bald blogging, miscellaneous musing, random reflection

God's Own Party: Interview with Daniel K. Williams, Part 2

2010-12-29T11:12:00.003-06:00

BB: You are one of a number of scholars writing about the Christian Right, thoughtfully archiving and critically reflecting on its history (and in many ways what is happening currently). For interested readers, how do you situate your work alongside other scholars of the Christian Right?

DW: Most of the other studies of the Christian Right that have been published recently (or that will soon appear in print) are narrower in scope than my work. Darren Dochuk has produced a highly insightful study of evangelical political mobilization in California during the postwar era, and Steven Miller has published an excellent study of Billy Graham’s role in creating a Republican South. Other scholars have studied the Cold War’s influence on the Christian Right, the place of megachurch pastors in contemporary political culture, or gender issues in conservative evangelicalism, among other topics. Many of those studies are excellent resources, and I think that readers who are interested in the topic may find it helpful to read those works alongside mine. I am certainly the beneficiary of a larger trend in the profession that is giving new attention to political conservatism and religion in postwar America. I have gained a lot of insights from conversations with other scholars in the field and from the works that they have produced. I look forward to more studies of conservative evangelicalism from emerging scholars in the field during the next few years. But most of these studies do not offer the breadth that my survey of the movement does (nor do they claim to do so).

My work is the most comprehensive, broadly based narrative history of the Christian Right currently in print. As a result, I think that my work highlights connections, long-term trends, religious nuances, and diversity within the movement that previous studies may have overlooked. One of the central themes of my book is that the contemporary Christian Right has deep historical roots. It did not emerge merely as a reaction to the cultural shifts of the 1970s. Instead, its success depended on alliances with the Republican Party and religious developments that had started decades earlier. In order to understand the Christian Right, one must understand something about the fundamentalist movement of the 1920s, the impact of World War II and the Cold War on conservative Protestants, and the division – and then reconciliation – between fundamentalists and evangelicals in the 1950s, as well as shifts in their understandings of race, gender roles, and the place of Catholics in the nation. I think that my work provides this.

I also emphasize the partisan history of the movement to a greater degree than most other scholars do. A central theme of the book is the argument that the Christian Right’s success depended on its alliance with the Republican Party, so the story of the Christian Right is essentially the story of the making of this alliance. Thus, my book draws on the archives of presidential libraries and evangelical publications to trace the development of this partisan alliance in much greater detail than most other works on the Christian Right do.

BB: As one who has studied the Christian Right for a decade a more, you are in a unique position to consider claims that the Religious Right is in decline, or perhaps dead (due to the 2006 midterms, and the 2008 election of Barack Obama). Yet as you point out in the closing chapter of God’s Own Party, evangelicals like Rick Warren maintain conservative theological positions but embrace a kind of social gospel that allows activist collaboration across party lines. At the same time, the emergence of Sarah Palin as a national political figure (and celebrity) of the Christian Right suggests a possible return to the combative style of recent Christian Right politicians. Given the long history of the Christian Right, how do you assess these assertions? In this regard, what might the 2010 midterm elections portend for the future?

DW: Few political movements have been pronounced dead as many times as the Christian Right has. And few have experienced so many unexpected resurrections. Pundits proclaimed the Religious Right dead at the end of 1982, after the Moral Majority was unable to prevent Democratic victories in the midterm elections. They said the same thing in 1989, when Pat Robertson’s lack of success in the Republican Party presidential primaries, the collapse of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and the high-profile scandals of several leading televangelists left the Christian Right temporarily leaderless. But on both occasions, the pundits who proclaimed the end of the Religious Right were surprised to see it emerge with even greater strength than it had had earlier. Ralph Reed’s success with the Christian Coalition in the 1990s put to rest any notion that the Christian Right was in decline. Similarly, when the Christian Coalition faded from the scene, Focus on the Family and other organizations quickly stepped into the void. I argue that the cultural polarization that led to the Christian Right’s emergence will assure its longevity even in the absence of national leaders. Christian Right organizations will come and go, but the cultural polarization that produced the movement is not likely to end anytime soon.

Nor are evangelicals likely to leave the Republican Party in the immediate future, despite some pundits’ assertions to the contrary. Despite an unprecedented outreach to evangelicals on the part of the Democrats, approximately 73 percent of white evangelical voters – and an even higher percentage of those in the South – voted for John McCain in 2008. Conservative evangelicals have invested too much in the Republican Party to leave it, and Democrats have not yet found a way to appeal to more than a minority of evangelicals. Even among evangelical voters under the age of 30 – the ones that the Obama campaign thought it had the greatest chance of reaching – approximately two-thirds voted Republican in 2008.

I do think, though, that we may see a shift in political style. While many younger evangelicals are still politically conservative, they have less patience for the strident culture war rhetoric associated with an older generation of Christian Right activists, such as Pat Robertson and James Dobson. Rick Warren may represent a new type of conservative evangelical leader. Warren tries to downplay his partisan preferences and avoid overt politicking, yet he is still strongly opposed to abortion and same-sex marriage, and he has not been afraid to take those beliefs into the political realm.

BB: What projects currently occupy your time? What might interested readers expect from the pen of Dan Williams in the future?

DW: My next book project will be a comprehensive history of the pro-life movement from the early 1960s to the present. I plan to discuss how and why the movement organized, who its leaders and activists were, and why the movement was able to achieve some degree of success in transforming the nation’s political debates and shifting Americans’ opinions on abortion even though the pro-life movement itself was often plagued with bitter internal divisions. I will discuss why pro-lifers ultimately mobilized on the right despite their early efforts to win the support of liberal Democrats, and why their relationship with conservative politics has often been uneasy. I also plan to analyze the divisions in the movement between Catholics and Protestants or between moderates and radicals, and how those debates have affected the movement’s history. Most of all, I want to examine the pro-life movement on its own terms, as a self-perceived struggle for human rights. Previous studies of the movement have often portrayed the debate over abortion primarily as a gender issue, and as a result, I think that they have overlooked key aspects of the pro-life movement that are critical to understanding its full history. As the first comprehensive scholarly history of the movement, my book will break new ground in this area.

I am also co-editing (with Laura Jane Gifford) a book on conservatism in the 1960s. Our anthology will present the latest scholarship on the transformations in the conservative movement that occurred during that decade. Our focus will be on local and transnational trends that have previously been overlooked in the focus on movement leaders. Instead of focusing on National Review or the leaders of the Republican Party, we want to examine what sorority members on southern college campuses or working-class women in Boston were doing during the 1960s that led them to abandon their Democratic Party heritage and embrace the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

God's Own Party: Interview with Daniel K. Williams, Part 1

2010-12-18T10:03:00.005-06:00

Baldblogger presents part 1 of an interview with Dan Williams, author of the recently published God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford University Press, 2010).

There are posts on his book over at Religion in American History (here and here), and John Fea at The Way of Improvement Leads home offers his take here. There's also a great audio interview at Barry Lynn's site Culture Shocks. Dan is an assistant professor of history at the University of West Georgia.

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Baldblogger (BB): God’s Own Party maintains that in order to understand evangelical political ascendancy vis-à-vis the 1980 presidential election, one must begin by examining the culture wars of the 1920s. Briefly connect the dots for us. Why is it important to consider this historical trajectory in order to understand evangelical Christianity and modern Republican politics? Does this perhaps help to explain your choice of subtitle—The Making of the Christian Right—as opposed to The Making of the Religious Right?

Dan Williams (DW): The contemporary Christian Right subscribes to a particular view of the relationship between Christianity and the public sphere that can be traced back to the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century. Fundamentalists of the 1920s believed that secular influences threatened the nation’s Christian identity, and that if Christians did not enter the political arena to defend the nation’s Christian values, the nation would face divine judgment and possible destruction. The conservative evangelicals who formed the modern Christian Right in the late twentieth century held this same view of America’s unique religious identity and the necessity of preserving the nation’s Christian values by fighting secular influences through politics. The culture wars of the late twentieth century were thus very similar to the culture wars of the 1920s.

Even some of the particular issues at stake in those culture wars were similar. Fundamentalists of the 1920s were concerned about sexual licentiousness, changes in gender roles, the state of the family, and the secularization of public education. Evangelicals in the 1970s and 1980s were concerned about these same issues. That’s not surprising, because late-twentieth-century American conservative evangelicalism was a direct theological descendent of early-twentieth-century fundamentalism. In fact, many of the conservative evangelical leaders of the late twentieth century had parents who had called themselves “fundamentalists” and had identified with the fundamentalist movement of the 1920s. Some had even worn that label themselves before exchanging it for the less pejorative term “evangelical.”

My book traces the story of evangelical political activism from the early twentieth century to the present, because the Christian Right is deeply rooted in the evangelical politics of the previous three generations. I think that some studies of the Christian Right have underestimated the connections between late-twentieth-century evangelical politics and those of an earlier era, but I think that one contribution that a historian can make to this discussion is to trace that political lineage.

Media reports of evangelical political activism in the 1980s commonly used the term “Religious Right” to refer to the movement, as though it were generically or ecumenically religious rather than distinctively Christian. During the 1990s, the phrase “Christian Right” became more common, perhaps because of the use of the term “Christian” in the most prominent Religious Right organization of the decade, the Christian Coalition. Today both terms are commonly used.

In my view, the term “Christian Right” is a more accurate descriptor, because the movement’s theology and worldview have always been distinctively Christian. Nearly all of the movement’s leaders have been evangelical Christians. Although a few Orthodox Jews and a number of conservative Catholics support some of the Christian Right’s goals, the movement’s leadership has always come from a rather narrow range of evangelical Christian denominations. And the movement’s history can be understood only in the context of the history of twentieth-century conservative Christianity, especially evangelical Protestantism.

BB: Can you briefly discuss pertinent moments in the history of the Christian Right where gender and race (either separately or together) figured (and/or figure) into this movement?

DW: The divisions between fundamentalists and evangelicals over race and civil rights prevented a unified, politically influential Christian Right from forming in the 1950s and 1960s. Although fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell, Bob Jones, Jr., John R. Rice, and Billy James Hargis were becoming increasingly active in conservative politics at the same time that mainstream evangelicals such as Billy Graham were, the two groups were at odds over racial desegregation. In 1964, fundamentalists mobilized on behalf of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed President Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act, but many evangelicals supported Johnson.

Fundamentalists and evangelicals did not come together on issues of race until the end of the 1960s. At that point, fundamentalists were ready to abandon their defense of segregation, while evangelicals who were upset by urban race riots were ready to distance themselves from the civil rights legislation in the interest of maintaining “law and order.” Both groups united in support of Richard Nixon.

Race was thus a factor in delaying the formation of the Christian Right, but when the Christian Right mobilized, its leaders claimed to be completely racially tolerant. However, the presence of former segregationists, such as Jerry Falwell, in prominent positions of leadership in the movement alienated many African Americans. The Christian Right found it very difficult to reach out to non-whites, despite the efforts of Falwell, Ralph Reed, and others to do so.

If the Christian Right took steps to portray itself as racially tolerant and distance itself from its segregationist past, it made no apologies for its conservative record on gender issues. The culture wars of the 1970s largely revolved around issues of gender or sexuality, and the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment was one of the movement’s earliest political causes. In the battle against the ERA, conservative evangelical women united with conservative Catholics to oppose feminism and protect traditional gender roles. Women played a leading role in mobilizing the Christian Right, but they did so as defenders of a “separate spheres” ideology of gender roles that was directly opposed to the gender egalitarianism of feminists and cultural liberals.

BB: Integral to understanding the history of the Christian Right is the fascinating history of communication styles and communication technologies of the 20th and 21st century. How did (and do) evangelicals and partisans of the Christian Right use print culture and visual culture—and in our own times social networking technology—to present their message, attract new followers, and in general attempt to impact American society?

DW: In the 1950s, politically active fundamentalists and evangelicals were masters of the use of radio and television. Jerry Falwell’s success on television, first in his own community and then nationwide, was one of the primary reasons for the rapid growth of his church and his fundraising ability. Fundamentalist radio broadcasters of the 1950s spread an anticommunist political message on hundreds of stations throughout the South and Midwest. Magazines also played a central role in spreading the gospel of political conservatism. Christianity Today promoted a moderately conservative Republican brand of politics among evangelicals, while the Sword of the Lord championed a more overtly right-wing political ideology among fundamentalists.

In the 1970s, televangelism and, to an even greater extent, direct mail, gave pastors such as Falwell a national political platform that they had never had before. Computer-generated direct mail allowed them to mobilize followers and raise money on an unprecedented scale. By the end of the 1970s, Falwell was raising more money per year than the Republican National Committee.
Evangelicals were also masters of the printed word. The bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s was not The Joy of Sex, Roots, or All the President’s Men, but was instead Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth. James Dobson became a household name among evangelicals primarily through his books, which sold millions of copies, and his radio program Focus on the Family, and he then used his national reputation as an author and Christian radio show host to become an influential political lobbyist. Francis Schaeffer was another bestselling evangelical author of the 1970s who used his books to shape evangelicals’ political thinking. In more recent years, Tim LaHaye, a former board member of the Moral Majority, has done the same with his Left Behind series of novels about the end-times.

BB: In your account of the history of the Christian Right, the 1990s seems to be an important and somewhat overlooked decade. How does the history of the Christian Right in the 1990s explain the making and unmaking of George W. Bush?

DW: During the 1990s, the Christian Right became far more effective at legislative lobbying than it had been before. Most of its gains in that decade came through the success of Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition. Before Reed and Pat Robertson formed the Christian Coalition in 1989, the Religious Right had received a lot of national publicity, but it had not had much success in influencing Congress, getting legislation passed, or even reshaping the Republican Party. Reed was determined to change that. Instead of seeking a national stage, as Falwell had done, he worked quietly at the local level to move state Republican parties to the right. By the mid-1990s, the Christian Coalition controlled more than one-third of the state Republican parties in the nation.

Reed then used that influence to elect social conservatives to Congress. By the late 1990s, congressional Republicans were far more conservative on social issues than they had been a decade earlier, and the GOP was becoming the party of the Christian Right. But this was not enough to ensure the success of the Christian Right’s agenda. When Congress passed a Partial-Birth Abortion Ban, President Bill Clinton vetoed it, and when conservatives in Congress impeached Clinton, he survived the attempt to remove him from office. Christian conservatives ended the decade frustrated, but more determined than ever to elect one of their own to the White House.

Several Christian Right leaders considered George W. Bush the perfect candidate. He was a born-again believer who read his Bible every day and was not shy about praying in public. He seemed to have a genuine opposition to abortion. He also had the name recognition and connection with business leaders and economic conservatives to allow him to win the nomination. In other words, he was not Pat Robertson or Gary Bauer, evangelical candidates who never had a serious chance of becoming president.

Eventually, though, many evangelicals became frustrated with Bush when they felt that he was not following through on his promises to them during his second term in office. Although Bush did give evangelicals the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban that they had long sought, his administration was not able to deliver most of the other items that they wanted, including a Defense of Marriage amendment to the Constitution. Evangelicals discovered that even when the White House and both houses of Congress were in their hands, they could not change the cultural direction of the nation. Politics alone could not curb the nation’s growing acceptance of gay rights, for instance.

W.E.B. on the Web

2010-12-15T14:40:00.002-06:00

About a year ago, I conducted an interview with the eminent historian Gerald Horne about his new biography of W.E.B. Du Bois. Read part 1 of that interview here, and part 2 here.

In recent weeks the magazine Political Affairs has interviewed Horne as well. Part of the interview comes as a podcast, with the full interview, "W.E.B. Du Bois in Global Contexts," available here. This interview of course highlights Du Bois's politics, but Horne also discusses Du Bois's international, Pan-African vision of the world.

Divided by Faith: A Decade Retrospective

2010-10-14T09:03:00.003-05:00

The Divided by Faith: A Decade Retrospective conference begins tomorrow afternoon.

I'm giving a presentation on the history of Divided by Faith--the book’s impact among scholars, accounting for its impact in the fields of American religious history and religious studies. Second, I gauge Divided by Faith’s influence within evangelicalism, examining how it prompted additional studies of racial justice. Finally, I end my presentation by reflecting on Michael Emerson’s continuing narrative about race, religion, and evangelicalism through subsequent books such as United by Faith and People of the Dream.

A big thanks goes to historian Rusty Hawkins and the folks at Indiana Wesleyan University for all of their work! You can find an updated conference schedule here.

Investigating Race and Religion in American History and Culture

2010-05-21T09:52:00.006-05:00

I recently received word about this important conference (also posted here):

The John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University invites proposals for an interdisciplinary conference commemorating the tenth anniversary of Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith’s groundbreaking book, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, to be held on the campus of Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, on October 15-16, 2010.

The conference will begin Friday evening with a dinner and panel discussion with Michael Emerson on the impact Divided by Faith has had on scholars and church practitioners. Professor Emerson will also present a closing address Saturday afternoon.

Divided by Faith’s influence has been felt among a variety of academic disciplines. Over the past decade, scores of historians, sociologists, and theologians have produced scholarship intersecting with the book’s theme of the power of race in American religion. American religious historians have explored the roots of segregated churches, sociologists have undertaken further investigations into ethnic and racial divisions of American congregations, and theologians have produced works suggesting that the days of racialized evangelicalism are numbered. Ten years after its publication, the scholarly ground initially tilled by Emerson and Smith’s book remains fertile for researchers from multiple disciplines. In recognition of the growing scholarship being generated in this area, the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University invites scholars working broadly on the overlapping topics of race and American religion to participate in this conference marking the tenth anniversary of Divided by Faith’s publication.

Successful proposals may consider a variety of topics related to the general theme of the intersection of religion, race, and American society. Proposals should include an abstract of approximately 500 words and a CV. Submissions from scholars and advanced graduate students working in sociology, history, theology, or other relevant fields are encouraged. Presented papers may also be considered for publication in an anticipated interdisciplinary volume on the influence of race in American religion. A limited amount of funding for travel may be available to students and scholars who are unable to obtain funding from their own institution.

Proposals must be received by July 15, 2010, and should be sent by email to rusty.hawkins@indwes.edu or by post to John Wesley Honors College c/o Rusty Hawkins; Indiana Wesleyan University; 4201 S. Washington; Marion, IN 46953.

Summer School 2010

2010-05-18T22:41:00.008-05:00

With final exams graded and the semester over, it is now on to summer reading--leisurely excursions through new works, and pouring over documents for writing projects--along with some class preps. And some reading for this seminar.

1. I'm reading Laurie Maffly-Kipp's Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories, a work that investigates the ways black Americans forged identities and documented pasts. According to the Harvard University Press web site: "Asserting a role in God’s plan, black Protestants sought to root their people in both sacred and secular time. A remarkable array of chroniclers—men and women, clergy, journalists, shoemakers, teachers, southerners and northerners—shared a belief that narrating a usable past offered hope, pride, and the promise of a better future. Combining Christian faith, American patriotism, and racial lineage to create a coherent sense of community, they linked past to present, Africa to America, and the Bible to classical literature. From collected shards of memory and emerging intellectual tools, African Americans fashioned stories that helped to restore meaning and purpose to their lives in the face of relentless oppression."

2. Delving into political history, Thomas Sugrue's Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race is a short but weighty account of race in Barack Obama's campaign for the White House and his early months as President. As the Princeton University Press web site states, "Sugrue traces Obama's evolving understanding of race and racial inequality throughout his career, from his early days as a community organizer in Chicago, to his time as an attorney and scholar, to his spectacular rise to power as a charismatic and savvy politician, to his dramatic presidential campaign. Sugrue looks at Obama's place in the contested history of the civil rights struggle; his views about the root causes of black poverty in America; and the incredible challenges confronting his historic presidency." I'm fascinated with historical works that attempt to document history of those still living and making history themselves.

3. Branching into the history of journalism, incarceration, and prison reform, I'm also making my way through a memoir of faith, hope, struggle, and survival: Wilbert Rideau's In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance. It is a book about Rideau's life before, during, and after nearly half a century in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison.

4. I'm a big fan of memoir. In recent years I've read the memoirs of several academics (world historians William McNeill and Philip Curtin), along with other writers such as historian Tim Tyson, activist Tim Wise, and minister Robert Graetz, a white pastor and activist during the modern civil rights movement. This summer it is the memoir of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir.

5. Although not published yet, I'm looking forward this fall to reading Jason W. Stevens' God Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War. "Religion has been on the rise in America for decades—which strikes many as a shocking new development. To the contrary, Jason Stevens asserts, the rumors of the death of God were premature. Americans have always conducted their cultural life through religious symbols, never more so than during the Cold War. In God-Fearing and Free, Stevens discloses how the nation, on top of the world and torn between grandiose self-congratulation and doubt about the future, opened the way for a new master narrative. The book shows how the American public, powered by a national religious revival, was purposefully disillusioned regarding the country’s mythical innocence and fortified for an epochal struggle with totalitarianism. Stevens reveals how the Augustinian doctrine of original sin was refurbished and then mobilized in a variety of cultural discourses that aimed to shore up democratic society against threats preying on the nation’s internal weaknesses. Suddenly, innocence no longer meant a clear conscience. Instead it became synonymous with totalitarian ideologies of the fascist right or the communist left, whose notions of perfectability were dangerously close to millenarian ideals at the heart of American Protestant tradition. As America became riddled with self-doubt, ruminations on the meaning of power and the future of the globe during the “American Century” renewed the impetus to religion." As I'm currently attempting to wrap my brain around the social and cultural history of the Cold War period, I'm looking forward to Stevens' book.

6. Then there's Thomas S. Kidd's next book, a study of religion and the American Revolution. Tommy has appeared at Baldblogger before (read here, here, and here). God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, as I see it, is part of Kidd's trilogy on religion and colonial America. His first book The Protestant Interest, traced cultural and religious transitions in New England at the turn of the eighteenth century, and his study of the Great Awakening explored colonial religious revivals in rich detail, and his forthcoming work closes out the eighteenth century.

UPDATE: 7. It seems that a post here cannot be complete without mentioning W.E.B. Du Bois. So, here goes: UC-Santa Cruz's Eric Porter has a forthcoming book The Problem of the Future World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Mid-Century with Duke University Press.

Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace

2010-03-01T12:13:00.002-06:00

Inspired by this author's innovative ways, and this book's Facebook page, you can now follow Holy Mavericks on Facebook (as if there were not 1000 better things to do)!

NAACP Unit 6816 (SHSU)

2010-03-01T11:55:00.009-06:00

On Saturday evening I had the privilege of delivering the Brotherhood/Sisterhood Conference banquet address for the NAACP student chapter (Unit 6816) on the campus of Sam Houston State University. I gave a talk titled "Finding the Past in the Present: W.E.B. Du Bois for a New Century."

I was also honored with the
2009-2010 Faculty Freedom Fighter Award, recognizing the
role of teaching and scholarship in keeping the memory of the
NAACP alive and continuing its work for civil and human rights
in the 21st century. I am particularly excited to win this award during the 2009-2010 academic year, months that span the centennial of the association itself and The Crisis magazine. The SHSU chapter is doing great work on campus and in the greater Huntsville and Houston communities, in addition to playing key roles at the national level. I'm humbled to be associated with chapter, and excited to be a part of the work the students are doing.

Amy Bass, Those About Him Remained Silent Interview, Part 2

2010-01-25T19:50:00.003-06:00

Baldblogger (BB): If one were to visit Great Barrington today—what of Du Bois might one see

Amy Bass (AB): It depends on how well they look. There are signs, there are plaques, there is a mural, etc. [BB: see these images here.] But it is what you don't see that tells the bigger story. There is Muddy Brook Elementary School, which in 2004 had the promise of being named W.E.B. Du Bois Elementary School. There is a smal parking lot and a trail on the site of his childhood home, but not the reconstructed house or the small museum that was envisioned in 1968. And there is still the occasional venomous letter to the editor, if one picks up a local paper, that asks why such a figure is recognized at all.

BB: Discuss the book’s cover.

AB: It's a photo taken right after the site of Du Bois's childhood home was conferred a National Historic Landmark. It tells its own story: unremarkable sign, abandoned property, descending fog. Rather gothic, I thought, and I'm incredibly pleased that my publisher agreed.

BB: Readers may or may not know you are a scholar and analyst of more recent Olympic games as well. [Read about it here, here, and here.] I wonder if you might discuss this work, and what’s in store for Vancouver.

AB: Yes, I've been a research consultant for NBC since Atlanta, 1996. It obviously is a position that was attached to my dissertation project on the Mexico City Games, and then my first book. But now it is just something that I have rare expertise in, so the relationship has continued. As for Vancouver? Winter Games are quirky things -- just about anything can happen when cold, wind, ice, and snow are involved.

BB: What projects are currently in the works? What can readers expect to see from the pen of Dr. Amy Bass in the future?

AB: Oh, I have no idea. I continue to write most frequently for Morphizm.com, which is a fantastic outlet for random thoughts. My most recent fixations there have been mostly about sports -- Tiger, Beckham, etc. And there's a few things wandering in my head right now. But with Vancouver right around the corner, most of my head is fixed on the Olympics.

MLK Day: A King for Our Times

2010-01-18T13:59:00.001-06:00

I posted this two years ago on MLK day, and I now post it again. We still need a King for our times.

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Around this time every year, as with many, King is on the mind. For many years the "I have a dream" mantra has dotted the airwaves and enveloped the history classroom. I sought to try to begin changing that a few years ago--at least in my classroom.

My students had already memorized a good part of the "dream" speech in their literature classes, so I introduced them first to the King who had a doctorate in theology. I then introduced a King who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 by having students read the speech. Discussions were interesting. This assignment preceded my reading of a few paragraphs of King's 1967 Vietnam War speech. The prophet was speaking, and speaking loudly and clearly, and he suffered for it.

Who is King for our times? A radical King, a prophetic King.

Harvard Sitkoff, a historian at the University of New Hampshire, just published a new biography that recollects--or resurrects--a radical and religious King who saw as part of the call to justice economic equality and antiwar activism.

And how is King remembered by some? Historian Andrew Manis published a short piece in 2005 titled "White America and the MLK Holiday." It is a penetrating article, and deserves to be read and re-read every January if not more frequently. A sampling of lines: "White America loves the colorblind King of 1963, but we studiously avoid the more radical King of 1968," and "King's birthday is a wonderful opportunity for the majority of white Americans to awake from our dreamworld."

While King's "I Have a Dream" speech is a profound and important oration, let us not forget his equally powerful and prophetic musings from the late 1960s.

It is here we may find a King for our times.

[Photo credit here.]

Of Prophets and (Black) Panthers

2010-01-15T15:29:00.003-06:00

Tune into CSPAN's BookTV this weekend for some important and interesting interviews.

One is with historian Peniel Joseph, a scholar of the Black Power movement among other subjects. Joseph is the author of two books, and a number of essays. The other is with sociologist Jonathan Rieder, about his latest book on the rhetorical (and religious) performances of MLK.

Amy Bass, Those About Him Remained Silent Interview, Part 1

2010-01-09T12:40:00.006-06:00

Baldblogger's next interview features yet another work on Du Bois: Amy Bass's Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle over W.E.B. Du Bois (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). A history professor at The College of New Rochelle, this is Dr. Bass's third book. She posted about the book at the University of Minnesota Press's weblog, in addition to a radio interview and a conversation with the The Berkshire Eagle. This is the first of two posts.

Baldblogger (BB): In short, Those About Him Remained Silent is a book about the controversy surrounding the quest to honor and memorialize W.E.B. Du Bois in his hometown of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, following his death in August 1963. What is the short and quick version of the book's main arguments?

Amy Bass (AB): It's tough to write hundreds of pages and then condense. More directly, the book is about the debate: why did a community that so embraced Du Bois in the late 19th century come to shun him almost a century later? But in a bigger sense, it is about ideas of race and nation and citizenship in the Cold War, and in an even bigger sense, it is about civil rights as a legacy -- how we remember, what we remember, and perhaps even most important, what we forget. The idea of memory is a really important one in this piece, and thinking about it in a cultural study has really changed my perspective on history, and the art of research, writ large. While I am not exactly sure what my next project is, I think it will continue in the vein of the study of memory, as it is something that has really captured my imagination, which is kind of interesting to me, because in the initial draft of the book, it did not even exist.

BB: You write that it was not until graduate school that you realized you grew up within miles of Du Bois's hometown. Discuss this realization and the process of studying and researching about the place you grew up-a literal kind of local history. To what extent did your impressions and understanding of Du Bois change-and the place from which you hail?

AB: The easiest way to explain it? He became a neighbor. It's interesting, because I was obviously reading a lot of Du Bois, but I wasn't reading Souls & and I wasn't reading the autobiographies. I was reading him as a black intellectual, as a Marxist intellectual. I came upon the Great Barrington reference in Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic in a seminar I was taking with Nikhil Pal Singh. I was so shocked by it -- and in retrospect this is kind of hilarious -- that my intitial reaction to fight it, to think it wasn't true. But then as I dove into his more personal writings, not only did I grasp it as a fact, I embraced him as a different kind of figure. There was something important to me about him being local. It was astonishing, because in a very real way, there are few more global thinkers than Du Bois. It gave me a truly parallel perspective.

BB: And a related question: your first book, Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) tackled a national subject-really a global subject-in the context of the modern Civil Rights Movement. Your latest book also explores the modern Civil Rights Movement-a "local" study of Du Bois in a national and global context. What have these books added to your knowledge and understanding of the CRM, both in terms of your research and how you teach it?

AB: The strangest thing for me was to realize that I'd written two books on 1968 -- it was completely without conscious intention. But it makes sense: my desire for studying civil rights is to ensure it a plurality -- this is something that I explore in the first book, and also with the study on Du Bois's legacy. It cannot be thought of as THE civil rights movement -- it has to be civil rights movements, plural, and I think both books examine why this is so. Civil rights had common goals of equity and citizenship, but it had such diverse figures, moments, strategies, organizations. It cannot be a cohesive entity, and yet we have compartmentalized it as such. My hope with both of these projects is that expands a bit as to where civil rights exists and who participates on its behalf, whether Olympic athletes or a few townsfolk who want to erect a sign where Du Bois once lived. I think it also demonstrates how strategies of civil rights did not necessarily begin as such. The movement to memorialize Du Bois in Great Barrington in the late 1960s was to be just that: an act of memory. However, as the controversy began to unfold, it -- I hope -- becomes obvious that this movement to remember civil rights turns out to be an action of civil rights itself.

BB: Discuss the evidence you used to construct your argument, both documentary and oral (and given the images of Du Bois memorials and commemorative plaques-I would say artistic or material evidence as well).

AB: The project began with a lot of conversations, the first of which were with my parents, who knew a lot of the central players. I then did a few more formal interviews with some key players who are still alive. I then went to the archives of the most prominent local newspaper, and that is where both the public debate -- editorials, letters to the editor, etc. -- and the behind-the-scenes debate, via files in the papers archives, came to light. The photos in the book are obviously also important, as is the site itself, which has changed dramatically, and for the good, since I began the research.

Spending the Holidays with Horne, Part 2: Interview with Gerald Horne

2010-01-01T22:41:00.008-06:00

I begin 2010 with part 2--the final segment--of my interview with Gerald Horne.

Baldblogger (BB): Your first scholarly work—Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (1986)—tackled Du Bois, and now over twenty years later you return to research and write another book on Du Bois (let us not forget, however, W.E.B. Du Bois: An Encyclopedia (2001), co-edited with Mary Young). First, how has Du Bois historiography changed during the last quarter century, and what are some fruitful avenues of research currently under investigation? Second, how was researching and writing W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography similar and different than your first work on Du Bois?

Gerald Horne (GH): With the collapse of the USSR and the formal end of the Cold War, it is possible to be more sober and objective in understanding these phenomena today--as opposed to the 1980s when Black & Red was being evaluated. Having said that, I think we need more digging in foreign archives about Du Bois; for example, archives of German intelligence concerning his student years there; British, French and Portuguese archives concerning the 'Pan African Congresses'; Moscow archives concerning the Communists' approach to him--ditto for Beijing.

Suffice it to say that I wrote the first book on a typewriter--the second on a laptop: enough said.

BB: I thought long and hard, and could not identify another scholar who penned separate biographies of spouses. How did researching and writing about Du Bois and his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois in Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (2000), shape your understanding of the Du Boises in particular, and twentieth century history more generally? What are the difficulties and delights of working on such spousal biographies?

GH: As so often happens in marriages, one spouse influences another--so having written a biography of Shirley Du Bois aided in writing the book under discussion: and vice versa.

To be candid, I cannot think of any "delight" involved. Generally, I find research to be delightful--and writing to be hard work.

Perhaps when I was writing the book at hand, I was conscious of not being repetitive--in terms of both themes and phrases--in terms of writing earlier Du Bois books.

BB: You are perhaps the world’s nimblest archive-hopper. What archives did you visit in preparing your Du Bois volume? What archives might you suggest to individuals interested in researching Du Bois and his life and times?

GH: Fortunately, Du Bois' Papers are on microfilm and, thus, easily accessible [BB: in a few years, the Du Bois Papers will be digitized and thus available for a wider audience]; some of his richest letters have been published under the aegis of Herbert Aptheker, who also prepared a comprehensive and annotated bibliography of Du Bois' work. Then there is my Du Bois Encyclopedia--all these, and other sources, were instrumental in penning this book.

As for archives, see the response above. I would particularly like to draw attention to the archives in Lisbon, Portugal, which are quite rich and which I used for my book, The Deepest South on the African Slave Trade (2007). As is well known, Lisbon not only once controlled Brazil--a 21st century superpower in the making--but, as well, Mozambique and Angola, homelands of numerous 'African-Americans'. Those interested in the struggle against apartheid would be derelict if the Lisbon archives--particularly at the Foreign Ministry--are ignored. Being a small power--today's population is only about 9 million--with a huge African 'empire', Lisbon was deathly paranoid (understandably) about anti-racism and anti-colonialism, particularly emerging from their often articulate backer: the U.S.

I would also suggest burrowing deeper into the National Archives in College Park, Md. and Washington, whose riches have yet to be fully explored; the Hoover in Palo Alto; the National Security Archive at George Washington; the Schomburg; the National Archives in London; New York University; etc.

BB: By my count you have authored around 25 books, with additional edited volumes. As you look back on a distinguished career as a scholar, activist, lawyer, and writer, what are the best things about writing? The most difficult? For those unfamiliar, what is your process for researching and writing a book or an article?

GH: The best thing about writing, I think, is creating a record for future generations to consider; then there is the creative process of conjuring up the appropriate words and images to move a reader. The most difficult? Hard to say. Having been writing a book continuously since August--which I just finished last week--I would say the most difficult thing was the time spent away from reading, from writing op-eds and commenting on the flashing issues of the moment, writing book reviews, etc.--I have felt this tremulously and tremendously.

I have just started two new books: one on the relation between Black America and Cuba before 1959, the other, a biography of the Black Communist, William Patterson. The latter will not be that difficult to research, his papers are at Howard, I visit there in a few days, I know where the 'bodies are buried', so to speak, having written about his comrades e.g. Du Bois, Ben Davis, Ferdinand Smith, et.al. The former is more involved, more complicated, requires *much* more digging. I have some themes in mind but others will emerge as I dig in; for example, yesterday I was reading an English language newspaper from Havana beginning in 1912 and what jumped out at me was the concern about Japanese encroachment in the hemisphere, so I guess that will be a theme since Tokyo simultaneously was making appeals to Black America. So, I go into this project with settled themes--solidarity between Cuba and Black America; 'racial' bonding particularly in music and sports; hysteria about radicalism on the part of their mutual antagonists; etc.--and I look for bolstering of these themes as I research; then other themes emerge--e.g. Japan-as I dig further.

BB: The cover of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography features a very courtly 1946 photograph of Du Bois with a penetrating gaze. What did you wish to communicate with this choice for the book’s cover?

GH: I confess: the publisher chose this photo.

BB: What material you have to leave out of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography? Put another way, what are certain points about Du Bois’s life you wished to have emphasized more?

GH: Perhaps I could have emphasized more his private life, his personal life--but choices must be made.

BB: What projects are currently in the works? You cite Negroes with Guns!: African-Americans and the British Empire Confront the United States before the Civil War as forthcoming in the footnotes; what can inquiring readers expect to see in the future?

GH: Reds in Paradise? Racism & Radicalism in the Making of Modern Hawaii is in press with the University of Hawaii Press. It tells the complex story of how an archipelago thousands of miles from the mainland became the 50th--and final?--state while the Communist Party and a union close to it played a leading role in these lovely isles. I have noticed that the hyper-active conservative movement in this nation already have perked up their ears at the prospect of this book, even though their ostensible target--Barack Obama--was born in 1961, two years after my narrative concludes! [BB: Regarding Barack Obama, Hawaii, and the Communist Party (among other important topics), readers may be interested to check out Horne's weighty, informative, and fantastic speech at the opening of the CPUSA (Communist Party, U.S.A.) archive in 2007, and in the previously cited interview about his recent book on US-East Africa relations.]

Negroes with Guns! is a de facto sequel to the work of Benjamin Quarles and also that of Simon Schama's Rough Crossings in that it discusses at length the unavoidable fact that the Africans in North America did not see the 1776 revolt as legitimate, saw it as a revolt against the proto-abolitionist 'Somerset's Case' and, thereafter, collaborated with London (particularly in the War of 1812 but also in contesting control of Florida, Texas, the Pacific Northwest, etc.) This conflict was resolved only with the Civil War--and abolition.

John Hope Franklin's FBI File

2009-12-26T11:08:00.002-06:00

I've been pouring through W.E.B. Du Bois's FBI files for my current writing project, and so Mark Anthony Neal's post about John Hope Franklin caught my eye. Talking Points Memo Muckraker discussed federal vetting for one of Dr. Franklin's appointments in the 1960s, and it also appears that J. Edgar Hoover--modeling the U.S. government's surveillance of Black Americans particularly during the Cold War period--examined some of Franklin's "ties" to communism.

It is now well acknowledged, of course, thanks to the work of scholars such as Robin D.G. Kelley, Gerald Horne, Brenda Plummer, and Mary Dudziak, that the demise of Jim Crow in the mid-twentieth century came via Black America's long-standing ties to the Communist Party, and the losing propaganda battle the U.S. tried to fight in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s as Moscow pointed out the U.S. anti-democratic practices at home while claiming to fight for democracy abroad.

Of particular interest in reading the file--excerpted here by TPM Muckraker--is the commentary about Dr. Franklin's praise for Du Bois's life, work, scholarship, and activism the year following Du Bois's death. Franklin said: "Dr. Du Bois has been an inspiration to me and to most members of my generation. ... His impeccable scholarship, his fearlessness as a leader,and his determination to secure freedom for all peoples, were the hallmarks of his great and illustrious life."

About Du Bois's 1951 arrest and trial, Franklin recollected: "I wish I could eradicate from my memory the picture of Dr. Du Bois, handcuffed like some common thief, accused at eighty years of age of being the agent of a foreign power. Even his later exoneration cannot obliterate from my mind the impression that, perhaps he was the victim not merely of the fanatacism that characterized those years, but that he was being punished for what he had represented for more than half a century."

Spending the Holidays with Horne, Part 1: Interview with Gerald Horne

2009-12-24T16:35:00.005-06:00

The next interview at Baldblogger--which comes in two installments--features an extended conversation with University of Houston historian Gerald Horne about his latest book, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography (2009).

In addition to his professorial duties at UH, Horne is a regular writer and commentator at Political Affairs. One may find him on-line with the "The Blackberry Interview" as well as an interview about his book on connections between East Africa and the United States Mau Mau in Harlem?: The U.S. and the Liberation of Kenya (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Other resources include a 2002 video lecture on reparations for African Americans. Horne also appears on YouTube, in a 3-part presentation from The Long Civil Rights Movement conference in April 2009.

In this interview Horne discusses his extensive research on Du Bois, important and salient points about W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography, working in the archives, and books he is currently writing.

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Baldblogger (BB): There are a number of biographies on Du Bois currently available—namely the early works of Elliott Rudwick and Francis Broderick from the 1950s and 1960s, David Levering Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize winning 2-volume study, published in 1993 and 2000, respectively (now available in a condensed one volume offering), Manning Marable’s readable W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (1986), and Edward Blum’s W.E.B. Du Bois: American Prophet (2007), among many others. Put simply, why the need for another biography on William Edward Burghardt Du Bois?

Gerald Horne (GH): Good question: I would say that my biography has a particular interpretation of Du Bois' life, previously unavailable. I would also add that the political experiences I have had are congruent with those of Du Bois, giving this particular biography a notable resonance, also unavailable elsewhere.

BB: Several distinguishing marks about your Du Bois biography merit mention. One is that you situate Du Bois’s life and times in an international context—relating his assaults on white supremacy at home to the color line that belted the world (to use the title of a 1906 Du Bois article). You also spend considerable time discussing the last two decades of his life (particularly chapters 10-12)—an important period that has received little scholarly attention. Moreover, you open the book’s introduction with the story of Du Bois’s 1951 arrest—not an insignificant place to begin the biography. On a related note you state in at least two places in the book that Du Bois became more politically radical with age, whereas conventional wisdom suggests that individuals tend in a more conservative direction as they advance in years (pp. 104, 163). I wonder if you might elaborate on these important features of your book?

GH: There is a saying, as you well know, that "all politics is local" and that we should "think globally, act locally." If you meld these two aphorisms you arrive at the point that in order to comprehend the ostensibly domestic--e.g. a man, Du Bois, born in the U.S.--one must understand the entire context (including the global context) that enveloped him. It is now well-established that a signal reason why Jim Crow began to crumble when it did--i.e. in the 1950s--has everything to do with the Cold War and the difficulty the U.S. had in presenting itself as a paragon of human rights virtue in the ongoing conflict with Moscow, as long as it was enmeshed itself in horrific human rights violations. The trade-off, little recognized--I'm afraid--is that in exchange for civil rights concessions, those of the left (e.g. Du Bois) had to be further marginalized. In other words, seeking to understand Du Bois' life without understanding the entire context in which he operated (including the global) would be quite short-sighted.

Opening the book in 1951 highlights this point--i.e. this was arguably the low point of his life: being arrested. But he was arrested not because of a moral failing, I would argue, but due to a changing political scene. I think that the nation was moving to the right, as Du Bois' life proceeded---then the nation made the extraordinary leap of moving to the right as civil rights were expanded. Du Bois could have accepted this civil rights bargain, as so many others did, but refused. As I argued in my book, Black & Red, these salient points are best illustrated in the last decades of his life--arguably the most important of his important life.

BB: A related question concerning Du Bois's twilight of years: for those so interested, what are some of the most important of Du Bois's writings, circa 1934-1963, you would direct readers to and why?

GH: Black Reconstruction, of course, is yet to be surpassed in explicating a critical era. In Battle for Peace--indispensable in understanding the question posed above. His Autobiography too is indispensable in the latter regard. [BB: The latest critical edition of Du Bois's writing--published under the editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and a series to which Horne contributes--came out in 2007 with Oxford University Press. Equally indispensable is the 35-volume collection of Du Bois's works compiled and edited by Du Bois's comrade and the indefatigable Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker.]

BB: Relative to Du Bois’s work with the NAACP, you note his role as editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine. It seems to me that the early issues of Crisis—under Du Bois’s editorship from 1910-1934—presents the interested scholar with a virtually untapped archive of early twentieth-century history. You write that, along with Du Bois’s earlier journalistic efforts in Moon and The Horizon, Du Bois sought both to assault white supremacy and inform readers about Africa, among other aims. Can you comment more about Du Bois and his work in/on The Crisis?

GH: The Crisis remains unsurpassed to this day. Without being invidious, compare this journal to its current iteration and you will find that it is not easy being radical--as Du Bois' iteration surely was--even today when the price to be paid is not as high as it was in 1910. Compare how Du Bois' version handled global matters with today's, where this weighty matter is largely absent.

BB: In chapter 7, you contextualize Du Bois’s 1924 book The Gift of Black Folk: Negroes in the Making of America, by discussing its publication under the auspices of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic outfit. You rightly point out that Du Bois roundly criticized the church’s support of white supremacy and segregation. While this is the only place in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography you address religion, I wonder if you might assess the surging scholarly interest in Du Bois and religion?

GH: Religion has been huge in the Black American Experience and it is only natural that this interest seeps into a consideration of an important figure e.g. Du Bois.

Satan in America: Scott Poole Interview, Part 3

2009-10-30T08:02:00.002-05:00

Baldblogger (BB): As writers, it is inevitable that some of what we write along the way ends up on the cutting floor. What did you have to leave out of Satan in America? What great stories are readers missing?

Scott Poole (SP): Lots, I’m afraid, ended up being left out and I’m sure you understand how painful that can be. This is why I wanted to include “Hunting the Devil: A Bibliographic Essay” at the end of the book to point readers to other resources. The book I originally proposed to write was much larger, in fact coming in at around 600 pages instead of 300. My publisher really felt that this was too hefty and agreed with me that, even writing a book of that size could not mean I would give my subject an exhaustive treatment.

So, I did not examine American literature to the degree I wanted to. The reader will get bit on Hawthorne, Melville and Twain in the 19th century but only a brief mention of Flannery O’Connor in the 20th. I wanted to say a good bit on O’Connor who stared into the American heart of darkness perhaps more directly than any of our great writers. This was a section that could be cut because other scholars have done this really well, including Jeffrey Burton Russell in Mephistopheles.

Another area that had to be cut significantly was my discussion of the “satanic panic.” I felt ok about this, in part, because other books had dealt with the details. I do hope I managed to convey the sense that American demonologies created a kind of moral crisis in American life during that period and that these beliefs found expression in the larger moral crisis of the Reagan years.

BB: Now a question about teaching: What is Satan’s reception in your classroom? In other words, how have students responded to the subject of Satan/evil in the classroom? (In my experience, students seem endlessly fascinated with the various incarnations of “Satan” in American culture.)

SP: College students love Satan! At least they love to talk about him and consider how popular beliefs about him complicate existing narratives of American religious experience. I teach a course on the History of Religion in the United States and really try to push students, usually successfully, to consider how stories we already know are changed when we factor in the Satan variable. I think it further illuminates everything from the Great Awakening, to the rise of the Methodist movement, to emergence of sectarianism in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century.

Certainly the connections I make between pop culture and theological belief hold a lot of interest for students who are, we all know, media saturated. As a teacher, I really believe that helping them to read “The Exorcist” or “Rosemary’s Baby” as an important document in American religion rather than just a scary movie with some interesting themes can help them interact with and interpret pop culture in a sophisticated way.

I have also found that “media saturated” doesn’t always mean media savvy…scholars need to help students look at pop culture in some depth, to read it as a set of documents that help us to explain American history and culture just as much as text we might locate in the archives. I love watching students be amazed to realize it can be done legitimately. After all, the goal is to help them become fully independent, fully rational and very interesting people who can interact with all sorts of information in a sophisticated way…its not to hit them over the head with some historical master narrative while telling tell them to memorize it or they don’t get any pudding (I guess that last comment really dates me).

BB: You’ve written extensively on the nineteenth century, politics, religion, and culture and now a long, historical look at Satan. Any new projects in the works that interested readers can keep our eyes peeled for?

SP: My collaboration with dark powers continues. In fact, I’m not even done with Satan yet. Although its too soon to give any details, I’m having early conversations with an accomplished documentary filmmaker about the possibility of turning the book into a film, perhaps a documentary series.

For my next book project, I hope to use the massive amounts of material I cam across on the idea of monsters and monstrosity in American history to again consider some of these connections between religious belief, popular culture and American identity. I think we need a historian’s take on American Monsters as well as the American Satan and I hope to be able to provide that.

I enjoyed talking about this with you Phil, thanks for taking the time with me.

Satan in America: Scott Poole, Part 2

2009-10-28T21:40:00.002-05:00

Today is the second installment of Baldblogger's interview with Scott Poole.....

Baldblogger (BB): One of the thoughts that came to mind as I read Satan in America was “fate” of God/gods according to the secularization thesis/narrative. Many of the foremost supporters of the secularization thesis have recanted in recent years (e.g., Peter Berger), writing about the endurance of religion and faith in the technological age. From one perspective, it seems that Satan “survived” the secularization thesis; few seemed to question the existence (and/or reality) of the Prince of Darkness even as many doubted the viability of belief in God/gods. Is this an accurate observation, and if so, what does this say about Satan in American religious history?

Scott Poole (SP): I don’t think the secularization thesis is at all tenable for American society. I actually make the case mushrooming beliefs about Satan from the 60s until today underscore the idea that not only is America not becoming more secular, its becoming more religious all the time. Berger has, as you note, recanted. Its as telling to note that the author of The Secular City, Harvey Cox, has published books on Pentecostalism and another called When Jesus Went to Harvard in the last few years.

Along these lines, part of my own intellectual background was a book that made a huge impression on me in the mid-90s called The Death of Satan. Written by the brilliant cultural historian and commentator Andrew Delbanco, the book argues that, as beliefs about Satan and the world of spiritual evil declined throughout American history (especially in the 20th with what he calls the birth of a “culture of irony”), Americans lost the ability to talk bout evil in meaningful terms

It’s a profound book but, in my mind, profoundly wrong in certain respects. Americans have not lost the language to talk about evil—they have a lurid, gaudy and intemperate language with which they do talk about it. What Americans have never been able to face, at least Americans who are white and of middle class and upper class status, is the way the national experiment is profoundly entangled with historical evil.

I hope that readers are struck, as I still am, by how frequently the Devil has been the ghost at the American banquet. My own experience as an author was to feel like I was on a guided tour of an American inferno, where beliefs about demonology seemed to be creating horrors at every turn. This didn’t cease in the 18th century, or the 19th century or t an point in the 20th. Indeed, one of my last chapters is entitled “Lucifer Rising” to convey the sense that , for specific historical reason, post-Vietnam, post-Nixon America became fertile ground for lurid beliefs about the Devil.

BB: Is has been interesting to read Satan in America during the opening months of President Obama’s tenure. As many are aware, some on the Right have presented the President as an incarnation of evil, with a few even claiming that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. This is a striking contrast to depictions of Obama as a messiah-like figure during the campaign. To what extent do these contemporary depictions relate to the arguments you make in Satan in America?
SP: I was completing the book in the final months of Bush presidency with the campaign well under way. Some bits were actually added during the revision/editing process after Election Day. I’m pleased you bring this up because, as an author, you always wonder if your book will be immediately dated, so much “of the moment” that it has little meaning once that moment passes. I, for example, wondered (and in some ways hoped) if the closing chapters of the book were so pessimistic and angry that it would seem very out of place in an America where hope seemed a the national sentiment.

I’m sorry to say that, if I were writing those final chapters today, I suspect that they might be even darker and angrier. The book argues throughout that the a desire to do violence to the Other has been one of the cycles hardwired into the structure of American historical experience, the process of demonization followed by an unleashing of terrible violence. In the last twelve months, the rhetoric of irresponsible individuals like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh , the pathological paranoia of the “tea baggers,” the fact that a recent poll of New Jersey Republics found almost forty percent of them saying that Obama was definitely or at least maybe the Antichrist points to a rising tide of darkness in American public life.

The book deals with the portrayals of Obama as the antichrist, as well as Sarah Palin’s connection to an exorcist who worries about the influence of Satan in the media and believes himself a witch-hunter. This is worth pondering: some of our fellow citizens believe the President to be a supernatural creature possessed by Satan and leading the world to the end-times. A recent vice presidential candidate has an exorcist as a spiritual mentor.

In 1836, Hawthorne wrote of Gallows Hill in Salem that it was overgrown and covered in weeds, just as the place “where superstition won its darkest triumph” should be. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Hawthorne was too optimistic. I don’t think that we have yet seen superstitions darkest triumph in our national history yet.

BB: I was particularly intrigued by some pointed and poignant comments you make in the closing paragraph in the Epilogue: “American historians have not, as of yet, been able to speak meaningfully about the reality of evil in national history . . .This is a failing in the profession. For too long, allegedly rejected notions of “American exceptionalism” and “American innocence” have blinded both the amateur public and the professional historian to the darker chapters of our history. . . Only when American historians reject the vestiges of national myth and equally acidic myths of “historical objectivity” can American historiography undergo a much needed exorcism.” I wonder if you can elaborate briefly on these thoughts?

SP: I think that American historians, especially those who deal with the American South, have dealt with individual evils and have been willing to discuss those in some detail. There is a powerful and moving historiography of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and treatment of the native peoples. What I was hinting at (it is not fully developed in the book) is that most Americans, historians and otherwise, do not have a sense of collective guilt over collective evil. We are all aware of the evils committed by the American nation-state throughout its history, we even are aware that the boundaries of the west were carved out by mass slaughter while prosperity was built in the east on the brutal subjugation of four million African Americans. And yet, we still have a major debate in the Texas school system over American history textbooks (and its thus a national debate since Texas purchase so many textbooks that it will effect what is published and what isn’t) with conservative leaders arguing that our schools should teach “American exceptionalism” and an optimistic notion of American achievement while avoiding any negative portrayals of American history.

Of course, the knee-jerk reaction for many would be to write this off as the ranting of an “anti-American” That is also an example of the refusal to face our collective past. Don’t the American people have a deep well of moral and spiritual tradition that calls us to some degree of penitence or at least mourning over our national atrocities? If not, doesn’t that mean there is something rotten at our very center? Either we are morally clueless or like Satan himself, filled with a kind of Miltonic triumph over our war against the good.

I don’t believe in the Devil that so many of those I have studied believe in. But I do believe in massive, collective historical evil, trans-human in its ability to incite violence and then encourage apathy about the result of that violence. And I think it has us just where it wants us.

Satan in America: Scott Poole

2009-10-26T20:23:00.001-05:00

This week Baldblogger interviews Scott Poole, a history professor at the College of Charleston and author of the new book Satan in America: The Devil We Know, just out with Rowman & Littlefield. Today is the first post of three. So while this week is filled with trick-or-treating, ghosts and goblins of various kinds, fall festivals, and haunted houses, give Satan his due by reading Poole's great new book (or surprise those unsuspecting trick-or-treaters by passing out copies of Satan in America!)

Baldblogger (BB): Satan seems to be an ever present interest, preoccupation, even obsession in American history and culture. What inspired your interest in this subject? What were the origins of this fascinating project?

Scott Poole (SP): I have joked with my parents that I probably would never have needed to write a book about Satan if they had let me get ticket to that Ozzy concert in 1986 or not cut off access to Ghost Rider comics around the same time. I don’t know if I’m entirely kidding. I did grow up in the 80s when, as I describe in the book, a wave of irrational paranoia about the influence of the Devil in popular culture, a “satanic panic” swept the country. Evangelicalism’s rather gaudy and dark symbolic world that imagines Satan in the lyrics of heavy metal music and heading up a worldwide conspiracy that will lead to the emergence of the Antichrist held and still hold, enormous fascination for me.

I also think that scholars of American religion have avoided this topic for too long. It seems to me that beliefs about the Devil shaped American religious practice as much, and sometimes more, than beliefs about God. Some wonderful historians, including some that have been very influential on me like Christine Heyrman, have looked at this as part of their larger work.

Finally, I have to confess that I’m an inveterate consumer of low and high-grade pop culture, in massive, possibly unhealthy, quantities. It makes me happy to connect my scholarly life with this other pretty important part of my life.

BB: A central tenant of Satan in America is that Satan, the diabolical, and the Other/Evil flexes and changes over time, depending on the historical context as well as the cultural needs of the moment. In your estimation, what is the most striking of these moments in American religious history?

SP: I was astonished at what I learned about the 18th century. This is not a period where, as a historian, I spend a lot of time and so I quickly became fascinated with how much power was attributed to the Devil in this era, even over and above what even the Puritans had given him. The whole notion of “spiritual warfare” becomes a primary part of the evangelical narrative in the 1740s and this makes Satan a constant shadow across their path.

Its interesting to note that, for many Puritans, seeing the Devil or having an encounter with him was evidence that an individual had made a “satanic pact” and was active as a witch. For the first generation of American evangelicals (and later generations as well) an encounter with Satan meant that were on your way to becoming a spiritual hero, a spiritual warrior. I tapped into some unused primary sources that I think show what a powerful and ever present force the Devil became for many Americans.

By the way, it is ironic to me that most people who hear about this book assume that I focus primarily on the Salem Witch trials. I don’t, in part because I believe the understandable focus on that episode tends to blind us to the larger role that beliefs about the Devil play in the American narrative.

BB: I was particularly intrigued by the multiple manifestations of Satan as a male, as well as the Devil as a female. I wonder if you could discuss the gendered dimensions of Satan in American religious history?

SP: Well, of course, gendered representations of the Devil are part of a much longer history of misogyny in the western world. Throughout most of that history, Satan has been gendered as a male but his chief servants and avatars have been gendered female. I think that this is generally known but I think that it is less well known that these representations have remained incredibly powerful in American religion and popular culture. Most of your readers have likely heard of the story of the Jersey Devil who haunts the piney woods with its moans and shrieks. Few probably know that these stories originate in the 18th century with tales of a monstrous birth connected to a woman accused of both witchcraft and sexual misconduct. I explore this in the book as part of a larger story I tell about the relationship between diabolical beliefs and efforts to restrict womens’ political and social agency.

Another aspect of this same theme is the rather surprisingly numerous appearances of the Devil in the silent film era and how, almost always, these were connected with the screen vamp. Theda Bara and Adele Farrington consistently played women who either made a pact with Satan to deceive men or were themselves deceived by him, either because they were sexually voracious or materialistic or both. Clearly this gendered imagery pointed to cultural anxiety over “the new woman” although throughout the book, in every period, you’ll be struck by how often women are linked with demonic evil. I recently commented on this in a discussion of American misogyny and the recent film “Jennifer’s Body.”

BB: Unfortunately, there are no images of Satan—artistic depictions of the Devil—in the book. In your opinion, what are some of the more striking, or enduring images of Satan in American culture?

SP: I think that in one sense some images of the American Satan do appear in the book. A central theme in the book is that “Satan has always been someone” for Americans and so when Thomas Nast creates an image of feminist Victoria Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan” then we are getting a good glimpse of American demonology. The book also contains a harrowing image used in the rather trashy late nineteenth century rag “The National Police Gazette.” Entitled “The Female Abortionist” it shows a young, middle class woman whose vitals are being literally consumed by a demonic imp. The message there is clear.

A lot of the images I wanted to include (but couldn’t because of the sometimes extravagant price my press would have had to pay for permission) include a lot of contemporary pop culture images that illustrate both the continued power of older images of the Devil (such as Linda Blair from the Exorcist) and newer, alternative Devils that I discuss in the book who often subvert older, more conservative paradigms. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an interesting example of the latter. I am really intrigued at how that show played with traditional concepts of misogyny and apocalyptic to deliver a very different message than these older narratives. I also look at Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy” and Kevin Smith’s “Dogma” for similar reasons.

Fall 2009: W.E.B. Du Bois

2009-08-13T02:47:00.001-05:00

As I'm preparing to take up a new teaching position this fall, beginning to revise my dissertation into a book manuscript, preparing several conference papers, and otherwise make steady progress on several other writing projects, recently I came across some books I'm looking forward to reading this fall.

As the title of this post suggests, these are works about W.E.B. Du Bois.

1. The first is from American studies scholar and College of New Rochelle historian Amy Bass. Well-known for her historical analysis of recent Olympics games, her first book Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete (2002) is a serious study with enduring relevance. (See also the recent documentary on Black Power, the quest for justice, and the 1968 Olympics, "Salute.") Professor Bass's new book, titled Those About Him Remained Silent: The Battle Over W.E.B. Du Bois, due out in October, is a study of the memory of W.E.B. Du Bois. The University of Minnesota Press's website contians this summary of the book:

On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois died in exile in Ghana at the age of 95, more than a half century after cofounding the NAACP. Five years after his death, residents of Great Barrington, the small Massachusetts town where Du Bois was born in 1868, proposed recognizing his legacy through the creation of a memorial park on the site of his childhood home. Supported by the local newspaper and prominent national figures including Harry Belafonte and Sydney Poitier, the effort to honor Du Bois set off an acrimonious debate that bitterly divided the town. Led by the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, opponents compared Du Bois to Hitler, vilifying him as an anti-American traitor for his communist sympathies, his critique of American race relations, and his pan-Africanist worldview. In Those About Him Remained Silent, Amy Bass provides the first detailed account of the battle over Du Bois and his legacy, as well as a history of Du Bois’s early life in Massachusetts. Bass locates the roots of the hostility to memorialize Du Bois in a cold war worldview that reduced complicated politics to a vehement hatred of both communism and, more broadly, anti-Americanism. The town’s reaction was intensified, she argues, by the racism encoded within cold war patriotism.Showing the potency of prevailing, often hidden, biases, Those About Him Remained Silent is an unexpected history of how racism, patriotism, and global politics played out in a New England community divided on how—or even if—to honor the memory of its greatest citizen.

2. One of my former professors, UH's Gerald Horne, has a biography of W.E.B. Du Bois coming out later this fall. I'm on a panel with Horne at the 2010 American Historical Association Annual Meeting in San Diego about the NAACP's magazine The Crisis, so I look forward to getting the full scoop on the new book there. Already an accomplished scholar and author, this newest biography comes from one of the leading Du Bois scholars today. Published in Greenwood Press's Biography Series, here is a blurb about Horne's forthcoming work, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography:

This revealing biography captures the full life of W.E.B. Du Bois—historian, sociologist, author, editor—a leader in the fight to bring African Americans more fully into the American landscape as well as forceful proponent of them leaving America altogether and returning to Africa. Drawing on extensive research, Gerald Horne, a leading authority on Du Bois and a versatile and prolific scholar in his own right, offers a fully rounded portrait of this accomplished and controversial figure, including the often overlooked final decades without which no portrait of Du Bois could be complete. The book also highlights Du Bois's relationships with and influence upon other leading civil rights activists both during, and subsequent to, his extraordinarily long life, including Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Jesse Jackson.

3. Just out, religious studies scholar Jonathon Kahn's book, Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, adds yet another layer to our understanding of W.E.B. Du Bois and religion. Here's a bit from Oxford University Press's website:

W. E. B. Du Bois is an improbable candidate for a project in religion. His skepticism of and, even, hostility toward religion is readily established and canonically accepted. Indeed, he spent his career rejecting normative religious commitments to institutions and supernatural beliefs. In this book, Jonathon Kahn offers a fresh and controversial reading of Du Bois that seeks to overturn this view. Kahn contends that the standard treatment of Du Bois turns a deaf ear to his writings. For if we're open to their religious timbre, those writings-from his epoch-making The Souls of Black Folk to his unstudied series of parables that depict the lynching of an African American Christ-reveal a virtual obsession with religion.

Du Bois's moral, literary, and political imagination is inhabited by religious rhetoric, concepts and stories. Divine Discontent recovers and introduces readers to the remarkably complex and varied religious world in Du Bois's writings. It's a world of sermons, of religious virtues such as sacrifice and piety, of jeremiads that fight for a black American nation within the larger nation. Unlike other African American religious voices at the time, however, Du Bois's religious orientation is distinctly heterodox--it exists outside the bounds of institutional Christianity. Kahn shows how Du Bois self-consciously marshals religious rhetoric, concepts, typologies, narratives, virtues, and moods in order to challenge traditional Christian worldview in which events function to confirm a divine order. Du Bois's antimetaphysical religious voice, he argues, places him firmly in the American tradition of pragmatic religious naturalism typified by William James. This innovative reading of Du Bois should appeal to scholars of American religion, intellectual history, African American Studies, and philosophy of religion.

4. David Levering Lewis, noted Du Bois biographer, has a new one-volume version of his two-volume biography coming out.
It is hard to tell is this is a revised and updated version of his previous work, or a repackaging of selected portions of his previous books. Either way, Lewis's W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography I'm sure will be well worth the read.

The Burden of Black Religion with Curtis J. Evans, Part 3

2009-07-11T11:43:00.005-05:00

Today's post concludes my interview with Curtis Evans.

Thanks, Curtis, for giving your time, and your extensive, extended commentary about your book, and the state of the field in American religious history. This has been another enjoyable interview!
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Baldblogger (BB): As you impressively show in chapters 3 and 4, the professionalization of many academic disciplines and fields of inquiry around the turn of the twentieth century profoundly shaped understandings of race and religion (and by extension, one could say, nationalism). Bolstered by “scientific evidence,” white social scientists essentialized conceptions of Black religious emotionalism. You argue that W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Negro Church (among others scholars and other works), in response, represented a virtual watershed in terms of creating the idea of a single “Black church” and providing a theoretical and terminological foundation on which subsequent analysis of African American religion was built. I have several questions related to this line of argument: first, how does Du Bois’s analysis of Black religious life in The Negro Church compare to his voluminous commentary on African American religion found in countless essays and articles in places such as The Crisis magazine? Edward Blum documents in W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007) that Du Bois’s religious reflections showed up in short stories, plays, prayers, novels, and other works such as Souls of Black Folk (1903). His study suggests that Du Bois’s work on religion expanded beyond a monolithic Black church. I wonder if you could respond to this? Also, I wonder if you might comment on Barbara Dianne Savage’s recent analysis of Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and Benjamin Mays as the leading triumvirate of early Black sociology of religion in Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (2008)?

Curtis Evans (CE): It is true that Blum’s book suggests that Du Bois’s work on religion expanded beyond a monolithic black church, but his study of Du Bois takes a longer view and a broader range of sources than I and Savage examined. I was particularly interested in Du Bois as a formative figure in the study of black religion as a disciplinary endeavor (in the social sciences). Where Blum and I differ is that I was not trying to demonstrate what Du Bois’s personal approach to religion was or how religious language figured in his entire corpus of writings. Nor did I deal with his more polemical critiques of black religion in the Crisis and other publications, though I briefly discuss his reengagement with black religion in the 1930s. In my book (and in a separate essay), I write about how Du Bois set out explicitly trying to undermine overly abstract and generalized conceptions of a static Negro problem or singular black culture. I try to attend to the tensions in his thought as a social scientist detailing the nuance and complexity of black life as he produced studies of particular black communities in various parts of the South and chided white scholars for failing to examine different local communities among blacks (to challenge their generalizations). My point is that his more potent and enduring legacy was a discourse of the Negro Church that was a normative and instrumental usage of black religion for social, political and economic ends and that, as Savage notes, “treated black people’s churches chiefly as social institutions and paid little attention to their religious mission.” It is not so much that I disagree with Blum’s rich analysis of Du Bois, but I was interested in Du Bois’s explicit goal to provide a detailed and local analysis of variant expressions of black religion (particularly during his time at Atlanta University from 1896 to 1910). What Blum and I focused on, I think, led us in different directions. Indeed, like Blum, for example, I note that The Souls of Black Folk is a rich and complex text and I attend not simply to the varieties of genre in the book, but also to its nuanced approach to black culture in the South. I conclude by saying that in some ways it demonstrates Du Bois’s rather conflicted approach to black religion. After all, Du Bois eventually abandoned his early quest for a dispassionate social scientific analysis of black religion and one finds a number of polemical and critical essays in The Crisis and other publications. I am not as inclined as Blum to take Du Bois’s many criticisms of black religion at face value or to assume that they correspond to reality in some direct sense. I feel that the quest to make the church into an agency of uplift consumed early interpreters of black religion and led to a dominant instrumentalist understanding of black churches (to use Milton Sernett’s apt expression), which labored under exaggerated expectations about what they could accomplish.

I have no substantive disagreement with Savage’s discussion of Du Bois, Benjamin Mays, and Carter G. Woodson as foundational figures in the study and critique of “the Negro Church.” I see Du Bois as different from Mays and Woodson in that he was engaging in a more profound manner many of the monographs and theories that were produced in a period when scientific racism reach its zenith and he reacted to these in the specific context of the university, in part, as a way of legitimizing social scientific analysis to counter racist theories. Not only that, but I find no evidence that Woodson or Mays sought to valorize social science in the way that Du Bois did, and from the very beginning of their studies, they were deeply involved in attempts to transform black religious life. Though Du Bois clearly desired a reformation of black religious and moral life, I see his early project as more directly enmeshed in a social scientific paradigm of putting the study of various social and cultural groups on a firmer academic foundation. His aspirations for scholarly legitimacy, in my view, set him apart from Woodson and Mays, though their final conclusions about “the Negro Church” converged in important ways. For example, each desired a more literate ministry as crucial to the uplift of the race, called for a reduction in emotional and otherworldly forms of religious expression, felt that the church should have a more structured and enlightened program for educating members in civic duties and social uplift, and urged churches to improve the moral and ethical lives of blacks. Here again, my assessment of their criticisms of black churches is the same as that of Savage, who writes: “So beneath all of their complaints about the churches and their hopes for reconfiguration lay the sad reality that these small local institutions could not bear the enormous political responsibilities being laid on them.” This quotation encapsulates powerfully what I mean by the burden of black religion, which was saddled with enormous duties and responsibilities by black leaders with implicit assumptions about the function of religion that often put them at odds with members who saw churches as more than social and civic institutions charged with uplift. That these demands were made at a moment when African Americans already had limited resources and faced extraordinary social and personal hardships make it all the more evident how heavily they weighed on black people (to the extent that they were even aware of some of these debates).

BB: Chapters 5 and 6 continue to break new ground in African American religious history. You astutely detail the work many Black social scientists did on religion and explore the role that theatre and drama (namely the play The Green Pastures) played in “displaying” or “staging” ideas about Black religiosity. How did these sorts of representations compare to earlier notions of innate Black religious sensibility? I wonder, also, if it is accurate to talk about the religious history of the New Negro Movement/Harlem Renaissance?

CE: To the extent that we can judge what intentions historical actors have and to the extent that most of our intentions are manifest to ourselves, we may plausibly assert that Connelly’s GP was an honest and sincere attempt to demonstrate how Christianity had sustained blacks through a long night of oppression and he hoped to present a picture of what missing values a modern industrial America might mine from its own minority in the rural South. These representations reproduced older images, but diverged from them in important ways. Here I must make a distinction between “innate religiosity” and other claims about black religion as primitive and simple. Innate religiosity was a particular scholarly concern, it seems to me, for social scientists, who were also addressing anthropological and sociological notions of a racial temperament. This debate took place from the 1920s to the 1940s. A parallel debate, in the cultural realm, was not so much about innate religiosity as about a natural or primitive religiosity that black people allegedly possessed, though admittedly sometimes it is hard to make neat distinctions between the two. In responses to Marc Connelly’s The Green Pastures critics and reviewers wrote approvingly (and sometimes condescendingly) about the primitive, emotional, simple and concrete (as opposed to abstract) religion of illiterate blacks in the South. This reminds me of Stowe contrasting Uncle Tom’s simple and unquestioning faith with that of the troubled and contested faith of literate whites. The questions arises: is it their condition (slavery or oppression in the Jim Crow South) that explains their peculiar religious practices and beliefs or is it their Africanness or blackness (hence racial difference) that is responsible for their religious differences (or perhaps both)? Blacks in these cultural works are always on a kind of stage to teach various lessons about suffering to white Americans. One reviewer of GP credited blacks with bringing a quality of kindness to Christianity. He believed that black Christianity helped blacks to triumph over temptations to hatred. He agreed with Connelly’s black God who gathers from his human creation that mercy is learned through suffering. By discussing Connelly’s play and social scientific studies in the same period, I was trying to do several things. First, I hoped to alert readers to how interesting it was that GP was in a sense heightening attention to black religion in the South (and calling for a retrieval of its best elements) at a moment when many black leaders were deeply troubled by what they saw as widespread emotionalism, otherworldliness, and overchurching. Second, I wanted to show how social scientific theories often overlapped with and sometimes mirrored cultural images of black religion. Robert E. Park, a noted sociologist at the University of Chicago and one of the leading theorists of race relations, espoused ideas about black culture as fundamentally artistic and rooted in expression (and based on a racial temperament) that seemed eerily similar to popular images of black religiosity as a spontaneous emanation from a tropical temperament (these images also converged in their elevation of spirituals as fundamentally expressive of a deep emotional bent of African peoples).

I do not feel comfortable talking about a straightforward “religious history” of the Harlem Renaissance or the New Negro Movement. I want to take seriously the claims and personal beliefs of many of the leaders who rejected Christianity and who in some instances abandoned religious belief and practice entirely. A topic I find compelling, however, is an aestheticization of religion in the dramatic productions, novels, poems, and art of many of these figures. I write a bit about James Weldon Johnson’s profession of agnosticism in the book and his sensuous portrayal and powerful evocation of black religious practice in the South. One finds this in his early work, such as his Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), but this is also to be found in his writings in the 1920s. I think it is quite remarkable that Johnson and others were very critical of actual black churches, organized religion, and religious beliefs and doctrines as they existed in the rural South or urban North (especially the latter), but they also provided some of the most moving artistic and literary portrayals of black religious music, ecstatic revival meetings, and preaching (particularly the chanted sermon). One could argue that this is a new way of experiencing and understanding religion and hence one could take a more capacious notion of the “religious” as a way of examining African American culture at this significant historical moment of transition. Or one could argue that this development was a corollary to arguments that the dramatic nature of black life was uniquely suited to plays and written portraiture. New technologies and ways of disseminating images (sound movies, radio, etc) were then factors in conceptualizing and thinking about religious experience. There were figures in the New Negro Movement who sought to mine the folk traditions of black culture and dramatize the aesthetic and religious dimensions of African American life. It was a new and powerful way of depicting black life and writers like Johnson explicitly tied this project to the quest for social and political justice, hoping that literature, drama and art would smash stereotypes of blacks and forge a new conception of black culture. GP complicated this picture and demonstrated powerfully that drama could mold and shape public perceptions in a number of different ways. It also indicated that the very images that black leaders wanted to consign to the past had a way of resurfacing before white audiences. There was no way to control the discourse of race and religiosity, especially in view of the tortured history of race, blacks’ relative lack of control of the means of producing culturally authoritative portrayals of black life, and the potent ways in which fantasies, longings and fears could be expressed in the new media of the 1920s and 1930s.

BB: In chapter 7 and the Epilogue you detail that social scientific study of Black religion throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s (and beyond), coupled with the long history of the Great Migration and Black urban life, and, ultimately, skepticism about Blacks’ innate religiosity. These chapters provide a robust (and I think enduring) narrative of a crucial period in African American religious history. In this context you call for work that offers more complicated pictures of African American religious life, analyses attuned to social location, historical situatedness, and multiple contingencies that shape human existence. What, then, does the future hold for the study of African American religion—in an age of globalization, and an era of megachurches and religious celebrities, etc.?

CE: I am very encouraged at the new work that has been produced in the last few years. The following works explore various dimensions of black religious history in helpful and nuanced ways: Wallace Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (2005), Edward E. Curtis, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975 (2007), Anthea Butler, Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (2007), and John Giggie, After Redemption: Jim Crow and The Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915 (2008). Savage’s book is both an example of a work that provides a new angle on older histories of African American religion and a history of black religious persons’ private and public lives. Agency, black religious diversity, complicating notions of a “black church,” religious practice and meaning—these and many other topics continue to evoke lively discussion and debate. They are enriching and complicating our narratives on African American religious history. When you speak about globalization, I must mention James T. Campbell’s Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (1998). Here is a rich work that explores the relationship that AME church members had with Africans as they did missionary work in South Africa and took on the Christian project of bringing civilization to Africans. Campbell’s book plumbs to their depth the ambiguities in what “Africanness” meant for early leaders in the AME church and how powerful the impulse to spread Christianity was among black converts to Christianity. It refutes simplistic notions of black nationalism that ahistoricize the relationship between Christianity and black Americans and the implicit claims in much of the literature on the seeming incompatibility between a nationalist black-based Christianity and a missionary project of spreading Christianity and civilization (deeply-inflected by Western culture and values).

As to megachurches and religious celebrities, Jonathan Walton’s Watch This! The Aesthetics and Ethics of Black Televangelism (2009) represents the kind of work that demonstrates the changing nature of black religious practice in a late capitalist society. Walton’s book also notes the importance of television and personalities in both the production and dissemination of religious values in an age of internet, cell phones, and various other electronic and miniaturized media. In some ways, he only touches on issues that Marla Frederick’s Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (2003) engages in depth. Frederick notes the interracial nature of televangelism, in which black women are increasingly drawn to broadcasts by white preachers. Many of these programs deemphasize race and place emphasis on individual achievement and potential. It remains to be seen how much impact these types of ministries will have on the salience of racial identity in the future.

BB: A final question: What are your present and/or forthcoming projects?

CE: I am currently doing research on the origins and development of Race Relations Sunday, an annual event held on the Sunday in February that was closest to Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. These were founded in 1923 under the auspices of the Federal Council of Churches. At the time, George Edmund Haynes, an African American with the first doctorate from Columbia University, was executive director of the FCC’s Department of Race Relations, and for the next two decades he remained one of the leading innovative figures behind the planning for and participation in RRS. The stated goal of the RRS was to demonstrate the sufficiency of Christianity to solve the race problem in the United States. One practical event was to swap pastors, whereby a black pastor preached in a white congregation and a white pastor in a black congregation. Often black spirituals were sung in national venues (events were promoted in local contexts, but there was a national event in a different city each year, as I understand it). Promoters hoped to create an environment where each group would be allowed to make its deepest theological and spiritual contribution to racial brotherhood. Suggested liturgies, outlines for sermons, and printed materials were disseminated in mass numbers for local churches. Because I am in the early stages of this project, it is difficult to get a sense about how widespread these events were. How many churches actually participated? Did they lead to other events throughout the year that specifically addressed racial divisions? Why did the amount of material published and the attention devoted to RRS decline in the 1950s (based on my research in the FCC’s files and notes of the administrative and executive committees of the Department of Race Relations)? These and other questions demand answers and I am hoping that these will become clearer as my project proceeds. I am interested in this project for several reasons: First, it allows me to continue research into the interracial nature of race relations and the fraught relationship between blacks and whites who are committed to the Christian faith. Second, I am particularly interested in the intersection of the social sciences and theology. It is clear to me that Haynes (a Congregationalist) and other leaders in the FCC articulated a theology of brotherhood and inclusiveness as the foundation and rationale of their project. Yet, the FCC’s reports and field workers were profoundly committed to an activist and applied social science that sought to uncover the wellsprings of prejudices, violence and inequality. Field reports on lynchings, interracial seminars and training sessions, and suggested readings of leading books on social psychology and sociology are some of the ways they expressed their faith in the power of the social sciences to unmask taken-for-granted aspects of social reality, though much of this material seemed so focused on the “peculiar” problems of racism in the South that one wonders why so little attention was paid to Northern problems. Third, I hope I can provide a thick description of what it was like for blacks and whites to join in worship in these seemingly artificial settings. Can we get a sense of how people experienced these events? Did some write about how these events affected their views of race and did they disrupt previous notions? Who were the kinds of people who attended these meetings? Fourth, I think more work remains to be done on African Americans (individuals and denominations) who were members of predominately white denominations. I am intrigued by Haynes’ work and the place of figures like Haynes in what the late Bill Hutchison used to call the Protestant Establishment. How did these African Americans view themselves in relation to the black experience? In what way did they see their role in advancing racial and social justice? What did they feel about black churches? This project allows some limited answers to these kinds of questions.

There is much work to be done. I am aware that James Findlay’s Church People in the Struggle (1997) examines the FCC and the National Council of Churches’ increasing activism and involvement in the black freedom struggling the 1960s. Findlay was not interested in RRS and only devotes a few sentences and a footnote to these events. Similarly, RRS are mentioned in passing in books such as David Reimer’s White Protestantism and the Negro (1962) and Thomas J. Sugrue’s Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008). But no one has taken these up as the subject of a monograph. I think they are worth such a study.

Historians on TV: YouTube Lectures

2009-07-08T00:40:00.003-05:00

The other day I came across some great lectures from a recent conference, "The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories," sponsored by the Southern Oral History Program at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Here is the conference website, and a YouTube channel with lectures from the conference. One of my former professors, Gerald Horne, delivered a stunning lecture, full of history and informed critiques of U.S. history and public policy. I've included Horne's lecture below, as well as segments from several others.

Here's part of a lecture from Kevin Gaines, whose books on Black leadership and African Americans and Ghana are must reads. His talk is followed by a segment from Mary Dudziak, whose recent books should be on your reading list as well.

The Burden of Black Religion with Curtis J. Evans, Part 2

2009-06-28T08:04:00.004-05:00

Today we continue the interview with Curtis Evans, and move into a discussion of the opening chapters of Burden of Black Religion.

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Baldblogger (BB): I wonder if you can discuss the transformation of The Burden of Black Religion from dissertation to book manuscript? Also, what did you have to leave out of Burden that is relevant and interesting to the narrative you construct? Looking back, what about Burden would you rewrite, restate, or revise (if anything)?

Curtis Evans (CE): I had to leave out much of the material on the historiography of slavery and early studies of black religion in the 1970s. Although I talk about some of these in the footnotes in the book, much of this material was foregrounded in the dissertation. In some ways, I added material in the book or expanded sections that I did not have in the dissertation (for example, thinking more about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s attempt to ground varieties of black religious experience in a distinctive African psychology). There are several things I would do differently, but I state these tentatively because I am still unsure if this would have been the best way to go about framing the book. I would try to cut back on some of the many figures I treat. Some readers have complained about the vast number of figures and studies that I summarize and critically evaluate. I take that to be a call for more summary and critical analysis by heightening my own voice and stating more forcefully what all of this stuff means rather than narrating so many disparate voices. I have mixed feelings on how to respond to this because I wanted to give readers a sense of history in part by quoting disturbing voices from the past to unsettle our contemporary moment and to evoke the difference and pastness of the past. I include many voices because I wanted readers to be exposed to a variety of approaches to this broad topic, but more importantly, I hoped to convey dissenting voices that challenged a dominant paradigm. History is quite messy and takes many unexpected turns and so I did not want to silence or overlook voices that were relevant to the project at hand. Sometimes the only way to do this was to summarize, quote and analyze the work or ideas that addressed the topic under discussion rather than subsuming them to my interpretative voice.

There is also a concern about framing the relationship between the actual history of African American religion and churches and the ideas, interpretations and cultural images that I describe. Should I have intervened to point out how one person, for example, distorted history for a particular political agenda? How often should I try to intervene, if at all, and point the reader to the realities of what we know about African American religion at a particular moment? Should some of these voices, especially the disturbing ones, remain unchallenged? I tried to deal with this in part by presenting contrary voices from the same historical moment. My “intervention” would have been not only awkward, but of little use given that many of the presuppositions discussed I do not share. Still, I realize that many questions probably remain unanswered to some readers because I have left my narrative in its current form. How were these texts, ideas and cultural images received, appropriated or rejected by black church leaders and members? Why did I not address this process more fully? All of these are important issues and I struggled with them. Ultimately, I concluded that important as these concerns were and are, they would have made an already broad project even more unwieldy. The reader will have to judge if my choices were appropriate.

Perhaps I should have tried to link more explicitly how ideas related to institutions (black churches, universities as producers of knowledge about black culture, etc.) and the social and political worlds in which such ideas were being articulated. I am open to the criticism that I do not often enough ground the persons and ideas I discuss in local contexts and social networks. I am reminded of George Fredricksons’ remarks in the 1987 preface to his book, The Black Image in the White Mind (1971), in which he notes how he wanted to demonstrate how ideas become instruments of group advantage or domination (more clearly than he did in his first book). Though I think my topic made this easier in some ways, I take this comment as a challenge to my own work. Clearly, when I cite early psychologists and liberal Protestants asserting that black religion is pathological emotionalism and predisposes them to erratic actions and sexually aggressive behavior against white women, it takes little imagination to understand the accusatory and sinister meaning of this claim in the context of public debates about the prevalence of lynching in the South. In fact, some of the critics were quite explicit about the need for discipline and the restraining power of the state for such an allegedly emotional and unstable race. What these ideas or cultural images mean is quite often clear enough, but how they relate to or translate into reality or public policy is a different issue.

Doing intellectual and cultural history always runs the risk of slighting social, political and economic situatedness and giving the impression that ideas and cultural images have an independent or detached existence apart from lived experience and material reality. Although I did not adequately portray the interaction between culture and social structure, I tried to focus particular attention on debates that emerged at moments of cultural transition and the actual movement of blacks. Thus I made note of black mobility, black movement from the South to the North, the rise of black leaders who were able to take advantage of limited educational opportunities and use these as tools to critique pervasive racism in various disciplines, and proximity and distance in the spatial relationships between blacks and whites (a topic to which I have become especially interested since reading the works of Arnold Hirsch, Thomas Sugrue, and David Freund). I saw all of these issues as crucial in shaping the nature and intensity of debates about black religion and culture. Ultimately, however, I defend my general approach to the history I narrate by arguing that I wanted to insert or recover a missing element in an array of studies on black political, social and cultural history. I hope to heighten the salience of religion for critics of black religion and let readers see how on a deep cultural and theological level the division between blacks and whites was in some ways just as significant as legal and political forms of segregation (though recent scholarship is complicating even these neat distinctions between the political, legal, and cultural). I also wanted readers to imagine how this overlooked reality might shed some light on another level of separation that would persist even after legal segregation had ended: the enduring cultural divide, which in part is an outgrowth of this longstanding animus against black religion. The moral and religious critique of black culture has powerful and deep roots in American history and this requires attention from historians of the black experience. I wanted historians to ponder this as a serious and real concern even if it may not seem as important as economic, political and social concerns, which by their nature have a concreteness to them that is seemingly lacking in the moral and religious issues that I narrate and analyze.

I felt that the religious history of African Americans, though obviously much work remains to be done, had already been told in broad contours. Similarly, the development and nature of slavery, the history of the origins and evolution of legal segregation in the South, and the course and contested nature of the black freedom struggle and the civil rights movement—all of these topics have attracted lots of necessary attention and we have some excellent studies on most of them. I just did not feel a pressing need to retell these stories. Let me state this clearly: yes, much work remains to be done on many of these issues, but for my purpose, I wanted to insert a missing element into or provide a different angle on already existing narratives about African American history and culture and histories of Jim Crow segregation and race relations in the North. Although this may sound overly ambitious, I see my work as a supplement to the work of different kinds of histories: African American religious history, political and cultural histories on various facets of American history, and the history of race relations more generally. I deliberately made this a story of interracial debate, dialogue and fierce argumentation. All of these ideas about black religion involved back and forth debates and shared discussions between blacks and whites, though clearly blacks did not possess the power, cultural authority or the luxury of “dispassionate” inquiry as did their white counterparts. I am not making a claim of parity in these debates as though blacks were on equal terms with whites. No one who is aware of the history of violence in the South and North and the depth of racial oppression in America would take this view. Yet, I tried to show how blacks and whites, though often separated by space, power, and various institutional and informal forms of segregation in the South and North, were in actuality in an ongoing sparring match, with both of them trying to craft a more compelling narrative about the meaning of black religion and the cultural contributions and place of blacks in the nation. Sometimes these debates were face to face and directly dealt with black religion and thus involved some degree of mutuality and sharing. At other times, blacks were handed a narrative or had to deal with an imposed vision, which they tried in various ways to appropriate, amend, subvert, or reject. But they could not opt out of this debate because it was such a pressing one about the tortured and painful history of racial oppression and the future prospects of blacks and whites sharing in a multiracial democracy (which was envisioned by a small minority before the period at which my book ends).

BB: Discuss the book’s cover.

CE: There is nothing terribly significant about the book’s cover. It was taken from a reproduced image in Harper’s Monthly in 1865. Various other publications carried similar portrayals of black religious revivals. The cover shows the preacher delivering a sermon to a crowd of believers, mostly women, who are falling to the ground in religious ecstasy. These kinds of images were used to portray a caricature of black religiosity as excessively physical and emotional. Yet, this image can also be seen as that intense moment in the worship experience where blacks felt released from their burdens and sensed a palpable relief from the troubles and struggles that they endured through the week. It conveys one of the senses in which I mean the burden of black religion. I was casting about for a different cover to match more fully the title and subject matter of the book, but my editor favored and we settled on this one.

BB: You spend the first two chapters detailing the ironies and contradictions of white notions of Black religiosity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What are the most pertinent conclusions from this period about carrying the “burden of black religion”?

CE: First, I was especially interested in how debates about the nature and morality of slavery ended in terms of their reflections on slave capacities and ultimately the issue of what African slaves could perhaps contribute to American culture (particularly at a moment when discussions about American character and America’s relationship with Europe became so salient). My argument is that slave religion (as practice and cultural expression) was a crucial component in the national imagination about Africans’ potential place in the United States. Let me say a word about Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to develop this point. This work was written when the sectional conflict between the North and South was deepening and debates over slavery were raging. This was the first American novel to sell over a million copies. Regarding this influential and important work, historians and literary scholars rightly point to Stowe’s conflicted portrayal of black characters. Yet, I was particularly interested in how Stowe’s corporate conception of American black slaves and Africans rendered “poor Africa” as under God’s chastisement, groaning for relief from oppression and suffering. For Stowe, God had chosen poor Africa for some inscrutable reason to be put in the “furnace of affliction,” though she remained hopeful that this was a chastening work that would prepare Africans for a great work in the future (about which she did not offer specifics except to say that Africans would exhibit a higher and different kind of Christianity than whites were used to practicing). Because she was an antislavery activist, I do not mean to diminish Stowe’s powerful contribution to the critique of slavery as an institution. But I find it striking that suffering and affliction become for Stowe and other romantic racialists peculiarly suitable for Africans and are attached to their religious expression as though they are racial traits. Resignation under suffering is valorized as a distinctive contribution of Africans (and this view is forwarded at a historical moment of transition when some liberal and evangelical Christians bring graphic attention to the bodily pain of slaves and reject unmerited suffering as willed by God, as Elizabeth Clark notes). This puts American blacks into a cultural space in which they become exhibitors (as if on a stage) to whites of how to suffer and endure adversity. Ironically, suffering becomes a necessary condition for black religion to reach its highest potential. To link black religion to suffering and hardship has the effect (whether intended or not) of limiting reflection on its potential role among freed persons. It valorizes suffering and slaves’ religiosity in connection with it to such an extent that it is hard to imagine how one can forward a vision of free and independent persons if this suffering and dependency are so necessary. The black religious experience, which capaciously rendered is the entire black experience in America in all its tortured forms, becomes a cultural receptacle or the national unconscious repository in which are stored fears, fantasies, desires, and longings that come to the surface at moments of cultural stress. Talking about blacks then is a safe way to express deep fears, worries, and anxieties about issues that seem inappropriate or improper in polite conversation. Here we enter the realm of psychoanalysis and we are forced to reflect on the cultural work that is being performed by what Fredrickson calls the “black image in the white mind.”

Second, my first and second chapters try to detail the transition from debates over slave religion to perceptions of and discussions about the religion of the freed persons. Proximity is important here. The lofty language about the redeeming qualities of slave religion, and its putative softening influence and gentle beauty, disappears among the Northern Protestants working among blacks in the South following the Civil War. Many of these men and women made great sacrifices to work among blacks in the South and played a major role in establishing secondary and postsecondary institutions in the South. I want to note this fact because my comments about their views of black religion may give the wrong impression, that I am somehow depicting them as unfeeling racists who consistently denigrated black culture. That would be a simplistic and one-sided analysis of their relationship to Southern blacks. My argument is that if we pay careful attention to white Northern Protestants’ evaluations of black religious practice from the 1860s to the 1870s it appears that geographical proximity increased the degree of hostility against black religion. I am not certain if this is a controversial thesis, but it does lead me to disagree with Ed Blum, who argues in his impressively researched Reforging the White Republic that persistent interracial contact tended to melt whites’ stereotypes and prejudices. I should like to believe that Blum’s arguments are in fact true, but I just do not find evidence (on the whole) for his views, though it should be noted that one point of disagreement has to do with focus. Blum looks at private writings, journals and diaries, and he is more interested in the work of political figures. So his reading is broader than my focus on written and published missionary reports, newspapers, and Northern journals. My concern was the public discourse surrounding black religion, not private reflections. No one, it seems to me, has examined this material with such thoroughness as Blum has. Judging from his footnotes and bibliography, he seems conversant with all of the relevant secondary scholarship on this crucial period of transition. Therefore, I state the following point with some degree of hesitation: If we understand the formation of independent all-black churches as one of the most important social developments in the post-Civil War context and recognize the crucial role that churches and religious culture played among blacks in the South, would our understanding about the prospects of segregation emerging in the late 19th century change? If the churches were a central component of black life and were the object of such a powerful moral and cultural critique even among Northern Protestants who came to work among blacks, does this not add another layer of explanation to why race relations deteriorated in the late 19th century?

Perhaps I am making too much of this and it can be argued that I am exaggerating the importance of black churches. One has to acknowledge that other factors were at work and maybe other historians will say that these critiques of black religion, especially denigrations of black culture by white Southerners, were rationalizations for the oppression of blacks in the South. Perhaps, but it does not appear to me that there were any good “other” reasons for white Northern Protestants to make up rationalizations for black oppression if they are working to help blacks and engaged in a project of racial uplift. This is not to deny that Northerners often expressed sympathy for the alleged plight that white Southerners had on their hand or that they escaped ethnocentric biases against Southern white and black culture. My point is that if we take seriously their critiques of black religious and moral life then we can better appreciate how profoundly ambivalent was the legacy of Christianity for blacks. While a system of slavery separated black families and often allowed slave owners to sexually assault black women with virtual impunity, white Northerners apparently did not see the irony in criticizing black Christians for their alleged inability to honor the sacredness of marriage or to uphold proper sexual morality. Because of black professions of Christian faith, Northern and Southern whites judged blacks deficient in religious and cultural practice precisely because they shared a common Bible and (in theory) a common faith. The qualities for which black Christians were lauded in slavery (patience, fortitude, forgiveness, etc.) had lost their salience. Now, the abolitionists were just as concerned as slave masters of the late 18th century that Christianity was a disruptive force in that it inhibited slaves’ capacity to labor. In the post-Civil War context, however, thrift, industry, and discipline (variously called the Protestant ethic or bourgeois values) were seen as the necessary effects of Christianity and the crucial virtues that would lift freed persons from their slave past. Black Christianity was seen as a both a central part of their culture and as a signal failure in inculcating the virtues necessary for a free people. Christianity, in my view, was one of the central divides between blacks and whites, especially Northerners, in the late 1860s and the 1870s.

The Burden of Black Religion with Curtis J. Evans, Part 1

2009-06-23T23:26:00.006-05:00

The next summer interview with Baldblogger comes to us from Chicago. The University of Chicago Divinity School's Curtis J. Evans will share his thoughts about scholarship, teaching, and his first book, The Burden of Black Religion. Please join us for this important conversation.

Evans has made some cyber rounds lately, engaging Georgia State historian David Sehat in a dialogue and discussion about Booker T. Washington and American religion in the Journal of Southern Religion. Read the concluding remarks here. Also, Paul Harvey recently posted a review of Evans's book at Religion and American History, and the University of Chicago Magazine published an on-line piece about Evans's new book in its May-June 2009 issue.

This is the first of several posts of my interview with Evans.

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Baldblogger (BB): If you don’t mind, briefly trace your academic journey through your undergrad years and grad school. Any formative teachers? Why were they so influential?

Curtis Evans (CE): As an undergraduate at the University of Houston, I was forced to declare my major by the end of my sophomore year. I had taken a variety of courses, but I was still not sure about deciding on a particular major, though I knew that I had immensely enjoyed all of the courses that I had taken in the field of history. After I declared my major in history, which was partly just to satisfy the university requirement, I began taking almost a rough parity of courses in American and European history. The lectures, discussions and paper assignments in classes by Bailey Stone (a specialist on modern European history and the French Revolution), Richard Jackson (medieval history), and Hannah Decker (modern German history) all had a profound impact on my thinking about political, religious and social developments in the West. Decker’s readings on and discussions about the Holocaust indelibly affected my mental world and raised questions about how to explain and understand violence and oppression at particular historical moments. Probably no course had such a long-term effect on me more than Cheryll Cody’s “The Old South,” which was both a history of the Old South and a detailed analysis of historiography on antebellum Southern history. This was a small open honor’s class that had a heavy reading load, but I enjoyed few courses that were so demanding. Cody was passionate about the subject and brought us into a very different world through the readings and class discussions. Here was a person very fluent in popular culture and yet who was also immersed in the 18th and 19th century South. There was something about this white woman that was new and different. She walked around with her Coke in hand making odd remarks about Eddie Murphy’s jokes from time to time and yet she had full command of her subject. Coming as I did from a small town of about a thousand people (and we were living in the countryside among a few families amidst fields of cotton and soybeans!) and having had such a limited experience of the world before moving to Houston (which was overwhelmingly large for a country boy), Cody struck me as a person who did not fit the field of history as I had imagined it. Her very presence presented me with a different model of who is qualified to study and teach history, to the extent that I was self-conscious about my own aspirations to teach and study history one day. After all, I grew up on a small farm in Louisiana with a father who received a third grade education and a mother who had only completed the tenth grade. I was a first generation college student and had no model in my family or upbringing about the kind of work I was doing at the university. Though Cody served as a source of intellectual stimulation and personal inspiration (particularly through her feedback and encouraging comments on my papers), it was not until Hannah Decker and Gerald Goodwin (a historian of American religion) asked me to come to their office and gave me detailed advice and encouragement about going to graduate school that I began seriously thinking about becoming a historian.

BB: What inspired your interest in American history, and why race and religion?

CE: Taking courses in history at the University of Houston is what initially inspired my interest in history in general. I took courses in various areas: for example, I continued learning more about the Reformation when I took an independent study course on the Radical Reformation at Gordon Conwell. Decker and Goodwin helped me imagine a specific career as an American historian, but that immediate goal was postponed because I went off to seminary because of a number of personal issues that I will simply list here: a church split, stumbling toward and grasping for a broader theology in my personal life, and trying to find out precisely where I wanted to end up professionally. At seminary, I was unsure about what I wanted to do, though I think my wife felt I was training to be a pastor. Eventually, after acceptance and enrollment in Harvard’s doctoral program, I resumed my study of American history, though during my first year I was still not quite settled on precisely what my focus would be. I initially wanted to keep working on a topic that I had written on for my master’s thesis: how white neo-evangelicals, a group of second generation “reforming fundamentalists,” engaged race and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. [BB: see Evans's recent article on this topic in Harvard Theological Review.] After further study and conversations with my advisors, it was not clear to me that I had much more to say about this topic or if it warranted a dissertation-like study. I was particularly intrigued by a course taught by David D. Hall on the emergence of liberal Protestantism in the 19th century, especially as it related to New England prison reform, anti-slavery and women’s rights. The religious foundations of many of these reforms caught my attention. I went to David’s office to talk about a point that intrigued me in Daniel Walker Howe’s The Unitarian Conscience. I remember discussing with David Howe’s argument that the rise of organized philanthropy among New Englanders was related to the decline of the sacramental functions of the church. This led to a number of other discussions and I was trying to link this specific insight in Howe’s book to other topics in which I had an interest. Somehow that conversation led (apparently circuitously) to a suggestion by David that I look at sociological studies of black religion in the 1930s and 1940s, a period that was a heyday for the sociological study of black culture. David mentioned a few issues that were raised by these studies, but I was not all that interested in this specific literature. When I began looking at these texts, I was fascinated by what I saw as underlying worries among social scientists studying black culture that there were those who continued exaggerating the religiosity of blacks and that the notion of innate religiosity for blacks seemed to be an implicit assumption among some scholars and within realms of popular culture. Social scientists were distressed by these persisting ideas and it appeared to me that they were eager to discredit them. I wanted to know why. What began as an initial and hesitant probing of this literature led me to dig deeper into the specific sources that they cited to try to get a handle on the popular or cultural images of black religion that troubled them. What resulted was continued reading, trying to trace back in time how African American religion was understood and conceptualized. Eventually, it was not clear to me where to stop. How does one locate an origin of a particular discourse? David and I talked a bit about this problem of finding origins. Howe and George Frederickson in different ways wrote about romantic racialists and liberal New England Protestants who emphasized a religion of feeling and emotion and I found that many of these people had much to say about slave religion and seemed to particularly map feelings, affection, and a “religion of the heart” on slave Christianity. When I began talking to my advisors, I sensed I had a massive project on my hand, but our talks convinced me (though some of them were a bit worried about the size of the project) that I would have to engage in an analysis of the evolution of historical ideas, theories and cultural images of black religion if I were to make sense of the long-term historical trajectory of the kinds of issues that black sociologists and other social scientists were addressing in the 1930s and 1940s. In this way, my area of special interest became this complex intertwining of race and religion in American history. I am quite struck now by how much I took up issues that seemed to be addressed foremost in different ways in scholarly works of the late 1960s and into the 1970s: Winthrop Jordan, Fredrickson, Eugene Genovese, Lawrence Levine, and Albert Raboteau.

BB: What is a “typical” day for you as a professor, scholar, and writer? Similarly, I wonder if you can comment on moving from a state university (Florida State) to a divinity school (Chicago)—why the change and in what ways, if any, does the change modify how you teach?

CE: I am not sure any of us has typical days. During a regular quarter, teaching and leading seminars and class discussions occupy a great deal of my time. I spend much of the week meeting with students and reading and reflecting on lecture material because I give two lectures one day of the week and on another day we discuss the reading and topic of the week. At Chicago, we have the quarter system and teach two courses per quarter (that is, a total of four courses per academic year—my sympathies to all of you who have a much heavier teaching load. I am acutely aware that I am quite fortunate!). I am teaching some courses for the first time and these require lots of reading, attention to recent debates and new areas of research, and thinking about how to frame themes and central topics. But there are always “side” projects for me: trying to write an article here or there to address a longstanding concern or to engage in a more self-conscious analysis of what it is that we do as scholars (such as my recent debate with David Sehat in the Journal of Southern Religion), and attending regional conferences to see what leading and senior scholars are saying about our field and where we should be going from here.
One notable difference between FSU and UofC is that the latter has a lot of master of divinity students who are going into ministry and social work. They often have a different set of issues and concerns than doctoral students in history and religious studies. This is challenging for those of us trained as historians and who feel the effects of the older paradigm of objectivity and dispassionate inquiry (which I think was still an ideal based on some of the courses I took in history at the University of Houston). Although I did graduate work at a seminary, I am still wrestling with how to appreciate more explicitly theological questions students often ask or seem to have in their heads and how to address some students’ more urgent desire to acquire practical skills and tools from history to enrich their ministry or social work. I do not have any easy answers to these concerns and I find myself talking with senior colleagues and friends for advice about how to bridge the gap (if indeed it can be bridged) between a traditional approach to history, where we at the very least try to suspend questions about current applicability and contemporary relevance as we engage in our research and writing, and more practical questions about social and personal utility and relevance that seem to characterize ministry studies and social work.

I am not sure that my actual teaching has differed all that much, though, as noted above, the ministry student cohort does make me more aware of different reasons why people study history and religions and this very process is forcing me to sense the need for wider reading in what it is that defines our study of history and how it should or does differ from other fields such as constructive theology. Perhaps too this is another variation of the debate in the field of religious studies framed as a division between those who take a theological approach to the study of religious phenomena and those who engage religion from a social scientific perspective.

BB: You have an undergraduate degree in history, and you were trained in theological disciplines as well as religious studies. This gives your work a decidedly interdisciplinary character with considerable depth. How do these three fields overlap, interrelate, and/or otherwise manifest themselves in your work? What does the future hold in terms of interdisciplinary work on American religious history?

CE: I suppose my graduate study in a seminary context makes me more attentive to the salience of theological language and religious beliefs. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s reading and citation of Scripture to reflect on blacks’ role in America and history, for example, cannot be understood without due attention to Protestant interpretations of Scripture in the 19th century and speculations about prophecy. Understanding Stowe’s theological worldview is absolutely crucial, but it is just as important to understand how Stowe is drawing upon contemporary racial theories to formulate her conceptions of blacks. Making sense of a complex figure like Stowe requires close scrutiny of theological language, historical analyses of developing racial theories and ethnology, and tracing the nature of incipient debates about challenges to received understandings of the Bible. This latter point is especially important when attending to Stowe’s contrast of Uncle Tom’s simple faith with Cicero as a representative of literate whites who are struggling with the truth and veracity of the Bible as a result of emerging questions in historical criticism and textual analysis, to which Stowe would have been acutely attuned in part because her husband, Calvin, taught Sacred Literature at Andover Seminary. A broad angle and some knowledge of different areas are required to get a firmer grasp on some of the figures in my book.

Perhaps also my recognition of white Northern Protestants’ constant critiques of black religious practice as deficient in adherence to the Ten Commandments is due to my familiarity with the significance of these normative theological commitments even for many Protestants who had moved beyond traditional or orthodox Christianity. My attention to theology also made me more attuned to a shift from a specifically theological and normative Christian critique of black Christianity to the language of psychopathology in the late 19th and early 20 centuries, which, while still normative and grounded in moral concerns, lacked the theological and moral specificity of Northern Protestant critiques propounded in the 1860s and 1870s. I think that my work in religious studies and history and my training at a seminary heightened my recognition of the intersection of changes in language (when theology figures less significantly) with the rise of the disciplines as generative of new questions and issues, and of different conceptions of religious practice as they emerged and impinged on interpretations of black religion. Perhaps my training made me more open to exploring not just change over time and how ideas and debates evolved in different historical and local contexts, but also to cast a broader net in placing professional sociologists and anthropologists alongside clergymen, activist critics of churches, and cultural productions such as plays and novels on African American religion (though I am not sure if this is because of formal study, temperament and inclination or the nature of the subject matter). In other words, the study and analysis of African American religion were never solely or primarily confined to any one discipline or field of study, but black religion was debated and discussed in a host of changing historical contexts, especially during moments of cultural stress and transition, and within a number of venues and settings (universities, churches, novels, plays, etc.). One then is required to be interdisciplinary by the very nature of the subject matter and also because black religion as an object of analysis was addressed by blacks and whites. This was so in part because it was broader than just religion (though religion figured centrally, in my view, in these discussions) and these issues were crucially about the place of blacks in America. One finds oneself grasping for a broader set of tools, different angles and a variety of approaches to come to terms with this kind of study.

I do not think that I am in a position to make confident predictions about the future of interdisciplinarity in the field of American religion. This topic was a major part of a recent discussion at a conference on Religion and American Culture. My good friend Lin Fisher has blogged about this conference on Paul Harvey’s Religion in American History site. There was not much consensus, as I recall. David Hall and others suggested that European historians (particularly British historians) have practiced a form of social and interdisciplinary history that has no comparable American parallel. The few examples given of interdisciplinary work were not only those written by European historians, but also about topics that were in another era in Europe (for example, Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars was cited by Dennis Dickerson). In general, I sensed that people were quite content with disciplinary boundaries, though open to doing discrete interdisciplinary projects.

Happy Birthday to Paul Harvey's Blog

2009-06-22T21:10:00.005-05:00

History Paul Harvey--a certified blogmeister and witty comedian and insightful critical of all this American religion--recently celebrated Religion in American History's second birthday. So kudos to Paul, all of my co-editors and the numerous visitors and commentors!

John Fea & The Way of Improvement Leads Home, Part 2

2009-06-17T22:01:00.004-05:00

Today concludes the blog interview with Messiah College historian, blogger, and author John Fea. Thanks, John, for giving your time and sharing your thoughts about The Way of Improvement Leads Home!

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Baldblogger (BB): Can you discuss a bit of the history of writing The Way of Improvement Leads Home, in short the evolution of this project? What was your experience transforming the dissertation into a book? Any advice for those of us who are in the process of getting the dissertation manuscript-ready

John Fea (JF): The Way of Improvement Leads Home is not a revision of my doctoral dissertation. I wrote my dissertation on religion in the West Jersey colony. In that dissertation I had a chapter entitled “The Rural Enlightenment” which included a lot of material on Fithian. This was the best chapter of the dissertation so I shopped it around as an article and it was eventually published by the Journal of American History in 2003. I got a lot of feedback from that article thanks to the editor’s decision to use it for the “Teaching the JAH” feature. After the article was accepted, I decided to scrap plans to publish my dissertation and write The Way of Improvement Leads Home instead. There was much anxiety in this decision, but I knew that this was the book I wanted to write. So between 2003 and roughly 2006 I went to work on the book. I am thus not sure if I am the best person to give advice about turning a dissertation into a book. It seems to me that most dissertations will eventually find their way into print. This, of course, is no guarantee that people will read them or be able to afford them. Some young professors rush their first book into print because they want to beat the tenure clock. Or else they are so sick of the project that they just want to publish it and get on to something else. I fully understand the need to take this route. I am fortunate enough to teach at a place that values and supports scholarship, but does not require a book for tenure. As a result, I could take my time with the project and write the book I wanted to write. There was something quite liberating about this.

BB: What are some important things that modern readers can take from the life of Philip Vickers Fithian? Why does he matter for today?

JF: I try to speculate on this a bit in the conclusion of the book. For me, Philip’s story is an American one. He reminds us that Enlightenment cosmopolitanism always existed in compromise with local attachments. We Americans still pursue self-betterment through higher education. We travel around the globe and boast about our world citizenship. But we also long for the passions, love, and faith that bring meaning, in a transcendent way, to our lives. We are mobile people, but we also search for roots as part of our attempt to connect to particular pasts or places. We cherish unlimited progress even as we prepare ourselves for death. It seems to me that these tensions have always defined the American experience. In other words, many of us hope that our “way of improvement” will lead us “home.” Philip’s life has made me think about how I live my own life. When I started a blog [BB: and a Facebook group!] to help promote the book I realized that it was hard to separate Philip’s eighteenth-century story from my own convictions about life. Those familiar with my blog know that sometimes it is unclear when I am blogging about my own thoughts about place, cosmopolitanism, self-improvement, or ambition and when I am describing Philip’s story in The Way of Improvement Leads Home. I am not sure if this lack of detachment makes me a bad historian, but I just can’t ignore the fact that many of Philip’s convictions and struggles are also my own.

BB: Can you discuss the cover of the book?

JF: The cover is a colorized version of an 1800 black and white engraving of Fithian’s home town of Greenwich, New Jersey. I, and the folks at Penn Press, think it turned out pretty well.

BB: It has been a bit over a year since the publication of The Way of Improvement Leads Home. If you could revise or refine or rewrite parts of the book, what would you change (if anything)? You’ve traveled on the speaking/lecture circuit discussing your book. It is quite an achievement to write a scholarly book that non-scholars read with great interest; how has the book been received by non-academics?

JF: This is a tough question to answer. When I speak to popular audiences about the book I wish that the title was not so academic-sounding. I wish that I had written it more for the popular audiences that seem to be fascinated with Fithian’s life. They want to know more about his love affair (and love triangle!) with Betsy or his work as a chaplain with Washington’s army. They love hearing stories such as the one about how Fithian almost slept through Washington’s retreat at the Battle of Long Island or how a wild dog soiled his newly laundered clothes during his visit to the Susquehanna Valley. Yet I always remind myself that this is also an academic monograph—an attempt to prove myself as a historian. As I go around the region speaking about The Way of Improvement Leads Home I have become convinced that any future books I write will be written with a more popular audience in mind. I want my Mom and Dad—who are not college graduates or history buffs-- to enjoy my books. From now on I am going to save the scholarly stuff for journal articles and try to write books for general readers.

BB: What are your present and/or forthcoming projects?

JF: I have a lot of half-baked projects going at the moment. I often have a hard time focusing on one project at a time. I tend to be intellectually curious about too many things at once. This summer I am working on completing a book titled, “Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: An Historical Primer for Christians.” If everything goes well it will be out in January 2011 with Westminster/John Knox Press. Sometime next year Notre Dame University Press will publish Confessing History: Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation. It is a collection of essays on faith and history that I am co-editing with Eric Miller and Jay Green. Contributors include Mark Schwehn, Wilfred McClay, Doug Sweeney, Tal Howard, Lendol Calder, Christopher Shannon, and Beth Barton-Schweiger. I also have six of nine chapters written on a book about the history and memory of a 1774 “tea party” in the town of Greenwich, NJ. Those of you who have read The Way of Improvement Leads Home know about Fithian’s involvement (or lack of involvement) in this event. I do not know if this project will ever see the light of day because I am still looking for a publisher, so if there are any acquisition editors out there please drop me an e-mail! My next big project, which I worked on during last year’s sabbatical and continue to work on, is tentatively entitled “A Presbyterian Rebellion: The American Revolution in the Mid-Atlantic.” This should keep me busy for a while.

John Fea & The Way of Improvement Leads Home, Part 1

2009-06-13T06:29:00.002-05:00

This summer looks to be another time of interviews and book discussions here at Baldblogger. Today begins the first of four interviews I'll be posting throughout the summer.

Today we begin with the first part of an interview with John Fea, Associate Professor of American History at Messiah College, regular blogger at The Way of Improvement Leads Home, and regular contributor to Religion and American History.

I first met John in 2004 at the Student Research Conference of the Conference on Faith and History Bi-Annual Meeting at Hope College. As I recall John gave a fantastic plenary talk at the Student Conference about growing up in Jersey in a working-class family, faith and the life of the mind, and life as a historian and intellectual. Then in 2007 I reconnected with John through the Religion and American History Blog. We've communicated regularly since then and he's been a great conversation partner about various matters relating to American religious history, publishing, and faith and scholarship. All reports indicate he's a fabulous teacher, and I can attest that he's a great writer and historian as well. And speaking of writing and history, let's get to the interview about his first book, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America.

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Baldblogger (BB): If you don’t mind, briefly trace your academic journey through your undergrad years and grad school. Any formative teachers? Why were they so influential?

John Fea (JF): Where do I begin? I really learned how to be a historian in, of all places, a divinity school. I entered Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, IL thinking that I might go into the ministry. (I did earn a Master of Divinity degree). But while I was there I learned that my real passion was history. I took an M.A. in Church History and did most of my coursework with John D. Woodbridge. While I was a student at TEDS Woodbridge was also teaching intellectual history at Northwestern in Evanston and was working on a monograph on French intellectual history In other words, he was not your average seminary church history professor. Through his courses I learned how to think historically and historiographically. I learned that there was always something at stake in the study of the past. When I got to graduate school in American history I found that I was more equipped than many of my fellow incoming graduate students.

BB: What inspired your interest in American history, and why religious, social, and cultural history?

JF: I focused on American history for several reasons. I grew up the grandchild of Italian and Slovakian immigrants. We were a Catholic working class family from northern New Jersey. I was thus always attracted to American history because it helped me to get a better understanding of the country to which my grandparents migrated. My family converted to Protestant evangelicalism when I was a teenager (that is a whole other story!) and I found myself immersed in a religious subculture that was very strange to me. (And still is!). When I got to Trinity I started reading the works of the so-called evangelical mafia: Mark Noll, George Marsden, Joel Carpenter, etc… I was fascinated by the way these historians were writing scholarly histories of the evangelical movement I had entered as a teenager. I wanted to know more about this movement, which ultimately led me to history as a means of making sense of my spiritual sojourn. By the time I got to graduate school I was more interested in thinking about American religion in its broader social and cultural context. Ned Landsman proved to be a wonderful advisor and early American history a wonderful field to study. I continue to work in this field because it allows me to think about the way religion informs culture and everyday life. I have always defined myself as an early American historian first, and an American religious historian second.

BB: What is a “typical” day for you at Messiah College?

JF: Teach, teach, and teach some more! During the academic year I am usually in my office at Messiah about four days a week. I try to teach all my classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and meet with students on Thursday afternoons. I also make every effort to take one day a week for writing and I often spend additional time writing on weekday mornings if I have some pressing deadlines. This past semester I sat on three very active committees, so my late afternoons were normally taken up by committee work. I try not to work at night so I can spend time with my wife and two daughters, but I will occasionally sneak back into the study for a few hours after everyone is asleep. We do a lot of teaching at Messiah, but the college has given me plenty of release time to support my scholarly work. I am happy here and have, over the past seven years, developed a sense of loyalty to the place.

BB: What are the best things about being a history professor?

JF: I feel privileged to get to do what I do. (I wrote about this in a Thanksgiving article in a November 2008 issue of Inside Higher Ed). I love working with students, although I sometimes wish I had more time to spend with them. Over the years I have had some great students who have gone on to do wonderful things. I enjoy staying in touch with them and watching them grow in their vocations as teachers, historians, lawyers, international relief workers, graduate students, and museum curators. I even have a former student with an M.A. in American studies who is a yoga instructor! As a kid from the working class, I have never been entirely comfortable as a member of the so-called “thinking class,” but at the same time I relish the opportunity to think, write and spend time talking—in and out of the classroom—about things that interest me.

BB: You identify your work on Fithian as a biography, and vividly intertwine the theoretical and pedagogical reasons for it (pp. 4-5). What is the best thing about composing a biography of someone who lived in the eighteenth century, and what are some of the limiting aspects or the most pressing difficulties of this genre? Did you take a previous biography (or biographies) you read as a model—or, what were some of the theoretical considerations you contemplated writing the Fithian biography?

JF: The Way of Improvement Leads Home is really hard to categorize. Yes, it is a biography and many of my readers are attracted to Fithian’s story. It traces, in rough chronological fashion, the course of Fithian’s short life. We learn about his school years, his love interest, his two years at Princeton, his travels to Virginia and the backcountry, and his involvement as a chaplain in the American Revolutionary War. Yet, I take so many detours from Fithian’s life story that some have described the book as “microhistory.” For a while I wanted to write something similar to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Midwife’s Tale, but I am not sure that my finished product comes close to what Ulrich did with the diary of Martha Ballard. Believe it or not, I actually got inspired by David McCullough’s John Adams. McCullough had come to Messiah College a few years ago and I drove him to the airport after his lecture. We talked about writing a lot and this prompted me to pick up his biography of Adams. While I cannot hold a candle to McCullough as a writer, his prose inspired me when it came time to write some of the accounts of Philip’s relationship with Betsy and his experiences with Washington’s army in the summer of 1776. If you read the book carefully, you will notice that some of the later chapters are written in a more of a narrative form. I think this may be McCullough’s influence.

BB: I find it very interesting that you refer to your subject as Philip, whereas most biographers seem to refer to their subjects with some “distance,” identifying them by a last name (at least this is my impression). I wonder if you can elaborate on this?

JF: I debated this one for a long time. In the end I decided that since I was writing about the inner-life of this young man, particularly his inner struggles to reconcile his ambition with his love of home, I would call him “Philip” so that my readers would feel a connection to him. So far it seems to have worked.

BB: Often biographers talk about putting their subjects on the proverbial psychologist’s couch—an allusion to an author’s psychoanalysis of his/her subject. Was this an exercise in which you engaged writing the book on Fithian?

JF: I don’t know if I would put it this way. Many who know me well have said that in writing Philip’s story I was actually, in some ways, writing autobiography. Much of Philip’s struggles have been similar to my own struggles as a working class kid trying to come to grips with an academic life. I think my experience as a first-generation college student, a Christian, and someone who has tried to reconcile my own ambition with my roots has actually helped me to better understand Philip. So I probably spent more time putting myself on the coach than I did Philip. In the process I became quite attached to this man’s story, although I can’t say that I ever really “liked” or “disliked” the guy.

Holy Mavericks on Kindle

2009-06-11T15:26:00.002-05:00

My book Holy Mavericks is now available via Kindle. See the NYU Press announcement here.

Two Dr. Phils and the Future

2009-06-01T08:30:00.004-05:00

Pictured on left: me (Phil) and my good friend and colleague Felipe Hinojosa at the CLASS (College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences) ceremony at the University of Houston's graduation on May 15, 2009. (Watch the ceremony here.) The 3-hour graduation ceremony seemed to go by quickly. My advisor, James Kirby Martin, was out of town, so Kairn Klieman, my African history professor (and under whom I won two writing awards) hooded me.

Felipe was one of my closest comrades in graduate school (along with LKH). We took a number of classes together, and ended up defending our dissertations on the same day. Felipe studies Latino/a religion, and wrote a dissertation on race relations, identity, and the Mennonite church. Felipe and I are also on a panel about American religious history as world history at this month's World History Association annual meeting in Salem, Massachusetts. I'm also happy to report that Felipe accepted a position in the history department at Texas A&M University. (Two other friends who graduated in May with Ph.D.s, Derek Hicks (religious studies) and Luke Harlow (history), both of Rice University, accepted teaching positions at Lancaster Theological Seminary and Oakland University, respectively.)

I won't be too far down the road from Felipe. Last week I accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor position in the history department at Sam Houston State University, about an hour's drive from Texas A&M. I received my B.A. and M.A. in history from SHSU, and am absolutely thrilled to return as a professor.

The last few weeks have been a time of reflection. They have also been a time of planning for the next stage in life. Ten years ago this summer I was preparing for my final semester as an undergraduate. Now I prepare to enter the university classroom on the other side of the lecturn.

I started doctoral studies in the fall of 2002, and spent grad school registered as a part-time student as I simultaneously taught history at a college preparatory school from the fall of 2001 until just last week. I can say that I really did enjoy graduate school. I remember with great affection my graduate seminars, have vivid recollections of my comprehensive exams, and of course will not forget my dissertation defense for years to come. It was a journey, and I have many people to thank who helped make it possible.

But, I'm glad it's over, too. I'm looking forward to the next chapter.

Du Bois Going Digital!

2009-04-18T10:19:00.009-05:00

In addition to defending my dissertation and seeing Holy Mavericks published--marks of a fantastic April--I just found out that the papers and writings of W.E.B. Du Bois are going ditigal. This is wonderful news!

This will of course make research much easier for scholars, but secondary students and undergraduates can read Du Bois letters or speeches right alongside works like Souls of Black Folk (1903). There is already a wealth of Du Bois material on-line, but this project will offer ascess to unknown and obscure resources.

Having worked extensively for the last several years on eighteenth-century New England pastor and theologian Jonathan Edwards, I often consulted the Yale University Press published collection of his works. I also worked in the Edwards Papers at Yale University and Yale Divinity School. Now, many of whose works are digitized and searchable through the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale Divinity School, and both scholars and students are asking new questions and making new observations about his work and influence. A whole slew of Edwards's sermons are now available, for example, so this may give even more insight into the daily and weekly pastoral labors of this frontier preacher. (And speaking of new thoughts and observations that emerge in the course of digital document research, read John Fea's thoughts on a project of his here.)

I would expect the same for Du Bois. The collection will be searchable, and no doubt new interpretations of one of the world's most significant Black intellectuals will come to light.

Thanks to a grant from the Verizon Foundation, the Special Collections Department at UMass-Amherst, where Du Bois's papers reside, will oversee the two-year project. It begins in July, and at the project's end will make Du Bois's work available the world over. Du Bois was a global thinker and world traveler, so it is a wonderful sign to see things come full circle.

"What we're looking to do is spark conversation about difficult issues in race, inequality, class and all these things are things that concerned Du Bois," said Robert Cox, director of the special collections at the UMass Amherst library. Cox continued: “Du Bois was a great intellectual and a great activist. He took things that he understood from his academic work and applied it to real-life situations and to improving the real lives of individuals in American society.”

I will continue to post updates and information about this project as I hear more. Feel free to send things that you find as well. Also, I hope to post more about the Du Bois papers in the summer, as my good friend Edward Carson and I are traveling to Massachusetts for research.

Read more about the digitizing Du Bois project from the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, and the Daily Collegian.

Holy Mavericks Update

2009-04-05T20:34:00.003-05:00

I'd like to draw your attention to several places Holy Mavericks appeared on the web this week.

In addition to my post about it, my friend and historian-blogger extraordinaire John Fea (Messiah College) threw up a nice announcement post. Dallas Morning News religion reporter Sam Hodges mentioned the book and provided a link to a great story on Shayne and Holy Mavericks that appeared in New Wave, Tulane's campus newspaper.

I also found Holy Mavericks on several other sites around the web. Journalist Sara Posner reviewed our book and Jonathan Walton's great study on black televangelism at Religion Dispatches. An announcement appeared at Library Journal a few weeks back, and the media and religion program blog at USC mentioned Holy Mavericks as well. It also showed up at the PoliPoint Press site.

I'm doing a couple of Q&A's about the book in the coming weeks, and as soon as they go live I'll provide links. I'm also building a page for Holy Mavericks for my own web site, and will provide a link once it is ready.

In the meantime, feel free to leave comments, questions, and criticisms about the book. Looking forward to the conversations.

In Print: Holy Mavericks

2009-04-01T15:36:00.004-05:00

I'm pleased to report that my book Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace (co-authored with Shayne Lee) is out today.

You can view the Table of Contents and the Introduction. Purchase a copy here.

Here’s a description of the book from the NYU Press website:

Joel Osteen, Paula White, T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, and Brian McLaren pastor some the largest churches in the nation, lead vast spiritual networks, write best-selling books, and are among the most influential preachers in American Protestantism today. Spurred by the phenomenal appeal of these religious innovators, sociologist Shayne Lee and historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere investigate how they operate and how their style of religious expression fits into America’s cultural landscape. Drawing from the theory of religious economy, the authors offer new perspectives on evangelical leadership and key insights into why some religious movements thrive while others decline.

Holy Mavericks provides a useful overview of contemporary evangelicalism while emphasizing the importance of “supply-side thinking” in understanding shifts in American religion. It reveals how the Christian world hosts a culture of celebrity very similar to the secular realm, particularly in terms of marketing, branding, and publicity. Holy Mavericks reaffirms that religion is always in conversation with the larger society in which it is embedded, and that it is imperative to understand how those religious suppliers who are able to change with the times will outlast those who are not.

Here’s what others have said:

“Introduces us to some of the most prominent religious innovators in the United States today—savvy spiritual suppliers,’ as the authors say—who are skilled at recalibrating their messages and ministries to fit particular audiences. Religious scholars will welcome the attention given to cultural themes in the analysis, and the emphasis on more than just individual choice; general readers will be enthralled by the creativity of the producers but also appalled at the captivity of religious faith to contemporary culture.”
Wade Clark Roof, University of California at Santa Barbara

“A fascinating journey into the worlds of five of the most influential religious leaders in the United States. Holy Mavericks provides an open window to view change both in American religion and American culture. In reading this book, you will find that these five religious giants do not practice old time religion, and yet, ironically, they do. Holy Mavericks shows us how.”
Michael O. Emerson, Rice University

“Takes us beyond the scandal-mongering and speculation so common in popular media coverage of religion to provide a deeper level of insight into some of the most influential ministries in the spiritual marketplace of American religion today. Combining keen sociological analysis with crucial historical contextualization, Lee and Sinitiere explain what have been the keys to the relative successes of these ministries' leaders as individuals willing to do business’ outside of traditional ministerial boundaries in a variety of ways. . . . A must-read for those seeking to understand this intersection of faith, commerce, and politics.”
Milmon F. Harrison, University of California at Davis

Bonjour from Paris

2009-03-04T17:47:00.007-06:00

I'm currently writing from Paris. I'm here for about 12 days with a colleague who teaches French and a small student group. I miss my family terribly, but am enjoying my time in France.

Our tour guide, Jean, is artistically inclined and conversant with history. He's a wonderful Parisian who has made Paris come alive.

While here my thoughts have naturally turned to W.E.B. Du Bois and Black Paris. He came to the city of lights in 1900 for the Paris Exposition, and won an award for his exhibit. Du Bois visited briefly before in the late 1890s on his way back to the U.S. after study in Berlin, and he came another time during World War I on behalf of the NAACP to research the experiences of Black soliders after reports of racism in the ranks surfaced.

The eminent European scholar of African American life, Michel Fabre, has written a fantastic book on Black life in Paris titled From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980 (1991). Fabre has a great chapter on Du Bois, and another fine one on James Baldwin. Prior to my departure I read some about Baldwin in France from David Leeming's great biography and brought along my "Baldwin Bible" to read while in Paris.

The image of Baldwin is at his home in southern France. The Du Bois image of him standing comes from the 1900 Paris Exposition and the photo of Du Bois at the lecturn comes from a 1949 speech at a Parisians for Peace event.

Religion in Colonial America

2009-02-26T11:25:00.002-06:00

Now back to another (less) frequent (of late) subject matter of Bald blogger: (Protestant) religion in eighteenth-century North America.

I found out earlier this week that my proposal was accepted for the Colonial Society of Masschusetts Graduate Student Forum. In April I'll be presenting the gist of my dissertation, and then discuss, debate, and interrogate it with graduate colleagues, Robert Allison, and Pauline Maier.

One of my committee members, Todd Romero, participated in the forum a few years back and my graduate colleague and friend Devethia presented her work last year. Both rave about it, so I'm thrilled to be a part of it.

Here's the panel I'm on (click here for the full program):

Panel 1: 9 to 10:30 [Friday 4/31]
Restless Souls: Dissent and Conflict in Church and State

Charlotte Carrington, University of Cambridge, “'Secular' 'Dissent' in New England, 1620-1689”

Christianna Elrene Thomas, Ohio State University, “‘In his Arm the Scar’: Medicine, Disease, and the Social Implications of the 1721 Inoculation Controversy in Boston”

Phillip Luke Sinitiere, University of Houston, “‘The Sad Tendency of Divisions and Contentions in Churches’: Popular Religion and Pastoral Dismissal in British North America”

Here's a few paragraphs from my dissertation's Introduction, which gives a sense of what I'll be discussing in Boston:

Protestant ministers in colonial America, mostly recipients of graduate degrees in theology from colleges like Harvard and Yale, aimed to help their parishioners make eternal sense of their temporal world through preaching, teaching, writing, and counseling. Pastoral labor generally involved hours of weekly reading, reflection, and study, visits with parishioners, family responsibilities, and above all sermon preparation and sermon delivery. Congregations expected exposition and explication of biblical texts and biblical themes, and sermons sometimes responded to local events like floods and epidemics, or larger provincial and imperial matters. In colonial America ministers and congregations operated according to a set of religious and cultural codes, and certain expectations existed on both sides of the pulpit.

Yet at times the spirit of the ecclesiastical arrangement between pastor and parishioner(s) was neither cordial nor cooperative. Ministers who fell out of a congregation’s graces sometimes faced censure or expulsion. At other times, mostly due to a congregation’s inability to compensate its parson, ministers voluntarily resigned or requested a dismissal. Still on other occasions, although much less frequently, a minister received a call from another church necessitating the request for a dismission. General reasons for congregational rupture included modifications in theology or doctrine, salary disputes, personality conflicts, displays of excessive spirituality, expressionless or cold faith, meetinghouse politics, intemperance, and in some cases marital infidelity. Frequently reasons for dismissal were local in nature, although often connected to large colonial religious currents such as the transatlantic revivals of the early 1740s. Whatever the case, church conflict was frequent and clerical dismissal a far more common reality for ministers and their congregations throughout the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Titled “‘The Sad Tendency of Divisions and Contentions in Churches’: Popular Religion and Pastoral Dismissal in British North America,” this dissertation examines the confluences between church conflict, congregational strife, lay religion, and pastoral expulsion among Congregational, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches throughout New England. Focusing on eighteenth-century America, it posits that doctrinal and theological concerns lay at the heart of many church conflicts. Pastors and congregations read their Bibles incessantly and intently, lived and imagined deeply in their religious worlds, and often fought tirelessly over interpretive matters related to scripture. Theologically trained ministers often competed for the imaginations of doctrinally competent and religiously literate laypeople who did not passively participate in their religious lives.

Pastors’ diaries and correspondence from the eighteenth century shows that ministers and laypeople often conversed about doctrine. Both believed that discussions of this nature could result in the advancement of religious knowledge and strides in personal holiness. However, theological discussions could and often did result in congregational conflict, as each side stood convinced of the validity of scriptural interpretation. Doctrinal argument of this nature and its conclusion, in the words of Massachusetts minister Solomon Williams’ 1750 sermon, evidenced a “sad tendency of divisions and contentions in churches.”

Du Bois and Religion

2009-02-19T22:44:00.000-06:00

[This is also posted over at Religion in American History.]

Today I received in the mail the much anticipated The Souls of W.E.B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections. It was well worth the wait. While I have not yet read every essay, I poured through many of them and want to highlight several points about this seminal collection.

First, kudos to Ed Blum and Jason R. Young. This is a stout collection of essays that unveils a spiritual Du Bois who—as we all know from Ed’s work was an American prophet—but from the new work also a scholar whose interest in things spiritual included commentary on the history of Islam, writing about Zionism, and reflections on the religious traditions of India.

The editors organized the essays into four segments: the first around the question of Du Bois’s religious inspiration, a section that analyzes Souls of Black Folk, another on the social and cultural history of Du Bois and religion, and a final section on Du Bois’s engagement with Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism.

In section one readers will find a revised version of Dwight Hopkins’s chapter on Du Bois from his great book on Black theology titled Shoes That Fit Our Feet, and an interesting essay on the (religious) pragmatist tradition of Du Bois—an important topic that Jonathon Kahn will expound upon in Divine Discontent: The Religious Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois, due out in July. Most importantly, Phil Zuckerman adds a keen challenge to Du Bois as a religious figure and claims he was decidedly “irreligious.” Zuckerman piles the quotes and the evidence quite high, and makes good points about Du Bois’s social scientific worldview as well as his extreme distaste for religious hypocrisy. Although I am not fully persuaded by his claims, Zuckerman nevertheless remains a very thoughtful voice in the growing body of work about Du Bois and religion.

The second section on Souls of Black Folk adds yet more texture to the multiple studies of this key work. So far my favorite part of the collection is section three. Ed’s contribution here comes from ch. 4 of W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet, one of the strongest chapters of his biography. (For more on this chapter see this post from my interview with Ed.) David Howard-Pitney’s essay ties Du Bois’s religious meditations to America’s civil religion and therefore contextualizes his work in new ways. Another very strong contribution in this section comes from Michelle Kuhl, whose essay studies Du Bois’s conception of manhood as reflected in his lynching/crucifixion tales published in The Crisis. Here Kuhl makes use of some of Du Bois’s understudied writing while editor of the NAACP’s magazine, and shows that Du Bois’s fictional work and creative writing is crucial for understanding his overall religious outlook.

The final segment of this collection takes Du Bois and religion in an entirely new direction by focusing on his understanding of Islam (Jason R. Young), his relationship to Zionism (Benjamin Sevitch), and the literary and religious depth of Du Bois’s Darkwater and Dark Princess (Ronda C. Henry).

Put this on your to-be-read list. It will be well worth your time. Here's what others have to say (from the jacket). James Cone describes this new book as "a thoughtful collection of essays," and Anthea Butler writes that it is an "excellent volume." Manning Marable says that the book contains "fresh insights" and "extraordinary essays." Finally, the BlogMeister recommends the essays as "wonderfully interesting" as the volume is "unusually coherent and cohesive."

The NAACP @ SHSU

2009-02-18T18:53:00.006-06:00

Yesterday I drove about 90 minutes to my alma mater, Sam Houston State University. I gave a talk at the history department's symposium to commemorate the centennial of the NAACP, sharing some of my research on W.E.B. Du Bois The Crisis (as mentioned in a previous post).

Harlem Renaissance scholar Cary Wintz as well as Texas Southern University historian Howard Beeth delivered talks. Howard's paper dealt with early twentieth century African American newspaper editor C.F. Richardson and Cary's presentation covered the life and work of the indefatigable Charles Hamilton Houston. The papers complimented each other beautifully as we saw the history of legal challenges to segregation, the work of the black press in Houston to criticize Jim Crow, and literary efforts to assert Black identity. The Q&A following the talks was quite good and discussion rich. Kudos to my mentor and friend Bernie Pruitt for her efforts to organize the symposium.

A number of students attended the talk, as well as several faculty members from history and other departments. It was a great joy to be back on campus, see old friends, and meet new folks. We all had a wonderful dinner afterward, and heard some amazing and moving stories about the Civil Rights Movement in Huntsville.

I speak again in Huntsville on Sunday at Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church as part of a local program commemorating the efforts of local civil rights leaders. Thanks again to Bernie for her efforts organizing this program.

The images that accompany this post are religiously-themed covers from The Crisis magazine. These images were part of my presentation. The image on the left features a Black Madonna with Black Christ child, and this issue contained a spiritual short story titled "Three Wise Men." The image on the right depicts the Three Wise Men (one Black) from the Christmas passage in Luke.

History of the NAACP

2009-02-11T21:27:00.004-06:00

Here's a piece I wrote for the Conference on Faith and History Graduate Student blog. UPDATE: a slightly amended version is now up at UrbanFaith.com. (Thanks, Ed.)

"The Faith of our Fathers and Mothers: Commemorating the NAACP"
By: Phillip Luke Sinitiere (Ph.D. candidate, history, University of Houston)

With the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln the subject of numerous conferences, colloquia, and television shows, I want to highlight another important commemoration in 2009: the centennial of the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Association celebrates its centennial this week. And next year is the centennial of its magazine The Crisis. The title of this post aims to recognize the contributions of the founders of the NAACP and The Crisis.

Organized by a multiracial, progressive coalition, in its early days the association worked for racial justice and led campaigns against lynching. It aimed at race pride, racial uplift, and civil rights. It is a testament to the vision and work of its founders that the NAACP thrives today. On the other hand, and despite the recent election of the nation’s first Black president, that the NAACP still exists means that more justice-oriented work remains. Read here a statement from one of its founders, Mary White Ovington. And click here for a timeline of the organization and read an insightful summary of its history here.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was another founder of the NAACP and tireless editor of The Crisis for nearly a quarter century. A prolific author, social critic, and leading intellectual, Du Bois’s remarkable legacy and progressive agenda has yet to be fully appreciated. That The Crisis is still in print today is due in many ways to the wisdom, foresight, and brilliance of its first editor. (Another early Black periodical, Opportunity, is still in print as well. It began in 1923 and is the magazine of the National Urban League.)

One place to examine Du Bois’s progressive worldview is on the pages of Crisis. And remarkably, one finds an amazing amount of religious reflection. Subsequent posts will briefly highlight Du Bois’s work in The Crisis. Before then if you want to read more about Du Bois and religion, I’d recommend historian Edward J. Blum’s W.E.B. Du Bois, American Prophet. (If you have Fides et Historia handy, for more on Du Bois see Blum’s article “Race and Christian Scholarship,” Fides et Historia 40/1 [Winter/Spring 2008]: 25-41.)

I conclude with a prayer Du Bois wrote for students at Atlanta University around 1910. Du Bois left Atlanta in the summer of 1910, bound for New York City to begin work as Director of Research and Publications at the NAACP.

While this prayer has wide application, and is borne from life experience, it may also inspire those of us in the midst—in the throes—of graduate work:

God give us grace to realize that education is not simply doing things we like, studying the tasks that appeal to us, or wandering in the world of thought whither and where we will. In a universe where good is hidden underneath evil and pleasure lurks in pain, we must work if we would learn and know. It is the unpleasant task, the hard lesson, the bitter experience that often leads to knowledge and power and good. Let us, O Lord, learn this in the days of youth while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when Thou shalt say, “I have no pleasure in them.” (Ecclesiastes 11:1-7).

From: W.E.B. Du Bois, Prayers for Dark People, ed. Herbert Aptheker (University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 28.

Commemorating the NAACP

2009-02-08T15:30:00.003-06:00

Next week I'll be speaking at Sam Houston State University as part of its "Commemorating A Centennial: The NAACP at 100" program. A week-long slate of activities includes both speakers and documentaries, commemorating activities in the U.S. and across the nation.

My talk on Tuesday is titled "The Prophetic Propaganda of W.E.B. Du Bois: Religion and The Crisis, 1910-1934." I'll discuss the spiritual short stories Du Bois wrote for the NAACP's magazine, and the religious art that accompanied the December and April issues in which his reflections appeared. (For more on Du Bois and art, check out Amy Kirschke's great book Art in Crisis.)

I'm really looking forward to the talk not only because of the subject matter, but also because I'm returning to my alma mater where I received a B.A. (1999) and M.A. in history (2001). It'll be great to see old friends and colleagues.

History of Judaism in America

2009-02-07T13:42:00.005-06:00

I first heard Jonathan Sarna speak in 2000 on an American Academy of Religion author-meets-critics panel that examined George Marsden's Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. I remember Sarna's incisive comments, wit, and arresting lecture style. Sarna is the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University.

Since then I've followed his work and scholarship and so perked up this morning when I read an interview with Sarna in my local newspaper on his newest book: A Time to Every Purpose: Letters to a Young Jew. The book is modeled after George Weigel's Letters to a Young Catholic. Although Sarna doesn't mention it, I should also note here Tony Campolo's Letters to a Young Evangelical.

Sarna is also a columnist with On Faith. The YouTube clip is from a 2005 lecture in Santa Barbara, California, on the history of Judaism.

Here's the interview with Sarna from the 2/7/09 issue of the Houston Chronicle.

If you have a question about American Judaism, the go-to guy these days is Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. His book, American Judaism, (Yale University Press, $20) won the 2004 National Jewish Book Award.

A Time for Every Purpose: Letters to a Young Jew (Basic Books.$25), is his latest. It’s a series of 13 letters to his daughter that address holidays in the Jewish calendar. After telling the story of each holiday, Sarna goes into issues that concern Jewish youth, including intermarriage and anti-semitism, social justice, the Holocaust and the environment. Sarna was in Houston recently for a lecture at the Jewish Community Center and sat down with Houston Chronicle reporter Barbara Karkabi.

Q: Why did you write your book around the Jewish holidays?

A: My editor gave me a beautiful book, Letters to a Young Catholic by George Weigel. He takes Catholic stories and uses them as a way of understanding Catholicism. Judaism really sanctifies time. I began to think about the relationship of our Jewish holidays to the central issues that young Jews are interested in.

Q: Why did you start with Passover?

A: By starting with freedom and ending with the joyous, uplifting holiday of Purim, I thought the narrative would work better. There are actually two Jewish New Years; Rosh Hashanah is one. But the Bible argues that the New Year begins with Passover because the Jewish people started anew. I’m using Exodus 12 as my validator.

Q: This is very different from your other, more scholarly, books.

A: It was totally different from anything I have done before and probably from anything I will do again. My editor felt there were themes in American Judaism, that deserved to be put into simpler language and presented in a different way. I have a son and daughter in their late teens, early 20s, and I have spent much of my career teaching. So I thought I could write for that age.

Q: And the response?

A: Very positive, with good reviews and comments. I’m waiting for more young people to read it. I didn’t gear it to adults, but, on the other hand, I think many are reading it and using it to talk to their children.

Q: Would it be good for non-Jews too?

A: Yes, just as I read the Catholic book. It didn’t say: “Warning, not to be read by non-Catholics.” It’s not a how-to book; the world didn’t need another one. But it was a way of thinking of these holidays, bringing them to life and making them relevant. I don’t think Tu be-Av is known to even some of my more Jewishly learned readers. It’s about love and marriage and a day in ancient Israel when the unmarried women wore white garments and went to dance in the vineyards, calling out to eligible bachelors: “Lift up your eyes and choose wisely.”

Q: How does the book keep Jewish youth interested?

A: I tried to write it in an engaging way. I think that to the extent that young Jews and all Jews are sensitive to the rhythms of their own calendar, that will remind them of the distinctive features of their culture. In part it’s the balancing of the American calendar and the Jewish calendar that helps to shape American Jews. There are so many holidays in the fall, it’s hard to observe all of them when I’m working. But it’s very important to think: “What are my priorities? How do I want to be known? What kind of a Jew do I want to be.”

Q: Do you have a favorite holiday?

A: I personally always loved Passover; maybe that’s why I wrote about it first. Not only are there wonderful rituals, but I think that to anyone in America, the central theme of Passover — freedom — resonates greatly. To have a seder is a very remarkable, moving ritual with passages that can remain relevant into history. None of the holidays have quite as much preparation; you have to clean your whole house. As far as my wife is concerned, without Passover, I would never clean my study.

Q: What does your faith mean to you?

A: I’m impressed by Judaism as a way of life. Remember that in Judaism, the commandments and the fulfilment of the commandments, as well as a life of study and learning, are very important. I’m not saying that Judaism is without belief, that’s certainly not true. But belief is actually in many ways secondary to study and the performance of ritual commandments. It’s what I make of being Jewish and the faith that defines me. That, to me, is a very powerful idea.

E-History: Teaching and Technology

2009-01-30T14:44:00.004-06:00

I was recently featured in my school's magazine, The Eagle, in an article about 21st century teaching. The article outlined the school's 21st century learning initiatives. Although it is not clear from the picture, I am teaching through Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and am referencing the website for the PBS documentary about his book. Here's the blogpost I used for the lesson that day.

Inspiration on the Internet

2009-01-24T11:12:00.003-06:00

It appears that this blog inspires people. I'm humbled that my musings mean something.

Messiah College historian John Fea awarded bald blogging with a 2009 Inspiration Award. Thanks, John!

I first met John in 2004 at the Conference on Faith and History bi-annual meeting in Holland, Michigan. At the time I was a third-year Ph.D. student, and if memory serves me correctly John gave a keynote address for the student presenters. I was (and am still) grateful for his reflections on finding balance in one's life amidst the busy nature of graduate school. I re-connected (pardon the pun) with John in 2007 through the Religion in American History blog, and have enjoyed our recent electronic exchanges. I should also say that I enjoyed his book on Philip Vickers Fithian.

While I suppose an Inspiration Award carries with it the responsibility to continue offering inspirational blog posts, more immediately I must pay if forward and bestow Inspiration Awards on 5-7 other blogs that inspire me (Feeling generous, or rather super inspired, so I doled out 9 awards.)

So, in no particular order, here goes.

1. The Way of Improvement Leads Home. That's right, John's blog inspires me too. I'm impressed with his blogging energy, and I always look forward to reading his historically grounded, thoughtful analyses of contemporary politics. I'm equally impressed with the way that he relates moments in the life of Philip Vickers Fithian to so many contemporary realities. John brings history alive this way, and I'm sure his classroom is the same way.

2. The Professor (formerly The Proletarian). This is the blog of my teaching colleague and good friend Edward Carson. I met Eddie two years ago and with our mutual interests we became fast friends. The Professor's blog is a gold mine of teaching reflections, political analysis, and all around solid commentary. I should add that Eddie's a fantastic teacher and lecturer. He's also marathon runner. And I'm thrilled that we are currently working on a book together. We will unveil the details of this project at a later date.

3. The Next Generation of Educational Leadership. This is the blog of educator, author, school administrator, athlete, and all around Renaissance man Nathan Barber. Nathan served as Dean of Students for a year at Second Baptist School in Houston, and I truly count it a highlight of my teaching career to have worked with him. Life is not the same without Nathan, but he's making a huge impact in Baton Rouge. Thanks to the world wide web I continue to draw inspiration from him.

4. Religion in American History. Like John, the efforts of Paul Harvey and Kelly Baker and my other co-editors are truly inspiring. In fact, I happened across one of Paul's class blogs a few years ago and his example, in part, inspired me to use a blog in my classroom. Religion in American History is one of the first blogs I visit each day. I continue to learn tons from the conversations going on there.

5. Musings of a Postmodern Negro. This is the blog of my good buddy Anthony Smith. I met Anthony almost 5 years ago, and his friendship means the world to me. At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, in so many ways he saved my life. His blog is creative, inventive, prophetic, and honest. As with other readers of his blog, I wish he'd blog more often.

6. The Homeless Guy. This is the blog of Nashville resident Kevin Barbieux. The subtitle of his blog says it all: "There's more to homeless people than being homeless." Kevin gives me tons to think about and is a voice for the voiceless. I've never met Kevin in person, but keep up with him through his blog and through one of my former students who knows him. I hope to meet Kevin one day. I want to shake his hand, give him a hug, and simply say "thanks."

7. Brands of Faith. This is media scholar and author Mara Einstein's blog. If you have not done so, you should read her fine book Brands of Faith. It adds some serious and critical perspective to the confluences of media, religion, and marketing in the present day. Mara's blogposts always inspire me to analyze contemporary religious culture in ways I've not thought about. I look forward to her next book on religion and contemporary culture.

8. Praxis Habitus: Blogging Race Religion & Culture. This is the personal blog of Davidson College sociologist Gerardo Marti. Having already heard of and read his work on multiracial churches, I had the privilege to officially meet and spend some time with Gerardo last fall when he was a visiting professor at Rice. Our conversations were lively, engaging, and thoughtful, and I'm glad to keep up with Gerardo through his blog. It is a treasure of cultural analysis and features commentary on the latest work in sociology of religion. There's never a dull moment at Praxis Habitus.

9. JazzTheologian.com: Syncopating, Improvising and Responding to the Call of a Love Supreme. This is the website and blog of Colorado pastor Robert Gelinas. I first met the Jazz Theologian about 4 years ago on-line, and I've regularly read his blog since. And if theology is about application, then Robert is a true theologian. He labors regularly for the saints there in Colorado and has nine children. The majority of Robert's kid's are adopted, so there's no doubt that the Jazz Theologian and his wife know how to syncopate, improvise, and respond to the call of a love supreme. (I should add that I'm looking forward to reading Robert's first book Finding the Groove: Composing a Jazz-Shaped Faith--due out in April--as well as his second, Strange Fruit: A Jazz-Shaped Response to the Call of the Cross, due out in 2010.)

The rules stipulate that those who accept an Inspiration Award (1) put the logo of the award on their blog if you can make it work with their format (the painting of Marie Antoinette); (2) link to the person from whom you received the award; (3) nominate 5-7 other blogs (sorry, had to do 9); (4) put the links of those blogs on your blog.

However, I'd like to add an optional fifth requirement: post a picture/image of a person you find inspirational and explain why.

Here's mine: James Baldwin.

I first started reading James Baldwin 4 years ago, and his books have been at my fingertips and in my briefcase ever since. Along with the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, Baldwin's writing has transformed my outlook on life. Suffice it to say that since beginning to read Baldwin I’ve discovered many times he seems to know me better than I know myself, and his pointed honesty calls me to be more authentic.

Of Politicians, Pastors, and Prayer

2009-01-05T09:53:00.004-06:00

Here's a piece Shayne Lee and I wrote about Rick Warren, Barack Obama, and the inaugural prayer. It relates to some of the ideas behind contemporary Protestant evangelical religious leadership and American culture, which we detail in our forthcoming Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace (NYU Press).

It is crossposted at From the Square, NYU Press's blog and Religion in American History.

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Numerous journalists, political pundits, and scholars are discussing and debating Barack Obama’s decision to invite California pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural prayer, particularly in the context of Warren’s support for California’s Proposition 8.

E.J. Dionne’s New Republic column, for example, titled “Big Tent,” (HT: John Fea) a thoughtful analysis of the Obama-Warren issue, reports that some wonder to what extent Obama has betrayed his liberal politics, while others embrace Obama’s decision and call for a more enlightened liberal politics. Christianity Today, the leading magazine of evangelical thought and culture, features some writers who are asking if Warren is the next Graham, or if he’s transcended the aged leader’s stature. Another voice of the religious right, Steve Brody’s blog at the Christian Broadcasting Network, “The Brody File,” (HT: Get Religion) features e-lamentations about Warren’s decision to pray at the inauguration. Alan Wolfe’s New Republic piece “Obama’s New Pastor Problem?,” (HT: John Fea) offers further contextualization about Warren and the religious right. And corroborating Steve Brody’s blog, Rachel Zoll’s article points out that some of Warren’s toughest critics are those on the religious right. Sociologist Gerardo Marti offers a brief history of Warren his Southern California context, what he calls “Warren-ology.” Religious studies scholar Anthony Pinn provides precise analysis of theology, political compromise, and the presidency, and historian of religion Anthea Butler contends that president-elect Obama misgauges Americans’ religious convictions.

Obama’s choice of Warren to pray at the inauguration—and in particular the range of responses this choice has elicited—gives us occasion to reflect on Protestant evangelical religious leaders we call “holy mavericks,” five of whom we discuss and analyze in our forthcoming Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace, due out in April with NYU Press.

We contend that Rick Warren is a holy maverick. Simply put, a holy maverick is an enterprising religious leader who crafts his or her ministry to a particular niche (or niches) in the spiritual marketplace. Holy mavericks are talented and savvy spiritual suppliers we call innovators, efficiently successful at recalibrating their messages and ministries toward the existential needs and tastes of church-going America. Houston minister Joel Osteen, for example, effectively marketed messages and books titled Your Best Life Now (2004) and Become a Better You (2007). Osteen’s brand of self-help spirituality reaches millions, and gains new followers each day.

Holy mavericks can be a fascination to the general public, and command wide audiences with messages of purpose, empowerment, and uplift. Rick Warren, for instance, took his purpose driven message to professional sporting events, political meetings, and to pastors in Africa. He also recently addressed the Muslim Public Affairs Convention in southern California. Holy mavericks can also exist as a thorn in the flesh of gatekeepers of church traditions who chide innovators for casting wide nets and polluting the gospel with “watered-down” versions of Christianity. Holy mavericks can elicit both intense loyalty and venomous contempt from clerical peers and congregants.

Another distinguishing mark of a holy maverick is his or her ability to sense how historical moments and opportunity structures shape their messages and marketability and help to bring their individual initiatives to fruition. Holy mavericks possess social, cultural, and spiritual dexterity. Put another way, holy mavericks are brilliant at surfing spiritual waves, a practice in which spiritual leaders discern where God is moving in one’s cultural milieu, and then prepare their churches and themselves to cooperate with the movement. Here’s Rick Warren: “Three key responsibilities of every pastor are to discern where God’s spirit is moving in our culture and time, prepare your congregation for that movement, and cooperate with it to reach people Jesus died for. I call it ‘surfing spiritual waves.’”

Warren knows that of which he speaks. Consider these snapshots from his recent activities: not many other preachers are friends with the president of Rwanda, write a monthly column for Ladies Home Journal, and receive a standing ovation after speaking at Harvard University. Not many other conservative pastors possess the flexibility to be pro-life and pro-poor, the ingenuity to lead a preaching seminar for rabbis at the University of Judaism, or the versatility to work and dine with homosexual activists while maintaining a firm stance against same-sex marriage. Not many spiritual leaders mentor prominent businesspersons like Rupert Murdock and Jack Welch, or can claim that after three decades of ministry, they have never been alone in a room with a woman other than their wife. Few evangelical pastors are friends with both President George W. Bush and Democratic president-elect Barack Obama, a notable participant at Warren’s 2006 Global Summit on AIDS and the recent Presidential Forum, both at Saddleback Church. And Warren’s latest book, The Purpose of Christmas, adds further insight into the complexity of this holy maverick’s cosmopolitan outlook. It continues to articulate the readable simplicity of the purpose-driven message and hit the major points of conservative evangelical theology (e.g., centrality of Jesus, authority of Bible, etc.). Yet with a closing chapter on Warren’s P.E.A.C.E. plan, it registers as decidedly cosmopolitan in outlook and activist in tone.

And there’s even more to the relationship between Warren and Obama: the president-elect launched a “40 Days of Faith and Family” tour while campaigning in October 2007 in South Carolina, an initiative clearly adapted from Warren’s popular “40 Days of Purpose” movement from a few years previous. (Read first-hand accounts about “40 Days of Faith and Family” from Obama’s website.)

So if Rick Warren is accustomed to surfing spiritual waves, and if Obama is serious about working across political lines as he embraces the change he promised, then Warren accepting Obama’s invitation to give the inaugural prayer is neither out of character nor a simple, shrill political move. It is a holy maverick at work.

If Warren is serious about working for social, political, and economic change through his P.E.A.C.E. plan and if Obama is serious about embodying change in today’s combative and partisan political order, and if these two visionaries will work together—at least for a day—then perhaps history will observe that the real mavericks of the 2008 Presidential election cycle were not, in fact, John McCain and Sarah Palin, but Barack Obama and Rick Warren. Why? In the midst of differences, each appears willing to find common ground in order to work together. Perhaps we all have something to learn from pastors and politicians after all.

Christmas with Du Bois 7.0

2008-12-25T00:40:00.001-06:00

O Thou Incarnate Word of God to man, make us this Christmas night to realize Thy truth; We are not Christians because we profess Thy name and celebrate the ceremonies and idly reiterate the prayers of the church, but only in so far as we really comprehend and follow the Christ spirit-we must be poor and not rich, meek and not proud, merciful and not oppressors, peaceful and not warlike or quarrelsome. For the sake of the righteousness of our cause we must bow to persecution and reviling, and again and again turn the stricken cheek to the striker; and above all the cause of our neighbor must be to us dearer than our own cause. This is Christianity. God help us all to be Christians. Amen.

Luke 2:8-14

Christmas

--from W.E.B. Du Bois, Prayers for Dark People, ed. Herbert Aptheker (U. of Mass. Press, 1980), p. 63

Christmas with Du Bois 6.0

2008-12-22T06:36:00.003-06:00

Du Bois used a Black Mary (and religion) to comment and editorialize about life in Jim Crow America in the 1930s, a brutal reality compounded by the economic hardships the Great Depression brought. As mentioned in a previous post she appeared in “The Son of God” and “The Gospel According to Mary Brown,” and in his creative writing Du Bois often voiced the political and the prophetic with women.

The contents of today's post comes from a short piece titled “Magnificat, 1931,” and Du Bois’s religious editorial appeared in the January 1932 issue of The Crisis.

Du Bois began this editorial by quoting from Luke 1 where Mary meets Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, and of Mary Elizabeth exclaims: “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”

In a response to suffering that reads much like Job’s remarks to Yahweh in the midst of his season of calamity, Mary Black reeled off to God a litany of questions, calling him to account for frustrated ambitions, unfilled promises, and a penetrating silence in the face of murder, mayhem, and disenfranchisement. Mary could not fathom another baby as a blessing since “none of us [have] a job.” “Blessed,” scoffed Mary, “How come? I can’t understand you and God and I don’t see no call for this soul of mine to magnify nothing! Look here: You see how we’ve slaved and worked and kept decent and gone to church and nobody calls us blessed,—they curse us.” Instead of blessing, Mary found nothing but rejection.

Owing to spending a lifetime in and around churches, in this story Mary acknowledged God’s power, holiness, and might, but had little time to contemplate theological concepts. Mary wanted to know what God could and would do in the temporal realm; she longed for mercy, meals, and peace and quiet. “But how about me? How about that mercy on them that was afeared of you from generation to generation?,” Mary asked God, “Didn’t Ma and Pa serve you? Didn’t Grandpa preach your Word? Ain’t I tried to do right? Well, how about me, then?”

While Mary longed for mercy to alleviate the suffering in her own life, and from a historical perspective in the lives and generations of her family, in what sounds similar to Jesus’ disciples James and John, Mary wished to call fire down from heaven on her enemies. She desired justice for the oppressed, and mercy for the marginalized.

In desperation, Mary ended her litany of questions at the pinnacle of frustration; she was hungry, poor, cold, broke, and angry. Bitter about the disparities created by Jim Crow, Mary screamed, “What do you do about it? I’ll tell you: You fill the rich and white with good things and the poor and black you send empty away, or lynch them. You don’t even help the Jews as you promised Abraham when he helped you. And now—my god!—and other baby!”

Set in the Great Depression, Du Bois entertained a question of theodicy, giving voice to Black frustration through the life of a woman.

With "Magnificat, 1931," Du Bois continued to identify white supremacy as a spiritual evil with unholy fruit of segregation and exploitation. Voicing passages and proclamations from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, Mary said: “You got strength in your arm—you can scatter the proud—well, why don’t you put down some of the might white folks from their seats and exalt a few black folk of low degree—why don’t you?”

Christmas with Du Bois 5.0

2008-12-17T09:39:00.004-06:00

Du Bois continued the theme of justice a year later, in a December 1911 piece titled “Christmas,” yet focused on children as the future hope of and for justice. (An interesting point to illuminate one context for this editorial: at the time Du Bois's daughter Yolande was 8, and Du Bois would go on to publish The Brownies' Book in 1920. Du Bois's first child, a son named Burghardt, died in 1899 at age 2.) Du Bois hoped that the struggled of today would yield the fruit of justice tomorrow. About Christmas, Du Bois refashioned John 3:16 and observed: “It is the day of the little Saviors of the World whom the Fathers so love that they send them to the world that the world may not perish but have Everlasting Life.”

In the following paragraph the shepherds from Luke 2 return and watch their flocks at night, “the long and dreadful night that lowers over the worlds’ darker peoples.” Such a state, Du Bois averred, prompts people to keep watch for a star or “strain their weary ears for the Voice of Angels with Good Tiding of great Joy which shall be to all people, with glory, not simply to other worlds, but on Earth Peace, Good Will toward men.”

From shepherds Du Bois moved to the 3 kings, “toiling heavily across the seas” in order to find the baby. “One King is black; on King is yellow; on King is white; all three are kings; all three see salvation in the justice, mercy and truth which will rekindle the worn and wicked earth.” Du Bois again emphasized that the Christ child represented universal justice and global equality. Some embraced this vision, while others resisted. “Must the Race Problem greet the cradle of the Savior of the World?," Du Bois asked, “It must; and upon the awful majesty of the three kings must dwell equal reverence and social equality.”

Du Bois continued with his Christmas queries: “But why should kings bow to babies in order to save the world? And if to babies, why to babies in mangers and tenements and rookeries? Why not bring this mighty embassage to the frilled and dainty babies of Fifth Avenue or Plaza Hotel?” Jim Crow created an unwelcome environment in places of white wealth, Du Bois replied, and
“[s]o the homage we pay to the low-lying Savior of the World to be is carried to the lower East Side and the upper West Side, to Black Harlem and yellow Chinatown, to the low, the despised…And there the Kings of the Earth shall bow and open their treasures and present unto the Babes three gifts: Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh.”

These gifts are neither items of ancient import nor twentieth-century consumable products, but for Du Bois blessings of life transcend the temporal realm yet are invariably intertwined with it. Gold meant raising children well and a modicum of stability, spending what is necessary for clothing, food, and shelter. Du Bois called frankincense “the ointment and balm of health,” by which he meant proper dietary habits, regular sleep, and warm and comfortable clothes to survive “the Hell of life in flats—all the Frankinsense on the alter of childhood.” As for myrrh, what Du Bois fashioned “the perfume and inspiration in the nostrils of a living human soul,” he intended “[k]nowledge and goodness—discipline and home life, reverence for parents, honesty, a hatred of lying lips, a love of honest work. All those are the gifts of kings on the alter of childhood.”

In customary fashion, Du Bois took biblical stories and found avenues for practical application whether it involved good deeds modeled on the life of Jesus, or allegorizing familiar Christmas stories. Du Bois believed religious ethics and spiritual morals far more important than claims to divinity or theological systems.

Du Bois closed this Christmas column with a meditation on childhood and its possibilities. Proper training of children might well bring the salvation of the world, since “[t]o childhood we look for the triumph of Justice, Mercy and Truth. As the children of this generation are trained, so will the hope of all men in the next generation blossom to fruition, and the song of the Angels above the Christ Child will be heard again in the old world: Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men.”

Christmas with Du Bois 4.0

2008-12-15T13:36:00.002-06:00

When Du Bois became editor of The Crisis in 1910, he wasted little time registering religious reflections on its pages. (The first issue appeared in November 1910.) Two early editorials display how Du Bois used the holiday season and religion as a way to reflect on the political realities of early twentieth-century America. We’ll take a look at one today, titled "Good Will Toward Men," and then another in the next post.

In December 1910, Du Bois focused on Jesus’ ethical imperatives of serving one’s neighbor and loving one’s enemy. “This is the month of the Christ Child,” Du Bois began the editorial, “when there was reborn in men the idea of doing to their neighbors that which they would wish done to themselves.”

Christmas, for Du Bois, was not occasion to reflect on the wonder of the Incarnation as a theological concept, but on its manifestation in the world, what he called “a divine idea—a veritable Son of God.” Du Bois claimed to “see glimmerings of the fulfillment of the vision” as
“[i]n blood and tears the world struggles toward this Star of Bethlehem.”

Yet Du Bois sustained a realist hope, a prophetic longing that did not mince words and spoke truth to power. Far too often the fight for equality and the struggle for justice did not live up to its ideal: it “not only miserably failed, but even its truth has been denied,” he wrote.

Du Bois ended this December editorial with a prayer and a plea. “God grant that on some Christmas day our nation and all others will plant themselves on this one platform: Equal justice and equal opportunity for all races.”

Christmas with Du Bois 3.0

2008-12-12T10:07:00.002-06:00

In the last post, from the December 1926 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois editorialized from Luke 2 about the birth of Peace, the Savior. Earlier that year, in January, he fashioned a story from Matthew 2 about the travels of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus to Egypt titled “No Room in the Inn.”

Du Bois began this editorial by quoting directly from Luke 2, an account of Christ’s birth, swaddling clothes, a manger, and an inn with no vacancy. Then, with the Great Migration in mind, and the attendant issues that emerged with an influx of southern Blacks to the North, Du Bois mused with sarcasm and satire: “Perhaps the inn was really full. Perhaps there was still place for the Rich but none for the Poor. Perhaps the manners of Joseph were not suited to the better bred patrons; perhaps Mary’s condition made the sleek gowned ladies, who could not be bother with children, high incensed; how shocking!” And addressing notions of racialized science present in the 1920s, Du Bois continued, “Perhaps the nose of Joseph was too high and his color too dark for the clerk at the inn.”

Using Mary, Du Bois reflected on the experiences of Black females. He narrated certain moments in her life even as he praised tenacity in the midst of struggle. (And much like the scriptures after the birth of Jesus, Joseph recedes from the picture.) “Ah, but how we black folk can sympathize with the poor little homeless mother of God! Long had been the journey and you had come into the great strange town at night. You hesitate—a stranger, a dark and harried stranger. Then taking desperate courage, you walk into the inn.”

Denied service, denied a place to stay, bewildered and humiliated from the stinging pain and harsh reality of Jim Crow, Du Bois used the experience of Mary and one part of the Christmas story to editorialize about white supremacy and black rage: “And all the time your heart sinks down, down, till the wave of anger and contempt sweeps it up…And so you storm into the night. There is no room in the inn. Not even for Jesus Christ.”

New Book: Jesus and Justice

2008-12-11T21:40:00.005-06:00

Just noticed that my good buddy Peter Heltzel's book is coming out next summer with Yale University Press. It is titled Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics. Peter teaches theology at New York Theological Seminary.

Here's a description from Yale University Press's website:

This timely book investigates the increasing visibility and influence of evangelical Christians in recent American politics with a focus on racial justice. Peter Goodwin Heltzel considers four evangelical social movements: Focus on the Family, the National Association of Evangelicals, Christian Community Development Association, and Sojourners.

The political motives and actions of evangelical groups are founded upon their conceptions of Jesus Christ, Heltzel contends. He traces the roots of contemporary evangelical politics to the prophetic black Christianity tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the socially engaged evangelical tradition of Carl F. H. Henry. Heltzel shows that the basic tenets of King’s and Henry’s theologies have led their evangelical heirs toward a prophetic evangelicalism in a shade of blue green—blue symbolizing the tragedy of black suffering in the Americas, and green symbolizing the hope of a prophetic evangelical engagement with poverty, AIDS, and the environment. This fresh theological understanding of evangelical political groups shines new light on the ways evangelicals shape and are shaped by broader American culture.

I had the privilege of reading this book in manuscript form; it does a masterful job of tracing the historical and theological roots of the various dimensions of evangelicalism. It is a timely book, full of passion, and brimming with rich insight. Read this for a preview of some of what you will find in the book. Peter also recently edited a volume of essays titled Evangelicals and Empire.

Christmas with Du Bois 2.0

2008-12-10T23:57:00.002-06:00

In the December 1926 issue of The Crisis, Du Bois titled his Christmas reflection “Peace.” And the cover that month featured an Aaron Douglas piece titled “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields.”

Taking his text from Luke 2, out of which the traditional Christmas story comes, Du Bois rewrote the biblical text to fit an early twentieth century context—where life intersected with labor, war, greed, technology, internationalism, wealth, and poverty.

The story, of course, begins with shepherds keeping watch over their flocks in the fields at night, “ignorant, black and striving shepherds—poor silly sheep all a-crying, in the gloom; field of harm and hunger.” Du Bois customarily wrote of striving black souls hard at work, and in the next moment the Angel of the Lord showed up to announce the good news of the Savior’s birth. “And lo, the angel of the Lord, Mahatma Gandhi, came upon them, brown and poor and the glory of the Lord shone round about them and they were sore afraid.” Universal in scope, the message the Lord’s angel brought “shall be to all people and nations and races and colors…for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour which is Peace.”

And what will be the sign of peace, Du Bois queried, and where will it be? “Ye shall not find Peace in the Palaces and Chancelleries, nor even in the League of Nations and last of all in the Church; but wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger, down among lowly black folk and brown and yellow and among the poor whites who work.”

In the story the shepherds responded: “War was, is and ever will be,” they cried. “Wealth rules. God is with the big guns and the largest armies; the costliest battleships, the swiftest airplanes and the loudest boasters of superior races.”

Du Bois ends the story with the appearance of a “lone, lean, brown and conquered angel” accompanied with “a multitude of the Heavenly Host praising God and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth, Peace!”

Once again, with Du Bois, salvation comes from the brown, black and lowly; the marginalized pronounce peace, forgiveness, wholeness, and redemption.

Christmas with Du Bois

2008-12-08T20:39:00.002-06:00

When it has struck me, in past years I have marked major holidays with reflections from or on some of the historical figures I’ve studied. Last year I commented about James Baldwin, for example, and also posted a Du Bois prayer about Christmas.

Well, it is the holiday season, and Du Bois returns for this series I’m calling Christmas with Du Bois (this picks up, I suppose, where my short-lived “Devotions with Du Bois” left off in 2007—or rather, never really got off the ground.)

I plan to post once or twice weekly until Christmas, offering my thoughts on what Du Bois had to say about Christmas while editor of The Crisis between 1910 and 1934. In my research I found that Du Bois not only had to say tons about religion (as this book so smartly details), but much about Christmas—and Thanksgiving and Easter, too. Du Bois often narrated Christmas through fiction and non-fiction.

Today’s comments come from a fictional short story, “The Sermon in the Cradle,” which appeared in the Christmas 1921 Crisis number (I’ve posted about this story before in the context of my teaching).

This story retold Jesus’ birth as if it happened under British colonial rule in Benin.

Wise men came from the East to inquire about this “new Christ,” which then troubled the Prime Minister and other officials. In the story, Du Bois rewrote the Nativity prophecy from Isaiah: “And thou Benin, in the land of Nigeria, art not the least among the princes of Africa: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my Negro people.” The star later guided the wise men to the birth site (“in a house”), and upon seeing this new African Christ, worshiped and presented gifts—“gold and medicine and perfume,” presents with symbolic significance and practical value. All of the wise men then left (warned by God in a dream not to return to London), except one black wise man who was from Benin. He “lingered by the cradle and the new-born babe,” Du Bois wrote.

Eventually “the multitudes” showed up and the black Christ child broke into sermon, as Du Bois reconfigured Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the poor folks for they shall go to heaven. Blessed are the sad folks for someone will bring them joy. Blessed are they that submit to hurts for they shall sometime own the world. Blessed are they that truly want to do right for they shall get their wish. Blessed are those who do not seek revenge for vengeance will not seek them. Blessed are the pure for they shall see God. Blessed are those who will not fight for they are God’s children. Blessed are those whom people like to injure for they shall sometime be happy. Blessed are you, Black Folk, when men make fun of you and mob you and lie about you. Never mind and be glad for your day will surely come. Always the world has ridiculed its better souls.

There are several important points to make about this inventive, creative story. First, the date of publication in the December 1921 issue. Many of Du Bois’s short stories about a black Christ appeared at particular times of the year—in December and in April. Du Bois himself understood the significance of Christian celebrations and the liturgical cycle, and some of his readers no doubt did as well.

Second, “The Sermon in the Cradle” is yet another instance of Du Bois retelling the life of Jesus as a black Christ. Other offerings on this score include Du Bois’s short stories “The Son of God,” published in the December 1933 edition of The Crisis, and “The Gospel According to Mary Brown (1919), among others.

Third, Pan-African and anticolonial movements were underway during the 1920s, and Du Bois understood World War I to be in part a colonial conflict and sought and pursued solidarity internationally. What’s more, Du Bois organized the first Pan African Congress in Paris in 1919 and another in 1921 and so this story is a clear indication that these issues were on his mind at the time. And of course it is significant that Du Bois chose the story and teachings of Jesus as one way to creatively narrate these larger global concerns. Du Bois did not find salvation in Bethlehem, but in Africa.

Fourth, and finally, the reformulated Sermon on the Mount highlights Du Bois’s explicit focus on the ethical dimensions of Jesus’ teaching. There are no miracles and “The Sermon in the Cradle” is devoid of divinity. Du Bois emphasized and hoped social and economic justice would eventually come for those subject to hurt and wrong. Even though there existed a deep thirst for vengeance, Du Bois placed God on the side of Black Folk since “the world has ridiculed its better souls.”

Watch This!

2008-12-02T21:12:00.004-06:00

My friend and colleage Jonathan Walton, assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, has a book coming out in February with the fine folks from NYU Press. It's called Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism. (And speaking of NYU Press, check out their new blog, "From the Square.")

Here's more:

Through their constant television broadcasts, mass video distributions, and printed publications, African American religious broadcasters have a seemingly ubiquitous presence in popular culture. They are on par with popular entertainers and athletes in the African American community as cultural icons even as they are criticized by others for taking advantage of the devout in order to subsidize their lavish lifestyles.

For these reasons questions abound. Do televangelists proclaim the message of the gospel or a message of greed? Do they represent the “authentic” voice of the black church or the Christian Right in blackface? Does the phenomenon reflect orthodox “Christianity” or ethnocentric “Americaninity” wrapped in religious language?

Watch This! seeks to move beyond such polarizing debates by critically delving into the dominant messages and aesthetic styles of African American televangelists and evaluating their ethical implications.

With an early focus on Rev. Ike and initial versions of the prosperity message, Walton places the contemporary phenomenon of black religious broadcasting in historical perspective, demonstrating that the types of syncretic and sensational black Christian practices witnessed on today's airwaves have been brewing within African American storefronts and on black religious radio for the majority of the twentieth century. He goes on to illumine the diversity of theology and social thought among popular black religious broadcasters in order to delineate the differences among figures often lumped together as monolithic.

In so doing, Watch This! provides a principled ethical analysis that situates televangelists against a larger cultural backdrop, evaluating them according to their own self-understandings and ecclesial agendas. From T.D. Jakes to Bishop Eddie Long to Pastor Creflo Dollar, Walton argues that despite their emphasis on social and economic advancement in the African American community, these leaders ministries frustrate their own liberatory aims and unwittingly reinforce class, racial, and gender injustices in America.

Such a nuanced examination of black religious broadcasting is certain to enrich our understanding of this prevalent and pervasive form of popular and political culture.

Matisyahu.Shattered

2008-10-22T19:31:00.007-05:00

One of my favorite musicians released 4 songs yesterday from new record called Shattered. The remaining songs will come out sometime in 2009. There's nothing like Hasidic Jewish reggae with deep spiritual wisdom and biblical history woven into it. And beatboxing, and more beatboxing.

This record has a newer, more mature sound; its deeper, thicker, and more complicated with a crisper, clearer Caribbean sound.

Matisyahu is a storyteller, a traveling spiritual guide, in so many ways a prophet for the 21st century.

Read my previous Matisyahu posts here and here. And check out Matisyahu's new website here.

Fall Books on Fall Break

2008-10-20T12:21:00.005-05:00

I’m on a fall break from teaching right now (although the 6-day hiatus from school for Hurricane Ike was really my fall break), so figured I’d highlight some books out this fall/winter that I've read, am reading, or will read.

First, some of the latest Du Bois: I'm really looking forward to The Souls of W.E.B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections, due out in January with Mercer University Press. Ed Blum and Jason Young edit what I think will be a stellar collection of essays.

Also, literary scholar and college administrator Brian Johnson just published W.E.B. Du Bois: Toward Agnosticism, 1868-1934 with Rowman & Littlefield. Johnson's great Du Bois reader, Du Bois on Reform, has been helpful in my research, and of course I'm looking forward to reading about Du Bois the agnostic in light of already reading about Du Bois as an American prophet. You can bet there will be some future blog posts on these books.

I read Cornel West's new book over the weekend, Hope on a Tightrope. It is a book for the everyday, ordinary reader and showcases West’s prophetic reflections about social justice and Christian ethics. It is a good read, with glossy, slick photos of West throughout the years. The book is apparently published with one of Tavis Smiley’s companies, and has a companion CD with Smiley interviewing West and selections from some of West’s spoken word projects.

There is nothing really new in the book, and I think this will give West’s critics more ammunition that he doesn’t write weighty academic tomes (or at least hasn’t in a while). That said, I think it is commendable that he writes and speaks as a public intellectual, and his voice is surely one of the gadflies of our age. Hope on a Tightrope is the perennial and prophetic West at his lyrical best. I understand now that West is working on his memoir, which I can’t wait to read.

I saw an ad for the book From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor. Looks really interesting, and there are several such books like this one, such as Life On the Tenure Track and many from the University of Chicago Press. I’ve not read From Student to Scholar yet, but here’s an interview with the book’s author Steve Cahn.

The final book I’d like to mention is Barbara Dianne Savage’s Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion, just out with Harvard University Press. I’ve been waiting for this book for a while, having read Savage’s earlier article on Du Bois, democracy, and religion. Paul Harvey compares Savage’s book to Curtis Evans’s The Burden of Black Religion, so I can't wait to read each side by side. Also, Curtis has agreed to a blog interview about his book, so look for that in the future.

What new books are you reading, or do you suggest to put on the reading list?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention another book I'm reading--Gerardo Marti's Hollywood Faith: Holiness, Prosperity and Ambition at a Hollywood Church. This is a good book. Marti's ideas are clear and profound, ethnography thick and descriptive, and writing accessible. From sermons, to church architecuture, to the fabric of everyday belief and ordinary faith, Marti gives readers and up-close-and-personal look at one Hollywood church. The book has a great cover, too.

Race and Religion

2008-10-11T12:21:00.003-05:00

Scot McKnight over at his blog Jesus Creed, is currently doing a review series on J. Kameron Carter's new book Race: A Theological Account (Oxford, 2008).

I've not read the book yet, but I've been waiting for it for some time after I first heard about the project a few years back. Looks like a good and important book.

Read the first installment of Scot's review here, and find the second installment here. (Follow this link to read some other blogging reflections on Carter's book.)

Maybe I'll write up some of my own thoughts on the book once I've had a chance to read it.

Faith and Politics in the Fall: Obama/Biden

2008-10-10T07:54:00.003-05:00

Here's the post faith and politics in the fall for Obama and Biden.

I've actually not seen much on Biden's religion as yet--the best reflection comes from my friend and colleage John Fea in his "Joe Biden's Catholic America."

Unlike McCain, Obama has spoken openly about his faith factor, and there's even a book about the subject. Interestingly, some even ask, "Is Barack Obama the Messiah?"

The following reflection comes from historian Gary Scott Smith in the form of a review of Stephen Mansfield's book on Obama (linked above).

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[BB: The original article appeared in the lastest issue of Christianity Today. Click on the title below to access.]

"A Pilgrim's Progress"

Since Thomas Jefferson was accused of being an atheist in 1800, the religious convictions of presidential candidates have often been an issue in American political history. In 1928 and 1960, the Catholicism of Al Smith and John F. Kennedy, respectively, drew close scrutiny and created controversy. Jimmy Carter's declaration that he was a "born again" Christian and George W. Bush's statement that Jesus was his favorite philosopher injected religion into the 1976 and 2000 campaigns.

As important as religion has been, Stephen Mansfield (author of The Faith of George W. Bush and other faith-focused biographies) argues in The Faith of Barack Obama that it is especially significant in the 2008 campaign, primarily because of the Illinois senator. Four factors have focused public attention on Obama's faith: the Democrats' revamped approach to win the votes of the nation's most religiously devout citizens; Obama's unusual faith journey; his frank admission that his faith informs his policies; and the inflammatory remarks of Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright Jr. Along with the claim that he lacks experience, especially in foreign policy matters, the nature and potential influence of Obama's faith on his presidency will undoubtedly remain a key campaign issue.

After John Kerry narrowly lost the 2004 presidential election in large part because Bush captured the votes of78 percent of evangelicals and 52 percent of Catholics (a higher percentage than Republicans normally win), Democrats developed a strategy to appeal more to religious Americans. They hired advisers and held forums to learn how to speak more effectively to religious groups and created organizations to target specific religious communities. Because many evangelicals are disillusioned by Bush's failure to strongly push their agenda—promoting pro-life policies, traditional marriage, and conventional morality—favor policies that Democrats have historically supported—protecting the environment, furthering social justice, and reducing poverty—they find these efforts attractive.

In his brief but engaging, sympathetic yet judicious religious biography of Obama, Mansfield carefully analyzes these factors and helps readers understand the context and impact of these issues. Mansfield also carefully details Obama's religious background: he was reared by religiously skeptical grandparents and an agnostic mother who encouraged him to view religion in a respectful but detached manner, and was influenced by the "religious tolerance of the Hawaiian Islands and the multiculturalism of Indonesia." His mother moved to Indonesia after she married a Muslim (who espoused a "folk Islam" that focused primarily on using rituals to drive away evil); as a young boy Obama occasional went to a mosque with his stepfather and learned about Islam while attending public school.

Still religiously rootless after graduating from Columbia University, he moved to Chicago in 1985 to work in community development on the South Side. Told that his lack of religious faith erected a barrier between himself and the poor people he strove to help, and already wrestling with his conscience, cynicism, and intellectual approach to religion, Obama attended Trinity United Church of Christ, pastored by Wright Mansfield chronicles Obama's journey over many months from skepticism to faith, which Obama describes as "a choice," "not an epiphany." Obama claims to have "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" and to believe in his "redemptive death and resurrection:' Despite such affirmations, Obama admits to doubts and uncertainties, discomfort with some aspects of Christianity, and a belief that there are many paths to God and salvation.

Mansfield provides an astute description of Trinity's history, ministry, and worship services, as well as Wright's background and the influence of James Cone's black theology on his views. Convinced that to follow Jesus Christians must work to liberate the oppressed, Wright demanded that the U.S. compensate blacks for slavery and increase its foreign aid to Africa, and denounced the government for failing to obey God's commandments. Even more provocative statements—including damning the United States for its racism and contending that the government devised AIDS to further subjugate blacks—which became public in April 2008, led Obama to break with his pastor and drop his membership at Trinity.

Nevertheless, polls indicate that many Americans are troubled that Obama apparently sat comfortably under Wright's ministry for two decades. Mansfield explains what attracted Obama to Trinity and kept him there: its commitment to social activism and many ministries to the poor; celebration of his African heritage; lively worship services and stimulating sermons; theological justification of political liberalism; and sense of community. Obama stayed at Trinity because he found a faith, a fellowship of like-minded Christians, and a foundation for his political vision.

Mansfield argues that Obama is an "everyman in a heroic tale of spiritual seeking" whom many Americans find to be either "a fellow traveler" or a leader in "a new era of American spirituality:' He contrasts Obama's faith journey with that of John McCain, whose faith emphasizes character and duty; Hillary Clinton, whose faith accentuates the social ethics of Jesus; and George W Bush, whose faith focuses on evangelical conversion. These four politicians "represent the dominant religious forces in American politics today!' Obama, Mansfield maintains, is "unapologetically Christian and unapologetically liberal." His faith is "transforming, lifelong, and real!' It "infuses his public policy" and "informs his leadership!'

Numerous examples demonstrate that the faith of Presidents, if sincerely held, has a significant influence on their world-views, character, agendas, relationships, and policies. Thus, should Obama win the 2008 election, Mansfield argues, his faith will play major role in how he governs. But even if the charismatic, articulate, personable senator from Illinois should lose to John McCain in 2008, at age 47 he will long ''be a political and religious force to be reckoned with in American society."

Readers will likely want more specific assessment of how Obama's faith will influence his priorities and policies if he is elected, but Mansfield's succinct analysis of Obama's religious background, convictions, and public statements on religion and politics is informative and even inspiring. Those who disagree with Obama's approach to politics will reject Mansfield's conclusion that by wedding his faith to his political vision, Obama will help "end the moral scourges of our time": poverty, racism, unethical conduct of the powerful and powerless, and inadequate analysis of the morality of American military intervention. Those who advocate strict separation of church and state or detest the way Bush's religious convictions have affected his presidency will probably dislike the influence Obama's faith has on his policies and campaign.

Many of us, however, share Mansfield's hope that the issues raised in the campaign by faith forums and Wright's charges will prompt continued assessment of how our nation can best advance the biblical values of righteousness and compassion.

Faith and Politics in the Fall: McCain/Palin

2008-10-10T07:33:00.007-05:00

Like many, I am starting to feel election season fatigue. Campaigning is well past marathon stage, and thankfully the finish line is in sight.

Nevertheless, I remain interested in the comings and goings of the candidates, keen to read policy positions and issue(s) statements, and attuned to faith and politics in the fall.

There has, of course, been tons written about this already but a few reflections from this week are worth posting. I offer these commentaries (in two separate posts) on the faith and politics of McCain and Obama. And here are a few posts on Palin by Grem, Sutton, Scholes, and Fea. UPDATE: with an HT to John Turner, Time has a piece on Palin and religion.

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[BB: The original article at Religion Dispatches has several hyperlinked sections. Click on the article title below to find those. HT: Paul]

John McCain: No God But Country (by Kathryn Lofton)

“I know how the world works. I know the good and the evil in it.” — John McCain

When talk turns to the intersection of religion and politics, religionists are a bore to have around; what you want is titter and amusement. But scholars of religious studies don’t offer much by way of demonstrative surprise at the obscenities of public faith. Like the manager of the strip club, they’ve seen it all before. Whisper to a religionist that the Christian candidate has a grandchild produced out of wedlock and you’ll get a game of one-upmanship. “Well, if you think that’s crazy, let me tell you about the nun in Dubuque who…the Hindu cleric who…the Catholic soccer mom who…the born-again President who…” Or, just as likely, you might get a little shrug, a roll of the eyes, and a tiny harrumph. “Religious people are just like nonreligious people,” one colleague remarked to me recently, “except religious people have whole cosmologies to explain their failures.”

What may seem like a flippant position is actually an elaborate argumentative vantage point that scholars of religion have been refining for over one hundred years. Religionists are, by their training, by their dispositional nature, less interested in the debunking of the religious subject (“I knew you were lying!”) than we are in the study of the religious subject (“Such a complicated way to understand the world!”). What religionists have learned through all this analysis is that there are no consistent or pure religious subjects. There have been men and women throughout history—of towering, articulated faith and of impressive, practiced piety—who have found ways to sin, prevaricate, and seemingly contradict the ideal postulate of their orthodoxies. It is no surprise that a man of Christian consensus might have an Afrocentric preacher, or an evangelical may have an impregnated teen, or a Catholic may have a weakness for plagiarism, or an Episcopalian may have a hankering for Charles Keating’s cash. These aren’t exceptions in the study of religion, they are the rules. Men and women believe even as they struggle, relentlessly, to behave.

So when I say that John McCain may not believe in God, I do so with serious thought, and with no small indifference. It matters very little to me (as a voter, as a thinker, and as a believer) that John McCain doesn’t articulate a deity familiar to any available denomination of Christianity (or Judaism or Hinduism or Islam). John McCain is, indisputably, a man of courage and intelligence. To suggest that he is not recognizably Baptist (nor ostensibly Episcopalian) is merely to demonstrate that our enterprise of discerning religion from political candidates misses, precisely, the realities of religion. In some contrast to the pursuits of journalism, the religionist does not anticipate the craven, presuming that all words of faith are pandering rhetoric meant to appease men with guns and girls with God(s). Rather, our job is to collect the available artifacts of religion (words and acts supplied in archive or public record) and render an analysis of the subject. For students of religion, this analysis is not an inherently apolitical exercise, but it is, at its best, one disentangled from theological prescription. Somehow, without a God (but not, as we will see, without a powerful creed) John McCain has forged for himself a moral mode, a discourse, a rhetoric of righteousness. What, then, ought it matter whether he is or is not, technically speaking, Christian?

It apparently matters to him, and to his opponent, and maybe it matters to you. McCain has noted several times that the “number one issue... that people should [use to] make a selection of the president of the United States [is] will this person carry on in the Judeo-Christian principle that has made this nation the greatest experiment in the history of mankind?” A person’s faith is, according to McCain, an “important part of our qualifications to lead.” Bracketing his dubious grasp of constitutional history, McCain’s words direct our assessment. How ought we estimate the existence of such Judeo-Christian principle? And is such a principle properly religious? As I proceed here with a study of McCain’s religious words and religious acts, it is worth noting that there is no test, no catechism, and no shibboleth (as much as the voting public may, for whatever reason, desire one) that will prove religious identity or personal commitment to a specific God. People say and do a lot of things they don’t actually mean. Trying to know what people actually do believe, or what they actually do mean, requires psychic skill far beyond the purview of most refereed journals, most tenured academics, and certainly beyond the polygraph limits of the American media. Remember (yes, you, Senator McCain; you, Senator Obama; and you, voting Americans): words of faith are precisely that: Words. To know a man’s religion as an observer (a voter, a journalist, a scholar, an outside believer) is to know, only and entirely, his language game. This is John McCain’s.

Acts of Faith

From the start, it should be clear that we don’t have a lot to study. The most consistent aspect of McCain’s performance of religion is his droopiness toward expressive devotion. When it comes to communal ritual and institutional affiliation—the social expressions of religious belief—McCain offers little more than a confusing hopscotch of churches and a sense of presumptive Protestantism. His strongest acts of faith have been political maneuvers, like his 2008 attempt to create alliances with evangelical leaders in an effort to convince the party’s base that he is a bible believer. This despite the fact that he denounced the Religious Right in 2000 as “agents of intolerance” and despite the definitional truth that he was not, by any useful meaning of that category, an evangelical. This is one of the many reasons the selection of Governor Sarah Palin was such a brilliant choice as a co-conspirator in 2008. Central casting could not have supplied a better religious beard.

Even in his 2008 convention speech McCain would not admire publicly Palin’s religious belief, choosing rather to note that “she knows where she comes from and she knows who she works for. She stands up for what’s right, and she doesn’t let anyone tell her to sit down.” McCain’s rhetoric is littered with invocations of chutzpah and independence even as his has been a (theological and professional) career bent on a studied moderation. “Ultimately,” writes McCain biographer John Karaagac, “we may say that McCain’s life offers a study in appropriateness.” Yes, McCain has done what was expected of him: he, great-grandson of an Episcopalian priest, attended an Episcopal High School, matriculated to the Naval Academy, then devoted himself to military service before transferring his duty to elected office. In high school, he attended mandatory chapel every morning and mandatory church twice on Sundays. He learned every line of the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed, acts of memorization which would later earn him the role of ad hoc prison chaplain in the Hanoi Hilton. When he married a woman more regularly religious, he followed her to church when they had time to go. He would listen, and nod, and think that there was something good about all this fellowship, all this love.

Such a rendition of McCain’s appropriate religious life fails to offer the fleshy, flashy McCain, the McCain of infamy and admiration. McCain’s life story (articulated in memoirs and stump speeches) is suffused with talk (and pride) for insubordination, fearlessness, and nonconformity. He fancies himself a “maverick.” Perhaps this is why he has such a hard time tying with a denomination, and why he doesn’t like talking about anything as singularly conceding as religious devotion. For some observers, the fact that McCain doesn’t talk much about his faith, about his Christianity, is a denominational inevitability. “McCain, actually, is being very authentic by keeping it inside,” writes voter Eric Gorski in a letter to the New York Times,” He doesn’t wear religion on his sleeve because he comes from a generation and upbringing—Episcopalian—that tends not to.”

Such a socially determinist explanation might apply if McCain had not made an abrupt move to a different church in the early 1990s. Although his campaign lists his affiliation as “Episcopalian,” McCain corrected a reporter in 2007, commenting, “By the way, I’m no Episcopalian. I’m Baptist.” That year—preceding his current national candidacy, just seven years after he was outfoxed by Bush in South Carolina—saw many oddly confessional claims from McCain on subjects religious. “It wasn’t so much a rejection of the Episcopal Church,” McCain said in October 2007 of his move to the North Phoenix Baptist Church. “I came into that church, I sat down, I got the message of redemption and love and forgiveness, and it resonated with me. I found going to that church was beneficial to me in my life.” He “got” the “message of redemption.” He’s been “going” to church. These are claims of some acceptance and presence, but not the conversion or holy abjection frequently described by individuals whose worlds have been transfigured by a particular reading of the gospel, a particular preacher’s poignancy, or a particular ritual process. Becoming Baptist was, by McCain's reckoning, a Sunday respite. Conveniently for him, this churchly idyll was found by quitting one of the smallest mainline denominations in order to attend the single largest Protestant sect, by leaving the land of Gene Robinson for the world of Billy Graham, Rick Warren, and Mike Huckabee.

For people who don’t enjoy the intricacies of Christian denominationalism, McCain’s language of change may seem adequate. He once drove a Ford, now he drives a Chrysler: What’s the difference? For religionists (the sort of people who love the messy details of sectarian schism), McCain’s terse description of North Phoenix does not supply nearly enough explanation for what is a jolting swap, like trading the Jetta for a Suburban. Yet McCain supplies no wake-up call, no re-awakening of his spirit to explicate his substitution of Sunday affections. He offers no specifications of the kind of Christ that pressed him from a the Book of Common Prayer to the Baptist Faith and Message. Nor, as mentioned above, has he shown the increased piety of the convert. When asked how often he attends church McCain says, “not as often as I should.” When asked whether he has participated in adult baptism, a ritual requisite for converts to the Convention, McCain says no, calling it “a personal thing,” adding on another occasion that “I didn’t find it necessary to do so for my spiritual needs.”

McCain’s decision not to participate in a major ritual of Baptist practice may be laziness, may be diffidence, or it may be a desire to evade hypocrisy. If I don’t take communion when I attend an Episcopal church, it’s not because I am antagonistic to communion (or Episcopalians). I don’t take communion because this ritual act of belonging is not mine because I do not, properly, belong. Why does McCain choose not to belong where he claims to belong? If these rituals are not McCain's, which are? Are his prayers Nicene still? Were they ever? McCain’s acts of faith requires a return to requisite high school ritual. Or, as he would have it, a return to Hanoi.

Words of Faith

For most political leaders, God is littered about their speeches, press releases, floor statements, editorials, and memoirs like verbal pork barrel. Federal executives and legislators tend to collapse into predictable patterns of religious invocation, using lines from the Gospel of Matthew, images of David and Goliath, or talk of covenants to build a City on the Hill in order to flourish their claims of political power. Yet in his years of public service prior to 2008, John McCain’s speeches are models of secular aridity. He doesn’t just occasionally speak of God or faith or America’s Christian promise; he never does. Indeed, John McCain does not like to talk about religion. “I’m unashamed and unembarrassed about my deep faith in God,” he has said, “But I do not obviously try to impose my views on others.” When pressed, McCain has been known to snap back to interrogating reporters, “The most important thing is that I’m a Christian. And I don’t have anything else to say on the issue.”

When McCain does use religious metaphor, it is language cribbed from another belated believer. McCain likens himself to Reagan, a man whose faith made a surprise appearance only once he achieved elected office. In his 2008 convention speech, McCain called upon his party to return to the “party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan.” In 2000, McCain separated that same party from the party of the Religious Right, fatefully remarking: “My friends, I am a Reagan Republican who will defeat Al Gore. Unfortunately, Governor Bush is a Pat Robertson Republican who will lose to Al Gore.”

This Reagan Republican has come around on Pat Robertson politics, volunteering to sacrifice once again for his country a piece of himself. At the “Civil Forum on the Presidency” moderated by Rick Warren at Saddleback Church this past August, and on countless other occasions during the campaign, McCain has canonized one anecdote to answer every question about God, every question about faith, every inquiry about his religious devotion. This is, of course, the tale of the dirt cross at the Hanoi Hilton. McCain describes this period with rehearsed (always dry-eyed) poignancy, recounting how his commitment to The Code of Conduct left him to rot for five and half years, how trapped in solitary confinement he was allowed a minute or two outside on Christmas Day, and how one guard looked him straight in the eye on that day (that holy day) and “drew with his sandal a cross in the ground.”

In recent press events, this moment in Hanoi has become his road to Damascus, the tale told to shunt rumors of irreligion. Conversion narratives have become mandatory formulations in American politics, signaling simultaneously theological affinity with an important voting bloc as well as the character requisite to serve an executive post with populist humility. As political scientist David S. Gutterman has observed, words of conversion feed multiple audiences:

Those who have their own conversion narrative will be able to recognize themselves in another’s story, and those who are not saved will be hopefully seduced by the plot of the story, so that they may know themselves as chaotic and fragmented, needing only to follow the path laid bare by the narrative plot in order to experience Jesus and be made whole.

That conversion talk is so much more common in contemporary politics than it was twenty-five years ago can be paralleled with other signs of the triumphant solipsist, including the success of confessional talk shows, competitive reality programming, and the discovery that celebrities are “just like US!”

Even within this din of come-to-Jesus moments, McCain’s story is discordant, failing to supply some of the basic ingredients for a ritual confession of faith. It includes no mention of God (or Christ) as an actor in his life or even in that dirt-drawn moment. There are no searching first-person studies of his character, expelling moment of personal sin revealed, revelled, and renunciated. His reading of the story varies, most frequently returning to it as a common text for two people seeking fellowship: “For a brief moment, neither one of us were in Hanoi, we were just two Christians celebrating the birth of Christ together.” Another time: “We stood wordlessly looking at the cross, remembering the true light of Christmas.” Yet another: “I will never forget the fact that no matter where you are, no matter how difficult things are, there’s always going to be someone of your faith and your belief and your devotion to your fellow man who will pick you up and help you out and bring you through.” The story, and its retread morals, has stirred a bit of predictable controversy. Blogger Andrew Sullivan finds it bears a striking resemblance to a tale once told by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. There have also been intimations that McCain only added the story once he entered politics, due to its absence from his 1973 captivity narrative. And historian John Fea has noted, aptly, that no matter the truth of the tale, it “tells us more about the guard’s faith than McCain’s.”

Whatever the origin of the story, McCain can’t stop in the midst of this election cycle from telling it to us. The cross may have been marked in the dirt, and McCain may indeed have been filled with a certain form of communal wonder, but is that wonder a “Christian” awe? McCain’s unwillingness to format the story neatly into a born-again plot line may indicate his own reticence to propagate a rhetorical fraud. In his memoir Faith of My Fathers, McCain does not describe this incident as a conversion to Christianity, but as a conversion to country, as the time when he finally understood his “self-respect in a shared fidelity to my country.” The cross in the ground was a crossroads for McCain, but not from sinner to saved. Rather it was his turn from Lt. Commander Cad to Citizen McCain. He mentions the words “Christian” and “Christianity” rarely, but when he does, it is always—always—connected with an idea of “America” or “American.”

Consider these examples. When Rick Warren asked what faith in Jesus means to him, McCain replied: “Means I’m saved and forgiven. And when we’re talking about the world, our faith encompasses not just the United States of America, but the world.” Elsewhere, in a Time magazine rendition of the dirt cross story, he comments: “I will always remember as well the Christmas services that my fellow prisoners and I held in a cell, when I gave thanks to God for the blessings he had granted me with the company of men I had come to admire and love. In the life of our country, faith serves the same ends that it can serve in the life of each believer, whatever creed we may possess.” McCain admits to a faith, and suggests that this “faith” has been his total “salvation.” “The only reason why I’m here today is because I believe that a higher being has a mission for me in my life—a reason for me to be here.”

That “higher being” isn’t God. That higher being is America. Again, after another telling of the Hanoi Hilton conversion, he proclaims: “This is my faith, the faith that unites and never divides, the faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. That is my religious faith and it is the faith I want my party to serve, and the faith I hold in my country.” Later, in his 2008 convention speech, McCain becomes more explicit, saying that after Hanoi, “I wasn’t my own man anymore. I was my country’s.” Salvation has but one source: “My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it.” Someone once called atheism an undetectable God. McCain’s God can be detected, it can be found: his God is the country for whom McCain survived.

The strident—near stunning—focus of his religious ardor has been to his nation. You won’t find McCain singing Baptist hymns. You won’t hear him weigh out the meaning of the Episcopal sacraments. You won’t find him doing these things because he doesn’t need them, nor does he (by all public practice and proclamation) want them. He has all the ritual and power, holiness and community he could want. Often McCain draws on images of Theodore Roosevelt’s frontier as his virgin paradise, a place where men followed the strenuous life to messianic effect. These men, the men and women who pursue such new lands and new struggles, are McCain’s parish, and their devotion is his ritual practice. His religion is the civil religion of America. “You know,” he explained at this year’s convention, “I’ve been called a maverick; someone who marches to the beat of his own drum. Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment and sometimes it’s not. What it really means is I understand who I work for. I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a special interest. I don’t work for myself. I work for you.”

This is the conversion of Hanoi. The cross in the dirt is religious talk, but it is the observation of a man who cannot make religious moments of his own, so he turns to the devotions of others to derive his piety. The real fall-on-the-knees moment is McCain’s conversion to self-sacrifice, to his nationalist orthodoxy. David Foster Wallace, who recently passed away, summarized this attitude with excruciating clarity in his account of McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign:

Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the nuts and having fractures set without a general would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened.

After a vivid portrayal of McCain’s torture (broken ribs, shoulder broken with a rifle butt, broken arm, teeth knocked out), Wallace places us in McCain’s position:

Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would cry out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer…Would you have refused the offer? Could you have?

That McCain did stay, that he did so against his obvious self-interest, in loyalty to the Code, might demonstrate, as Wallace puts it, that McCain is certifiably insane. But we also know...

[F]or a proven fact, that he is capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches now you can feel like maybe it’s not just more candidate bullshit, that this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit—the man does want your vote, after all.

The man does want your vote, after all. And so we return to where we begin. How do we ever know the mysteries of the man’s soul? And what, really, should those mysteries have to do with our political estimations? To declare that McCain is not Christian against his (once rare; now constant) protestations to the opposite is not intended to be insubordinate to his proudly proclaimed truths. It is merely to say that, like policy positions, religion has an evidence pool. If a man says he supports nuclear power, we can check his voting record and decide for ourselves if the votes support that position. If a man says he believes in God, the evidence is harder to find. Did Jesus die for your salvation? We take it as a matter of faith: McCain says so, then it is so. But for the religionist, this is a position that would garner no high marks. Scholars wobble, constantly, between our task of understanding the material (“What, precisely, does the Book of Mormon say?”) evaluating the material (“How, precisely, does this map onto broader patterns of religious behavior?”). John McCain calls himself Christian, yet his religious worldview (articulated in word and act) does not map anywhere near the Episcopal Church of his childhood, nor the Baptist church of his adulthood. Indeed, it is hard to find John McCain’s religion without a lot of conjure, and a lot of (dangerous, on scholarly grounds) imagination.

Yet he has conceded to a religious mimicry, invoking (lightly, never avowedly) from (what just happens to be) the most consequential Protestant voting block in the Republican Party. Contemporary culture, doped up on Daily Show smirks, is certain that all surfaces deceive, all tales are seductions, and all one-liners lie. To be sure, honesty is not the coin of the political realm, and we may be savvy to practice a vigilant doubt. It is tempting, then, to suggest that McCain’s dramatic turn to religious talk in the last few months is the world’s greatest cover-up, hiding the secret truth that this is no man of God. Someday we may find evidence that Rove edited McCain’s texts, that McCain resisted Palin’s Pentecostal panache and that, all along, McCain begged that he might never again have to tell the tale of the cross and the dirt. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ll find diary upon diary authored by John McCain keening for Christ’s particular grace. Or maybe we’ll hear stories (from his daughters, from his sons) of how embarrassed, how mortified he was to be such a religious monkey, how certain he was that The Code of Conduct was all he should need, and how it was that that man, that eight-year President, made him be so very evangelical in order to win back the very party that (once upon a time, not so long ago) made him lose a primary by calling his daughter black.

But for now, we just have this man, this testifying and freewheeling man who has made his own choices (in word and act). He is a man running hard in the hardest race of his life, a man who believes in his country, who believes he would serve it well, who believes that he is the best American for the job, and since all Americans are assumed to be, at base, Judeo-Christian then it is no lie at all to say that he is, at base, a good Christian man. And so he is. A good Christian man. He says it, and we have to believe him. We, the scholars. You, the voters.

We believe him against the evidence because it feels better to believe that his life—his survival, bound and tied, long ago—is a testimony to Jesus’s mercy. We feel better believing that nobody would ever, or could ever, lie about a loving God, or lie about loving Christ. And despite our own schismatic compulsions (in daily life, in sectarian divide), we like to believe that all denominations look the same in the dark.

Finally, we want to believe that words of faith are different than words of politics, that when a man speaks of God he is more honest, more reliable, than he is when he speaks of policy promises. In short, we just want to believe that belief is. That’s what we want, and it’s what McCain now provides. Who among us could judge him? After all, it’s not in his self-interest: it’s in ours. McCain plays in a theater, with a script, that we designed (not without a little assistance from Them, from Rove and the Southern Baptist Convention and the RNC and the DNC). Despite his disinterest in the subject called Jesus, he dances for our pleasure, he sings a salvation song for us, for those who he seeks—always, relentlessly, with frightening abandon, self-deception, and self-sacrifice—to serve.

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This article was assisted by research completed by Anne Farris and Mark O’Keefe for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (see their religious biography of McCain, as well as the public record of McCain’s speeches).

Bald Guys and Bow Ties

2008-10-01T20:29:00.003-05:00

This week is homecoming week at my school, and today was "twin day." After discussion and planning with my friend and history colleague Jim, we decided to be twins. This was Jim's second day in a row to wear a bow tie, so I like where this is going.

Eddie, if three's a crowd, then with your brains and bow ties the department would be unstoppable. We'll have to take another bow tie picture with you when you are on campus next.

Street Knowledge: Homeless Bloggers

2008-09-30T23:19:00.008-05:00

A former student of mine, currently attending Belmont, recently brought to my attention the blog of Kevin Barbieux, a homeless blogger from Nashville. He blogs at The Homeless Guy.

After reading some of his posts, Kevin has a lot to say, and I like what he has to say--particularly about the topic of hospitality. I'm not sure if Kevin has kids, but his thoughts on hospitality and children, in my opinion, is right on. Here's a brief sample:

Nothing could be more crucial to parenting as hospitality. It is the most necessary aspect of raising a child. For with hospitality parents are required to recognize the person, and the individual that is their child, and to give this person full respect and consideration. It is striking how often parents fail to do so. And it is not at all surprising how messed up a child becomes when mistreated by a parent. Like the old saying goes, as the tree is bent, so shall it grow. Show me an adult that is lacking proper social skills, and I'll show you someone who was not treated with respect by their parents.

Read the full post here. And read another post about hospitality here. Reading Kevin's posts brings to mind another writer on homelessness, Fr. Gary Smith, whose Radical Compassion: Finding Christ in the Heart of the Poor is perhaps my favorite book. And check out this site, Where's Brandt?, another homeless blogger.

Thanks for sharing your stories, Kevin and Brandt, and gracing us with your wisdom, insight, and perspective.

Travelblogging 3.0 from Atlanta

2008-09-26T17:51:00.002-05:00

Google technology
CLOUD COMPUTING

RSS: “real simple syndication”

Connectivism

Network Literacy

METAPHOR
Google reader: Will Ricahrdson’s textbook for subjects related to networking, technology, and teaching; Will can update at anytime; he does not have a passive relationship with this textbook

(Book): Everything is Miscellaneous; creating “folkonomies” not taxonomies

Model: search term—what is your passion?
e.g.—mountain biking; first site Will pulled up had advertisement, so public site making profit….ended up being a personal blog.

Show students how to VET websites

Social Bookmarking

SUMMARY: This session was more about the application of the new connectivity programs; it was a real whirlwind; wish there would have been more time for the discussion. Good, but too short.

As promised, I'll be offering my narrative summary thoughts of the conference sometime over the weekend.

Travelblogging 2.0 from Atlanta

2008-09-22T09:28:00.004-05:00

Don't have time to hyperlink notes, but here they are from Will Richardson's morning presentation. Finished up about 15 minutes ago. I'll follow up with narrative reflections as soon as I can.

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Twenty Five Days to Make a Difference (blog)—11 years old; example of young people living in a networked world

Metaphor: kids driving the technology school bus; driving is sketchy; adults holding on for dear life

Implementation in teachers’ own lives: this isn’t just a seminar about adding something to classroom!

Clay Shirkey: Here Comes Everybody: tectonic shift

Technology Review: "How Obama Really Did It"; new mantra—not “It’s the Economy, Stupid” but “It’s Networking, Stupid”

NPR: Internet Cartoon Pays Off For Kansas Candidate (8/12/08): Morning Edition

USA Today: Gray Googlers Strike Gold

Surf the channel.com—movie clips, etc.

What is the fine line between collaboration and plagiarism? (Nathan Barber recently blogged about this.)

“If you are not participating in this technology, conversation, you will most likely get left behind”
Literacies, nuances to participation in this connected culture

“Live Scribe” pens

Educational establishment largely opposed to new technologies; my question is why? The world is changing—get on board!

WR: besides having kids, blogging has changed his life the most

Do we address hypertext reading/scanning and textbook reading scanning? What’s/where the disconnect?

del.icio.us network

clustermaps

fanfiction.net—writers can add chapters to books, create sequels, etc.

Myspace.com: 85% of users have public profiles

To teachers: What are we doing to prepare students to get a job at my school in 7 years?

Who is teaching MySpace? (responsible use, thoughtful engagement, etc.)

Using technology: Difference between MODERATING and MONITORING; explain

IMPERATIVE: help students prepare for the global world; savvy, critical, connective, innovative
MIT opencourseware

Content is not scarce; content is not static

“The currency of information is paramount”

Raise kids who are editors….

Clarence Fisher—classroom with “thin walls” (technology)

SCRATCH

“The best teachers in the lives of my kids are the ones that they find”

The Flat Classroom Project

RadioWillowweb

“Be selfish” about using technology for yourself—learning it by yourself

What are my own learning practices? (compare/contrast with/to students: have a conversation)

SUMMARY: The main points of Will's presentation were to document that 21st century education, learning, and communication is here and emphasized the imperative for educators to know the new technologies and develop new literacies, or risk becoming irrelevant. The upshot of the PLP program in which I am involved (and which he and Sheryl co-faciliate), is to walk through a non-linear journey for the academic year to learn, discuss, collaborate, etc.

Travelblogging from Atlanta 1.0

2008-09-21T22:42:00.004-05:00

Arrived here in Georgia after an uneventful flight. I've had some great conversations so far about curriculum development and collaborating across disciplines, and what kinds of teaching strategies my colleagues have employed over the years.

Also had a great conversation with the Director of Academic Affairs at my school about teaching full time the last 7 years with 6 of those engaged in doctoral study. I taught 5 classes each day, and two nights a week (with the exception of 1 semester) took graduate seminars.

Some background: I finished an MA in history in May 2001, and began teaching full time in August 2001. I spent 2002-05 taking courses and then essentially writing the dissertation since March 2007, when I took my final research excursion to New England.

The short of it is that it has been an amazingly rich time of interplay between teaching and research/writing. In the conversation earlier today I recounted how I bring teaching questions now to my archival research (or participant-observation)--essentially thinking about how I could teach using primary documents--and while I think of course about content, argument, structure, etc. with my writing, I also think deeply about communicating ideas--in other words, does my writing pass the muster of the scholarly guild and can one of my sophomore students pick it up, read it, and at least get the main arguments and structure? And of course the use of technology has been an ever present tool in the mix of it all. Such a schedule--teaching and going to school in the midst of a growing family--is insanely busy (how thankful I am for a patient and understanding wife!), but has been profoundly transforming and intellectually stimulating.

All these thoughts and observations come flooding back amidst the course of the conversations I had today. I anticipate it will continue tomorrow during the PLP seminar.

On the Road: Travelblogging

2008-09-20T21:56:00.003-05:00

As I wrote recently, tomorrow I leave for Atlanta and the Powerful Learning Practice conference at the The Lovett School. I'm looking forward to meeting other teachers from across the country, seeing what they do, learning new things, and contemplating more ways to collaborate.

Connectivity is a term often used in the context of communications technology and mathematics, but it strikes me as an equally important term for 21st education. It's a term that's collaborative, generative, and participatory.

Since the PLP seminar is only one day, I'm not sure how much time I'll have to blog during the course of events, but I hope to compose a couple of posts while there.

W.E.B. and Wall Street

2008-09-18T11:00:00.004-05:00

Thinking and hearing about the latest news from Wall Street reminded me of some of what W.E.B. Du Bois wrote many, many years ago.

Published in 1935, the year after Du Bois left the NAACP, these paragraphs from Black Reconstruction in America read like many of the creative religious parables and moralistic news stories he wrote while editor of The Crisis. (Read more about this book here; HT: The Proletarian.) And if Du Bois is an American prophet, then these words about religion, commerce, and global capitalism have a certain resonance with recent events. I’m not sure that history repeats itself—the human past and human experience are far too complex—but a wise person once wrote that there is nothing new under the sun. Du Bois, it is safe to say, certainly had an inkling of both.

Anyway, food for thought.

Suppose on some gray day, as you plod down Wall Street, you should see God sitting on the Treasury steps, in His Glory, with the thunders curved about him? Suppose on Michigan Avenue, between the lakes and hills of stone, and in the midst of hastening automobiles and jostling crowds, suddenly you see living and walking toward you, the Christ, with sorrow and sunshine in his face? Foolish talk, all of this you say, of course; and that is because no American now believes in his religion. Its facts are mere symbolism; its revelation vague generalities; its ethics a matter of carefully balanced gain….God wept; but that mattered little to an unbelieving age; what mattered most was that the world wept and still is weeping and blind with tears and blood…[T]he immense profit from this new exploitation and world-wide commerce enabled a guild of millionaires to engage the greatest engineers, the wisest men of science, as well as pay high wage to the more intelligent labor and a the same time to have left enough surplus to make more thorough the dictatorship of capital over the state and over the popular vote, not only in Europe and America, but in Asia and Africa. The world wept because within the exploiting group of New World masters, greed and jealousy became so fierce that they fought for trade and markets and materials and slaves all over the world until at last in 1914 the world flamed in war. The fantastic structure fell, leaving grotesque Profits and Poverty, Plenty and Starvation, Empire and Democracy, staring at each other across the World Depression. And the rebuilding, whether it comes now or a century later, will and must go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States during 1867-1876—Land, Light and Leading for slaves black, brown, yellow and white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat (pp. 123-24; 634-35).

(Y)ike(s): A Hurricane in Houston

2008-09-15T00:32:00.009-05:00

It is now early Monday morning. I began typing my reflections early Saturday morning, as Hurricane Ike was making its way through Houston.

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Saturday, September 13
It is now about 7:30am, and I’ve been awake for 4 hours or so. I went to bed about 12:30am and woke up about 3:30am (Ike made landfall around 2am) to shearing winds and rain pelting the windows of my home. No more sleep for me.

I was surprised we still had electricity when I awoke. Between about 3:30am and 6:45am, the electricity flickered 7 or 8 times, but it has been off now for close to an hour. I was able to catch local newscasts and see the radar. Now that the power is out I’m listening to the radio.

We live in the far northwest part of Houston which means we are on the west side of the storm—the so-called “clean” side. Nevertheless, we are getting some high winds and heavy rain. (My guess is that the gusts are in excess of 50 mph.)

My parents and two brothers (and future sister-in-law) as well as my mother-in-law are on the east side of the storm—the vicious “dirty” side of Ike. My brother is in law enforcement on the east side of town, and my future sister-in-law is a nurse and on call in the medical center area of Houston. [At this point (early Monday morning), I've not talked to them, although I know they are both fine. And I have not talked to any of my teaching colleagues, so I hope they are all doing fine. I did get a voicemail from The Proletarian last night to say they were ok but without electricity. I've not talked with my two Religion in American History blog friends who are in Houston either, Luke Harlow and Gerardo Marti, but hope to connect at some point later on today. UPDATE: Luke reports in the comments that he's doing fine, and all is well with Gerardo as we spoke by phone this morning. Three of my teaching colleagues are doing ok, although without electricity. Haven't heard from everybody, though.]

The kids have been asleep downstairs through it all. They’ve hardly rustled, thankfully. Every so often I hear things pelting the windows and roof, and the general whistling and howling of the wind is a bit unsettling with the gusts. Power lines dot the north edge of the backyard, and they continue to whip and rock back and forth. I’m hoping they don’t snap.

Now that it is getting light outside, I see shingles around the backyard and a few in the front. Two sections of our backyard fence are down—similar to what happened (as I remember it) during Hurricane Alicia in 1983 (I was 6 at the time).

Monday, September 15
Once the rain stopped on Saturday we were able to survey the damage to our home. Thankfully, it was minimal. We lost significant numbers of shingles on the north and east side of the roof, and none of the tar paper (if that is the correct term) was torn, so at this point there do not appear to be any roof leakage. Four sections of our fence fell over due to high winds (the pictures you see), and so with some new wood, some nails, a saw, and a hammer it should be fixed soon. I've already talked with the neighbors, and I'm happy to say it was easy to arrange splitting the repair costs.

We were without electricity all day Saturday and most of the day Sunday. We listened to the radio to see what we could gather about getting electricity back, and to find out about the rest of the city. Our cell phone service was spotty, and so we could really only leave voice mails with family and friends. We hopped in the car to drive around the neighborhood to survey the damage and to cool off a bit, and did the same on Sunday.

Overcast skies prevented the house from getting too warm on Saturday, but by that evening it was a bit stuffy. It actually rained early Sunday morning and by midday the sun was out and things began heating up significantly. We had stocked up on water so were able to keep somewhat cool and the kids enjoyed melted pop sickles in the afternoon. Our food supply was getting somewhat low because, well, six mouths to feed is a lot, and because our ice in the cooler in which we had sandwich meat, pasta, milk, etc. was beginning to melt.

We passed the time by reading inside, and by playing outside, chatting with neighbors, and watching the kids run around and splash in the water with neighborhood friends. We saw some dear friends at the store this afternoon (while we were still without electricity), and they invited us over for some a/c, a wonderful meal (they had an industrial size generator installed at their home Friday morning, so they were in pretty good shape throughout the storm), and hearty fellowship.

Now that electricity is back on and we've been able to catch up with the news and with family (some of whom do not have electricity yet), we are fortunate to have escaped with minor damage and minimal discomfort without a/c for a day and a half. Volunteers are out in massive numbers helping those in Houston and surrounding areas who were hardest hit. Thoughts and prayers help at a time like this, no doubt, but so does food, water, shelter, a/c, etc. Many of the schools here will be out through Wednesday, and it appears most local universities will reopen on Tuesday (at this point).

In addition to my own two cents worth about Ike, there are some other news sites you might find of interest: A Houston Chronicle blog, Houston Independent Media's Ike stories (you may have to scroll down the page), a Weather Underground blog, and a local CBS affiliate's Ike site. Here's a resident from my town who posted some YouTube videos of Ike, another video of a neighborhood close to where I teach (about 40 minutes southwest of where I live), and some AP aftermath footage.

(Inter)Connecting the Past: Digital History

2008-09-10T20:41:00.006-05:00

I recently came across an article in the Journal of American History that discusses the future of digital history.

In the round table discussion titled "The Promise of Digital History," William Thomas describes "digital history" this way:

Digital history is an approach to examining and representing the past that works with the new communication technologies of the computer, the Internet network, and software systems. On one level, digital history is an open arena of scholarly production and communication, encompassing the development of new course materials and scholarly data collections. On another, it is a methodological approach framed by the hypertextual power of these technologies to make, define, query, and annotate associations in the human record of the past. To do digital history, then, is to create a framework, an ontology, through the technology for people to experience, read, and follow an argument about a historical problem.....Digital history possesses a crucial set of common components—the capacity for play, manipulation, participation, and investigation by the reader. Dissemination in digital form makes the work of the scholar available for verification and examination; it also offers the reader the opportunity to experiment. He or she can test the interpretations of others, formulate new views, and mine the materials of the past for overlooked items and clues. The reader can immerse him/herself in the past, surrounded with the evidence, and make new associations. The goal of digital history might be to build environments that pull readers in less by the force of a linear argument than by the experience of total immersion and the curiosity to build connections. (Versus the narrative anticipation of what comes next, this is a curiosity about what could be related to what and why.)

This is a very thorough and helpful definition I think. In essence digital history uses computer and Internet technology as a tool to more quickly disseminate information about the past even as it exists as a participatory medium. The fluidity resident in it is an important variable in this equation, as it helps educators to (perhaps) more critically address the different learning styles that exist in our classrooms.

Steven Mintz is another participant in the digital history round table. Formerly at the University of Houston (but now at Columbia), Steve is a wonderful human being, kind soul, and innovative and critical thinker. Two years ago he graciously gave of his time when I organized a technology seminar for history graduate students at UH.

Whereas Thomas defines digital history above, Mintz chronicles the history of digital history brilliantly:

Digital history has evolved through a series of overlapping stages. Stage 1.0 consisted of communication and course-management tools, such as e-mail, online syllabi, Web-CT, and Blackboard, supplemented by content-rich Web sites (like History Matters, Lincoln/Net, and my own Digital History site) that made a treasure trove of high-quality primary source documents, music, historic images, and film clips available to instructors and students.

Stage 2.0 involved the creation of hands-on inquiry- and problem-based history projects designed to allow students to "do" history. Thus in Richard B. Latner's Crisis at Fort Sumter, students read the information available to President Abraham Lincoln from the time of his election on and compare the decisions they make with those that Lincoln made at critical junctures.

We have now entered Stage 3.0, in which the emphasis is on active learning, collaboration, and enhanced interaction. Wikis, blogs, mash-ups, podcasts, tags, and social networking are the buzz words. These technological innovations offer opportunities to students to share resources and create collaborative projects.

Stage 4.0 lurks just beyond the horizon. It includes three-dimensional virtual reality environments, which allow students to navigate and annotate now-lost historical settings. A stunning example is Lisa M. Snyder's reconstruction of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Stage 4.0 is informed by a "constructivist" understanding of learning, in which students devise their own conceptual models for understanding our collective past. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a colleague in instructional technology, Sara McNeil, and I, are completing MyHistory, which will allow students to create online history portfolios, in which they can develop multimedia projects, and construct timelines, annotate images, and keep notes.

While Mintz's Digital History site is cutting edge (I've used it tons in my U.S. history classes), I'm intrigued with his latest venture: MyHistory. Looks interesting.

This post could go on and on, and there is just loads of great material in the article for discussion. What have been some of your best experiences with "doing" digital history? Your most challenging? Why do you think digital history is important?

Du Bois Debut

2008-09-05T18:09:00.003-05:00

While I've blogged tons and tons about Du Bois both here at baldblogger and at Religion and American History, my "official" Du Bois debut comes in November at the Urban History Association national meeting in Houston. This is my first face-to-face scholarly presentation on Du Bois.

I'll be presenting some of my research on Du Bois and religion. Here's my panel for Saturday morning November 8:

African American Editors, Urban Migration and Civil Rights During the 1920s and 1930s
Chair: Mary Lamonica, New Mexico State

Jinx Broussard, Louisiana State University, "Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: The Journalism of Alice Dunbar Nelson"

Jane Marcellus, Middle Tennessee State, "Representation of Employed Black Women in the National Urban League's Opportunity During the 1920s and 1930s"

Mary M. Cronin, New Mexico State University, "C. F. Richardson and the Houston Informer's Fight for Racial Equality during the 1920s"

Phillip Luke Sinitiere, University of Houston, "Sermons in the City, Parables of a Prophet: W.E.B. Du Bois, Religion, and The Crisis, 1910-1934"

Moderator: Breea Willingham, St. Bonaventure University

You can read the full conference program here. I'm glad to see that the history department at UH is well represented (and UH historian Marty Melosi is the president of the UHA), my co-editor Darren Grem from Religion and American History is presenting, and a host of other friends and colleagues will be there as well.

Of Hope, Humility, and Reconciliation

2008-09-04T22:25:00.007-05:00

Over at God's Politics, some recent posts and conversations related to racial justice offer hope, humility, and the possibility of reconciliation.

Jason and Vonetta Storbakken, and interracial couple and founders of Radical Living in Brooklyn, recently challenged progressive white leaders of the New Monasticism movement to release the reigns of power, and listen more intently to the marginalized "minority" voices in their communities. Read their post here.

On the struggling road for justice, divestment of power and from privilege can bring hope, necessitates humility, and makes reconciliation possible. And it's hard for white folks to do.

Shane Claiborne has responded to the Storbakken's post (and here too), and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (who I intereviewed at baldblogging earlier this year in three posts; read here, here, and here) has posted as well.

With Shane and Jonathan (and others), I hope we can "pass the mic."

Connecting the Classroom, or Creatively Collaborating in Convergence Culture

2008-09-02T23:30:00.004-05:00

I'll be traveling to Atlanta in a few weeks to attend a Powerful Learning Practices conference with several colleagues from my school. It will be held at The Lovett School.

I've followed some of the technology and teaching conversations over the last few years, have participated in it, and always discover new voices and new perspectives. One is from Will Richardson, author, blogger, and educational consultant; the other from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, blogger and consultant-collaborator. Both will facilitate the conversation in Atlanta. (Other perspectives I read come from Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture, and Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing, among others.)

Anyone familiar with their work and/or approaches? I like what I've seen and read so far.

Going West

2008-08-12T23:22:00.006-05:00

A few weeks back while browsing the stacks at UH's M.D. Anderson Library, I came across a new book on Cornel West and writing--literally the composition of text. I'm still contemplating how I will incorporate this into my history classes and pondering deeply about West's influence on my own writing and research agenda, but at the very least this book provides food for thought, and hope for the future.

Will you "go West"?

Also, it appears Cornel West has a new website, and some forthcoming material this fall.
++++++++++++++++++++
Here's a description for the publisher's website:

Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy identifies and explains key aspects of the work of Cornel West—the highly regarded scholar of religion, philosophy, and African American studies—as they relate to composition studies, focusing especially on three rhetorical strategies that West suggests we use in our questioning lives as scholars, teachers, students, and citizens.

In this study, author Keith Gilyard examines the strategies of Socratic Commitment (a relentless examination of received wisdom), Prophetic Witness (an abiding concern with justice and the plight of the oppressed), and Tragicomic Hope (a keep-on-pushing sensibility reflective of the African American freedom struggle). Together, these rhetorical strategies comprise an updated form of cultural criticism that West calls prophetic pragmatism.

This volume, which contains the only interview in which Cornel West directly addresses the field of composition,sketches the development of Cornel West’s theories of philosophy, political science, religion, and cultural studies and restates the link between Deweyan notions of critical intelligence and the notion of critical literacy developed by Ann Berthoff, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. Gilyard provides examples from the classroom to illustrate the possibilities of Socratic Commitment as part of composition pedagogy, shows the alignment of Prophetic Witness with traditional aims of critical composition, and in his chapter on Tragicomic Hope, addresses African American expressive culture with an emphasis on music and artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and Kanye West.

The first book to comprehensively connect the ideas of one of America's premier scholars of religion, philosophy and African American studies with composition theory and pedagogy, Composition and Cornel West will be valuable to scholars, teachers, and students interested in race, class, critical literacy, and the teaching of writing.