Sex Talks

by Elesha Coffman

As noted in Carol Faulkner’s post on American History Now, John McGreevy named “religion and sexuality” as a neglected research topic. I don’t have a broad enough knowledge of scholarly trends to affirm or question this judgment, but sexuality certainly hasn’t been a neglected topic at Princeton University this week. By coincidence, two scholars visited campus to discuss new work on religion and sexuality, and while the presentations were quite different, they both reflected a combination of concerns that have become pervasive in the field—the linguistic turn and attention to religious practice.

On Monday Christy Gardner, associate professor of communication at Wheaton College, gave a public lecture (sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion) on her new book Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns. Her central argument was that evangelicals gained traction for their abstinence message, which is preached at flashy events sponsored by parachurch organizations including True Love Waits, Silver Ring Thing, and Pure Freedom, by shifting from negative to positive rhetoric. Out: The “just say no” approach, accompanied by nit-picky lists of what the abstinent may not do. In: A creative appropriation of feminist ideas, promoting chastity as an empowering choice for young men and women, a way to reclaim control over their bodies in defiance of an MTV culture that insists teens are helpless slaves to hormones. Alongside this analysis of why abstinence rhetoric works (though the programs don’t always work, delaying sexual debut for some teens some of the time), Gardner provided comparisons with evangelical abstinence programs in Africa. In that context there is less emphasis on personal empowerment, largely because Africans do not experience their lives as a succession of free choices.

On Thursday Bruce Dorsey, chair of the history department at Swarthmore College, visited the religion department’s weekly American Religion workshop to share insights from his works in progress on two sex scandals in the 1830s, both involving evangelical clergymen. In 1833, in what was at that point the longest trial in American history, an itinerant Methodist minister named Ephraim K. Avery stood accused of impregnating and then murdering mill worker and fellow Methodist Maria Cornell. He was eventually acquitted, but this verdict, like so many others in high-profile cases, stirred rather than settled debate. In 1835 a Christian Connection revivalist named Eleazer Sherman was tried in an ecclesial court for making sexual advances to young men. Sherman was unapologetic, casting his actions as examples of Christian brotherhood, but the other ministers involved hastened to discredit his ministry and distance themselves from him as much as possible. Dorsey interpreted these scandals as evidence of shifting cultures of work, gossip, gender, and sexuality in the new republic. At a time of so much mobility, with so much in flux, scandals marked the collision of different sets of expectations. The fallout from those collisions radiated in all directions as people newly connected by print and popular culture attempted to make sense of what happened.

Though both presentations attended to religious leaders—albeit entrepreneurial ones whose success owed little to credentials or formal, institutional support—Gardner and Dorsey followed the “lived religion” track in focusing on ways religious ideas play out in the everyday. What’s it like to sit in a strobe-lighted room full of teenagers yelling, “Sex is great”? How does this make sense to them? Or, what sorts of behaviors occurred when nineteenth-century revival preachers shared close quarters on the road? If different men perceived the same behaviors very differently, as in the Sherman case, why?

The more striking commonality between the presentations, to me, was their concentration on rhetoric and narrative. (Granted, Gardner is a rhetorician, not a historian, but I didn’t find her presentation that different from something I might hear at AAR or ASCH, so for the purposes of this discussion I’ll count her as one of us. I hope she doesn’t mind.) In response to expected questions from the audience, Gardner was able to give statistics on the abstinence programs, but her real interest was how people talked about sexuality—at rallies, in testimonies, in small groups, in Africa. Similarly, while Dorsey has spent enough time with the literature of the Avery case to form definite conclusions regarding who did what to whom, he was more interested in storytelling, especially the blurry line between Christian confession and gossip. When was a tale of sexual misbehavior evidence of contrition to nineteenth-century evangelicals, and when was it grounds for ostracism, even prosecution? Misreading that distinction could be extremely dangerous.

Perhaps now that attention to practice (including, often, deviant practice) and language has become widespread in the field, a surge of scholarship on religion and sexuality is on its way. I might get to test that hypothesis next week, when the CSR, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the Center of Theological Inquiry sponsor a conference on the 400^th anniversary of the King James Bible. Goodness knows there’s plenty of racy stuff in there.

American History Now, American Religious History Now

by Carol Faulkner

I first read The New American History (originally published in 1990) in graduate school. Its early 21^st century counterpart, American History Now, edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, is now available from Temple University Press, and perfect for a new generation of graduate students studying for exams. The essays survey the state of the field, emphasizing new historiographic trends across and within chronological periods. In this edition, included among the “Major Themes,” is John T. McGreevy’s essay on “American Religion.”

McGreevy explains the impetus behind this inclusion of American religion with an amazing fact: “more historians now identify themselves as historians of religion than as social historians, cultural historians, or even political historians.” And kudos to our blogmeisters for this site, which, McGreevy observes, “steer[s] the scholarly conversation.” (And, somewhat surprisingly, this may be the only reference to a blog or other internet resource in the entire book).

But McGreevy notes something unusual about American religious history: “The term ‘field’ may be a misnomer. Fields mean coverage, certainly, but at a practical level fields are defined by arguments as much as by the day-to-day trudge of the survey course. And in American religious history courses, and the scholarly literature upon which they rest, arguments are elusive.”

I have been thinking about those lines since I read them. Do others agree? If so, what does this tell us about the study of American religion? Despite its newfound popularity, even centrality, to American history, is it underdeveloped or undertheorized?

McGreevy acknowledges different methodological approaches, dividing those focused on “lived religion” and those attempting to integrate religion into “the main narratives of American history.” But, as McGreevey writes, the “field’s organizing principle is diversity,” the dynamic and vast “marketplace” of religions.

This edition includes a cheering essay for women’s and gender historians. In her article on the field, Rebecca Edwards states that “The real triumph of women’s history, then, can be found elsewhere in this volume: almost every author, whether writing on a specific period or a major themes in American history, incorporates findings in women’s and gender history.” McGreevey’s essay is a good example, mentioning scholarship by Kathleen Cummings, Ann Braude, Catherine Brekus, Victoria Brown, Anthea Butler, Maureen Fitzgerald, Marie Griffith, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Amy Koehlinger.

And, for graduate students searching for a dissertation topic, McGreevy notes that “surprisingly little scholarship has appeared” on “religion and sexuality,” though he praises two studies, Leslie Tentler’s Catholics and Contraception and Cynthia Gorney’s Articles of Faith.

What do you think of McGreevy’s essay on the “field”?

Beyond the Protestant Nation: Religion and the Narrative of American History

Paul Harvey

We hadn't yet posted notes on the Saturday and (dreaded) Sunday morning sessions at the AHA in Boston, more on that forthcoming. But we definitely want to highlight one session of huge significance, which unfortunately got stuck in the no-man's-land of the Sunday morning (Jan. 9) at 8:30 a.m. slot at the AHA. Despite the unfortunate time placement, the panel "Beyond the Protestant Nation" ought to be one of the most interesting of the whole conference, and certainly of great interest for American religious history/studies scholars. I'm pasting in the abstract below, with the following note from panel organizer Chris Cantwell of Cornell University:

"The round table grew out of a conversation Orsi and I repeatedly return to, where it seems that scholars who work on Protestants are able to make far bigger claims about American history than historians who work on other religious traditions. The protestant work ethic, for example, tells us about the foundations of America's capitalist ethos. Catholic street feste, however, tell us about immigrants; not about America. Out of this conversation Bob and I put together a round table that features scholars who do not work on traditionally defined Protestantism to ask how would the American historical narrative change if we gave the questions and concerns of non-Protestant religions the same interpretive strength as Protestantism receives."

Here's the abstract:

Beyond the Protestant Nation: Religion and the Narrative of American History

American historians, like their counterparts in other fields of historical inquiry, have become increasingly interested in integrating religion into our historical narratives. Prominent religious figures now appear in survey courses; we see theological ideas contributing to the formation of political philosophies and programs; and we use popular ritual practices to convey the culture of an era. But in studying the most religiously diverse country in the world historians have implicitly perpetuated an interpretive hierarchy of American religious life that inflates the illuminating power of certain religious communities and circumscribes or even ignores the historical (and historiographical) contributions of others. For instance, exploring the contours of the Protestant work ethic or evangelical conceptions of the state tell us, scholars argue, about the foundation of America’s capitalist ethos or our core political values. Catholic street feste to particular saints or changes within Reformed Judaism, however, are about urban culture or the immigrant experience—about Catholics and Jews, not about “America.”

This roundtable seeks to bring the deeply rooted Protestant and religious presuppositions of American historiography to light to challenge its assertions. Historians who insist on the historical primacy of Protestantism (singular) are not describing the past; they are implicitly reproducing a particular nationalist ideology that has long equated the identity and wellbeing of the United States with “Protestantism.” “Protestant,” moreover, entails assumptions about the kind of religiosity that has been consequential in American history. Embedded in the enduring and unchallenged identification of America as “Protestant” is an implicit argument about religion and modernity that endorses specific ways of being religious. Jewish orthodoxy, Mormon revelation, Catholic devotionalism, spiritualist meetings, Pentecostal tongue speaking, and other ways of being religious are excluded or defined as historically marginal.

This roundtable proposes to invert this interpretative hierarchy to ask how the American historical narrative change if the historiographical questions and concerns of non-Protestant religious groups were given national significance. What questions would rise in importance? What questions would decline? How would our periodizations change? In short, the round table seeks to ask what it would mean to re-imagine the American historical narrative from a more robustly plural religious perspective—not to include other religious idioms in our stories, but to rethink the narrative itself from a post-“Protestant” perspective? The round table convenes a number of scholars who work on religious traditions other than “Protestant” to explore this question of a post-Protestant historiography. Lila Berman considers the consequences of Protestant paradigms in Jewish studies, where authors have contorted Jewish beliefs to underline their seamlessness with America’s “Protestant” values. Wallace Best argues that assumptions about the Protestant nature of African-American religiosity have obscured the spiritual beliefs of admittedly secular and non-believing black activists. Robert Orsi suggests that the way Catholics have been “American” demands revisions of the idea of a singular American modern. Catherine Albanese asserts that though loosely organized and poorly defined, metaphysical religiosities have been a potent “third force” in American history that has inflected and shaped much of what we see as purely mainline and evangelical Protestantism. Richard Bushman highlights the distinctive perspectives Mormons brought to many phases of American history and how these have engaged and shaped the contours of the nation.

Though each participant brings a particular insight to the panel, the roundtable hopes to put these perspectives in conversation with the audience to explore the possibilities of a post-Protestant historiography as a field.