Finishing a Good Work

Darren Grem and Tim Gloege 

We invite you to consider a request made by Sarah Morice Brubaker, friend of the late Sarah Hammond.  She is sending out an all-call to anyone who might be able or willing to contribute their skills or knowledge toward finishing Sarah's book, God's Business Men: Evangelical Entrepreneurs in Depression and War, which would have been published with University of Chicago Press.  It was under contract and in revision. 

If you'd like to help out, send e-mail to sarah.morice.brubaker@ptstulsa.edu. 

Our Gentle Whisper: The Religious Life and Times of Elijah James Blum

by Edward J. Blum

This post is to announce a new memorial fund to honor the life of Elijah James Blum.

The History Department at San Diego State University would like to announce its fundraising efforts to create the “Elijah James Blum Memorial Fund." Elijah, son of Associate Professor Edward J. Blum and Jennifer Blum, passed away on August 31, 2011, from complications related to a mitochondrial disorder. After developing cataracts in his eyes and degenerating muscularly such that his eating and breathing were impaired, Elijah died peacefully at home with his family. His favorite game was peek-a-boo and he laughed far more in life than he cried. He was just over eight months old.

Elijah did not live long, but the religious whirlwind that was his life had stories to tell. He was a member of Al-Anon, a brother to more than twenty men who met each Saturday morning at a park to share their experience, strength, and hope through the spiritual journey of the twelve steps. He listened to men discuss their “higher power” and joined the generations who have found freedom through a program forged from the pains of alcoholism and the Great Depression in the 1930s. Elijah was known as the “littlest man at the park,” and in a group that cherished “principles over personalities,” it was clear that he was everyone’s favorite person. As Elijah’s ability to eat withered, we prayed that the words of the Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book” would hold true today, that the “age of miracles is still with us.” Sadly, we all had to learn new depths of what it meant to admit our powerlessness. We now choke our way through the “serenity prayer” and hope that by repeatedly claiming that we “accept the things we cannot change” that we would actually find some peace.

As doctors scratched their heads trying to determine what was making it so hard for Elijah to eat and then to breathe, the line between “religion” and “science” blurred and then dissolved. When preparing to take Elijah to the hospital for the fourth or fifth time, his pediatrician mumbled “he’s in God’s hands now.” Increasingly, doctors and nurses started invoking prayer and hope for a world beyond what we could see. These moments brought hope to Jen, but left me hoping simply in hope. At those moments, I didn’t want an allegiance of religion and science. When I couldn’t tell the difference between the doctors of medicine and the doctors of divinity, it felt like both were admitting that their arts were not up to the task.

Then as it all fell apart and it became a question of not if Elijah would stop breathing, but when, there was the makeshift baptism at the hospital. It was a congregation of three where “we” took precedence over “me.” The childhood development people tell us that we’re “we, before we’re me,” but we had heard so many evangelical preachers say all the time that “God has no grandchildren.” But Elijah couldn’t have a conversion moment; he wouldn’t have the opportunity to tell a story of his wickedness, the power of God’s intervention, and the progress of a new pilgrim (if he would have even traveled that route). We had to make a choice, and there would be no Puritan half-way about it. Elijah’s baptism began with an apology. “We’re sorry, Elijah, that we are deciding this for you. We wish you could decide this on your own, but since you cannot and since our family follows Christ of whom the stories say he healed women, men, and children, we baptize you in the name ….” It was a baptism of anguish, but one nonetheless.

And there were a few of our last ditch efforts. When Elijah’s breathing failed and he had to have a tube and a machine work air into his small frame, we tried our own religious invention: the “power of positive breathing.” We snuggled beside him and breathed deeply. We let his body feel our muscles move as we whispered to him, “this is how we breathe Elijah; easy in, and easy out. This is how we breathe.” And when we removed the tube, I believed that maybe, just maybe, his body would have heard. It didn’t, or at least not as we wished.

Through all of these struggles, our enduring image of Elijah is by far the most striking. He developed cataracts and his vision was impaired to the point that he could only see bright lights. But his favorite game was peek-a-boo. Every time Jen popped up with “peek-a-boo,” Elijah laughed and rocked and shouted with delight. Watching him transformed how I and his Uncle Paul revised our manuscript on Jesus. All of a sudden, there was a new spirit in our writing about people who longed to see what had no visible form, who searched for salvation in the dark of night, who laughed amid terrible loss, and who generated meaning from the deaths of their children through the supposed death of God’s son. Every sentence of the book became a testament to Elijah’s saga and the joys we experienced with him. Thank you for letting me share these little bits of his and our spiritual journey.

The “Elijah James Blum Memorial Fund” will be used to support teaching and learning in the History Department at San Diego State University. Tax-deductible contributions to the fund may be made by writing a check to “The Campanile Foundation,” referencing the Elijah James Blum Memorial Fund on the memo line and sending it to Bonnie Akashian, SDSU Dept. of History, 5500 Campanile Dr., San Diego, CA 92182-6050. Please contact Beth Pollard (Associate Prof. of History, epollard@mail.sdsu.edu) or Nancy Lemkie (Senior Director of Development in CAL at SDSU, nlemkie@mail.sdsu.edu or 619-594-8569), if you have any questions.

Forgetting Why We Remember: David Blight on Memorial Day in Charleston, May 1, 1865

Paul Harvey

From historian David Blight (HT John Fea), an essay on Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865, an event of enormous symbolic significance at the time but forgotten afterwards in the "national reconciliation" mode of late 19th-century Memorial Days following their semi-official beginnings in 1868. Blight begins by describing how the "Lost Cause tradition thrived in Confederate Memorial Day rhetoric; the Southern dead were honored as the true 'patriots,' defenders of their homeland, sovereign rights, a natural racial order, and a 'cause' that had been overwhelmed by 'numbers and resources" but never defeated on battlefields."

But before the Civil War was over, black soldiers had established a meaning for that day consonant with their experience of fighting for freedom:

But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.

Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war.

The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freedpeople, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

The procession was led by 3,000 black schoolchildren carrying armloads of roses and singing the Union marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Several hundred black women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantrymen. Within the cemetery enclosure a black children’s choir sang “We’ll Rally Around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner” and spirituals before a series of black ministers read from the Bible.

After the dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantrymen participating were the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th United States Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite.

The war was over, and Memorial Day had been founded by African-Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic. They were themselves the true patriots.

Despite the size and some newspaper coverage of the event, its memory was suppressed by white Charlestonians in favor of their own version of the day. From 1876 on, after white Democrats took back control of South Carolina politics and the Lost Cause defined public memory and race relations, the day’s racecourse origin vanished....

The OKC Bombing, the Millennialist Right, and Terrorist Realities and Phantoms in the work of Michael Barkun

Paul Harvey

On a more serious note than the below, and in remembrance of a hugely significant day for my home state, today of course is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, an event that didn't entirely surprise me (albeit the scale and destructive force were shocking) given the level of conspiratorial and hate-mongering rhetoric amongst the various far right groups that was prevalent in the state prior to that time (although the perpetrator was from New York, and his accomplice from Kansas, so not to overly provincialize the causation). Incidentally, if you ever find yourself in downtown OKC, the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum is a terrific memorial site, largely free of the treacly sentimentalism that I feared would dominate. Instead, the memorial is simple, stark, and reflective, as good a remembrance as one could hope for.

Reflecting on the Oklahoma City tragedy, and its antecedent in the David Koresh and the Branch Davidian debacle at Waco two years previously, the religious studies scholar Michael Barkun produced one of the most thoughtful examinations of the subject, one that foreshadowed a good deal of the culture of fear that emerged after 9/11, in his essay "Reflections After Waco: Millennialists and the State," originally published in the June 2, 1993 Christian Century, and later reprinted in The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945, edited by Phil Goff and myself.

In his essay, Barkun traces the tragic story of the misunderstanding between Koresh and the ATF, and how the inability of the ATF and other agents to understand Koresh's millennialism had the ironic and terrible effect of feeding further into that very millennialism, leading up to the conflagration at the compound and the deaths of the agents attempting to storm it. He wrote of how "the single most damaging mistake on the part of federal officials was their failture to take the Branch Davidians' religious beliefs seriously." Instead, the natural impulse was simply to result to the tag label of "cult": "The very act of classification itself seems to make further investigation unnecessary," made worse by the reliance on a network of so-called "cult experts": "Like many other law-enforcement agencies, the FBI hass relied heavily on this questionable and highly partisan expertise--with tragic consequences. It was tempting to do so since the hostility of those in the 'anti-cult' movement mirrored the authorities' own anger and frustration." The end result, according to Barkun, was that "the government's actions almost certainly increased the resolve of those in the compound, subdued the doubters and raised Koresh's stature by in effect validating his predictions."

Barkun furthered his investigation of millennialist groups on the right with his 1996 book Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, a study of the long history of the Anglo-Israelite movement which somehow wound its way down, in a somewhat bowdlerized but nonetheless potent form, to the latter-day militia movements and other groups who influenced Timothy McVeigh and others of his ilk. Barkun then went on to produce a far-ranging survey of A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America.

Today's UNC Press blog features an interview with Barkun about his new book (the first I had heard of this text) Chasing Phantoms: Reality, Imagination, and Homeland Security Since 9/11. A brief excerpt:

Q: How did you get interested in government homeland security policy?

A: If we think of homeland security in the broadest sense, it goes back to the mid-1990s, the years of the armed standoff at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, the growth of the militia movement, and the Oklahoma City bombing. The FBI had failed to grasp the importance of religion in the Waco standoff and was now trying to figure out how to factor religion into their decision-making process, an enterprise in which I was involved. In that period, of course, the emphasis was on domestic sources of violence, not foreign terrorism, a focus that didn’t change until 9/11.