David Hempton on the Church and the Long Eighteenth Century

Randall Stephens

London, 1808. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The April issue of Historically Speaking includes Donald Yerxa's interview with David Hempton. In July 2012 Hempton will assume his role as dean of Harvard Divinity School. Hempton is a leading historian of religion with numerous scholarly interests, including religion and political culture, comparative secularization in Europe and North America, the history and theology of evangelical Protestantism, and the rise of world Christianity in the early modern period. He has written a number of important and award-winning books, including Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750-1850 (Stanford University Press, 1984); Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale University Press, 2005); and Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (Yale University Press, 2008). His most recent book is The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century, published in 2011 by I.B. Tauris as part of its History of the Christian Church series.

Donald A. Yerxa: What are you attempting to do in The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century?

David Hempton: This is a general history of worldwide Christianity in the so-called long 18th century (roughly 1680 to 1820). I adopt a consciously global perspective on the identity and manifestations of the church and try to move beyond emphases and topics that are rooted mainly in Europe. In a sense I have written two books for the price of one. Book one seeks to "map" world Christianity in all its manifest diversity—Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and multiple indigenous varieties. I also try to address the thorny problem of missionary motivation in the early modern period before choosing sites of "encounter" between European Christians and the wider world in North and Latin America, the Caribbean Islands, India, China, and Africa. Book two deals with more conventional themes such as the Enlightenment, the evangelical revival, the rise of religious toleration and antislavery sentiment, the French and American Revolutions, secularization, and much else besides. Even here, I try to offer some fresh interpretations of some much-studied episodes in the history of Christianity.

Yerxa: What are some of the topics that come to the fore in your survey of global Christianity that would not be particularly present in a study of European and/or North American Christianity?

Hempton: One way to answer that question would be to look at how the field of ecclesiastical or church history has changed since, for example, the volumes of the Pelican History of the Christian Church first appeared in the 1960s. The Pelican series has stood the test of time for half a century, but obviously much has changed since then. For example, Gerald Cragg's excellent volume, The Church in the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 (1960), deals mostly with the ecclesiastical history of Western Europe, and especially the intellectual challenges posed by the Enlightenment. Since then, shifts in intellectual culture associated with postcolonialism, postmodernism, and feminism and changes in historical methods ushered in by the growth of social, cultural, and global history have transformed the way we think about early modern religion. In particular, religious encounters between European Christians and native peoples throughout the world can be interpreted no longer merely through the eyes of Europeans. Hence, I deal with complex manifestations of Christianity among indigenous people, slave cultures, and other civilizations. . . . read more at Project Muse>>>

An Interview with Historian of Religion Paul Harvey

Randall Stephens

From the new issue of Historically Speaking . . .

Paul Harvey is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Harvey is a historian of American religion and has written broadly on race, the South, and the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries. He’s the author of Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). With Edward J. Blum he has written the forthcoming Jesus in Red, White, and Black (University of North Carolina Press).

Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens recently caught up with Harvey to speak with him about the field of African-American religious history, teaching, and his new book Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).

Randall J. Stephens: Could you say something about how historians wrote about African-American Christianity fifty years ago and how they write about it now?

Paul Harvey: Historians, at least white historians, mostly didn’t write about African-American Christianity fifty years ago. Black scholars did, of course, and fifty years ago the works of sociologists like E. Franklin Frazier dominated the field. Those scholars tended to be highly critical of what they called “the black church,” a term that was invented by 20th- century sociologists. They often saw “the black church” as either hopelessly other- worldly, peddling enthusiasm and a desperate eschatology rather than substantive improvements in the lives of their congregants, or (in the case of more well-established urban churches) too concerned with protecting bourgeois comforts to address the real issues facing most African Americans. Fifty years, ago, liberation theology and “black theology” were just beginning to take root in works such as Howard Thurman’s Jesus of the Dispossessed, a classic of 20th-century American theology. And of course Martin Luther King’s writings were just starting to enter the public realm, culminating with “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963. But in terms of scholarly works, the broader historical community basically knew nothing about African-American religious history.

Obviously we’ve come a long way since then; the same revolution in social history that affected all other fields of history in the 1960s and 1970s shaped the writing of African-American history as well. The 1970s were the real years of landmark achievements, especially with the publication of Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion (very well known at the time) and Mechal Sobel’s Trabelin’ On (less well known then and now, but a brilliant if sometimes rather eccentric book). Over the next decade or two, studies of religion during and after slavery poured forth, and in my own early work I tried to contribute to that by pushing forward studies of African-American religion in time, focusing on the years after the Civil War. Most recently, scholars such as Curtis Evans (The Burden of Black Religion) and Barbara Savage (Their Spirits Walk Among Us) have challenged us to question the very terms that have defined the field, including “the black church,” which are intellectual constructs of a very particular period rather than historical realities themselves. This kind of challenge really hit the public realm when Eddie Glaude published a short piece called “The Black Church is Dead” for the Huffington Post. Glaude’s piece suggested that contemporary black churches had lost their prophetic voice, and that black parishioners were gravitating toward gospel-of-prosperity preachers that celebrate American capitalism in a way that would shock a figure such as Martin Luther King. That piece generated such a controversy that it hit the New York Times. I begin my book by talking about the piece and the arguments that ensued from it.

Stephens: How do you think historians will be treating black religion fifty years from now?

Harvey: In the epilogue to my book I suggest a couple of themes that relate here: diversification and re-Africanization of African-American religion. The same trends of immigration and pluralism that have affected all of American religion apply to African-American religion as well. Churches with African immigrant congregants and pastors are becoming increasingly prominent in New York and other urban areas, and they will eventually spread to smaller cities and to the South. Many of these feature the kinds of spirit possessions, exorcisms, and supernatural theology that African- American church leaders in the 19th century tried to drive out of their church life; they saw them as too primitive. Catholicism is also an increasingly important part of black religious life, in part because of Afro-Carribean Catholic immigrants (most obviously Haitians, but black Brazilians and others as well). Then, too, Islam continues to exert a major influence, and draws a substantial number of black American converts, as well as African immigrants who come from Islamic traditions. In fifty years historians will be discussing how a once overwhelmingly Protestant group of black churchgoers became much more diverse. This is “back to the future” territory, because that is the kind of religious diversity with which Africans began their enforced sojourn in the Americas.

Stephens: Did your teaching of African-American history influence you as you wrote the book?

Harvey: My teaching always influences my books, and vice versa, so the short answer is yes. Perhaps even more so for this book, which is meant for classroom use. I had in mind while writing it, “What exactly should my students, or any students in a typical class, know about the particular subject I’m writing about here?” I tried to focus on those essentials and avoid some of the more arcane or esoteric points and debates that my other books have spent much more time on. I also tried hard to write a pretty traditional historical narrative, showing some of the basic stuff historians want to show— change over time, diversity, complexity, etc.

Stephens: What was it like to write for a more general audience? >>> Read on at Project Muse

Overlapping History Projects

Dan Allosso

It’s interesting and sometimes instructive when different threads of work occasionally overlap. I had this experience earlier in the week, when I turned from some brainstorming I was doing regarding the Historical Society’s RIHA program (thinking about how I might structure a proposal that incorporated some 19th-century American and British social innovators who lived on the fuzzy edge between religion and irreligion), back to my online Environmental History project. I’ve been dragging my feet completing the next video in that series, but I had some time yesterday afternoon, so I parked myself in the library’s coffee area determined to write up my notes on Theodore Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated, which is the basis for my next “chapter.”

For those unfamiliar with Steinberg’s book, it’s an insightful look at early New England textile industrialization, and how the social understanding of common resources gradually changed to allow corporations to completely control the Merrimack River from Lake Winnipiseogee to the ocean. Taken from his dissertation, Steinberg’s story of the gradual “instrumentalization” of natural resources leans heavily on the work of his advisor, Morton Horwitz, who showed (in The Transformation of American Law) how many of the most sweeping legal changes of the nineteenth century happened not as a result of legislative or executive action, but through seemingly insignificant lower court rulings and changes in contract law. This is clearly a missing link in the chain of “how the heck did we get here?!” that environmentalists have to deal with, so you can see why I want to highlight it in an “EH for regular people” series. But neither Steinberg’s book nor Horwitz’s are easy reads, so they’re easily overlooked outside the academy. So my task is to render the main ideas in 10-15 minutes, in plain English.

So here’s the overlap: around 1810, Boston merchants Francis Cabot Lowell and Nathan Appleton each individually seem to have visited Robert Owen’s New Lanark textile mills in Scotland. Lowell and Appleton took what they learned at Owen’s water-powered mills, and returned to Massachusetts to form the Boston Manufacturing Company on the Charles River and later, as the Boston Associates, developed the Merrimack. No doubt the size of New Lanark (Owen’s mills were the largest in Britain at the time) and the community that had been built to serve the mills suggested some of the new forms of social engineering the Boston Associates developed in Lawrence, Lowell, and Manchester. They had a different effect on Owen himself.

Robert Owen emigrated to Indiana in 1825 and established a socialist community called New Harmony, on the site of an earlier “Harmony” built by the followers of German pietist George Rapp. The New Harmony Working Men’s Institute (est. 1838) contains the oldest continuously operated library in Indiana. Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, became a leader of the Working Men’s Party in New York before entering politics as an Indiana Representative, corresponding with Lincoln about Emancipation, and writing a radical draft of the 14th Amendment. Both the Owens are claimed by social reformers, radicals, and secularists in Britain and America as founding fathers of their various movements.

Robert Owen’s story suggests that there was a moment of recognition, when he and others like him discovered the magnitude of the social forces they were manipulating. Why the Owens chose to respond to this discovery as they did, and the Lowells and Appletons as they did, might turn out to be a very interesting, very contemporary story.

March 2011 Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

Randall Stephens

The new issue of the Journal of the Historical Society has been arriving in mailboxes this past week. Articles from it can be downloaded at the Wiley Online Library. The March 2011 issue features:

"Blind Men of Industan"
F. S. Naiden

"Three Weeks in Mississippi: James Meredith, Aubrey Norvell, and the Politics of Bird Shot"
Aram Goudsouzian

"Neither a Secular nor Confessional Age: The Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875"
Thomas Albert Howard

"Tar and Feathers"
Barry Levy

"The Age of Reagan? Three Questions for Future Research"
John Ehrman

Here is a little from Howard's "Neither a Secular nor Confessional Age: The Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875":

Europe's "revolutionary century," the nineteenth, has experienced its own historiographical revolution in recent decades. Not too long ago its direction reflected the academy's penchant to think in terms of "secularization"; the title of Owen Chadwick's The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1975) might serve as an illustration of an earlier status quo. Encouraged by the advent of the so-called "new cultural history" in the 1990s and building momentum ever since, religious topics have emerged as a significant focus of scholarship. One German scholar, Olaf Blaschke, has influentially proposed that, far from a "secular age," we might do better to think of the nineteenth century as a "second confessional era," in light of the persistence of Catholic and Protestant "milieus" throughout Western Europe and lingering confessional animosities and prejudices. Blaschke's words have received much deserved attention. read more >>>

Religion and American Prisons in the Antebellum Era: An Interview with Jennifer Graber

Randall Stephens

"Americans incarcerate," writes Jennifer Graber in her new engaging book The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). "Though the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population," she writes, "it has almost a quarter of its prisoners." Such facts make the long history of American prisons and their maintenance all the more interesting. Graber, an assistant professor in the department of religious studies at the College of Wooster, analyzes the "intersection of Christianity and politics in the American penitentiary system."* Her interesting account also looks at the religious dimensions of discipline and the ideas that undergirded punishment from the 1790s to the 1950s.

Randall Stephens: You write that antebellum Americans disagreed on much when it came to prisons, but most “affirmed religion's central importance” to prisons and reform. How was criminal justice “religious” in this era?

Jennifer Graber: If you were concerned about criminal punishment in the early republic, there were lots of things to fight about. Once the states began to build prisons, the big debate was between a discipline out of Pennsylvania that featured total solitary confinement and one out of New York that combined labor in workshops during the day with solitary confinement at night. Partisans for these two systems called the other side un-American and un-Christian. Beyond the rival disciplines, people debated the best way to reform inmates. They argued about what was more important: a good Sunday School teacher in Sing Sing or clean water and decent food in Sing Sing? Without fail, everyone interested in the debate claimed that “religion”—and they used the word “religion” even though they meant variations of evangelical Protestantism—was central to inmate reformation and the overall health of American prisons as strong institutions. What they didn't realize is that their common evocation of “religion” masked significant differences. For instance, they all thought that prison chaplains were necessary, but disagreed—sometimes violently—over the role these ministers should play inside institutions. Or, they all assumed that God ordained the civil authorities to punish lawbreakers, but varied on the question of that punishment’s severity.

Stephens: What kinds of problems did evangelicals target in the prison system? What can we learn about them by the sort of reforms they pursued?

Graber: Their first target was colonial-era punishments, whether it was steep fines, corporal punishments such as whipping or branding, or the gallows. They joined a trans-Atlantic movement to reform punishment and were active in the construction and administration of the first prisons. Protestant evangelicals—and I include many Quakers in this group, which might ruffle some historians’ feathers—envisioned the prison as an ideal site for prompting criminals’ conversion and reformation. Because these reformers had the new nation’s urban slums in mind, they emphasized the need for a decent physical environment, steady labor, education, and worship. Once the prisons were off the ground and running, reformers also had to take a stand on the reemergence of corporal punishment.

What can we learn about these evangelicals? Unfortunately, I think we see their utter inability to countenance cultural patterns and systems of meaning outside their own. Many of them were certain that criminals from poor neighborhoods would welcome the opportunity to go to prison. Despite the rising number of Irish inmates in the 1830s and 40s, it never occurred to them that it might be a good idea to have a Roman Catholic priest visit inmates on their deathbeds. Ultimately, for evangelicals the prison was one site for making the America they wanted. They had a vision in which all newcomers—as well as slaves and American Indians—would become like them. Of course, this perspective was shared by the broader upper and middle classes. It would have been strange for these reformers to see things otherwise. I mention it because this worldview helps explain how they approached criminal justice and why they failed to see that their prison experiments weren’t working.

Stephens: When it came to prisons, how did Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beamont, and other observers understand the American difference?
Graber: Tocqueville and Beaumont were coming from France, where there had been no substantial criminal justice reform. Other interested onlookers came from England, where most of the reform ideas came from, but had never been realized. For these folk interested in prisons, then, America was a blank slate, a place where something new and revolutionary could be attempted. Touring these facilities, however, brought many visitors out of abstract considerations and back to the difficulties of organizing an ethnically and religiously diverse population. Just because Americans could try something new did not mean that they could achieve the perfect institution. Slavery also cast a shadow over these tours of facilities where people labored against their will and could be whipped for disobeying. Foreign tourists struggled with the resemblance between prisons and slavery. In this way, America’s prisons both fascinated and repelled them.