and their dignity involved reclaiming their individuality. Many of those present on Sunday morning declared that Jonestown was not made up of homogenous people, that the takeaway message of the tragedy should be that the only true master is within, that Jones had become an impediment to the functioning of the community, and that people should think very carefully about the degree to which they are willing to sacrifice themselves to pursue their principles. I could not help but wonder if part of the process of the survivors reincorporating themselves into American culture involved relearning how to think about the status and authority of the individual.

To be continued.

Locavangelism: Eating as Spiritual Practice, Part III

Editorial note: This is Part III of Rachel Wheeler's discussion of what she calls "locavangelism." Part I is here; Part II is here. The last couple of paragraphs here are a repeat from Part I, which I repeat here as a summary of the series.

by Rachel Wheeler

Why now?

Having attempted to show how various wings of the modern food-centered environmentalist movement draw on patterns of evangelicalism, I’d like to take a stab at answering two questions: why food now? and what does it all mean? The immediate answer to the first question, I believe is 9/11 and the 2008 financial meltdown. Growing your own tomatoes, people are discovering, is a way to economize, enjoy better food, and connect with a past that feels safe during a time of great uncertainty. Locavangelism seems to represent a sort of personal declaration of isolationism. The past decade, beginning with 9/11, has persuaded many that globalization represents a threat rather than an opportunity, and this sense of threat has led many to want to seek a closer connection to the dirt in their own back yards. But I think we can’t stop there. The 1990s were crucially important in laying the groundwork that would eventually produce the locavore movement.

The turn to food, I believe, marks a desire to marry belief and practice, it represents a backlash against an era that liberals and conservatives are seeing as superficial: the go-go-90s witnessed the make-over of many American cities. Everyone celebrated the decreased crime rates, and the cleaner subways – both unquestionably good developments—but the 90s also brought a new era of consumerism and suburbanization with the growth of sprawling McMansion studded developments gobbling up prime farmland on the outskirts of many cities (particularly in the Midwest). Shopping became the number one leisure activity among Americans, and suddenly people traded in their under a dollar coffee habit for $3 (and more) grande skinny caramel macchiatos.

Political liberals got their President in 1992 with Clinton’s election, while Conservatives were laying the groundwork for a Republican take over that came in 1994. Republicans and Democrats had great reason for hope in the 1990s. On the left, the 1990s marked the high point of the “politically correct” or PC movement, when liberals learned to call black people “African-Americans,” and Indians “Native Americans” and feel they were doing their part to right the wrongs of prior, unenlightened times. The 1990s also saw the growing influence of the Religious Right. The Republican Revolution of 1994, and the election of a born-again Christian - George W. Bush-- in 2000, swelled hopes among America’s evangelicals that a conservative Christian agenda would finally be implemented. His election marked an astounding and seemingly unassailable alliance of conservative Christians, fiscal conservatives, and big-business. But neither Clinton nor Bush accomplished what their supporters hoped, leading to a suspicion about the meaning of professions of faith, whether of the PC or the evangelical variety: does calling a person in a wheelchair “physically challenged” rather than handicapped change their experience of being handicapped when public buildings are not accessible? Will a politician who professes to be born again necessarily be above political compromise? Some Conservative Christians began having second thoughts about their enthusiastic alliance with big-business. Liberals and conservatives were dismayed by their leaders’ political (and moral) compromises, though perhaps more often, they were inclined to see the problems as coming from the other side of the political aisle.) As Rod Dreher writes in Crunchy Cons, “Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.”

The writings of locavangelists, of the lefty and Christian Agrarian variety, are rife with professions about the incongruity of belief and action. All the authors considered here write of the impulse to bring belief and action together. The financial implosion has lent further impetus to the desire for change: the promise of ever increasing wealth, of ever increasing house values, has proved illusory and this realization has prompted many to reconsider the meaning of work. If it is not to make more money and buy a bigger house, what is it for? So, I think there is something of a widespread re-alignment of values going on, with many people opting to focus their energies on the familial and the local, shunning the plastic and the consumerist, and seeking above all, the authentic, however that might be constructed. Beavan, the No Impact Man, writes: “I want my work to align with my values. I want to write about what’s important. I want to help change minds. The blurb for Year of Plenty (by Goodwin, the Presbyterian pastor) announces, this is the story of “one family wrestling with what it means to re-integrate life and faith.”

What locavores on the left and right seem to have in common is their emphasis on the importance of practice. It seems to me to be a commentary on what many now see as the superficiality of the 1990s. Both sides are seeking ways to realize their beliefs through actions. It is telling, I think that the environmental movement is growing not by more people heading for escape to a pristine wilderness, but through rediscovering the ancient traditions of agriculture, a turn that seems eminently more practical in a precarious world. As Ragan Sutterfield writes, “the problem with our role in creation is that we don't remember it. In our fallen state we have forgotten our place, both within God's will and love and also in our love and care for creation. We need to be reminded of who we are and what we are about. Practices and disciplines are our primary way of learning to remember, of being recollected to our place and call as creatures. I would like to offer farming, done well, as one of those disciplines.”

I find it fascinating, that a predominantly Protestant country has suddenly discovered “practice.” I don’t know quite what to make of this: it could be a response to the broader political and cultural forces, or it could suggest the assimilation of important religious ideas and practices from other religions. Americans are clearly hungry for practical guidance: Michael Pollan’s prescriptive book Food Rules, was quickly vaulted to the top of best-seller lists. Americans seem to want to be told what to do and many are finding new spiritual rewards in practicing the discipline of eating according to Pollan’s rules. Locavorism may well be the new Kosher, but it is being embraced with evangelical fervor.

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.

Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism in America Today

Editor's note: I'm delighted to guest post today a contribution from our old friend Rachel Wheeler of IUPUI - Indianapolis, who's currently serving a year as a Fulbright Fellow in Germany. We've blogged before about Rachel's excellent first book To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-century Northeast.

Lately, though, Rachel has been contemplating some important matters more close to the present day. She presented a draft of her ideas as a paper, and I'm excerpting a bit of this below as Part I of what will be a three part post about food, sustainability, and religious sensibilities in contemporary America. On this most food-centric of holiday weekend, it seemed appropriate to post this. After reading this, continue on with Part II of this series here, and the finale, Part III, here.

Eating as Spiritual Practice: Locavangelism in America
by Rachel Wheeler

About a dozen years ago, I found myself on a college campus in Portland, Oregon, listening to a talk by a man who billed himself as the “mad, vegetarian cowboy.” Howard Lyman was the founder of an organization called “Voices for a Viable Future,” and that day, as I’m sure he did at hundreds of other public appearances, he told the story of how he had grown up on a cattle ranch in Montana in the 1950s. It was a small operation, but one that had sustained the family for several generations. Then he went off to ag-school at a time when “better living through chemistry” was embraced by agricultural scientists. He came back to the farm with the zeal of the convert. He told his father he wanted to make the ranch bigger and better. They bought up more acres, and started on the path to modern, chemically intensive, factory farming and feed-lot ranching.

Then in 1979, Lyman became paralyzed from a tumor on his spine. His doctors said they could operate to remove the tumor, but chances were he would remain paralyzed, or worse, die during the surgery. Lyman made himself a promise that if he survived, he would devote his life to what he believed was right. The surgery was successful: Lyman not only survived, but he was once again able to walk. At the time, Lyman was 300 pounds (135 kg), and he suffered from diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. True to his word, he changed his life. He became a vegetarian, dropped to a healthy weight, and started un-doing all the “improvements” he had implemented on the family’s ranch. He became a lobbyist on Capitol Hill against factory, feedlot farming and even found himself being sued for libel by the beef industry. He became president of an organization named: EarthSave, whose motto is “healthy eating for a healthy planet.” Today he runs an organization called “Voice for a Viable Future.”

Though I cannot know for sure, I am willing to bet that the vast majority of the people in the audience that evening counted themselves as despisers of “organized religion” (the Northwest being the least-churched region of the country, and Reed College students being the second most un-religious students in the whole country) and that they perceived nothing at all religious about the evening. But I couldn’t help but feel I had just attended a religious revival. Lyman’s talk had all the hallmarks of a revivalist sermon, minus any mention of God or Jesus. He had told of the sinful ways in his youth, his arrogance and his disregard for the wisdom of tradition. He recounted the crisis sparked by illness, a miraculous cure, and the epiphany that allowed him to see the error of his former ways. He then chronicled his path of righteousness. The lecture ended with what felt like an altar call, as Lyman exhorted listeners to renounce the sinful ways of the world and follow the narrow path of righteous eating.

In the dozen years since I heard the Mad Vegetarian Cowboy, a lone voice in the wilderness has turned into a loud chorus; and a cultural shift seems to be under way with food front and center. You can scarcely open an American newspaper or magazine today without finding a story that in some way mentions the locavore movement. The term “locavore” was coined in 2005 to mean someone who eats food that did not travel far to reach the plate. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary declared “locavore” the word of the year for 2007. The Girl Scouts now offer a badge that can be earned by preparing a meal of locally grown food. The movement is far from monolithic: it is possible to find a wide range of belief and practice, from the casual practitioners who occasionally frequent farmer’s markets to augment their supermarket shopping, to those who might be termed fundamentalist locavores, who will not eat a morsel at a restaurant without knowing how far the food traveled, and how the animals were housed and fed. The locavore movement, made up largely of the college educated and reasonably well off, has created a mini-publishing industry, and a flurry of books recounting experiments in extreme locavorism or eco-living has rolled off the presses in recent years: some of the titles include: the bishop of locavangelism, Michael Pollan’s, In Defense of Food, Collin Beaven’s, No Impact Man, Barbara Kingsolver’s, Animal Vegetable Miracle, Kristen Kimball’s, The Dirty Life, and my favorite title (though I confess I haven’t read the book), by Vanessa Farquarson, Sleeping Naked Is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days.

There is an equally voluminous output by Christian publishers, though it has gone largely un-noticed by the mainstream media. Presbyterian pastor Craig Goodwin recently published, A Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living, and Ragan Sutterfield, founder of a farm-school for disadvantaged youth, published a collection of essays entitled, Farming as a Spiritual Discipline. Rod Dreher, a Methodist turned Catholic turned Eastern Orthodox, has written about conservatives who embrace what are usually seen as liberal issues in his book: Crunchy Cons: Or How Birkenstock Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party); and one of my favorites, Don Colbert’s, What Would Jesus Eat?

One of the most prominent voices today bridges the Christian and the secular, lefty realms and belongs to Joel Salatin, who calls himself a “Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic,” or sometimes, just a “lunatic farmer.” Salatin first came to national prominence through the writings of Michael Pollan, who featured Salatin in his 2006 Omnivore’s Dilemma, which has become the bible of the Locavore movement. Salatin is a 1979 graduate of Bob Jones University (a fundamentalist Christian university), who runs a farm in Virginia. He writes on the farm’s website: “We are in the redemption business: healing the land, healing the food, healing the economy, and healing the culture.”[1] What the “mad cowboy” and the “lunatic farmer” both mean of course, is that they are far from crazy. Like Wendell Berry before them, who often wrote poems as “the Mad Farmer,” they mean that they are the ones who perceive reality most clearly, and who are willing to be seen as crazy by the world in order to proclaim their truth. Consciously or unconsciously, these authors are invoking the trope of the “fool for Christ;” the believer who challenges societal norms in order to follow a higher calling, and, they hope, lead the way to salvation.

This recent food “madness” begs for interpretation. Is it simply the latest health craze destined to meet the same fate as the Atkins diet, or aerobics? or is there something deeper going on? I think indeed there is something deeper going on, and I believe there are profound resonances with deeply rooted elements of American religious culture. But I think what is most fascinating of all is that the movement has gained substantial momentum among two groups who rarely care to be associated with each other: evangelical Christians and secular liberals. And I think this convergence offers some hope (Tea Party vs. Occupy Wall Street to the contrary) that the chasm between right and left may in fact bridgeable. . . .

What locavores on the left and right seem to have in common is their emphasis on the importance of practice. It seems to me to be a commentary on what many now see as the superficiality of the 1990s. Both sides are seeking ways to realize their beliefs through actions. It is telling, I think that the environmental movement is growing not by more people heading for escape to a pristine wilderness, but through rediscovering the ancient traditions of agriculture, a turn that seems eminently more practical in a precarious world. As Ragan Sutterfield writes, “the problem with our role in creation is that we don't remember it. In our fallen state we have forgotten our place, both within God's will and love and also in our love and care for creation. We need to be reminded of who we are and what we are about. Practices and disciplines are our primary way of learning to remember, of being recollected to our place and call as creatures. I would like to offer farming, done well, as one of those disciplines.”[2]

I find it fascinating, that a predominantly Protestant country has suddenly discovered “practice.” I don’t know quite what to make of this: it could be a response to the broader political and cultural forces, or it could suggest the assimilation of important religious ideas and practices from other religions. Americans are clearly hungry for practical guidance: Michael Pollan’s prescriptive book Food Rules, was quickly vaulted to the top of best-seller lists. Americans seem to want to be told what to do and many are finding new spiritual rewards in practicing the discipline of eating according to Pollan’s rules. Locavorism may well be the new Kosher, but it is being embraced with evangelical fervor.

[to be continued]

---

[1] http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

[2] Ragan Sutterfield, Farming as Spiritual Discipline

Baseball, Heartbreak, and the Absurd

Happy today to post this from my colleague Jeffrey Scholes, the Director for the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Jeff sends up a cry shared by all Texas Rangers fans, after this last World Series, about the absurdity and cruelty of the universe.

by Jeffrey Scholes

We have been told that baseball is a religion by movies, scholars, players, pastors and especially fans. Whether this equation draws on either an over-romanticization of the sport, as we get in films such as Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, or from a stripping of religion of its transcendent objects, at the very least, it’s safe to say that baseball is religious for many. As a life-long baseball fan, I’ve known this generally and intuitively. But as a life-long Texas Rangers fan, I now know this specifically and viscerally.

The loss in the World Series at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals late last month in game 7 was painful enough, but the Rangers lost last year in the final game of the season too. You’d think the collective fan memory wouldn’t be that short or own coping skills wouldn’t atrophy that quickly so as to leave Rangers fans with no psychological protection. Ask a current Cubs fan or a White Sox fan six years ago or a Red Sox fan seven years ago about reconciling short memories with 100 year-old ones. Thankfully (mercifully?) the wounds incurred by fans of the Rangers are superficial by comparison. And no doubt, the charge of superficiality is likewise made by those who wonder how on earth religion and a game in which millionaires hit a leather ball with a wooden stick can even be mentioned in the same sentence. I understand the reaction of both the long-suffering fan and the sports critic alike, but as the little girl in John Feinberg’s example of the futility of rational arguments in the face of pain, I say to both, “Yes, but it still hurts!”

The pain that requires some kind of religious medication is not there by virtue of the fact that the Rangers lost in the World Series for the second time in a calendar year. It is the pain that comes from reflecting on how the Rangers lost—specifically in game 6. With a 3-2 series lead and needing one more game to win their first championship in 50 years of franchise history, the Rangers blew five leads in last Thursday’s game.

Admittedly, the difference between wins and losses in baseball often comes down to a pitch moving one centimeter higher than it should be or a fielder standing one foot to his left before a ball is hit. Hence leads can change and games can be won or lost in “butterfly effect” fashion that can’t really be applied to football or basketball. Yet in game 6, the micro became macro in a hurry as the butterfly’s wings flapped one foot away from a drunk with the nuclear codes.

The Rangers had a two run lead, two outs on the Cardinals with two strikes thrown to the opposing batter in the “last inning” of the game—TWICE. The Cardinals reducing both of these leads to zero in do-or-die moments for them before hitting the winning homerun—well that simply doesn’t happen in baseball. On pitching to the Cardinals’ Lance Berkman in the 10^th, Rangers’ pitcher Scott Feldman sums it up: "I was one strike away. That pitch there, I didn't quite get it in enough and he was able to get enough of the bat on it to knock it into center field." An inch more inside to Berkman, and who knows. We can only be left to wonder.

Every team that loses in the World Series can point to reasons for the result, some more sound than others. And yes, Rangers fans should be happy with a more successful season than 28 other teams this year. But the way game 6 was lost, all of the appreciation for a great season or the giving of an obligatory “we’ll get ‘em next year!” does not heal. Nor do counterfactuals used as rationales (“If Cruz had a slightly better read on that ball, he would have caught it!”).

I know that Red Sox fans have their “Buckner moment” and Cubs fans have their Steve Bartman; both of which punctuate as well as scapegoat their decades of heartbreak. But both teams also have a religious infrastructure to explain the inexplicable and to comfort, at least partially, the extremely discomforting losing seasons year after year. Heart-attacks as well as heartbreaks demand diagnosis and when the pain is chronic, failed yearly treatments will move the most skeptical fan into the transcendent for the cure. But what about acute pain that occurred at a time when no attack was imminent nor had one happened before?

Absent a history of devastating losses and the ability to experiment with a host of religious palliatives, Rangers fans are left to deal with a kind of absurd occurrence. They may never have to experience something like this again with a championship next year or another unending World Series appearance drought. Or they may be dealt another trauma sooner than they’d like. Either way, game 6 stands alone with no history and no future. In religious terms, the isolated, seemingly pointless—yes absurd—can shove you into a Kierkegaardian leap of faith that next will be different or into a Nietzschean resignation to a nihilistic world or into something in between.

Even in the case of the historically forgotten Texas Rangers, baseball, yet again, draws on religious ways of thinking to do the work of interpretation. Though game 6 has nothing to do with romanticizing baseball or the kind of moralistic didactics that show how one can learn from such seemingly random events. The game is just there to do some damage for the time being. And while fans of the Texas Rangers have no recourse to their own pantheon that can intercede on their behalf to explain the pain away or be manipulated so that this doesn’t happen again, this may be the only time in which I wish we did.

Mosh If You Love Jesus: Guest Post

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

Mosh if You Love Jesus: An Introduction to Christian Metal

Charlie McCrary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Scary Things Religious Studies Should Be Researching

Today's guest post is from W. Scott Poole, a friend of our blog and author of the now available Monsters in America (follow Scott on twitter @monstersamerica) as well as one of my personal favorites, Satan in America. According to Baylor Press, the book charts the prevalence and persistence of monsters as the "concoctions of the public imagination--reactions to cultural influences, social change, and historical events." Scott, then, points out how scholarship on monsters can be fruitful to the study of religion.

Five Scary Things Religious Studies Should be Researching

W. Scott Poole

“Note to Self: Religion, creepy.”-Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I think historians of American religion might agree with Buffy. Sometimes the research paths we pursue end us up in the darkest parts of the forest.

Some may think it odd that I began my career working on memory and religion in the Reconstruction South, moved to work on the Devil and am now working on Monsters. I think most of my religion and American history colleagues find this perfectly explicable.

And yet, I do think that we need more history of religion scholars thinking about these frightening topics, especially in relation to American history. There are some good studies out there on horror narratives and how they intersect with media, the religious impulse and the human psyche, but they often don’t focus in on American culture or historical experience.

So, for your Halloween pleasure (did you hear, by the way, about Jesus-ween?), I’ve compiled a short list of some topics worth examining.

Here are five areas where I think American religious historians need to get scary:

1.) Zombies: Ok, maybe this is a monster whose time has crested and, more importantly, maybe Kelly J. Baker has the zombie apocalypse under control with her new work on the relationship between apocalyptic ideas and zombie-mania. At the same time, there are so many religious narratives about the end of the world, purity/corruption and resurrection embedded in the zombie story that we need to engage this one from a lot of angles.

By the way, I’m a big fan of religious studies scholar, and fellow Baylor author, Kim Paffenroth’s Gospel of the Living Dead. Great with students and not a bad place to begin with your reading on zombies and religious studies.

2.) Alien visitation narratives: The Cold War and the sci-fi genre seemed to come together in the 50s and 60s to produce the narrative of “invaders/saviors” from beyond the stars. Many of these stories functioned as conversion narratives with messianic overtones. Some of these narratives even created religious movements that remain with us. A good place to begin is Christopher D. Bader. F. Carson Menken and Joseph D. Baker’s Paranormal America.

3.) The new spiritualism: The interest in paranormal encounters is driving (and of course being driven by) the popularity of the Ghosthunters franchise. When considering this phenomenon, I think most scholars of religious history automatically will think the tradition of American spiritualism. How does this new American spiritualism compare to earlier versions? Is it driven primarily by pop culture or are their deeper sources?

4.) Posthuman terrors: I prognosticate a bit in Monsters in America that our next terror will be posthuman monsters, a category that I think includes everything from the killer androids, to dark things waiting for us on the digital frontier, to the human body finding something horrible on the other side of transcendence, to disease creating a posthuman world.

One possible path into this area is the one taken by Myra Seaman, a friend in medieval literary studies and an editor of Postmedieval. Seaman has written of how medieval conceptions of transcendence through mystical union with Christ bears some resemblance to posthuman narratives like the Matrix.

Come on Americanists, surely there are similar connections to be made between these ideas and various kinds of American conversion narratives? Moreover, what does it tell us about American apocalyptic narratives that there are so many “godless apocalypses” out there…and that there have been for thirty-to forty years now?

5.) The Devil himself: Mark Twain once complained that, “all the churches issue bibles against him…but no one wants to listen to his side of the story.” The history of the development of beliefs about the Devil, crucial to understanding American religious consciousness over time, needs further study. Most works have dealt with the European Devil or focused on the witchcraft trials (and mainly Salem, of course).

Yes, I did write a book about Satan in America: The Devil We Know. But, like most first books on a new area of study it is a.) limited, b.) flawed, and c.) really a call to further study as much as anything. Colonial witchunts beyond Salem, slavery and conceptions of Satan, the history of exorcism in America, all of these are wide-open fields in diabolical studies.

I should add that I’m very excited about Sean McCloud’s work on evangelical demonology and how it also points us in some new directions in considering the Prince of Darkness.

Final note, for religion scholars interested in walking on the dark side, let me recommend to you John W. Morehead’s Theofantastique site. John is both a great guy and a great scholar who has created a real nexus of study for these topics. His blog is on my regular reading list and it’s really how I keep up with new books and scholars I need to know in my freaky little subfield.

Monsters in America | Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting from Baylor University Press on Vimeo.