Who Has a Religion? Baker and Wenger on Definitions of Religion in the 1920s

by Edward J. Blum

“Get anything good for Christmas?” a friend nonchalantlyasked several days after J.C.’s birthday. My enthusiastic response, “Oh yeah, abook on the Klan; was actually reading it Sunday morning listening to acousticsunrise,” was met with irritation in the form of disinterest. The friend didn’treally care what I had received, and he didn’t really want to entertain aconversation about the Klan. He shot back, “weird.” I, of course, was blind tohis hopes for distance and pressed in. “It’s really neat, the author takesseriously the religious ideas of the Klan – from their white robes to theirsense of American history and exceptionalism.” Sadly, the conversation went theway most of mine go with non-academics. The harder I tried for him to see how fascinatingthis was, he just didn’t care, and once again retorted, “yeah, just soundsweird.” At this point, I got it and turned the conversation to a religiousinterest everyone seemed to share: Tim Tebow and the magical run of the DenverBroncos.

 

I’ve had enough conversations with non-academics who seem togo into snooze mode when I invade their worlds with the past, but I still feltsad that my pal would rather talk about a mediocre quarterback for a mediocreteam than about heritages of hate and what they mean for our nation. But evenmore, I was bummed that my friend did not want to understand that what we thinkabout “religion” influences even stories like that of young man Tebow.

Of course, the book I was trying to tell my friend about wasKelly Baker’s Gospel According to theKlan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930. I don’t want torehearse its main arguments here – how GospelAccording to the Klan looks not just at what the Klan was against, but alsoat what they were for, how it showcases the ways in which their whiteProtestant nationalism pervaded their sense of manliness, femininity, andhistory, or how the Klan’s print culture was so crucial to their sense ofidentity and imagination. Those are all excellently fleshed out in the book andshown so nicely through the Klan’s public writings.

What I would like to draw our attention to is how ProfessorBaker’s study and a slightly older book, Tisa Wenger’s fantastic We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (2009), provide anotherlayer of religious division and redefinition during the 1920s. Wenger showsthat the 1920s conflicts over Pueblo dances became moments when notions of“religion” collided. For the United States government, religion was somethingdistinct and somewhat separable from other spheres of life, but many Pueblo hadno sense of that division. As white modernists who were sympathetic to thePueblo rallied to their side, they helped create the idea that the Indian danceswere “religious” and hence should be protected against federal legislation bythe First Amendment. Yet by forcing American governmental approaches toreligion upon the issue and by defining one aspect of Pueblo behavior asreligious, they helped sever the totality of Pueblo life into supposedlydiscreet parts (religion, land, politics, society, etc.) Thereafter, Nativeclaims to land, remains, or treaty recognitions have been battled on the legaland religious terrain established by the American government.

We all know the 1920s as a time of religious dissension anddebate. Modernists and Fundamentalists raged against one another; Bryan andDarrow battled at the “trial of the century” in a small Tennessee town; SisterAimee Semple McPherson polarized the West with flappers and Pentecostals on oneside and liberals and the mainline on the other. Together, Baker and Wenger addanother layer – the layer of religion itself. In both cases, the verydefinition of “religion” was up for grabs. In Baker’s case, contemporaries ofthe Klan tried to demolish them as non-Christian or as makers of a false faith.The Klan tried hard to create a viable religious worldview, and for an“Invisible Empire,” they sure made it visible in their print culture and publicperformances. For Wenger’s folks, Native American life had to be atomized sothat certain elements could be construed as religious. By obtaining a“religion,” the Pueblo had to give up some of their definitional control.

So to my friend who would rather talk Tebow than Klan robes,I understand. It is less mentally strenuous to debate the case of Tim Tebow –whether accuracy is as important as admiration, whether completion percentagesmatter more than charismatic personhood, or whether we should privilegecomebacks over Christian being. But if we want to get to the core of Tebow orany other fascination rendered “religious” in America, we can get a little helpfrom our friends Kelly Baker and Tisa Wenger. See you all in Chicago.

Robert Jeffress and the History of Anti-Mormonism

Paul Harvey

Earlier this year John Turner reviewed for our blog Patrick Mason's new book The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South, a book foreshadowed in an outstanding article in the Journal of Southern History.

Good time to be reminded of this again while Mitt Romney endures the latest round of this particular ugliness. Over at Religion Dispatches, Joanna Brooks interviews Mason, and the two discuss the various stages of anti-Mormonism in American history -- from violent vigilantism in the mid-19th century, to the adoption of the "cult" terminology in the 1960s and 1970s (a word that my students still use to describe anything in religion that strikes them as vaguely weird or outside their experience), and more recently to "organized anti-Mormonism," reflected in the comments of the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas. A little excerpt:

That helps me understand the edge I hear in the contemporary caricaturing of Mormonism as a “cult.” It’s not just theological differentiation. There’s an edge to the accusation. It’s a residue of the anti-Mormon violence of the nineteenth century.

Yes. Once Mormons drop polygamy in the late nineteenth century, anti-Mormon violence stops. Violent anti-Mormonism disappears, whereas African-American lynching does not. But latent ideas of Mormons as polygamists continue to dominate the Southern imagination.

Usage of the word “cult” as a descriptor for Mormonism picks up steam in the 1960s as a reaction to new religious movements like the Moonies, Jonestown, Scientology, and so forth. It also indexes a feeling of eroding religious authority on the part of mainline and evangelical Protestants who have had a custodial relationship to culture in the American South. Beginning in the 1960s, with greater secularism, there comes a sense that this Protestant custodial relationship is under threat. “Cult” becomes a catch-all phrase to catch new and unrecognizable religious movements.

Mason also discusses the role that anti-Mormonism also plays for church authorities (to label dissenting views or mild criticisms as "anti-Mormon"), and praises Mitt Romney's handling of the latest controversy.

Bland is Beautiful: In Defense of Religious Moderation

Paul Harvey

I'm pleased today to host a guest post from Professor William Egginton, who is Andrew Mellon Professor of the Humanities at The Johns Hopkins University, where he also chairs the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literature. Egginton's new book is In Defense of Religious Moderation: click on the link for a brief summary of the book's major thesis. Egginton's post may be read profitably in conjunction with David Hollinger's discussion of Robert Putnam's and David Campbell's massive sociological study American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, posted today at Immanent Frame. Hollinger finds particularly compelling the "demonstrable tension between intensity of belief and pluralistic tolerance," where the "beauty of blandness becomes visible." Egginton provides a philosophical exploration of the kind of religious (and secular) moderation which questions the existence of a "master code" which provides the source of all human knowledge. I would also remind you of David Stowe's wonderful post about David Hollinger's OAH presidential address, in which David talks about the two religious sides of his family, one more conservative and one more mainstream or liberal, and how his family's experience suggests much about the American debate between ecumenicists and evangelicals, and more broadly between religious Americans and secular Americans.

Egginton's work was just published this summer by Columbia University Press, and his post is particularly timely here after the events in Norway and yesterday's commemoration of 9/11, both of which suggest that the ancient ideal of moderation still has an awful lot going for it. The excerpt below comes from chapter three of In Defense of Religious Moderation, published this summer with Columbia University Press -- the press which will also very soon, in just a few months, be publishing our rather thick new reference volume The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, co-edited by myself and Edward J. Blum.

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How Religions Become Fundamentalist
by William Egginton

A conclusion from what I have argued so far would seem to be that fundamentalist thinking, whether religious or otherwise, has always existed, even while it has been accompanied by ways of thinking that undermine it or criticize it from within. This conclusion, however, contradicts some recent work in the history of religions that suggests that fundamentalism, contrary to how it is often perceived in popular culture and the media, is a profoundly modern phenomenon. Karen Armstrong has made this argument by distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge, which she expresses with the Greek terms mythos and logos.

Whereas mythos refers to a holistic knowledge that is metaphoric at heart, logos designates a focused, pragmatic kind of knowledge best exemplified by specific problem solving. Whereas mythos forms the basis of our cultures and their self-understandings, their sense of right and wrong, of what is heroic or abhorrent, what to be admired and what to be ashamed of, it makes no pretension of describing physical objects and their functioning. Logos, in contrast, is the kind of knowledge that tells us a lot about the physical world we inhabit; it comes from observation and experimentation and permits us to intervene in highly successful ways in our environments.

For Armstrong, both kinds of knowledge have their respective places in any society. A society that tries to solve practical problems through the application of mythos, however, is bound to run into serious problems. Likewise, the use of logos to regulate every aspect of human cultural, spiritual, or psychic life has the potential to do great harm. In this light, she goes on to claim, modernity can be seen in some ways as the ascendancy of logos over mythos; where Western and other cultures had traditionally valued both forms of knowledge, the creative, metaphoric, all-encompassing weltanschauung of mythos and the pragmatic, problem-oriented, representational thinking of logos, modernity and the success of the scientific revolution led to an almost total suppression of mythos from the realm of “serious” intellectual endeavor. Rather than valued as another realm and way of articulating beliefs, mythos came to signify a childlike and obsolete attempt to explain the world, an endeavor now pursued to far greater effect by the scientific method.

As the Western logocentric worldview grew in power and influence during the scientific revolution, areas of social and personal life that used to be approached under the aegis of mythos were dealt with as if they were objects to be manipulated. The assumption began to dominate intellectual circles that every aspect of existence, including cultural practices and human desires and beliefs, could be explained through objectively discoverable physical laws. While this assumption did indeed lead to some breakthroughs in medicine, psychology, and economics, it also produced its own excesses. As I point out in the next chapter, a society that denies that humans have a cultural and psychical existence that is not reducible to physical causes risks alienating aspects of existence that humans cling most desperately to. Arguably some of the worst political atrocities of the last century, specifically those stemming from certain interpretations of Marxist “scientific materialism,” were direct results of this kind of thinking.

The other effect of an excess of logocentric thinking has to do with what happens to the sorts of beliefs usually contained in mythos when mythos is denied as a valid category of experience. This, according to Armstrong, is the origin of the specifically modern phenomenon of religious fundamentalism. Faced with a uniformly logocentric standard for truth claims, defenders of religious faith begin to interpret religious texts and teachings in a way that had never been normal practice before, namely, literally. Already in the seventeenth century Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps the greatest scientific mind before Einstein but also a religious fanatic, had become obsessed with purging Christianity of mythical doctrines. Since Newton could understand doctrines like that of the Holy Trinity only in literal terms, he could make no sense whatsoever of them, unlike the earlier Gregory of Nyssa, who found in the Trinity an image he could use to express “the unnameable and unspeakable.”

Such a backlash, in fact, is at the origin of the term fundamentalism, which was coined by U.S. Protestants in the early years of the twentieth century as a rallying call against mainstream theological tendencies such as the so-called higher criticism, which had been emphasizing a return to more nuanced and metaphorical interpretations of the liturgies since the late nineteenth century. Already in the 1880s, Dwight Moody had founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago in an effort to defend against the higher criticism. And between 1910 and 1915, the oil millionaires Lyman and Milton Stewart funded the publication of twelve paperbacks called The Fundamentals, which sold some 3 million copies. Fundamentalism was born.

Whether Christian or of other faiths, the movements we call religious fundamentalism are always the result of a perceived attack on a given community of faith. This is one reason why the attempt to regulate or restrict religious practice, what the new atheists are in essence calling for, has always resulted in and can only result in more fervently held beliefs, often in the form of fundamentalist backlash. In other words, when secularists criticize all religion, the unintended consequence of their actions is strengthening exactly that aspect of religious belief and practice that is ultimately at odds with modern, democratic values.

This dynamic can be seen in Europe today as modern, secular states like France grapple with the Islamic practice of veiling women. Far from successfully inculcating a sense of equality between men and women of all faiths, attempts to restrict public demonstrations of religious affiliation like the veil have led to backlashes, such that many women who wear it today in Western countries like France are doing so as a sign of cultural identity and anticolonial sentiment. Likewise, we tend to view the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” which was eternalized in the 1955 play and 1960 film Inherit the Wind, as having revealed the depths of belief in creation science already present in fundamentalist communities. But as Armstrong has argued, before the Scopes trial few fundamentalists actually believed in creation science or thought it particularly important to do so. Creation science became a hot-button item for the fundamentalist movement only after William Jennings Bryan’s defeat in court by Clarence Darrow was ridiculed by the journalist and essayist H. L Mencken, who wrote in an obituary for Bryan that he “lived too long, and descended too deeply into the mud, to be taken seriously hereafter by fully literate men, even of the kind who write school-books.” In the face of such humiliating condescension, groups tend to close ranks around tenets and practices that define them as different from the outside world. . . As with the Christian case, Islamic fundamentalist movements have emerged largely as a backlash against enforced modernization and perceived humiliation, with the added aspect of violent political repression not present in the Christian case. . . .

For Karen Armstrong, the fundamentalist backlash in religions since the dawn of modernity has constituted a kind of perversion of the original essence of these faiths. She claims that most if not all the faiths that are widely practiced today originated in what she calls following Karl Jaspers the axial age, the time between more or less 900 and 200 b.c.e. when the major tenets of all the world’s principal systems of thought emerged, albeit in different parts of the world. She includes in this list Confucianism and Taoism in China; Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Many of the ethical insights of these different traditions are the same. They all, for example, produced some version of the golden rule, which was designed to eradicate the egotism that had brought societies at the time into crisis and which is still at the heart of just about every religious and ethical system in existence today. In their religious manifestation, axial faiths therefore all require kenosis, or the self-emptying essantial to some theological interpretations of Christian love.

Another axial principle is that of the ultimate transcendence of the universe, whether conceived of in material or spiritual terms. In other words, the axial traditions agreed that, however we conceive of the world, no human can ever be understood as having the last word; knowledge is an infinite process. At their core, then, the world’s religions were never about doctrine or the literal interpretation of the divine will but about generosity and tolerance for others. When they have degenerated into dogma, they have betrayed that original purpose.

As religions have developed and evolved they have also stagnated and grown sedimented layers of dogma. In the face of social conflict they have become fortresses of group identity and been deployed to measure purity of commitment and foster intolerance for others. But despite these changes religions carry with them the core of their original purpose. I have mentioned how the Judaic and Christian theological traditions emphasize the ineffability of God’s ultimate knowledge, but the Koran too insists that God communicates through symbols because thought cannot contain him, and no revelation can be definitive. Furthermore, the Koran also holds other faiths to be authentic, and Muhammad told his followers to pray toward Jerusalem because the God they prayed to was also the Jewish and Christian God.. . .

As mentioned, popular culture and the media tend to think of religious fundamentalism as a kind of embarrassing leftover from a less-informed, less-educated past. As Nicholas Kristof, a columnist whom I deeply admire, wrote in a recent column about the increase of troops in Afghanistan, “It breaks my heart that we don’t invest in schools as much as medieval, misogynist extremists.” I certainly understand Kristof’s point, but while the Taliban are indeed misogynist extremists, there is nothing medieval about them. Prior to the onset of modernity in the sixteenth century, and especially prior to the expulsion of the Jews and later the Moors from Christian Spain, European thought benefited immeasurably from the intermingling of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian intellectual and theological traditions. While religious intolerance was no doubt also an issue during the Middle Ages, it is a gross mistake to associate religious fundamentalism with bygone times.

. . . At the core of all fundamentalist thought is the belief that the world exists as a kind of knowledge, that it can be known as it is in itself if only we learn to read the code. While this belief has existed in many cultures at many times, one of the functions of the axial religions was to undermine that conviction, to teach people that the transcendent nature of ultimate reality was such that no human could ever, in principle, come to know the ultimate truth. What is crucial to grasp is that this core principle simultaneously sustains the existence of mythos and logos as two separate but equal domains of knowledge; for if the ultimate, all-encompassing questions are by nature infinite, if human knowledge in principle cannot grasp everything, then practical, objectifying logos is simply not relevant to such discussions, and the holistic, metaphoric standards of mythos have their place. Likewise, to the extent that modernity has allowed mythos to be pushed aside by the practical successes of the scientific method, the axial principle of the transcendence of ultimate knowledge has been weakened. But it is this principle that more than any other works to defend humanity from the dangers of its own certainty. It is for this reason that modernity’s privileging of logos over mythos, in Armstrong’s terminology, has paved the road for a specifically religious fundamentalism, namely, by weakening that aspect of religious traditions that have been the most effective critical weapon they have against the fundamentalist impulse: moderate belief.

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.

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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 . . .

First Prejudice Revisited

Earlier in the year, Paul and Randall both blogged about Chris Beneke and Christopher Grenda's edited collection of essays, entitled The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

Six months late to the conversation, I recently read selections from the volume and found it by far the most stimulating collection of essays on American religious history I've read in years. Thus, anyone who shies away from edited volumes should overcome that prejudice and get a copy immediately. The essays will prove a valuable resource for anyone teaching or studying the history of American religion.

A few of the many highlights:

- John Corrigan's analyzes the New Englander reimagination Native Americans as Amalekites whose destruction God had commanded. This was entirely new to me. [I especially appreciated the closing reference to an 1844 newspaper editorial that applied the Amalekite analogy to Mormons and Catholics].

- Susan Juster's essay on the prosecution of religious crime in Early America provided me with a wealth of anecdotes for my Am Rel Hist survey next semester. Nothing like a fresh story about a blasphemer being repeatedly bored through the tongue to get students' attention.

- Richard Pointer very thoughtfully analyzes white Protestant American responses to native religious practice. Pointer avoids simplifications, noting circumstances in which white Americans tolerated, appreciated, and even adopted aspects of native religion and other instances (especially in New England) in which white communities suppressed religious practices.

- Anyone wanting a brief but very helpful primer on colonial American anti-Catholicism ("antipopery") should read Owen Standwood's essay.

My apologies for not mentioning the many other fine essays. As Paul earlier noted, the collection is unusual for its coherence and for the fact that many of the authors reference and engage the work of their co-contributors.

The collection closes with two gems, essays by Beneke and Christopher Grasso which arrive at rather different conclusions about the progress of post-revolutionary religious freedom in the United States.

From Beneke: "It was Error of Fact better to be a religious minority in the United States in 1780 than in colonial America in 1750; better in 1800 than 1780; and better still in 1850 than 1800." Mormons and Catholics in the 1840s would probably have questioned at least the "better still in 1850 than 1800" portion of Beneke's thesis. If one is going to commit what Beneke labels the sin of "Whiggism," better to sin boldly, as Beneke does. Actually, Beneke sins rather carefully and makes a strong argument that "something ordinarily considered 'progress' occurred, and that it was enduring." No more boring of tongues.

From Grasso: "The idea that a deist, skeptic, or freethinker could be a virtuous neighbor and a patriotic American citizen remained nearly as controversial by the middle of the nineteenth century as it had been at the end of the eighteenth." So much for Whiggism. Grasso's essay includes a splended account of freethinker Abner Kneeland's 1838 travails. The fact that Kneeland "lectured twice weekly before an audience of as many as two thousand people" and had 2,500 subscribers to his newspaper, though, suggests a relatively high degree of religious freedom beyond mere toleration. Between these two closing essays, there is much food for thought and room for debate. As a whole, The First Prejudice presents a wealth and diversity of original, primary source research coupled with smart analysis and nuance. It should become a standard read for graduate students in American religious history and a model for future edited collections.

"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.

Judeo-Catholic-Protestant America

Chris Beneke

Kevin Schultz’s Tri-Faith America begins with the story of a priest, a rabbi and two Protestant ministers. It might be the first line of a joke, but it's deadly serious. The four chaplains were aboard the U.S.S. Dorchester when it was sunk by a German torpedo in February 1943. They all went down with the ship, prayerfully, arm-in-arm after having given their life jackets to sailors who lacked them.

The sacrifice of the Four Chaplains represented something of a landmark in the history of American religious comity. These men were "celebrated ... as emblems of the new tri-faith nation." Yet, as Schultz shows, Americans were already prepared to appreciate the larger significance of their heroism because of the ecumenical groundwork that had been laid over the previous decade by the anti-prejudice proselytizing of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), which confronted a revitalized Ku Klux Klan and a swelling, virulent strain of Western antisemitism in the 1920s and 30s.

Schultz's assiduous research demonstrates that the NCCJ wasn'tmerely engaged in a half-ass exercise of holier-than-thou idealism. During WWII alone, the organization sponsored traveling "tolerance trios"--consisting of a rotating roster of priests, rabbis, and Protestant ministers--who visited nearly 800 military installations and addressed 9 million Americans. This was missionary work on a par with the massive evangelizing and Bible distribution efforts undertaken by American Protestants during the Civil War.

In the early postwar period, such everyday features of American culture as films, manners, and educational programming were shaped by the tri-faith model that the NCCJ had so carefully cultivated. Postwar liberalism was in turn infused with the mostly tolerant and religiously derived moral imperative that went by the name of the "Judeo-Christian tradition."

Upon this somewhat narrow foundation, postwar Americans would adopt broader conceptions of tolerance that included a larger range of religious groups. Religious bigotry and discrimination certainly didn't disappear, but they were largely driven from public life by the early 1960s. Though groups such as the NCCJ proved slow to promote civil rights for African Americans, the trope of inclusion that they popularized resonated throughout the 1960s. Meanwhile, before the Judeo-Christian tradition was appropriated by the Religious Right in the 1970s, it was employed by Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders to discredit racist institutions and policies in the 1950s and 60s.

There were deep, intangible costs accompanying the triumph of the tri-faith ideal, which Schultz details. Among them was the loss of communal identity by Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Also endangered were some of the vibrant, distinctive traditions within each of these larger faith categories. Prophecy withered as ecumenism bloomed.

Still, Schultz provides us with an unapologetically progressive account. He makes clear how profoundly important religious differences were to early twentieth-century Americans and how tirelessly some worked to transcend, or at least mediate, them. Tri-Faith America gives religious tolerance its due as a crucial component of postwar liberalism. In this, it represents a sharp rebuke to the fashionable idea that American religious freedom and religious tolerance have been little more than subtle exercises in coercion

An Interview with Chris Beneke on The First Prejudice

Randall Stephens

About a week ago Paul blogged on Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda's, The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2011). The edited volume, "presents a revealing portrait of the rhetoric, regulations, and customs that shaped the relationships between people of different faiths in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It relates changes in law and language to the lived experience of religious conflict and religious cooperation, highlighting the crucial ways in which they molded U.S. culture and politics." I recently caught up with Chris by email and asked him some questions about the project and the work being down on tolerance/intolerance.

Randall Stephens: What is the unifying theme of The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America?

Chris Beneke: Our title, The First Prejudice, plays on the popular understanding of religious liberty as the nation’s “First Freedom.” It also draws on the proposition that religion was initially the source of the deepest prejudice to afflict early Americans and the object of the first large-scale efforts to mitigate prejudice. We asked our contributors to be attentive to the distinguished and extensive historiography on church and state, but not beholden to it. The idea was to create a history of religious tolerance and intolerance that took into account a broader range of religious and cultural interaction than histories of religious liberty have traditionally done. For us, it presented an opportunity both to build a compelling new narrative of early American religious history-where religious differences are at center stage-and to develop a common set of reference points and questions that would frame more useful conversations about tolerance and intolerance in America.

Stephens: Why did religious tolerance develop in the West when and where it did?

Beneke: In a sense, it depends on what you mean by tolerance (I know it’s annoying when historians say that, but there, I’ve gone and done it). If you mean what Willem Frijhoff calls “everyday ecumenism,” or at least everyday cooperation and non-violence, then it’s very old indeed. Historians have been hard at work in the archives over the past two-plus decades, discovering that sort of tolerance in surprising places across medieval and early modern Europe. But as a commonly accepted ideal, as a stated commitment to some form of equality, and a legal practice that guaranteed a modicum of protection, tolerance is something that developed in the intellectual capitals of northern Europe during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And though I risk irritating my intrepid co-editor and some contributors by saying this, I think that it took hold in a much more fundamental and irrevocable way in the early national United States.

Stephens: When it comes to religious tolerance did the early United States differ all that much from Great Britain and western Europe?

Beneke: Here's the very short answer: official church establishments persisted across most of Europe into and beyond the twentieth century. In the United States, they did not. The U.S. may have maintained an unofficial Protestant establishment for many decades (via instruments such as the common law, public education, state religious tests.), but the fact that it was un-official and the fact that it was accompanied by substantive protections for free exercise, was critically important. For all the disingenuity involved, an un-official establishment was surely more hospitable toward religious minorities than almost any official establishment might have been. Maybe just as importantly, the commitment to disestablishment and religious liberty meant that the religiously intolerant had to explain themselves and find ways to wrap bigotry in the mantle of tolerance.

These factors have always kept American religious intolerance in check.

Stephens: How did particular religious groups or individuals "wrap bigotry in the mantle of tolerance"? Are you referring to anti-Catholic crusading in the mid-19th century?

Beneke: That’s a very good example. One common theme in American religious history is the excoriation and the marginalization of the allegedly intolerant, a point that John Corrigan and Lynn Neal have recently made well. Roman Catholicism is a prime example. Mormonism is another. More recently, it’s been Islam. Of course, as the controversies over burqas in France illustrate, we aren’t alone in this. In general, however, if you want to limit religious violence and religious discrimination, it’s better to have strong public norms in favor of tolerance, than not.

Stephens: It seems that the scholarly literature of tolerance/intolerance and the religious/irreligious roots of America's founding can't help but be tied to contemporary debates about church and state. Could you say something about the connection between the history being written on these subjects and the current debates about religion in American public life?

Beneke: I really hope that people who have a say in the decisions on these issues today-including judges and law clerks-will read The First Prejudice. But it would be a poorly prepared judge or law clerk that read only our book. As much as we sought to engage the literature on church-state relations, our conclusions were about seventeenth and eighteenth-century people who lived in a very different world.

Having said that, I think there are some scholars-notably Sarah Barringer Gordon and Tisa Wenger-whose recent books connecting religious studies and religious history to church-state issues resemble ours and do speak directly to larger questions about religion in modern public life. Steven K. Green and David Sehat have also expanded our appreciation for the subtle ways in which freedom can be limited, even under conditions of formal disestablishment. But our collective, comparative attention was focused on early modern Europe. It’s partly for this reason that The First Prejudice supplies a broader (if I were immodest, Randall, I would say “essential”) context for historians who are looking at the intentions of the founders and the political, cultural, and juridical legacies that developed thereafter. It’s just not possible to understand the reasoning behind the First Amendment, and similar provisions made in the states, without knowing a good deal about the contemporary meaning of religious liberty, the contours of religious interaction, the landscape of different faiths, and the social conditions that regulated relations between them. That’s what our contributors provided. Brilliantly.

Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America

Paul Harvey

Congratulations to our contributor Chris Beneke, and to Christopher S. Grenda, whose edited anthology has just come out: The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

(Incidentally, a shout out to U. Penn Press, which has been putting out great stuff in American religious history over the last several years, ranging from this book to Janet Lindman's Bodies of Belief to Ed's religious biography of Du Bois to Steven Miller's study of Billy Graham).

Chris has posted here before on some recent scholarly discussions on religious tolerance and intolerance generally in the early modern world, a subject that has produced a number of landmark scholarly works in the last few years. And quite a long time ago we blogged about this particular book, then in its "forthcoming" state (click on the link for the table of contents), and blogged also about Chris's seminal text Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism.

With this new edited anthology, featuring twelve essays from many of the top scholars of this subject, the conversation continues. I'll have more to say about this volume later after I have time to digest all of it, but suffice for now to say that it provides just the kind of first-class scholarly analysis that one would hope for, and will be an absolutely essential text for university libraries. Perhaps most importantly, the editors don't try to elide or explain away the differing arguments put forth by the various authors, but include a sterling introduction which explains and sets in context some of the major debates in this field. The editors propose a "co-existence" framework, one that was neither "tolerant" nor "intolerant" per se, and then suggest a research agenda that should warm the hearts of historians: get thee to the archives!

If this volume can bring mainstream religious history and its focus on identity and practice into a fuller dialogue with the traditional concerns of church-state history and its focus on ideology and law, it may become possible for teachers and scholars to communicate more confidently about the history of tolerance and intolerance in early America. There is hard work ahead. To understand how religious differences were lived in early America, we may need to resuscitate a long neglected tradition in American religious historiography: town and parish studies. That would mean renewed attention to local records . . . It would also entail investigations of the many sites where inter-religious interaction took place, including the unlikely places that recent cultural and social history has equipped us to probe such as homes, shops, taverns, and the streets.

In short: playing around on Google Books is no substitute for the hard historical research required in exploring this topic.

The editors are self-consciously bringing together two disparate forms of inquiry which have been pursued simultaneously but without a lot of dialogue in recent years: the social history of religion in early America (including lived religion), and the intellectual/constitutional studies of church and state, primarily concerned with ideas rather than everyday behavior. The editors explain that the authors of the chapters in the anthology "depart from both recent scholarship on the history of religious culture and the venerable study of church-state relations by their willingness to relate changes in law and rhetoric to the social experience of religious differences across British America and the early United States. They gaze broadly across the vast expanse of tolerance and intolerance in America, at the many varieties of persecution and the various manifestations of toleration, at the groups that were immediately affected by constitutional guarantees of religious liberty, and those that were not." The intent is to help "identify intersection points where the tangle of regulations, rhetoric, and customs that governed relations between early American faiths can be addressed without reflexively defaulting to the languages of toleration, religious freedom, or church and state."

Any number of recent works, including David Sehat's Myth of American Religious Freedom and the edited primary source anthology Religious Intolerance in America, have documented the substantial history of religious intolerance/repression in American history, while much older scholarship and newer works such as Chris's Beyond Toleration have explored the history of relative freedom and toleration. The dialogue continues renewed and afresh in this terrific new anthology. For my own research interests, I especially appreciate the inclusions of essays by Jon Sensbach and Richard Pointer on what "toleration" meant for Natives and African Americans. The last two essays, by Chris Beneke and Christopher Grasso, provide wonderfully contrasting examples of "America's moderate religious revolution," on the one hand, and the "boundaries of toleration and tolerance" experienced by religious skeptics and "infidels," on the other.

Thanks to these our brethren: George Washington on Religious Civility in Wartime

by Chris Beneke

General David Petraeus’ warning this week about the dangers posed to U.S. troops by Koran burning in the states brings to mind a notable incident in American religious history. Amid the siege of British-occupied Boston in 1775, the recently appointed commander of the Continental Army, General George Washington issued an order that must have resulted in some grumbling in the ranks. For decades, English and American Protestants had burned effigies of the Pope to celebrate the thwarting of (the Catholic) Guy Fawkes' attempt to blow up Parliament on November 5, 1605. Bostonians marked the anniversary in a particularly lively way that featured fireworks, two flammable "Popes," and one grand fistfight. But in November 1775, with Catholic support for the American war effort desperately needed, an irritated Washington ordered his soldiers to forgo their beloved Pope's Day festivities. The words that he included in his orders may be worth recalling:

As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form’d for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope – He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain’d, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America: At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.

The campaign in Canada didn't end well. But Washington's sentiment--that we have good friends, of different faiths, aiding us against a common enemy--might still be of some value.

New Scholarship: Opposition to Polygamy in the Postbellum South

by Edward J. Blum

For those of you still living in the present, I know this is a hard and confusing time. Reports of President Obama as a Muslim, debates over Ground Zero, and the start of the semester can trouble our souls. Perhaps you need an intellectual refuge. If you do, grab the current edition of the Journal of Southern History and read Patrick Q. Mason’s fantastic article on anti-Mormonism in the South <“Opposition to Polygamy in the Postbellum South,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 3 (August 2010): 541-578)>. It’s a terrific study of how white southerners rallied against polygamy from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the twentieth century. Sure, it’s not a fun story (it involves murder and mayhem just like most aspects of American history), but the essay offers a lot to think about from the past.

More on the Lower Manhattan Mosque

Randall Stephens

Following up on Paul's post . . . (and apologies for more on a topic that many readers here are probably sick to death of) I paste below some recent comments on the lower Manhattan Mosque debate. There seems to be as much ranting and raving out there as actual calm, reasoned discussion. (Watch the overheated Aug 16 debate on PBS's NewsHour.) Obviously for some politicians the whole issue is a tar baby. Others hope to score big cultural cognition points by sounding off on it.

I've been wondering why more pundits have not been asking some basic questions, like . . . why are so many Americans--60% to 70% polled--so easily equating all of Islam with terror and with the 9-11 attacks? Every Southern Baptist is certainly not an abortion clinic bomber.

Weighing in:

"Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the holocaust museum in Washington"* - Newt Gingrich

"As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practise their religion as everyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community centre on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances."* - Barack Obama

"The First Amendment protects freedom of religion. Senator Reid respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else."* - Office of Senator Harry Reid

"Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn't it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate."* - Sarah Palin

"In every religious community, one of the things that has happened over the course of immigration is that people get settled and eventually build something that says, 'We're here! We're not just camping.'"* - Diana Eck

"You can study Islam at virtually any American university, but you can’t even build a one-room church in Saudi Arabia. That resistance to diversity, though, is not something we want to emulate, which is why I’m glad the mosque was approved on Tuesday."* - Thomas L. Friedman