Category: Religion804

This week our readings on urban religion aligned with my own excursion to the International Deaf Geographies conference at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Thankfully the subjects covered in Robert T. Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street and Diane Winston’s Red-Hot and Righteous provided a great deal of productive overlap with my thinking this week on space and place.

In Madonna, Orsi examined the religious expression of Italian Americans in East Harlem. In particular his focus is the festa, a ritual celebration of la casa della Madonna, the Madonna of 115th Street. His approach emphasized lived religion and popular religion.  He defined lived religion as “religious practice and imagination in ongoing, dynamic relation with the realities and structures of everyday life in particular times and places.” (Orsi xii) Popular religion included “all those crazy religious things that people do and all the crazy ideas they have outside the structures of an organized and properly ordered church.”(Orsi xl) Using these frames, he identified the religious practices of this largely immigrant community in two ways; daily interaction, through promotion of the domus and continued commitments to the Madonna;  and the feste, a period of public, open religious encounter that occupied both sacred and profane spaces. Orsi placed primacy on the worldview of his actors as he traced the ways in which believers understood their experiences  through the lens of the Madonna.

Building on a rich source base of oral histories and interview transcripts, Orsi was able to interrogate religious expression and experience on multiple levels. Orsi’s work is useful because it emphasized religious expression that took place outside of bounded church structures, into the homes and streets. Orsi argued that these expressions produced their own unique iconography. The “icononography of the streets in dense urban communities like Italian Harlem: the street is a text composed by the people, though their composition is shaped and constrained by the social and economic facts of their lives.” (Orsi 33) Thinking about how religion is lived also encourages scholars to consider and take seriously notions of the supernatural. This also provided Orsi with a means of examining notions of power, both sacred and profane, but also gendered power and religious institutional authority. The feste and associated practices operated in liminal capacity, creating a period when these hierarchies were disrupted. Moving his focus into the street and thinking seriously about how actors made sense of their world gave him space to think about the many ways faith is practiced.

In Red Hot and Righteous, Winston examined the work of Salvationists in New York 1880-1950. Like Orsi, Winston described the religious activities that took the men and women of the Salvation Army to the streets in an effort to “saturate the secular with the sacred.” (Winston 4) Salvationists “occupied city thoroughfares” transforming the city into a “‘Cathedral of the Open Air.’ A figurative canopy spread over the city, turned all of New York into sanctified ground.” (Winston 2) In so doing, Salvationists put themselves at odds with legal and social norms. Winston contended that these efforts were significant to their service to the “unchurched”.  Winston framed these efforts in the context of a late 19th century, early 20th century consumer culture. She suggested that Salvationists embraced this culture, “selling” themselves in the urban market by reinterpreting cultural symbols to win over souls and wallets (Winston 5).

Drawing from American War Cry and archival materials, Winston demonstrated the way that Salvationists disrupted ideas about faith by redefining religious practice. In large part, the visible role of women in enacting “faith as service” differentiated Salvationists from other religious figures. In these cases, they did not “minister” but lived religiously, expressing their faith through service to others. “Salvationists offered a religious vision rooted in a vernacular faith and expressed in the coalescence of the Army’s Holiness theology and the culture’s regnant consumerist ideology… Redeeming the world… meant facing its challenges  (poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, and prostitution) and turning its secular idioms (advertisements, music, and theater) into spiritual texts.” (Winston 8)

Though both Winston and Orsi examined objects, behaviors, and spaces that are largely associated with the profane rather than the sacred, these are surprisingly different projects. Orsi’s work focused on a thick description of immigrant Catholicism in East Harlem. His study of symbols and meaning is rooted in lived experience, focusing on how individual believers made sense of their experiences and their faith in these contexts. He was able to draw these questions out of narrative oral histories. Winston, on the other hand, working from a church publication focused more directly on the institutional role of the church. While progressive in their reform efforts, Winston has more difficulty evaluating claims of equality or difference. Instead, her work focuses on the intersection of religion and consumerism in an urban setting. Here, material symbols (red buckets, particular attire, and even donuts) take on a sacred meaning.

Both of these texts were useful to me in considering the subjects at the Deaf Geographies Conference. For my interests, in what ways can a project like Orsi’s be useful for examining deaf religious histories? To what degree can the lived experiences of deaf congregants and missionaries be accessed? Or thinking about Winston’s project, In what ways did deaf people communicate their faith to hearing believers? Calls for donations, public outings, and the (in)visibility of deaf people traveling on trains- Winston’s work is driving me toward some new questions on these fronts.

 

The subject of this week’s reading is twentieth century American Evangelicals. Matthew Sutton and Molly Worthen offer a new interpretation of evangelical history that examines the shift from fundamentalism to evangelicalism after World War II. As we saw in a previous week in Kruse’s work One Nation Under God, both Worthen and Sutton aim to disrupt traditional narratives regarding conservative expression in this period, seeking to root the origins of the rise of the Christian Right much earlier than previously described. While Kruse argued that the conservative response to New Deal policies resulted in a blending of Christianity and capitalism that played out in political and legislative realms from the 1950s onward, Sutton and Worthen focused their efforts on the intellectual and theological positioning of evangelicals more exhaustively.

Worthen’s work, Apostles of Reason, suggests that the fundamental question for twentieth century evangelicals was the continued tension between secular thought and fundamentalist faith. She addresses the “anti-intellectualist” quality frequently attributed to evangelicals and examines the “theological heritage” that linked “a wide spectrum of believers.” [Worthen 3-4] Instead of imagining this group as emerging politically in the 1970s, Worthen suggests their increasing prominence should be rooted in the postwar efforts of “New Evangelicals” [Worthen 25]. She argues that rather than antagonism toward intellectual inquiry, this group consistently struggled to reconcile certainty (biblical inerrancy) with social and cultural shifts. These debates, reflected a “crisis of authority” as fundamentalists, and later evangelicals, made sense of the tension between reason and revelation [Worthen 2]. She suggests leaders (including “a coterie of journalists, evangelists, and educators”) reimagined fundamentalism and envisioned a “Christian Weltanschauung” that would find expression in organizations like the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE); publications like Christianity Today; and institutions like Fuller Theological Seminary.

In American Apocalypse, Sutton undertakes a related project. In this work he sets himself apart from scholarship on Evangelicalism which suggests that fundamentalism emerged in the late 19th century, peaked in the 1920s and began a decline after the second world war. Instead he suggests that World War I was instrumental in shaping the thinking of radical evangelicals [Sutton xiii]. Though others point to the Scopes Trial as instrumental in diminishing the prominence of fundamentalism, he contends that a continuous thread connects late nineteenth century fundamentalists to postwar evangelicals. It was, he argues, a particular apocalyptic worldview engendered a particular expression of fundamentalist/evangelical to changing geopolitical contexts. Across this text Sutton is most interested in unpacking that worldview and examining how each of the momentous events of the twentieth century lent legitimacy to their radical vision [Sutton 5].

Sutton suggests twentieth century evangelicals (or as he also describes them, “pre-millennialists-turned-fundamentalists-turned-evangelicals”) saw themselves as uniquely positioned to read and understand the coming of Christ in the end times [Sutton 373]. These prophetic interpretations encouraged believers to “occupy” the world and to save souls [Sutton 5]. The role of government, the form of secular education, and the horrors of war- each of these were transformed through a lens of the coming apocalypse. Toward this, Sutton presents the “rebranding” that occurred in the post-war period as a “recasting of their positions” [Sutton 292]. He suggests that their support of the war effort (in the face of liberal criticism of American intervention abroad) reversed their position and social prominence [Sutton 266]. It is at this period, as well, that leadership worked to represent evangelicals as a cohesive group, even as charismatic leaders captured the attention of believers [Sutton 327].

Worthen, on the other hand, emphasizes the fundamental tension between inerrancy and rational thought. As evangelicals interacted with social shifts, they struggled to reconcile a belief in the authority of the bible with the power and authority of the state. The response, Worthen suggests, resulted in a debate between and amongst evangelicals as well as liberal protestants. American evangelicals did not “share one mind, [but they did] share an imagination” [Worthen 11]. Through organization, publication, and sermonization “preachers, teachers, writers, and institution-builders” created and disseminated ideas in a continued effort to convert and save [Worthen 9].

Both of these works are significant contributions to the historiography on conservative Christianity in the twentieth century. Sutton and Worthen both carefully contextualize the negotiated shift in representation of evangelical faith after World War II. Both also offer areas of productive overlap. Sutton, for instance, validates Kruse’s assertion about the importance of New Deal, but offers a richer interpretation of the factors that shaped evangelical opposition [Sutton 258]. Worthen and Sutton both identify and critique the anti-intellectual framing of evangelism, though this subject receives more comprehensive coverage in Worthen’s work [Sutton 150].

Sutton and Worthen make use of extensive archival source materials, relying on periodicals and newspapers as well as collections of the papers of key figures. Though both offer an insight into the intellectual basis for evangelism, a project which necessitates the examination of leadership and prominent figures, Sutton is a bit more successful in the incorporation of multiple views and dissenting voices. While neither text is able to adequately address race and gender, Sutton is more effective in addressing these gaps. Any examination of the modern American evangelical movement would likely struggle to incorporate a nuanced reading of the different faiths.

The readings this week have examined mainline and Liberal Protestantism, in particular the print culture that accompanied religious expression in the twentieth century and the shifting role of missionaries after World War II. These works by Elesha Coffman, Matthew Hedstrom, and Sarah Ruble present a perspective of broad, liberal protestantism that balances and challenges the conservative narratives offered by Kruse and Moreton and offers a nuanced reading of how various groups responded to a shifting political and cultural world.

Both Coffman and Hedstrom utilize print culture to describe the period between 1920 and 1950. In The Christian Century, Coffman examines the growth of a single religious periodical into a national magazine with wide distribution and influence. In Coffman’s interpretation, The Christian Century is understood to be a vehicle by which elite thinkers exerted significant influence. She adopts Pierre Bourdieu’s Cultural Capital as a framework for describing these contributors- accessing both their credibility and elitism in her critique. The “coalition of highly educated, theologically and politically liberal Protestants” was an elite cadre interested in shaping society, politics, and religion. They saw themselves as “social, progressive, modern, liberal, or ecumenical” but Coffman suggests that that they represented the emerging Mainline [Coffman 8]. Contributors to The Christian Century wielded significant power in defining the Protestant response to the public and social ideas and events at this period. They utilized print to influence and educate, linking themselves to a network of elite institutions while also seeking to represent the national voice of Protestantism. Editors and contributors to the Christian Century, in an effort maintain economic viability, moved the publication away from denominational affiliation to an undenominational identity [Coffman 61]. This shift positioned The Christian Century to “reach beyond Protestantism” to contend with the intersection of religion and politics [Coffman 79]. Still, the publication touted the rhetoric of, and appealed to, “the educated, the liberal, the urbane, the reformers, the influential.” [Coffman 79]. Even as editor, Charles Morrison, “believed he represented the Protestant majority,” it is unlikely that a significant number of layreaders read the magazine [Coffman 108]. Coffman’s work fills a significant historiographical gap. While a number of historians have emphasized the decline of Mainline Protestantism after World War II, Coffman suggests that these existing narratives have yet to describe the contours of this group before WWII.

In a similar project, Hedstrom examines cultural programs of reading as “mechanisms of popular religion and spirituality in modern America” in The Rise of Liberal Religion [Hedstrom 4]. The emergence of a distinct “middlebrow” religious culture between 1920 and 1950, he suggests, fostered a “spiritual cosmopolitanism” in middle-class Americans. Through programs of consumption that took several forms (a Religious book week in the 1920s; the Religious book club in operation from 1927 onward; and the Religious books round table of the American Literary Association) reading promoted an individualism of religious experience and expression.  These “middlebrow” readers embraced a faith that was “outside the bounds of churches” [Hedstrom 6]. The consumption of interfaith books turned reading into an act of piety that displaced power in traditional denominational worship and asserted of religion into daily experience [Hedstrom 220]. Hedstrom utilizes the notion of lived religion to describe this process. Though these lists were cultivated by an elite group of liberal protestant booksellers, publishers and civic leaders, Hedstrom suggests that these books were selected to appeal to (and shape) middle-class concerns. Hedstrom also reframes the declension narrative, suggesting instead that the decrease of institutional attendance after WWII reflected not a decline but a diffusion of devotion. Both Hedstrom and Coffman make excellent use of print resources, looking across multiple texts to identify these intellectual and cultural shifts. In dealing with print culture, both address publishing practices and marketplace consumption in useful and meaningful ways.

Ruble’s project, The Gospel of Freedom and Power, is set apart from both of these texts. This work deals with the major shifts in thinking about mainline and evangelical missions since WWII. While she makes significant use of text, including The Christian Century, the focus of this slim book is the public debate regarding missionaries and missions, the public perception and conversation rather than particular historical actors or specific missions. Ruble examines these conflicting rhetorics about power and influence abroad, suggesting that the cultural texts of the period between 1920 and 1960 reflect a growing concern with what it meant to be American and an attempt to make sense of missions and their role in the post-war world [Ruble 2]. Across this period, Ruble identifies a shift in attitude toward imperialism in mission efforts and an engagement with anti-colonial movements. Power plays an important role in this text as public conversations contended with changing attitudes about Americans’ role in missions abroad. Historical actors struggled to make sense of their conceptions of power, of equality and of difference. Ruble largely contends with three groups: Mainline Protestants, Evangelical Protestants, and Anthropologists. Each of these groups struggled with notion of missions, resolving these tensions in different ways; Mainliners “both took up the cause of freedom (variously defined) for people abroad and asserted, implicitly and otherwise, that they know what freedom should look like” [Ruble 21]. They saw themselves as promoting “universal values such as democratic process and religious liberty” [Ruble 32]. Evangelicals were more concerned with separating freedom and gospel, identifying and responding to nationalism by modifying their structures and behaviors. Anthropologists were critical of mission efforts, advocating autonomy and positioning themselves as “arbiter of what constituted true freedom.” [Ruble 119].  Placing this work alongside Coffman and Hedstrom, Ruble offers a perspective on how conversations about religiosity changed after 1950.

The three texts this week shared an interest in the development of and spread of ideas regarding religion, and all were interested in understanding the role of mainline Protestantism in the twentieth century. Hedstrom and Coffman overlapped significantly in their use of print and rhetoric of a marketplace. Both focused on the influence of a particular group; elite/middlebrow, and suggested a loosening of denominational bonds, but not a weakening of faith. All three texts sought to uncover the changing expression of religion in the face of broad ideological shifts. However, particular voices are missing from each of these texts. For example, by focusing on a single publication Coffman has made it difficult to identify how this The Christian Century might have differed from other texts of this period, or how readers incorporated these ideas in their lives. In large part,  non-elite voices are missing as is any full discussion of race and gender. Though there is a chapter on readers, their perspectives are largely missing and the scope of influence in laypeople’s lives remains unclear. Despite these gaps, all three texts offer an important examination of religious expression in the twentieth century.

This summer I’ve undertaken a readings course in 20th century American Religion with Dr. Sharon Leon. The next few posts will include my own thoughts as I work through each of the readings and prepare for my minor field exam.

In our first set of readings we covered To Serve God and Walmart by Bethany Moreton, One Nation Under God by Kevin Kruse, and Redeeming Time by William Mirola. While we organized them under a theme of class and economics, these readings varied in meaningful ways. Moreton and Kruse developed complementary overviews of the rise of the religious right in the second half of the twentieth century, both examining the increasing influence of faith in politics and economics across this period with differing emphases. Mirola’s work, a study of the eight-hour movement in Chicago, stood apart in time period (1866-1912), approach (sociological history), and subject matter (the emergence of progressive Protestantism in relation to labor movements). Despite differences in subject and actors, these works are useful in identifying the role of religion in locating actors in social and political spaces. Below, I will put Kruse and Moreton into conversation as I consider each one historically and historiographically.

Kruse’s work directly argues against the existing historiography to assert that the Christian Right did not emerge as a result of Communism or Cold War anxieties, but rather as a result of opposition to the New Deal. The confluence of faith and politics, Kruse suggests, started in the 1930s as corporate Conservatives enlisted clergymen to contest the New Deal welfare state. While FDR and others linked the New Deal to Social Gospel concerns for “the public good,” Conservatives undertook a public relations effort to contest this challenge government expansion. This merging of clergy and corporatism resulted in a blend of American individualism and free-enterprise that combined Christianity and capitalism. Though Kruse appears skeptical about the degree to which business leaders legitimately held religious concerns or whether this represented a public relations campaign to protect corporate interests, he demonstrates that over the next three decades that conservative evangelical Protestants asserted influence over the “rhetoric and rituals of public religion” [Kruse 292]

Popular leaders asserted political and economic authority through intimate social networks, effecting a confluence of “piety and patriotism.” [Kruse 73] Figures like Abraham Vereide, Billy Graham, and Dwight Eisenhower blended politics, economics, and religion through several forms of public prayer; prayer breakfasts, revivals, and prayers at cabinet meetings. These efforts “popularized… [and] politicized” public prayer. [Kruse 38] Through public appearances, radio broadcasts, tv programs, and written publications these figures prayed and sermonized to a larger public, marshalling ministers and lay people as a wave of legislation asserted Christian religion to be at the core of American identities.

These processes, which largely took place during the mid-1950s, demarcated a period “when Americans underwent an incredible transformation in how they understood the role of religion in public life.” [Kruse xiv] Kruse handles this transformation with a great deal of nuance- while he does seem skeptical, he is not dismissive. Religion in One Nation Under God is largely a means of positioning oneself, ideologically and socially, but not necessarily cosmologically. Kruse, or perhaps his actors, are less interested in cosmology than campaigning. He makes excellent use of primary source material from dozens of archival collections. The scope of his work is impressive.

In To Serve God and Wal-Mart Moreton attempts a similar project. In this work Wal-Mart serves as the centerpiece for uncovering the developing notion of Christian free enterprise and the rise of the Christian Right in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreton explores the way that Wal-mart negotiated a transition from a small store in the Ozarks to one of the most prominent corporations in the world. Exploring this shift in terms of business practices and ideologies she is able to identify the overlap of religion and corporate culture in both corporate leadership and consumers. The book reveals how Wal-Mart branded itself in terms of “corporate populism” and promoted conservative religious values through the recruitment of management from evangelical colleges and the promotion of gendered hierarchy in stores. [Moreton 13, 33]

The story is often one of contradictions, that the big-box retailer grew in an anti-monopoly/anti-corporate region by creating the image of the store as a mom-and-pop operation, for instance. But while Moreton is critical and highlights these contradictions, she is less interested in lambasting the corporation. Rather she seeks to understand how Christianity and commerce came to be tied together, how Walmart aligned consumption with faith. Moreton emphasizes that the growth of Wal-Mart reflects a unique blend of rural Southern, conservative Christian beliefs with free-market capitalism that appealed to middle-class consumers.

This exploration of the joining together of religion and commerce in the Wal-Mart model is useful in two regards. First, the broader exploration of Wal-Mart’s adoption of innovative business practices and techniques reveals the ways in which conservative Christian ideals were incorporated and disseminated. From hiring practices that reinforced gender hierarchies, to the reconfiguring consumerism as an act of Christian service, and the evangelization of Wal-Mart among college-age students in the US and abroad, these practices contributed to a much broader adoption of evangelical free-market values. Second, the political influence exerted by Sun Belt entrepreneurs provides us with access to the religious leaders and legislators that both publicly and privately promoted those values in policies and institutions of higher education.

In both regards, Moreton offers convincing arguments, making excellent use of her source materials. Her use of internal documents (company newsletters and reports, oral histories) and broadly disseminated public documents (newspaper articles and reports) enables her to examine the subject from multiple angles. Though the “consumer” as an individual is often obscured, Moreton calls to the foreground Wal-Mart’s corporate structure, from clerk to management, to a broader sense of the corporation’s influence internationally.

Putting these works together highlights differences in historiographical approach and interpretation. Kruse’s work focuses on the period between 1930 and 1970, where Moreton’s work is largely between 1930 and 1990. While both assert an increased connection between politics, economics, and religion in the second half of the twentieth century, Kruse more strongly links this rise to a response to New Deal policies, while Moreton demonstrates that some business benefited from the New Deal and that, particularly in international efforts, business did express concerns about the threats of Communism and the Cold War. Kruse’s work, with its focus on intellectual shifts and national politics is also significantly different than Moreton’s which traces the subject through the lens of a single business. Although both are interested in the broad shift toward Christian Conservatism, Kruse emphasizes public religion, legislation, and other outward forms of expression, while Moreton looks at internal expressions within the policies and politics of an institution.

Despite differences in project, the texts frequently overlapped in their discussion of figures and events. They were also similar in the voices that were missing. Though class plays a significant role in Kruse’s analysis, a nuanced reading of race is largely absent. Moreton, similarly, cannot entirely address the experiences and reactions of lower- and middle-class consumers, but focusing on the experiences of management available in the source material. Although both books emphasize Evangelical Protestantism, other religious faiths are not addressed. It should be noted that their reliance on documents and organizational publications may have produced these gaps. Overall, however, both these texts provide powerful insight into the shift of political and religious affiliation in the second half of the twentieth century.