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

Kelly Baker

Beefsteaks when I'm hungry

Something tall and cool when I'm dry

Give me greenbacks when the times are hard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the AntiChrist Matters in Politics

by J. Michael Utzinger

Matthew Sutton's reflections on the antichrist and American politics can be found in today's New York Times under the title "Why the Antichrist matters in Politics." There is some great food for thought here including how dispensational premillennialism (Sutton wisely didn't use this term in an op-ed) feeds anti-government sentiment. He also suggests that a power vacuum among politically oriented evangelicals have allowed libertarians and Tea Party activists (like Bachmann, Perry, and Paul) to exploit evangelical energies without the type of religious leadership (previously seen in individuals like Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell) who tempered the tendency toward apocalyptic excess. Perhaps a throw-away line, but I appreciated the analogy with Marxism to explain apparent tensions within the evangelical between expectation and action. After all, to those of us who study apocalypticism historically, it is easy to see Marxism as a secularized form of Christian apocalypticism (albeit a this-worldly type). The whole piece can be found here.

Update from Paul: Matt is going appear this evening on MSNBC's "The Last Word" with Lawrence O'Donnell, via satellite. Check your local listings!

Update from Kelly: Here's the clip!

Noebel Cause: Summit Ministries Director Retires

Paul Harvey

Colorado Springs hasn't been in the news quite as much in recent years (Ted Haggard notably excepted) as it was at the height of the culture wars. That may soon change as the Republican primary heats up. In the meantime, though, here's an important organization-in-transition story for you, from a (relatively) little known but quietly powerful local Christian training center that has exerted its influence over a couple of generation of folks now. Mark Barna, our local Colorado Springs Gazette religion reporter, recounts the career of David Noebel of Summit Ministries, who is retiring after close to half a century of leading his group. Originally an offshoot of Billy James Hargis's Christian Crusade, Noebel struck out on his own after sex scandals brought Hargis down -- including a couple who, upon their honeymoon, discovered they had both slept with Hargis out of wedlock. Noebel reportedly pushed out Hargis and took over the Christian Crusade program, folded it into Summit Ministries, and has carried on from there since.

In case you are worried that Noebel will get bored during his retirement, fear not.

Though retiring from Summit, Noebel will continue to lead the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, founded in 1953 in Iowa by Fred Schwarz to track U.S. communism, and currently headquartered in Manitou Springs. Noebel has written for the nonprofit’s newsletter for 45 years.

Noebel is best known now, at least among historians, as the great nonstop fountain of colorful quotes from his books in the 1960s and 1970s, most of which are rants about communism and rock-n-roll -- see, for example, Rhythm, Riots, and Revolution (1966), and Marxist Minstrels (1973). The first simply cannot be beat as an anti-rock screed (if I'm wrong about that, Randall, correct me): Noebel writes:

"THE BEATLES, or THE MINDBENDERS, for example, need only mass hypnotize thousands of American youth, condition their emotions through the beat of the 'music' and then have someone give the word for riot and revolt...If the following scientific program is not exposed, degenerated Americans will indeed raise the Communist flag over their own nation"

Because he's usually quoted in that context, Noebel has tended to be written off as a product of the culture wars of an entirely different era -- one before Christian rock/pop infiltrated the enemy headquarters and established itself on the scene (as David Stowe has documented in No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of Evangelicalism), and before, as Charity Carney just described, saccharine instrumental Muzak versions of Lennon's "Imagine" are piped into Christian chain stores.

But far from being the product of another era, Summit Ministries has remained an active training organization, with tens of thousands of people coming through its programs and filtering its message out to the grassroots. Sarah Posner has described its work in this area in much greater detail here. She writes:

If Noebel seems stuck in time with his fearmongering about a fifth column of “reds” aiming to take over America, his protégés continue to reinterpret his conspiratorial thinking in ways that reverberate throughout the conservative movement—despite the embarrassment over conspiracy theories from some conservative journalists. Noebel himself acknowledged the thread running from his activism to the Tea Party movement. “Most of them are evangelical Christian anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-statist... Michele Bachmann is one of their leaders and she certainly is a fine Christian gal and she’s got her feet in that camp big time.” And, he added, “I would say Ron Paul, for example, Ron Paul is more Christian than anything, to tell the truth.”

Noebel’s influence can be seen in the work of a Summit alumnus who answered the Christian Right call for evangelicals to create their own media and entertainment enterprises to replace secular ones. Noebel makes an appearance in the propaganda film Agenda: Grinding America Down, produced by former Idaho state legislator Curtis Bowers, who recently won the Christian Reconstructionist San Antonio Christian Film Festival. As a youth, Bowers and his family spent summers at Summit, which he described recently as “such a valuable and important thing that was helping turn America back to God and the Bible."

Noebel has been a colorful character for sure, and will remain a surefire source for quotable quotes for historians documenting the cultural conflicts of the 1960s/1970s. But he should remain of interest for his considerable influence on influencing the rhetoric and positioning of a substantial sub-group in contemporary politics. This far predates the Tea Party, and while off or under the radar for a couple of decades, its day is here -- again.

And if nothing else, that's good for business here at RiAH, and it primes the pump for interest in the new book by Randall and the forthcoming masterpiece (American Evangelicals and the Politics of Apocalypse, under contract with Harvard U. Press) from Matt.

Meta #Metta; or, If You Want World Peace, Pay Your Parking Tickets

Paul Harvey

It's official: Ron Artest (forward for the Los Angeles Lakers) has changed his name to Metta World Peace. I do not find it quite as clever as the 1970s classic change of Lloyd Free, who proclaimed himself "all-world," to "World B. Free," but it's certainly more effective than Prince changing his name to something that no one could say, and then changing it back.

"Metta is going to be the first name and it means like friendship, love and kindness," Artest told Stephen A. Smith on 710 ESPNLA earlier this month. "World Peace is going to be the last name, so everybody can get ready to buy their World Peace jerseys."

Hidden in this story, however, is a far more important moral, and indeed a lesson for us all:

"Artest's initial request to change his name last month was delayed because of a failure to pay an outstanding parking ticket."

No word yet on whether Matt Sutton was involved in getting that parking situation rectified as quickly as it was.

Live long and prosper, Metta. And let us all remember that lesson about life's priorities. Pay your parking tickets, and then you may exercise your rights of religious freedom. (Might add, it also helps to avoid going into the stands to punch fans of the opposing team; just saying).

Fear Itself: Literary Reflections on 9/11

Paul Harvey

Editorial note: Over the past few days and continuing through this weekend, reflections, essays, and artistic responses pour in on the 10th anniversary of September 11th. I have written my own consideration historicizing our national response to the event for Religion Dispatches, and Kevin Levin has developed much further and more insightfully the comparison I draw between Civil War commemorations and 9/11 remembrances.

Just this evening I have been reflecting on Judith Weisenfeld's look at "The Ephemera of Commemoration," about "grassroots modes of mourning" which sprung up in impromptu 9/11 memorials to those murdered that morning; on Hussein Rashid's consideration of works of art since/about 9/11; on Randy Balmer's history lesson on why Ground Zero and lower Manhattan were sacred spaces for America's best pluralist ideals long before 9/11; and on Mark Silk's reminder of why memorializing the epochal events for an entire community work best as collective secular rituals that bring the community together, and not (as has happened already) as food fights over whose religious leader was or wasn't there.

One voice that will stick with me this weekend whom I had not heard before is that of Fekkak Mamdouh, the Morocco-born waiter at Windows on the World restaurant on the top floor of the Twin Towers, who spoke about the loss of dozens of his friends and co-workers that day and his life since 9/11 for the radio program The World today.

Mamdouh might have appeared as a character in Amy Waldman's powerful novel The Submission; as I blogged about a few days ago, don't miss Haroon Moghul's interview with Waldman. In trying to think about some of the major artistic literary responses to 9/11, I recently read Waldman's The Submission alongside Netherland, Joseph O'Neill's much-noted novel from a few years back. I read some other short stories and novels as well, including Don Dellilo's Falling Man, and listened to a variety of music that reflected on the day and its aftermath, but ultimately these two works stick with me the most.

The definitive artistic work may come in a future generation, but in the meantime, below is a consideration of O'Neill's and Waldman's moving novels on this anniversary weekend, along with some thoughts putting them with my favorite piece of popular music which beautifully reflects on our era of fear, Arcade Fire's Neon Bible. If nothing else, I hope the following short essay provides some food for thought on your own reflections and responses to that day and all that has come since.

__________________________________________________________

We were trying to understand . . whether we were in an apocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely pre-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington, and, for that matter, Moscow. (Joseph O’Neill, Netherland)

The fear is there, Paul. The fear is real . . People need someone to blame at a time like this. They’re not consoled by abstract notions of process. (Amy Waldman, The Submission)

I can taste the fear
Gonna lift me up and take me out of here (Arcade Fire, “Intervention,” from Neon Bible)

In his inaugural address in March 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt said that “this is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly.” He warned against “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” During the war, when reasons for fear were all too numerous, he proposed “freedom from fear” as one major plank of his “four freedoms.”

Since then, we’ve learned to fear fear itself. During the Cold War, fear became the basis of “security,” as well as the subject of a huge volume of artistic production which tried to understand how fear would shape democracy – what Ira Chernus has called the “national insecurity state.”

And again, in the last decade, we’ve learned to fear fear itself, in part because America’s civil religion of security and religious impulse towards boundaries of belief have embraced fear. Those fundamentally religious impulses – with all the complicated forces forming them, and the opposite if not quite equal reactions against them – have informed artistic productions reflecting on the events of September 11 and their years of aftermath. From Don DeLillo and Philip Roth forward now to novels and music emanating from post 9/11 America, artists have been drawn to fear as a theme which has color-coded our anxieties, shaped our politics, produced our wars, and deepened our divisions.

In our version of the day that will live in infamy, fear expressed through social conflicts and allegories of wonderful but unachievable neat resolutions drive the plots of two of the most engaging novelistic works addressing post-9/11 America: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (published 2008) and Amy Waldman’s new novel The Submission.

And the same notions drive many of the songs of the single best exploration of nameless fear in popular music of the last decade, Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible. On that recording, the fear is omnipresent and real, but unexplained and without a specific referent except that the tide is high, and it’s rising still/And I don’t want to see it at my windowsill.

“I’ve heard it said that the indiscriminate nature of the attack transformed all of us on that island into victims of attempted murder, but I’m not at all sure that geographic proximity to the catastrophe confers this status on me or anybody else,” Hans van den Broek, the narrator of Netherland, notes of the fact that on the morning of 9/11 in midtown Manhattan he watched televised images of the attack just as he would have done if he were in Madagascar. It’s the same observation about the mediated sensations of mass tragedy and mourning that Don DeLillo, our best novelist of “nameless fear,” would have made.

One’s interpretation here all depends on what the meaning of it is. It’s a nameless it that drives the lyrical prose of Netherland, as well, and that it compels the actions of many of the characters who step out of real life and from the green rooms of cable talk shows and into the pages of The Submission

From different ends of the 9/1l literary shelf, Joseph O’Neill’s and Amy Waldman’s novels explore the taste of fear and foreboding after 9/11, combined with a sense that the sheer everydayness of life and the foibles of human nature survive the most devastating of attacks.

And in both novels, reflecting a generalized American experience of the last decade, actual wars reside elsewhere. They are there to be commented upon, observed, argued about, and watched on the television screen. Of the invasion of Iraq, the oddly passive protagonist in Netherland simply comments “The war started. The baseball season came into view.” Hans, a Dutch oil futures analyst, tries to piece together a life taken apart by the events of 9/11, on the one hand, but more by his own passivity and inability to seize meaning in human relationships, on the other. “Hot” wars abroad scarcely matter.

America’s wars play little direct role in The Submission, either, but provide the indispensable backdrop for a plot exploring America’s conflicted relationship with religious diversity and media hype. The story follows the fortunes of Mohammed Khan (an architect and secular son of a Muslim immigrant from India who goes by the name “Mo” and prefers Chinese takeout food for his meals), the designer of “the submission” which has won the competition for a Ground Zero memorial. When the name of the winner is revealed to the competition committee, all hell breaks loose. From there, the novel follows a cast of recognizable character types, in a manner reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.

In writing The Submission, by her own account, Amy Waldman struggled to make her novel not seem quite so ripped from the headlines, but life kept overtaking her art. When the “Ground Zero mosque” controversy sprang up (a sequence which parallels the response to the revelation of Mohammed Khan’s winning the prize for the Memorial in the novel), she rewrote portions of the plot so that it would not seem quite so plagiarized from real life. She could not do that for Alyssa Spier, the tabloid reporter for a New York Post style paper in the novel. Despite the author’s best effort at satirizing the tabloid press, Spier comes across as a whiter shade of Rupert Murdoch’s pale, unable to match the cellphone-hacking shenanigans of the News of the World crowd.

While these novels take philosophically different approaches, from the most elegant/restrained to the most ripped-from-the-headlines full of action, one truth unites the two: outsiders, immigrants, and the marginalized ultimately understand America and represent it best. In Netherland, the rogue-hero is Chuck Ramkissoon, the cricket-playing and illegal lottery-organizing charming shyster who befriends the drifting upper-class Dutch immigrant banker. Hans van den Breuck believes he can take care of Chuck and his world of dark-skinned West Indian cricket players, who come out of their taxis and their bodegas to engage in cricket matches, but realizes later that “they’d already been looking after me.” Chuck’s dream, presented with gracious humor in the novel, is that the United States cannot fulfill its destiny as a carrier of civilization until it has embraced cricket. Chuck recognizes and wants to mass commercialize (in the form of huge sports stadiums) a renewed British Empire, only with America at the helm, even as he recognizes that cricket in America is underwritten by “the same agglomeration of unspeakable individual longings that underwrites cricket played anywhere—longings concerned with horizons and potentials signed or hallucinated and in any event lost long ago.” Cricket is their attempt to impose a religious order – one of clearly defined rules, rituals, and grace – on a turbulent America whose moves and motivations cannot be grasped or controlled.

Chuck is also the immigrant on the make, combining inspiring dreams with the gritty reality of running a shady lottery in his community on the side, the side job which leads to his being killed and body dumped in the river. By that point, the endpoint of the story which begins the novel, Hans has rejoined his wife in London, and in trying to explain Chuck to her unfolds the story which frames the novel. In replaying his relationship with his family, with America before and after 9/11, and with the cricket crew gathered around the central character of Chuck, he realizes that “we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.”

Both Netherland and The Submission give voice, in their stylistically contrasting ways, to the uglier underside of the entire decade since 9/11—the vast machinery of war blithely unleashed, the maddening car-alarm sirening of cable news, the hypocrisies both big and small of individual daily lives, the sensation-hungry press. O’Neill’s more lyrical, poetic prose expresses this best: “The rinsed taxis, hissing over flesh slush, shone like grapefruits; bit if you looked down into the space between the road and the undercarriage, where icy matter stuck to pipes and water streamed down the mud flaps, you saw a foul mechanical dark.”

The way that fears from contending places in the social fabric feed on each other, indeed need each other, is chronicled in journalistically skillful sociological detail in The Submission

The novelist takes satiric swipes at the recognizable character-types who depend on fear to maximize their own media exposure, but ultimately takes seriously the socially destructive role of nameless fears.Waldman chronicles the doings of everyone from obnoxious “headscarf pullers” harassing Muslim women, to high-society philanthropists who just want us all to get along, to organizers of media-ready groups such as Save America from Islam, to equally media-ready spokesmen of groups such as the Muslim American Coordinating Council, which uses the Memorial competition in the novel to promote its own interests. In the midst of the media hubbub, the original point of everything – the geometrically patterned garden that was to memorialize the victims of that day – is lost in a swirl of accusations that the design is a “martyr’s paradise” meant as a dog-whistle to jihadis across the world. Again, while the novel is meant to be parody, its painful humor in depicting what happens to Mo’s design seems more true to life than the real-life parody of the “9/11 Mosque” fiasco. In both cases, though, FDR’s warning against “nameless, unreasoning fear” seems swamped by the manipulations of fear by our media culture, and the ways those fears overtake even those who seek to poo-poo their power.

As the novel progresses, the real heroine emerges, the parallel (in part) in The Submission to Chuck in Netherland. In The Submission, it is Asma, a Bangladeshi woman and New York undocumented immigrant whose janitor husband had been crushed in the collapse of the Towers, and who later, after barely receiving acknowledgement and compensation for her husband’s death, realizes quietly that “there was no one to speak for her husband, for the army of workers who cleaned and cooked and bowed and scraped and when the day came died as if it were just another way to please . . . she couldn’t shake the sense . . . that history had only narrowly made room for him.” Asma’s encounter with her personal tragedy, losing her husband when the towers fell, and with being among the “uncounted” among the victims afterwards, shook her: “Faith for her had always been something like an indestructible building. Now she had spotted a loose brick whose removal could topple the whole structure, and her hand hovered near it, tempted, afraid.”

And yet, her entire experience makes her not fearful (even though she has every reason to be the most fearful of all, as the hand of the state investigates the details of her life and status), but the most bold in defense of Mohammed Khan’s submission for the Memorial of a geometrically patterned garden, with tufts of steel sticking up as tree branches in the center. At a media-made event in which “the families” can praise, vent rage at, or otherwise comment on the submission, Asma states her truths most simply and directly, chastising those who would fear fear itself: “The gardens of paradise are for men like my husband, who never hurt anyone. . . I think a garden is right . . . because that is what America is—all the people Muslim and non-Muslim, who have come and grown together. How can you pretend we and our traditions are not part of this place.”

Asma’s plea makes her a media celebrity, which exacts a heavy price. But hers is the voice that stays with the reader after the nonstop cultural chatter parodied in the novel finally fades to black.

The characters portrayed by Waldman ultimately build walls rather than gardens. They suggest the viscerally religious response towards exclusion and suspicion, a powerful force in American religious and political history. But Asma’s dignity through her tragedy suggests that America’s diverse religious and cultural fabric is too interwoven ever to be pull apart by the cultural tug-of-war fueled in part by the well-funded Islamaphobic kulturkampf of the nativist right. That’s a message of hope coming from a novel which deploys satiric characterizations of nameless fear to devastating effect.

Postscript: And it's a hope enacted by the myriad interfaith groups, conversations, meetings, and public forums which have happened over the last decade. Amy Sullivan has noted the importance of understanding religion in a post 9/11 world. Given the subject of this blog that is probably preaching to the converted, but after thinking through Amy Waldman's novel of ideas, that work seems more important than ever.

Fear and Loathing in Post 9/11 America: Amy Waldman's The Submission

Paul Harvey

Amy Waldman's new novel The Submission has hit the bookstore and amazon shelves at our moment of national reflection on the 9/11 anniversary. The book has been reviewed many places, too many to list here, and Maureen Corrigan glowingly reviewed the work today on Fresh Air, calling it a good candidate for America's 9/11 novel (beating out, in her mind, some other serious contenders by the likes of Don Delillo and Jonathan Foer).

I have written a piece about the novel, which will appear soon either here or elsewhere (will link to it or post it shortly). In the meantime, Haroon Moghul has conducted an insightful interview with the author and posted it over at Religion Dispatches.

The novel, in case you haven't seen or heard about it yet, follows the story of a competition for submissions to design the 9/11 memorial, two years after the day. When the winner's name is revealed -- Mohammed Khan -- all hell breaks loose, and the rest of the novel follows the story of all the contending passions, both real and media-made, which we've witnessed over the last several years. The novel certainly functions as social satire, as it intends to do, but as the book progresses there are many powerful passages which transcend the genre and give voice to powerful emotions in both the characters and the reader. The work asks difficult questions and doesn't provide any easy answers.

Here's a brief excerpt from the interview, and then follow the rest at the break. My own thoughts on the book (as well as on another very different take on post 9/11 New York, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland) will be posted soon.

The novel seems to intertwine tragedy and how we remember tragedy. It’s a very American story, obviously—but the aftermath of September 11 has affected the whole world. Do you think audiences outside America can connect with your story?

I do. As you say, what happened to America has affected so much of the rest of the world—both because of America’s response, and because of the debates about and within Islam that September 11 prompted. America, and the ideals it’s meant to represent, obviously cast a disproportionate shadow globally, and even though the novel is a fictional portrait of the aftermath of 9/11, I think it will resonate with all of the non-Americans who have followed the real-life version.

And many of the novel’s questions are universal: how do you decide what you believe, and how do you act on that? How do you balance loyalty to the dead and the living, to family and country, and to yourself? How do private histories or personal insecurities shape public dramas—and thus the course of history? The Submission is about all of that.

Continue reading here . . .

Religious Leaders and Gay Marriage

Randall Stephens

Several days ago NPR featured a story on "Pastor Debates Moral Issues Of Gay Marriage." In the wake of the legal decision in New York, news outlets across the country have been interviewing and polling pastors and congregants on the subject.

"The campaign for same-sex marriage and civil unions have already scored some significant legal victories recently," comments Michel Martin. "As we just heard a few minutes ago, Rhode Island just accepted a measure to allow civil unions for same-sex couples. Later this month, same-sex couples in New York will be legally allowed to marry. . . .

Bishop HARRY JACKSON, JR. [senior pastor of Hope Christian Church in Maryland just outside Washington, D.C.]: Well, I still believe that spiritually we're dealing with whether we're going to inculcate a pro-gay lifestyle culture. Nobody wants anybody to be discriminated against or hurt, in terms of employment or any of those kinds of things. I think in many places, the legal issues are settled. The moral issues still remain."

Beck's Long Goodbye

Kelly Baker



On this past Thursday night, Glenn Beck said goodbye to Fox News and television sets, and hello to GBTV, his internet news channel. Here's a recap of the last show involving Jon Stewart, Hitler, and God. Over at Religion Dispatches, I editorialize about his departure, his legacy of history-making, and his brand of nationalism. Here's a glimpse:

Much of the coverage concludes that Beck is, at best, “bonkers.” Alex Pareene of Salon.com, however, realizes that perhaps this is not “some sort of victory”; that leaving Fox is not the end of Beck, but rather that his legacy might not be as a talking head but as an amateur historian, the creator of Beck University, with a clear, and popular, articulation of nation. The tagline for BU promises, “learn history as it really happened” with David Barton responsible for courses labeled Faith 101, 102, and 103, in which students can (of course) learn about the faith of the Founding Fathers.

Beck’s mantle of telling history like it really “was” is packaged, glossy, and consumed. Yet this mantle, or even legacy, does not solely belong to him. The struggle to reclaim the nation, or “restore honor,” began long before he, the John Birch Society, Joseph McCarthy and the like joined it in the mid-twentieth century. Americans, from the Reconstruction Klan in the 1860s, the Know Nothings of the 1890s to the second Klan of the 1910s and 1920s, to home-grown Christian fascists of the 1930s, sought to protect a nation in peril from any perceived threat, be it Catholic, Jew, African American, or Communist.

Food and no Food

Randall Stephens

Eating . . . and not eating. Since the post from the other day was about religion and weight gain, here's another about relieving world hunger and fasting for a cause.

NPR ran an intriguing story the other day about Former Congressman and director of Alliance to End Hunger Tony Hall, who "has joined dozens of religious leaders and thousands of supporters to protest budget cuts that they say will unfairly affect the poor." It reminded me of George McGovern's talk I heard at the University of Florida nearly a decade ago. The lecture was sponsored by the History Department. McGovern pondered his religious upbringing, discussed what the US could do to alleviate hunger around the globe, and spoke briefly about how the 9/11 attacks were changing America and its relationships with other nations. (I'm also thinking of activist and ag specialist Glen Fell who spoke at ENC the other day on his work training subsistence farmers around the globe in an effort to reduce hunger.)

Back to the NPR piece:

Pam Fessler, "Ex-Congressman Fasts To Protest Budget Cuts," NPR, April 17, 2011

PAM FESSLER: Meet Tony Hall. A few weeks ago, the 69-year-old might have been called a little pudgy. Today, he hikes up his pants before he sits.

Mr. HALL: I am the executive director of the Alliance to End Hunger.

FESSLER: He's also a former Democratic congressman from Ohio who made headlines in the 1990s by going on a 22-day hunger strike. He was protesting what he saw as congress's failure to address the problems of the poor. And today?

Mr. HALL: Well, I'm in my 18th day of a hunger fast. I started off as a water-only fast and now I'm doing liquids. And really what we're trying to do is raise awareness.

FESSLER: So far, he's lost about 18 pounds. But Hall says it's not so bad, especially when thousands of people around the world die each day of malnutrition and millions of Americans worry about their next meal. He worries what will happen if lawmakers accept proposed cuts in food stamps and foreign aid.

Mr. HALL: They have a moral obligation when they look at this budget not only to cut the budget but to cut it in a righteous way. . . .

Pole Dancing for Jesus?

Art Remillard

"Pole dancing for Jesus." Seriously? OK, there's something wrong here. I mean, "Jesus Didn't Tap" is one thing. But this? It must be an April Fools joke. After all, it's posted on April 1. And Mr. "Wisenheimer" himself, Mark Oppenheimer, authored the story.

Alas, a quick Google search shows that, indeed, the former-stripper-turned-born-again-Christian Crystal Deans has in fact Christianized her pole dancing classes. And predictably enough, there are plenty of critics. "Pole dancing has transcended from strip clubs," blasts one blogger, who admits that it has become a more mainstream form of exercise, but objects to the lingering "sexual aspect."

Ah sex. Oppenheimer theorizes that this is the story's initial draw. "People are reliably called to attention by the promise of a little skin. And there is something extra naughty when the skin belongs to a Christian, presumed to be a good girl gone bad--the kind of girl who, to quote the old blues song, goes to church on Sunday, then cabaret all day Monday." Yet, in talking with Deans, Oppenheimer discovers someone who simply wants to redefine herself and others. "This has helped a lot of people," Deans explains. "It’s helped people with weight. It’s helped people spice up their marriages. It’s done a lot of good things."

As for the stigma of pole dancing? "I go to church every Sunday and I pray," says Deans . "I talk to God things like that I think there’s nothing wrong with what I do. I teach women to feel good about themselves, to feel empowered and we get in really good shape. God is the only person that judges so anybody who wants to judge me, feel free to but I'm good with God, so that’s what’s important to me and I really don’t care what people think."

So this curious case becomes an example of one person's effort to empower bodies and souls. No joke.

Contributors in the News

Paul Harvey

A brief note on some of the doings of our contributors here at RiAH.

First, John Fea is busy on a speaking schedule in support of his new book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?On part of that tour he appeared at the Virginia Festival for the Book, and his panel there is now up on the C-SPAN website (it was shown on C-SPAN 2, that harvest of riches for book geeks everywhere).

Contributor Jon Pahl has been traveling the world, engaging in interfaith dialogues, currently in Jakarta. You can follow his travels at his blog, linked above.

Chris Jones is celebrating surviving his comprehensive exams, not to mention making plans to be a father! Congratulations to Chris. Also on the graduate school front, contributor Heath Carter, whose excellent article about "scabbing ministers and striking saints" in the 1894 railroad strike recently appeared in American Nineteenth Century History, has been awarded the Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation fellowship to support his work next year.

Kelly Baker is tinkering with the title of her soon-to-forthcome book, now entitled Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, out soon with University of Kansas Press. Gerardo Marti's book on worship in multiracial churches (Worship Across the Racial Divide: Notions of Race and the Practice of Religious Music in Multiracial Churches) is slated to come out with Oxford, next spring I believe, and Art Remillard's book about competing visions of civil religion in the post-Civil War South (especially the "Wiregrass" South) will be out with University of Georgia Press around the same time. Meanwhile, Seth Dowland will be decamping from Duke cross country to Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA, where he will be a new assistant professor in the Religious Studies Department (correct me if I got the departmental affiliation wrong, Seth). Seth's book Family Values will be out with U. Penn Press next year we hope, and I hope many of you saw the preview for the book in his Church History article. And Lin Fisher, who's enjoying his year as an NEH Fellow at the Mass. Historical Society, is right at the end stages of finishing his terrific book The Indian Great Awakening, which Oxford will publish a bit down the road.

My co-blogmeister Randall Stephens is gearing up for his Fulbright in Norway next spring, where he will be a "Roving Scholar," while Ed Blum will be spending the year in Germany on a Fulbright as well. Meanwhile, Matt Sutton will use his recently awarded full-year NEH fellowship to work on his much-anticipated text about fundamentalism and politics since the 1930s. It's been a good year for Young Scholars.

As for me, I will be spending next year teaching a wonderfully light 3-4 load, directing 40 some odd senior theses, and writing to the NFL commissioner complaining about how the lockout has cancelled the fantasy football season, which is the only thing that gets me through the fall. As Historiann would say: Awesome!!!.

Oh, and after Glenn Beck's television contract with Fox runs out, he will be joining me as fellow blog-meister here at RiAH. So, please join me in welcoming Glenn to his new, highly-paid gig here at RiAH!! As you can see from the above, he will be joining an illustrious group of contributors.

The rest of ya'll, send your news.

Mapping Religious Life in the Five Boroughs

Paul Harvey

Earlier we blogged about a fascinating web venture, A Journey Through NYC Religions, run by a former Texan turned New Yorker who is endeavoring to map every house of worship, of every religious tradition, in the NYC metropolitan area.

In "Mapping Religious Life in the Five Boroughs," Mark Oppenheimer writes about this project, and spends some time with its creator, Tony Carnes, as he spots small mosques above Pakistani restaurants in Queens and the like. And read it now before the Times pay wall goes up. A little taste:

Along the way, Mr. Carnes, with three part-time assistants and other freelance helpers, is posting his findings online tonycreligion.info, his “public square,” he called it, where people can read about “the sizzle of religion in New York — the kosher sizzle! The halal sizzle!”

Mr. Carnes is in search of every church, cathedral, synagogue, shtiebel, mosque, temple, zendo and ashram. His crew gathers information by asking for it, in person. By the end of 2011, they will have driven every street in New York.

Oprah: Gospel of an Icon

Paul Harvey

Another day, another author interview -- I was hoping to do this myself somewhere down the road, but no longer necessary as Immanent Frame's "Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life" has done it for me.

Kathryn Lofton's new book Oprah: Gospel of an Icon, is just out -- and just out in time for Oprah's new network, in what must surely be a divine coincidence. Check out the interview about the book here, where the author speaks with her usual panache. A little excerpt:

NS: What is it about how American religious history is studied now that has left Oprah not well-enough understood?

KL: I would say that the “how” of what we study is less problematic than the way we cordon our topics, which is very much an inheritance of our role as seminary church historians. I want to see more books written about objects that seem unlikely for religious studies, such as those seemingly in the purview of pop culture, but also those from economic and political arenas. Moreover, I think our disposition toward our subjects is often too tender for our own good. If on the one side we’ve been formed by our seminarian genealogies, on the other we inherit an abused mentality, one that flinches constantly at the possibility that elsewhere in the humanist ranks we’re being mocked for proximity to the religious subject. And so we appear, I think, often too defensive of our topics, believing they need caretaking before exposure to the imagined Marxist menace. So, if there is a critical edge to the book, it is to goad us to be less worried about explaining our subjects to their cultured despisers, and instead pursuing the mediations of their belief systems, the multiple functions of their ritual reiterations, and the social systems to which they reply and in which they participate

Read more about the book here, and more on the author here.

The Fellowship of Christian Statesmen: From New Contributor Blake Renfro!

Today's post comes from another new contributor (a banner week for us along those lines): Blake Renfro, a graduate student working with Gaines Foster at Louisiana State University. Welcome, Blake!

The Fellowship of Christian Statesmen

by Blake Renfro

A short distance from our nation’s capital there is a modest old row house. A cohort of senators and congressmen live in the house while working in the city. They write their modest rent checks to a decidedly inconspicuous entity known as the “C Street Center.” A recent article in The New Yorker by Peter Boyer, entitled “Frat House for Jesus: The entity behind C Street,” examines the powerful evangelical group that owns the house. (Click here for an older Washington Post article on the same house).

“There’s this whole Washington phenomenon, related to access to power and the aphrodisiac of power,” says one of Boyer’s sources. This observation seems fair. Political culture is defined by ambition and status, but its concomitant religious culture proves more elusive. Ostensibly, individuals like Billy Graham and his successor Rick Warren address the nation’s moral conscious, while acting as personal counsel to the Washington political elite. Boyer’s article reveals a religious entity that seemingly defies this assumption. The C Street row house is one such facet of Washington’s religious culture that both caters to power and eschews it at the same time. The house is an ideal part-time residence for legislators, but it is also an “accountability group,” of politicians who “have pledged to hold one another to a life lived by the principles of Jesus.” The ministry that owns the house is partly funded by an organization known as “The Fellowship.”

The Fellowship was created in the 1950s. According to Boyer, it has become one of the most important evangelical organizations in Washington. Those of us familiar with religion in American life, know that religious groups of every type have lobbyists and activists on Capitol Hill. Born during the height of postwar ecumenism, The Fellowship sponsored the National Prayer Breakfast under the Eisenhower Administration, and it continues to this day. Of course, the main question is: Why haven’t we heard more about this organization? The answer is fairly simple. Doug Coe, the organization’s director for forty years, makes a concerted effort to keep the ministry out of the press. With a fairly modest budget of fifteen-million dollars, Coe and his small staff contribute to a variety of causes in Washington and throughout the world. Yet, the majority of their work “is interpersonal ministry to the powerful.” The Fellowship has established numerous small prayer groups throughout the city, which bring together politicians and bureaucratic officials. Unlike the preaching of more public evangelicals, Coe’s brand of Christianity is less concerned with salvation. The Fellowship focuses on shaping the morality of power and influence. Washington’s political culture might seem immoral, but Doug Coe believes he can persuade the powerful to live a life of humility and good character. He has won accolades from Ronald Reagan, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and many others.

Critics charge that The Fellowship is a secretive organization which hinders democratic ideals. In a recent interview on Fresh Air, the writer Jeff Sharlet suggests the organization has supported Ugandan legislation which would make homosexuality punishable by death. Sharlet ignores the rather broad reach of Doug Coe’s ministry, arguing that The Fellowship is merely a fringe movement that “recasts theology in the language of empire.” There might be some truth to this observation. But, The Fellowship has earned the respect of nearly every powerful politician in Washington. This phenomenon encourages us to reconsider the intersection of political and religious culture. Sometimes powerful leaders find solace from unlikely companions.

The C Street row house, despite its flaws, illustrates how democratically elected leaders seek resolution in their political differences. Boyer movingly recounts how, in the spring of 2000, Congressman Bart Stupak’s son committed suicide after a high-school graduation party. Laying their differences aside, his housemates from C Street comforted their friend. Tom Coburn, who accompanied Stupak to view his son’s body, concluded that, “There was no decision to be made. I mean, we had to get to Bart and just be there to support him. We had a contingent of ninety members of Congress come to the funeral. And what they got to see was something they hadn’t seen in a long time: Here’s three Republicans and two Democrats lovin’ a brother through a problem.”