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.

Fracturing the Apocalypse and Gaining my Religion: Some Crossposts for a Monday

Paul Harvey

We've had a good run here for a few weeks on the blog, but may be slow for a little while as the reality of scrambling to keep up with classes, grading, and everything else hits all of us. Anyway, while we wait for the new round of inspiration, here are a few links of note to keep you busy this week.

HNN interviews Matt Sutton about the apocalypse, the furor over his New York Times editorial, and his research in this area here; don't forget our summary of much of this here as well. A little excerpt from an interesting exchange in the interview:

It sounds like there’s a natural political alliance between apocalyptic evangelicals and libertarians. Their objection to Roosevelt, Johnson, and Obama seems to have been ambitious social programs that increase the power of the state because it fits with their apocalyptic narrative.

I think that such an alliance does exist, though I’ve gotten a bunch of angry emails from libertarians this week for lumping them together with evangelical Christians, so they’re not necessarily happy about it. But certainly the anti-statism of libertarianism resonates with the anti-statism of evangelicals, and there are a number of journalists who have been doing work on this recently, looking for links between fundamentalists and the Tea Party.

And there have been stories showing that there are indeed strong connections and strong parallels, though libertarians and evangelicals differ in a lot of things (marijuana, abortion, gay marriage). In terms of anti-statism, though, they have a lot in common, and this is exemplified by candidates like Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry, who preach anti-statism to both libertarians and evangelicals.

On a different part of the political spectrum, the #occupy (or #ows) movement has generated a great post for us by Janine here (generating a huge number of hits for us thanks to it being picked up by Andrew Sullivan), and more recently a roundup of views and commentary here, by the likes of Nathan Schneider, Anthea Butler, Elizabeth Drescher, and others. On a different albeit related subject, Anthea has posted a wonderful remembrance and appreciation of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth here, and Charles Marsh has done the same here.

By the way, as many people have noted, recently Don't Ask Don't Tell came to an end, and lo and behold, the Republic has not crumbled and the military has not disintegrated. On a related unfounded predictions note, the mislabeled "Ground Zero Mosque" has opened, at least on a small scale, and America somehow has not yet succumbed to sharia law. Still awaiting apology from Newt Gingrich and the whole mob of usual-suspect-Islamaphobes for wasting our time with their hysterical culture wars bullshit. Going to be waiting a long time for that one. Maybe it came to their attention how effectively they were skewered in Amy Waldman's novel The Submission. Or not.

Finally, for something completely different, I meant to blog on this when it came out but just didn't get to it. The new documentary film "Hype," a 20th-anniversary retrospective on "grunge" in general and Nirvana in particular, is sitting in my Netflix queue, but in the meantime a few weeks ago Raymond Haberski put up a wonderful post juxtaposing Nirvana to Daniel Rogers' new massive work of intellectual history The Age of Fracture. Going to graduate school in a college town set in rural Ohio, he concludes:

The undergrads had on two even three shirts tied fashionably around their waists and layered in ways that coordinated colors and patterns. I couldn’t really be against them, I thought; after all they probably like the Seattle sound. And yet, these future masters of commercial culture stood in stark contrast to their neighbors in towns such as Chauncey and Nelsonville, places that had been overlooked and underemployed for decades. Those folks, not the ones wearing the new hip uniform, had much in common with that most famous of Nirvana’s refrains, tragic and fitting as it is: “oh well, so what, nevermind.”

It's hard to summarize the post, so just click on the link and read it, it's more than worth the short time it will take. And while we're on the subject of popular music, here is a reflection on how the recently-deceased group R.E.M. helped one person "lose religion and live a life of faith"'; and here's another, reflecting on how "R.E. M. hung in there and showed what it might mean to stand up to an accelerating debasement of our national culture without giving in to cynicism."

Virtual Orientialism: Asian Religions Without the Asians

Paul Harvey

A couple of posts coming up here (falling behind already this semester -- the world rushes on, committee meetings must be attended, papers graded, and our poor little blog gets left ignored in the corner) about new books of interest just reviewed in Choice. I've tried to pick out selections here from works which cover subjects that are receive less attention than one would want both here at the blog and in American religious history more generally (our blog contributor Mike Altman is working on Hinduism in America and knows a lot more about this subject generally than any of the rest of us here, so Mike weigh in here with thoughts that you have!).

The first comes from an author familiar to many of you, Jane Iwamura, whose new book about Asian religions and American popular culture is out. Having grown up on Kung Fu and still able to quote lines from it, I certainly am familiar with the topic of "cultural stereotyping by the media" mentioned in the review below. For that and many other reasons, I look forward to picking this work up soon.

Aside from the review, here's a great short piece by Prof. Iwamura drawing on the book. And if you would like a more in-depth scholarly discussion of the book, here is Rudy Busto's discussion of the book, from a panel discussion at McCormick Theological Seminary last year. Finally, I would remind you of the great selection of primary sources on Asian American religions with Asians in Tweed and Prothero's Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History, still an indispensable primary source compilation.

Iwamura, Jane Naomi. Virtual orientalism: Asian religions and American popular culture. Oxford, 2011. 214p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780199738601, $99.00; ISBN9780199738618 pbk, $24.95. Reviewed in 2011oct CHOICE.

Deeply indebted to Edward Said's Orientalism (CH, Apr'79), infused with Jean Baudrillard's conceptions of the hyperreal (Simulacra and Simulation, 1994), and written in the style of Judith Snodgrass's Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West(CH, Jan'04, 41-2767), this volume more fully develops Iwamura's examination of the "Oriental monk" icon and narrative, which first appeared in Religion and Popular Culture in America, edited by Bruce Forbes and Jeffery Mahan (CH, Oct'00, 38-0893). Iwamura undertakes an analysis of photographic and television images appearing in popular media between 1950 and 1975. Through a close reading of representations of three Oriental monks--D. T. Suzuki, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Kwai Chang Caine (Kung Fu)--Iwamura (Univ. of Southern California) variously unpacks Americans' unfolding perceptions of the East, the dynamics of cultural consumption and appropriation, and the systematic processes of cultural stereotyping by the media. Easily accessible, this work will interest students of American popular culture, media studies, and Asian American religiosity. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic libraries supporting upper-level undergraduates and above. -- M. A. Toole, High Point University And for further information, here's a bit about the work from the book's website:

Saffron-robed monks and long-haired gurus have become familiar characters on the American popular culture scene. Jane Iwamura examines the contemporary fascination with Eastern spirituality and provides a cultural history of the representation of Asian religions in American mass media. Encounters with monks, gurus, bhikkhus, sages, sifus, healers, and masters from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds and religious traditions provided initial engagements with Asian spiritual traditions. Virtual Orientalism shows the evolution of these interactions, from direct engagements with specific individuals to mediated relations with a conventionalized icon: the Oriental Monk. Visually and psychically compelling, the Oriental Monk becomes for Americans a ''figure of translation''--a convenient symbol for alternative spiritualities and modes of being. Through the figure of the solitary Monk, who generously and purposefully shares his wisdom with the West, Asian religiosity is made manageable-psychologically, socially, and politically--for popular culture consumption. Iwamura's insightful study shows that though popular engagement with Asian religions in the United States has increased, the fact that much of this has taken virtual form makes stereotypical constructions of "the spiritual East" obdurate and especially difficult to challenge.

Friday Night Ramadan Lights

Paul Harvey

Today is an unabashedly patriotic "I love this country" post. In "All-Nighters Keep Football Team Competitive During Ramadan," the wacky beauty and deep pragmatism of American religious pluralism (with the countervailing voices of bigotry also present, if muted this time) come through. Friday Night Lights takes on a new meaning in Dearborn, Michigan. A favorite passage:

Some teammates said they would break their fasts on opening day to gain energy and avoid cramping (and make up for it with later fasting.) Leila said he would not eat or drink until sundown, which should occur about halftime. Then coaches will provide water, dates, oranges and other fruit to help refuel their players’ empty tanks.

“You might not have a lot of energy that first half, but once you eat you feel refreshed,” Leila said. “After halftime, I’ll be coming after those guys.”

From Muscular Christianity to Tim Tebow

Paul Harvey

Just a quick note to a post by our contributor Art Remillard, whose book Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era will be out this December with the University of Georgia Press.

Art's has posted here many times before on his current research interests in religion and sports (no, Sutton, fantasy football does not count). Over at the Historical Society blog, Art has reflected on "Building Bridges from 'Muscular Christianity' to 'The Tebow Thing,'" which stems in part from his current research and work in religion and sports in the South from the Civil War to World War II. A little excerpt, and then click the link for all of it:

So on "opening day," I invite students to cross a bridge from their hometown YMCA to "muscular Christianity." I cite Luther Gulick, his efforts to institute athletics at the Y, and his lifelong quest to understand "the relation of good bodies and good morals." I then turn to his colleague, James Naismith. On January 20, 1892, the Presbyterian minister gathered eighteen young men at a YMCA gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, to play his newly invented game called "basketball." Practically, Naismith hoped that basketball would give restless young men a suitable indoor activity for the long winter months. More importantly, as theologian Michael Novak summarizes, "The idea behind the game was moral, Christian, and hygienic: active clean living through vigorous exercise." Right from the gun, then, students discover the religious roots of a familiar game. Later in the course, drawing mostly from Bill Baker's Playing With God, I locate Gulick, Naismith, and other "muscular Christians" within the social gospel tradition, and discuss how they sought to Christianize all corners of society, from the schoolhouse to the gymnasium.

Continue . . .

The Look of Catholics

Emily Clark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blessed with a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch's Spiritual Strivings

Paul Harvey

A few days ago I blogged a bit about Reinhold

Niebuhr and Gillian Welch, an unlikely but (in my view) apt combination of theologian and performing artist. In this short essay for Religion Dispatches, I develop my thoughts about her newest recording (and some of her previous recordings) at greater length, focusing especially on her musical relationship to the "hard religion" of the rural South whose music she recreates, rejuvenates, and reinterprets. We here at the blog await word from her publicist about the possibility of an email interview, but suffice to say if that happens (big if there) it will be awesome!!!! Scroll down a bit for a live performance of one of the tunes from the record.

Update! Alec Wilkinson for the New Yorker makes many similar points about the record, in this piece just out for the magazine. Cool, but I wrote mine early last week, so feeling ahead of the curve, even if I do live in a flyover state and famously conservative city!

A brief excerpt from the piece, and then follow the rest at the link:

“It is the best kind of record: one that lures you in and soothes you with harmonies and banjo, only to leave you wondering what the hell just happened.”
—Kitty Empire, review of The Harrow & the Harvest in The Observer, June 26, 2011

That’s a good question to ask of someone who sings of spending seven years with her companion

on the burning shore, with Gatling guns and paint,
working the lowlands door to door, like a Latter-day Saint.

And that’s before she’s turned out at the top of the stairs, by someone who took all the glory,that you just couldn’t share. Welch and her partner David Rawlings sing in haunting union:

I’ve never been so disabused, never been so mad
I’ve never been served anything that tasted so bad.

Listening to this song, “The Way It Will Be,” I too don’t know what the hell just happened, but it’s impossible not to complete the story, to fill in those gaps. We’ve all eaten that bitterness at some point. And that urge to figure out the details in the mysteriously unsettling story comes wrapped here in religiously-tinged narratives and imagery that historically have received their richest expression in the musical culture of the American South.

Welch’s Southern characters, though, emerge not from some imaginary version of God, country, and family, but from the spiritual strivings of folk who have seen plenty of hard times.

Continue . . . .

Here's a clip from one tune, "The Way It Goes," performed recently:

Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010: Your Top 10 List

Welcome back to our contributor to Everett Hamner, who's been goofing around doing research and teaching at Western Illinois instead of spending time on the all-important business of blogging. Below are his thoughts on ten recent pieces of American literature, of all genres, which show the vitality of religion in American literary culture. Feel free to add your own suggestions for a top ten list in the comments section.

Religion in American Literature, 2000-2010
by Everett Hamner

As one of the literary types haunting this blog, and in small recompense for all I learned about American religious history from my just-graduated Young Scholars in American Religion cohort, I thought some of you might appreciate these recommendations of 21^st-century novels and graphic narratives to teach, reference, or just enjoy. Beyond their individual quality, my only criteria for inclusion was that they significantly engage religious questions and that they had not been discussed before at Religion in American History. The resulting list is neither exhaustive nor even my own “top ten.” But it is relevant and eclectic, featuring postmodern doorstoppers and plot-driven page-turners, science fiction and realism, with main characters ranging from African American Protestants to a Catholic-Islamic-Hindu syncretist. I hope many of you discover something intriguing.

1) E. L. Doctorow, City of God (2000). The back cover promises “a detective story about a cross that vanishes from a Lower East Side church only to reappear on the roof of an Upper West Side synagogue.” That just scratches the surface. This postmodern collage of literary forms, including emails, jazz lyrics, free verse, and prayers, is definitely about something missing, but not so much the cross as the God presumed to have hung upon it. Yet this is not merely another expression of Dover Beachian despair. Featuring dark matter and quantum physics, the Holocaust and the atom bomb, Tillichian theology and “Evolutionary Judaism,” and early Christianity and modern filmmaking, the novel is worthy of its namesake. As an early passage has it, “That the universe, including our consciousness of it, would come into being by some fluke happenstance, that this dark universe of incalculable magnitude has been accidentally self-generated … is even more absurd than the idea of a Creator.” A.

2. Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2001). Martel’s novel is one of only a couple on this list that is neither by an American writer nor about American religion. Instead its settings are India, Mexico, Canada, and most of all, the Pacific Ocean. At one level, this is a fairly simple adolescent adventure story, a tale of shipwreck and survival. The twist is that the ship in question was carrying a zoo, so Pi’s lifeboat companions include an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and a Bengal tiger. Too fantastic, you say? Then let me assure you that this half-comedic narrative is framed so as to render the entire novel a study in epistemology and an inquiry into the nature of fiction, allegory, and metaphor. Oh, and because the main character believes that “religion is about our dignity, not our depravity,” he assumes that a loving God won’t mind if a growing boy is simultaneously a pious Catholic, Muslim, and Hindu … even if he doesn’t tell his priest, imam, or pandit. Pluralism, anyone? A-.

3) Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra, and José Marzán, Jr. Y: The Last Man (2002-08).

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative is thriving in the new millennium, and I don’t just mean Left Behind. Now collected in book form, this widely-acclaimed comic series will turn off some with its graphic violence and sexuality, but those who tackle it will be rewarded with much more to ponder than the average superhero tale. Utilizing a premise going back to Mary Shelley, this globetrotting narrative interrogates potential mutations of feminism, homophobia, racism, genetic engineering, US nationalism, global terrorism, and religious fundamentalism. True to the genre, there is plenty of hyperbole, special effects, and tongue-in-cheek humor, but these lush panels are as consistently evocative as the plot is relevant. Surgeon General Warning: strangely addictive. B+.

4) Joe Sacco, Palestine (2002). And now for something intensely historical, just to counterbalance the colorful future of that last entry. Joe Sacco does in-depth reporting through immersing himself in the world’s least stable environs. Rather than a feature in The New York Times Magazine, however, the result is graphic narrative. This account of two months in the Occupied Territories in 1991-92 is an effort to uncover the personal dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. There are certainly references to larger-scale political maneuvering, but the core of this work is its on-the-ground tales, which come from both sides of the fences. The wounds of rock-flinging juvenile operatives, the devastation of a neighborhood’s olive trees (and thus some residents’ primary sources of income), the torture of political prisoners, women’s feelings about the hijab, and the obliviousness of Western tourists … material religion, indeed. B+.

5) Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (2003). Richard Powers is best known for his mastery of scientific detail and his insights about human responses to new technologies. Like his stellar National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker (2005), this novel foregrounds evolution,but here the transformations are primarily of music, race, and religion. Spanning the second half of the twentieth century, particularly the civil rights movement and its legacy, this is not only a 600+ page meditation on jazz, opera, and classical music, but a compelling argument about America’s need to embrace racial hybridity, confront class divisions, and search deeper than religious labels. With a Jewish immigrant father and an African American mother, the brothers who are the novel’s main characters face the same sort of dilemmas observed by their father decades earlier. Among them: “If I want to get ahead, I must become a Christian. But if I use Christianity to get ahead, I lose my soul!” A-.

6) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004) and Home (2008). “Faulkner without the pretension,” I thought upon reading Gilead’s last sentence. The Pulitzer selection committee must have felt similarly, and among these recommendations, Robinson’s interwoven novels are the most certain to appear on future American literature syllabi. But greatness is only one element of their appeal. If you need antidotes to megachurch spectacles or clergy sex scandals, these quiet works consider far more mundane matters. Very little occurs plot-wise, and even some of the major events take place offstage. What we do get is immense theological depth, attention to ordinary beauties and graces easily overlooked. We find main characters who are largely admirable andindeed wise rural Iowan pastors. Seriously, this is possible. Need more? Well, race plays a major role. And in covering the same events from the two old men’s perspectives, the novels become a single, very successful narrative experiment. They are also full of understated humor, as in this description of a home health care book: “It was large and expensive, and it was a good deal more particular than Leviticus.” Taken as a whole, what Gilead’s narrator says of a verse in the gospels may be what even the most informed readers feel about American Protestantism after finishing these masterpieces: “You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completelyignorant of it.” A+.

7) Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2007). I debated listing this novel, as I’m not sure it says anything explicit about religion, at least not if defined narrowly. But a single scene from its sparing journey through a barely recognizable, post-apocalyptic American wilderness should be enough to convey the work’s significance. Having walked for days with little to eat, a father and his small son find an underground emergency bunker in the yard of an abandoned home. If the reader has not already accompanied this pair through the bleakness of the preceding hundred pages, the sensory impact of the moment is impossible to fully convey, but suffice it to say that I will never look at a tin of canned fruit the same way. “He turned and looked at the boy crouched above him blinking in the smoke rising up from the lamp and then he descended to the lower steps and sat and held the lamp out. Oh my God, he whispered. Oh my God. What is it Papa? Come down. Oh my God. Come down. Crate upon crate of canned goods. Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. […] He held his forehead in his hand. Oh my God, he said. He looked back at the boy. It’s all right, he said. Come down. Papa? Come down. Come down and see.” A-.

8) Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2010). Speaking of food, here is one of the best science fiction novels of the decade, and the problem here is calories. Imagining a twenty-third century in which international oil obsessions have given way to scarcities of food production, the setting and artificial beings involved are remindful of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, but the setting is Thailand. As in Life of Pi, the religion here is syncretistic, but the strange combinations in play—Buddhists overlapping with Grahamites, with stories about “Noah Bodhisattva, who saved all the animals and trees and flowers on his great bamboo raft and helped them cross the waters”—are taken for granted. This is a compelling contribution to the cyberpunk tradition that invites readers to extrapolate from current religious, ethnic, and global economic tensions and then to reinvest in that future’s history. B+.

9) Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting … (2010). Ralph Ellison worked for more than forty years on his follow-up to Invisible Man, but never could bring himself to finish. The reasons were legion, and have recently been thoroughly explored in Adam Bradley’s Ralph Ellison in Progress and Arnold Rampersad’s biography. Scholars of race and American literature are well aware of this struggle, but as I will likely argue in a future essay, those who study American religion should be, too. This 1100-page volume contains a wealth of archival material painstakingly organized and introduced by Bradley and John F. Callahan, including the most coherent 300+ pages of the second novel (which were originally published in 1999 as Juneteenth). Such an unfinished monstrosity may prove too massive for some to engage, but be not afraid: it includes many bite-sized excerpts that deal powerfully with civil religion, African American Protestantism, and the increasingly hybrid religious realities evident at the turn of the millennium. See especially the eight excerpts published by Ellison during his lifetime that appear at the volume’s conclusion. A-.

10) Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010). I’m cheating with this one, as I just discovered it myself and am only a hundred pages in. Given the praise garnered elsewhere, though, that’s enough to recommend it. With the 36 chapters receiving such titles as “The Argument from the Improbable Self” and “The Argument from the Irrepressible Past,” philosophers and theoretically-oriented historians of religion and science may be most immediately attracted, but this is compelling reading for anyone in the humanities whose afternoons are commonly devoted to faculty meetings and university lectures. Although several main characters are unapologetically brilliant, Goldstein holds nothing back in critiquing the posturing and petty divisions that characterize too much of academic life. Meanwhile, the novel’s equally serious and humorous reflections on the relationship of faith and knowledge and on modern dynamics of religion and secularism suggest an ear very close to the ground. A-, so far.

Hard Times Ain't Gonna Rule My Mind

Paul Harvey

What do Reinhold Niebuhr and Gillian Welch/David Rawlings have to do with each other? Nothing, you say, and that would be correct; everything, I say, and that's probably a stretch to say the least, but it's a reflection that came this morning reading/listening to two entirely unrelated pieces (update: now, three pieces, see the update below).

In "Religious Realism," over at The Book, Alan Wolfe reviews Why Niebuhr Now?, a posthumuously published work by the intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins. Wolfe provides a thoughtful review both of the book's strengths and weaknesses, as well as a nice short examination of Niebuhr himself, including a couple of sentences related to the subject to come shortly: "Niebuhr was of course serious, at times ponderous, himself. Yet he consistently warned against the kind of seriousness that dismisses the ironies inherent in human existence."

I happened to be reading that while listening to The Harrow and the Harvest, the new and long-awaited recording by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings -- you can listen to it in full (for the next couple of weeks or so, I think), here, courtesy of NPR Music (big HT to Deg for pointing me there).

Welch's musical persona always has been inspired by the kinds of struggles, personal journeys, dreams, and frustrated longings of characters that seem to step from the interwar years, updated a bit sometimes but carrying the kind of message and leading the kinds of lives of people that Reinhold Niebuhr's southern-born students (including Howard Kester and many others) and their comrades and co-workers (including Claude Williams and Owen Whitefield, discussed at full length in Jarod Roll and Erik Gellman's new book The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America) worked and lived among during some of the tougher years of the twentieth century. Heath will be posting a full-length interview with the authors of that book soon, so stay tuned for that.

"Hard times ain't gonna rule my mind," Gillian Welch sings, reflecting the characteristic determination of her song-characters to survive the vicissitudes that befall them, both those dictated by fate and those they bring on themselves. These are stories of American religious realism, in this case perhaps more personal and less archetypical or self-consciously mythical than in some of her previous records. At their best, the songs poignantly reflect on the ironies inherent in human existence.

UPDATE: Jim Sleeper of Yale University sent me his review of the same book by Diggins, about Niebuhr, which just confirmed the conclusions I reached above about Niebuhr's theology as lived out in the characters in Welch's songs. More than a simple review, Sleeper's short piece aptly summarizes some of the most important conclusions Niebuhr reached in his work, and how they apply today. As Sleeper explains:

The faith, although Christic and biblical, turned paradoxically on humans’ experience not of God’s presence, but of his absence. Niebuhr’s “religious vocation was to doubt religious certainty,” as Diggins puts it: “Genuine religion is always a struggle between belief and unbelief.”

That struggle is inevitable, Niebuhr held, because, on the one hand, our individual finitude and mortality make us experience the wonder, love, and yearning that generate religion, art, and compassion. On the other hand, because we’re limited and doomed as creatures, we’re also willfully or wistfully doomed as creators, with no external vantage points or leverage on history. That predicament generates incessant flights into illusory self-importance, power, omniscience, and material security—and therefore into idolatries of rugged individualism, liberal universal nationalism, the invisible hand, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the global village, and techno-nirvana.

As Welch sings, "the Great Destroyer sleeps in every man."

Catholic Looks at American Culture in the Antebellum Era and the Mid-Twentieth Century: Two New Books

Paul Harvey Just a brief note on two new books that will be of interest to some readers here, both important pieces of scholarship on the Catholic relationship with American politics and culture. First, a review from Choice, just below, on Catholics and slavery: Wallace, W. Jason. Catholics, slaveholders, and the dilemma of American evangelicalism, 1835-1860. Notre Dame, 2010. 200p index afp ISBN 026804421x pbk, $30.00; ISBN9780268044213 pbk, $30.00. Reviewed in 2011jul CHOICE.

Over the past 40 years, scholars have produced a cornucopia of quality scholarship detailing the importance of religion in the antebellum era and how particular religious ideas shaped competing visions of the American Republic, creating the context for and animating the Civil War. Wallace's fine volume elucidates the challenge Catholicism brought to that discourse. Its traditional theology challenged the individualism in the hermeneutics of northern and southern Protestants. Increasing German and Irish Catholic immigration threatened the English domination of the US. In five crisp chapters, Wallace (history, Samford Univ.) outlines how Catholicism debated the hegemonic discourse of Protestant-based acquisitive capitalism, articulated a traditional accommodation to slavery as a product of human sin, and asserted its own historic and ongoing contribution to the discussion of social morality and the proper sources of the Christian life. In their attempts to explain, Catholic leaders offered a powerful critique of nationalism and religion rooted solely in the authority of individual believers under the Constitution and Scripture, an intellectual impeachment given credence by the outbreak of Civil War. Catholicism offered an alternative vision rooted in tradition, realism, and theology. Summing Up:Recommended. All levels/libraries. -- E. R. Crowther, Adams State College Next up, a book just received which appears to be a landmark study: Anthony Burke Smith, The Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War, hot off the press from the University Press of Kansas. I've only had the chance to skim through parts, but it looks fascinating, and later this summer Emily will give us a more substantive discussion of the book up here. A brief bit from the book's webpage:

For much of American history, Catholics’ perceived allegiance to an international church centered in Rome excluded them from full membership in society. Now Anthony Burke Smith shows how the intersection of the mass media and the visually rich culture of Catholicism changed that Protestant perception and, in the process, changed American culture.

Smith examines depictions of and by Catholics in American popular culture during the critical period between the Great Depression and the height of the Cold War. He surveys the popular films, television, and photojournalism of the era that reimagined Catholicism as an important, even attractive, element of American life to reveal the deeply political and social meanings of the Catholic presence in popular culture.

Smith shows that Hollywood played a big part in this midcentury Catholicization of the American imagination. Leo McCarey’s Oscar-winning film Going My Way, starring the soothing (and Catholic) Bing Crosby, turned the Catholic parish into a vehicle for American dreams, while Pat O’Brien and Spencer Tracy portrayed heroic priests who championed the underclass in some of the era’s biggest hits. And even while a filmmaker like John Ford rarely focused on clerics and the Church, Smith reveals how his films gave a distinctly ethnic Catholic accent to his cinematic depictions of American community.

Smith also looks at the efforts of Henry Luce’s influential Life magazine to harness Catholicism to a postwar vision of middle-class prosperity and cultural consensus. And he considers the unexpected success of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s prime-time television show Life is Worth Living in the 1950s, which offered a Catholic message that spoke to the anxieties of Cold War audiences.

Revealing images of orthodox belief whose sharpest edges had been softened to suggest tolerance and goodwill, Smith shows how such representations overturned stereotypes of Catholics as un-American. Spanning a time when hot and cold wars challenged Americans’ traditional assumptions about national identity and purpose, his book conveys the visual style, moral confidence, and international character of Catholicism that gave it the cultural authority to represent America.

In short, the book appears to be a cultural history accompaniment to Kevin Schultz's Tri-Faith America, reviewed at the blog here previously by Chris Beneke. The book features extensive discussions of Catholic representations in the movies, going far beyond the usual "Legion of Decency" emphasis that most books about Catholics and the movies cover. There are also chapters on Catholics in Life magazine, on Fulton Sheen and Catholics in television, and on "John Ford's Irish American Century."

The Future of American Religious History Monographs

by Edward J. Blum

If you take a quick glance at Paul Harvey’s vita, you’ll see that he plans to dominate the publishing world of the next 12-24 months (from my sociological skills, I count that he has 4 books that will probably be published in that window).

But there are other books that look pretty exciting too – both of which I’ve checked out in dissertation form. As mentioned a few times on this blog, Kelly Baker’s Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 should be available in September. David Morgan – by far one of my favorite historians, writes of it: “An original and sobering work. In the present age, when we may no longer pretend that the lines between violent fanaticism and religious fervor are clearly discernible, this book makes a timely and urgent intervention. Hatred may have more to do with religion than we care to acknowledge.”

Her title alone reminds me of a little section in Matt Sutton’s book on Sister Aimee where on a church survey form, one congregant wrote down for occupation: “Chief Klansman.” Way to go, Kelly, and what a striking cover!

Then Art Remillard’s Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era should be out by December. Not only a blogger, Art is an editor at the terrific online Journal of Southern Religion. Doyen of southern religious history Charles Reagan Wilson claims of Art’s book, “anyone wanting to understand how a variety of people in the South have understood its spiritual and moral meanings will like this book.” I think he’s right, and my guess is that reviewers will read it in comparison with Paul Gaston’s New South Creed and John David Smith’s terrific Old Creed for the New South. Art’s book may also be read as a kind of prequel to Andrew Manis’s Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars (2002).

Speaking of J. D. Smith … he’s blurbed another forthcoming book that looks fascinating: W. Scott Poole’s Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (out in October). Smith writes, "Poole brings to life American horror stories by framing them within folk belief, religion, and popular culture, broadly unraveling the idea of the monster. Thanks to Poole's insights we see the ubiquity of the monster lurking in and around us." Scott is one of my favorite historians of religion and culture – whether we’re talking South Carolina during Reconstruction or Satan in comic books. This is sure to be another path-breaking book.

And look out early Americanists. Amanda Porterfield’s study of religion and politics in the early Republic – Doubt – should be published soon too, and I think given her work and David Sehat’s Myth of American Religious Freedom we’re going to have to rethink Nathan Hatch’s democratization thesis pretty seriously.

Congratulations to Kelly, Art, Scott, and Amanda.

"To Normalize the False Teachings of Mormonism the World Over"

Paul Harvey

As the long -- very long -- Republican primary season just begins to get going, here's a little reminder that anti-Mormonism didn't die out in the 19th century, or in the 20th century, or after that: Warren Cole Smith, "A Vote for Romney is a Vote for the LDS Church." A little taste:

Placing a Mormon in that pulpit would be a source of pride and a shot of adrenaline for the LDS church. It would serve to normalize the false teachings of Mormonism the world over. It would also provide an opening to Mormon missionaries around the world, who could start every conversation: "Let me tell you about the American president." To elect a Mormon President is to advance the cause of the Mormon Church.

Yes, like the election of Richard Nixon normalized the teachings of Quakerism, and the election of Clinton the teachings of Southern Baptists. Anyway, further discussion of the evangelical division about Romney's faith may be found here, and doubtless in a million other places in the months to come. As for said pending discussion, don't you know that you can count me out.

Our friend Joanna Brooks is about to fire up a post about this, so I'll update here when that is up.

Update: It gets worse. Joanna recounts her conversation with the author here.

In the meantime, that little blast from the past requires an antidote, so here's an interview with the South Park-ers Trey Parker and Matt Stone talking about their musical The Book of Mormon, the full soundtrack of which I'm looking forward to hearing sometime soon. Maybe they'll follow with a sendup musical about the United Church of Christ, or the Unitarian Universalists.

Update: Also, I meant to put this in the original post, but blog friend and part-time basketball analyst Matt Bowman of Georgetown University reflects here, in The New Republic, on the comparative "business Mormonism" of Romney and contrasts that with the much hipper public image of Jon Huntsman. Taking the two together, he says, suggests a sort of generational shift in internal LDS dynamics and culture. Very interesting reading.

How Oprah Became a Messiah: Prophet and Profit

Paul Harvey

As Oprah departs, to much media coverage, let us turn once more to our contributor Kathryn Lofton for a summing up of "What is Oprah"?

K. Lofton's book Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, has engendered a lengthy, multi-part, fascinating set of responses from numerous other scholars at Immanent Frame, and on the occasion of Oprah's departure from the network airwaves, Lofton's reflections on her career and meaning in the context of American religious history can be found at CNN Belief Blog, in the Los Angeles Times, in the New York Daily News, and in the Washington Post. Over at Killing the Buddha, Nathan Schneider also provides these links as well as a link to his own interview with Lofton, and gives his own thoughts, here.

Perhaps the easiest place to connect in to all this discussion is at the piece at the CNN Belief Blog, where our valued colleague writes:

As she departs from her ritual slot, there will be a vacuum for some. Yet if history has taught us anything, it is that the void will not be left gaping for long. “The false messiah is as old as the hope for the true Messiah,” wrote Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig. “He is the changing form of this changeless hope.”

Oprah represented humanity’s ceaseless interest in spiritual responses to personal problems. We now live in her world: one of first-person confessions, required makeovers, and spiritual consumption.

The measure of her consequence will be not in whether or not she mattered to you, but whether the world you occupy looks more like hers than you know.