Know Your Archives: The Center for Popular Music

Randall Stephens

It takes a certain temperament to be a historian.  For example, you have to, at least on some level, enjoy rummaging through dusty manuscripts and spending hour upon hour hunting down sources, reading, rereading, and conducting keyword searches until your fingers become arthritic claws.

I don't enjoy that last one, but I do enjoy visiting archives.  Some more than others.  I've been to a variety of amazing collections over the years.  Maybe only one of those, the Reading Room of the Library of Congress, matched shear beauty with the amazing scope of materials.  (Getting tired of reading through that bound volume of brittle 19th-century newspapers?  Have a stretch and look up at the beautiful dome.) For the most part, historians don't visit archives for the lovely vistas. Quite a few archives are situated in cold basements with little sunlight and flickering, humming florescent lights.  An ideal setting for a troglodyte, but not a vitamin-D-deprived historian.

Downtown Nashville, summer 2012

This past summer I went on the road to do some initial research for my next book project, currently titled The Devil's Music: Rock and Christianity from Elvis to Larry Norman.  It was a great experience.  All the archivists and assistants I encountered proved terrifically helpful.  I visited some really stunning collections.  Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center may lay claim to being the best place to study all things related to 20th-century Protestantism, and evangelicalism in particular.  (Don't let their hopelessly outdated 1990s website make you think any less of the place.)  To the south of Wheaton I trekked to the Southern Baptist Historical Library. The staff their gave me numerous tips and helped me track down obscure pamphlets, documents, and letters that I could never have imagined even existed.  As a bonus, the Southern Baptist Historical Library is in Nashville.  Music nuts can take a break by boot-scooting over to the Country Music Hall of Fame or dropping some greenbacks at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, founded in 1947.

My favorite collection that I visited on this cross-country trip was the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN. Seldom has research been more fun.  I perused dozens and dozens of books on rock history, gospel, and pop music.  (It was hard not to fall down an rabbit hole.) I listened to a rare, 1956 acetate interview with Elvis Presley from a Texas radio station.  Girls screamed in the background as a flustered Elvis answered with his typical "yessir." I thumbed through anti-rock diatribes from the Carter years.  Through it all I got a better handle on my topic. 

The Center holds acres of records, tapes, magazines, books, manuscripts, and much more. (Search there extensive collection here.)  And the staff at this place, the gem in its crown, could not have been more helpful.  With their aid I found enough research material to keep me working away for months. 

In the Know Your Archives interview embedded above, I speak with Dale Cockrell, Director, and Martin Fisher, Curator of Recorded Media Collections.  They describe the materials the Center collects, the kinds of research being done there, and pretty much explain why anyone doing anything on music history should make the trip to MTSU. 

No Person Shall Bee Any Wise Molested: Religious Freedom, Cultural Conflict, and the Moral Role of the State

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A conference planned for October 3 - 6, 2013, in Newport and Providence, Rhode Island, organized by the Newport Historical Society, the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, Salve Regina University, the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom, the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University and the Rhode Island Historical Society to mark the 350th anniversary of the 1663 Rhode Island Charter.

What is religious toleration? What are its functions, effects, and limits in society? How has it manifested (or not) around the world in human history?

The 1663 Rhode Island Charter stipulated that no person "shall bee any wise molested,punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinione in matters of religion." This charter famously ignited the "lively experiment" that both reflected and shaped religious and political developments in the early modern world and has continued to influence global conversations about the role of toleration and religious freedom. The 350th anniversary of this charter provides a timely point of entry into a thoughtful consideration of a far larger set of questions about religious freedom in particular historical and present day contexts.
Far from exemplifying a simple narrative of "progress," toleration and religious liberty have
been contested, often resisted ideas that have proved surprisingly difficult to implement equitably. This is especially true when one looks outside the traditional boundaries of church- state relations to consider the lived experiences of religious dissenters, ethnic minorities, women, and enslaved and free people of color, including American Indians and indigenous populations around the world. The uneven adoption of such ideas in the early modern world, ongoing intolerance in the United States even after the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and the globalization and contestation of full religious liberty today suggest that a more comprehensive investigation of the meaning of religious liberty and toleration is an issue of particular urgency for the present.

Situated in historic Newport and Providence, Rhode Island, this conference looks at the sources, consequences, changing meanings, and lived experiences of religious freedom and intolerance. To that end, the program committee solicits panels and individual paper proposals that represent innovative research on the broad themes of religious liberty, toleration, intolerance, religious conflict, and the role of government in such contexts. Papers that cut across traditional lines of disciplines, geographies, and chronologies are especially welcome, as are papers that look at transnational and comparative contexts, local and international conditions of toleration, and the shifting boundaries between the public and the private. In addition to historians, the committee hopes to engage scholars from other disciplines, including (but not limited to) anthropology, ethics, literature, religious studies, political science, economics, theology, sociology, law, philosophy, and peace, conflict, and coexistence studies.

Possible topics include (but are not restricted to):

* New perspectives on the 1663 Rhode Island charter-its context and consequences
* Shifting meanings of religious freedom in specific historical contexts
* Intersections of religious freedom or prejudice with race, ethnicity, class, gender, or
* sexuality
* Limits of religious freedom and expression
* Economic, cultural, and political consequences of religious tolerance and intolerance
* Conflicts over public space
* Religiously inspired moral coercion
* Nationalism, national identity, and transnational networks
* Historical formations of the religious, the civic, the secular, and the state
* Experience of the religiously unaffiliated, freethinkers, and the "nones"
* Attitudes towards religion in secular culture
* The interplay between law, policy, and religious coexistence
* Lived tolerance and intolerance
* Interreligious dialog and ecumenism
* Instruments of religious intolerance in the twenty-first century
* Governments and indigenous peoples
* Literary and artistic boundaries of religious freedom

Please send a 500 word proposal and curriculum vitae for each participant to
spectacleoftoleration@gmail.com by February 1, 2013. Full panel proposals should be sent
under one cover and should include a panel chair and respondent. Questions should be directed to the email above.

This conference is part of The Spectacle of Toleration: Learning from the Lively Experiment,
a multi-year project that aims to open up an international conversation about toleration and
religious freedom. In addition to the academic conference, The Spectacle of Toleration plans
to provide several years of public programming. For more information, please see:
www.newporthistorical.org/index.php/the-spectacle-of-toleration/

Richard Nixon: Victim of Religious Prejudice and Religious Pluralism

Chris Beneke

The morning after his loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential balloting, Vice-President Richard M. Nixon was awakened by vigorous tugging on his arm. No doubt groggy after two hours of election-shortened sleep, Nixon found his twelve-year-old daughter Julie next to him. She had been concerned by the previous evening’s returns and wanted to know the final outcome. Hearing the bad news, Julie then posed what her father described as a “strange and disturbing question.” “Daddy,” she asked, “why did people vote against you because of religion?” As Nixon recalled in his 1962 political biography Six Crises, he assured his daughter that people didn’t choose candidates because they “happen to be Jews or Catholics.” Instead, they chose them based on their estimation of the individual candidate’s merits.

This was an inspiring vision of political decision-making that didn’t comport with much else that Nixon wrote about religion and the 1960 election, nor much else in Nixon’s general approach to politics. Never one to underestimate the forces aligned against him nor his own suffering, Nixon went on to explain to readers that a smaller proportion of Catholic voters turned out for him than “any Republican presidential candidate in history (22 per cent).” Worse for his prospects that year, “there was not a corresponding and balancing shift of Protestants away from Kennedy.”

It may have taken the famously huge and fragile ego of Richard M. Nixon to imagine himself as a casualty of both religious tolerance and religious bigotry in the 1960 election, but that seems to have been what he was driving at. Nixon later made the point in a less veiled form. Kennedy’s Catholicism only appeared to be a political liability, Nixon wrote in his 1978 memoir. It actually improved the Massachusetts Senator’s chances:

"The Religious Issue: An Un-American Heritage,"
Life Magazine, July 4, 1960.

The pockets of fundamentalist anti-Catholic prejudice that still existed were concentrated in states that I stood to win anyway. But many Catholics would vote for Kennedy because he was Catholic, and some non-Catholics would vote for him just to prove they were not bigoted.

A master at harvesting resentments for electoral advantage, Nixon had somehow failed to turn anti-Catholicism into a critical mass of votes in the 1960 election. Aside from some covert overtures to anti-Catholics, his strategy seems to have involved subtle references to Kennedy’s Roman Catholic faith coupled with ecumenical appeals to Catholic Republicans and liberal Protestants. Shaun Casey, author of The Making of a Catholic President, notes that a supposedly confidential Nixon campaign memorandum, indicating that Kennedy’s faith would not be exploited for electoral gain, was “actually released publicly.” The same style of disingenuity may have been at work in television speech delivered on the eve of the election, in which the Vice-President urged voters to vote for the best candidate no matter what their religious affiliation.

One reasonable conclusion to be drawn from Nixon’s frustration regarding the “religious issue” in the 1960 election was that anti-Catholicism was such a doddering, parochial prejudice by this point in American history that even Nixon (the man whose own White House Counsel would later outline a plan to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”) dared not put it to explicit use. The fear that it would provoke a fierce reaction among Catholics, as well as sympathetic Protestants and Jews, was well-founded. Moreover, Kennedy and his team adeptly refuted charges that the Pope would take up residence in a JFK-White House, simultaneously co-signing bills and issuing encyclicals to Protestants. The result was that the Nixon camp was not able to successfully evoke the gaunt, withered specter of Vatican political power.

Then again, we don’t have to buy Nixon’s full self-pitying narrative to appreciate that he hit on something approaching truth when he portrayed himself as a victim of both Catholic preference for a fellow Catholic and the public’s aversion to the appearance of bigotry. Indeed, Nixon may have stumbled upon a fundamental paradox in the history of modern American thought, which accommodates certain expressions of group identity, while labeling the rest as mere chauvinism. There was no shortage of prejudice in 1960 (religious and otherwise), but what Nixon may have been describing was the tipping of electoral scales toward the flawed liberal dogma of pluralism, which has so far proven superior to all of the alternatives. 

Papist Patriots: Maura Jane Farrelly’s interview in Historically Speaking

Chris Beneke 

Among the gems in the latest issue of Historically Speaking is Randall Stephens’ interview(yes, we shamelessly shill for one another on this blog) with Brandeis University historian Maura Jane Farrelly.

Farrelly’s book Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity was published earlier this year with Oxford University Press. She focuses on colonial Maryland, which was home to British America’s largest concentration of Roman Catholics, including the influential Carroll family.

Anti-Catholicism in early Maryland was a complex phenomenon, Farrelly notes, not easily reducible to hostility toward Roman Catholics. Papist Patriots shows how a dual Roman Catholic identity -- distinguished by its compatibility with broader American understandings of religious liberty and its commitment to a hierarchal and communal church -- were reconciled in this largely Protestant country.

Excerpted below are a few tidbits from Stephens’ interview with Farrelly.

On her historical dissent from the Roman Catholic priest and theologian John Courtney Murray’s pivotal postwar argument that “there was a natural fit between Catholicism and a commitment to individual rights and religious pluralism”:

Farrelly: I agree with him that the Catholics living in the British colonies in the 1770s had embraced the American consensus, but I’m not sure their natural-law mindset was the reason why. I think it was their unique experiences as a politically -- but not economically -- oppressed minority in an English colony where Catholicism had been tolerated -- and then wasn’t that ‘prepared’ colonial Catholics to accept the ideology of the founding.

On the dual challenge faced by early Catholics:

Some Catholics rebelled more strongly against their government; others rebelled more strongly against their church. But most pushed against both with equal weight, telling their king that he could not have dominion over their religious consciences and telling their church that it could not determine their civil loyalties or behavior.

On the similarities between seventeenth-century Maryland and twenty first-century Iraq:

In 2006 nearly 235,000 people in Iraq fled their homes because of sectarian fighting. As staggering and disturbing as that statistic is, it still represents less than 1% of the entire Iraqi population. In contrast, 80% of the settlers in St. Mary’s County either fled or were killed in what is known as the ‘Ingle-Claiborne Rebellion’ of 1645-46.

On the formation of an American Catholic identity:

. . . Maryland’s Catholics understood after 1689 that English identity alone was not going to provide them with the liberty they sought. To claim the rights of Englishmen, they were going to have to assume the mantle not of English identity, but ‘Marylandian” identity, since religious toleration had been a fundamental component of Maryland’s founding. In 1776 that is precisely what they did.

Farrelly isn’t the first historian to offer an explanation of how early Roman Catholics became Americans (or more properly, first Marylanders, and then Americans), but she may have just provided us with the most persuasive one.

Historians in the News Roundup

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Melody Burri, "Historian Nancy Hewitt to present new work on Quaker Amy Post," MPNnow, August 22, 2012

Farmington, N.Y. - Nancy A. Hewitt, Professor of History and Women's Studies at Rutgers University, will give the fourth talk in the summer series for the 1816 Farmington Quaker Meetinghouse Museum.>>>

Professor Hewitt will present "Faith and Politics: The Spiritual Journeys of Amy Post."

Edward Helmore, "UK Harvard star Niall Ferguson accused of intellectual fraud," The Week, August 22, 2012

 THE British-born journalist and Harvard-tenured historian Niall Ferguson has landed himself in a nasty spat with some of America's most distinguished economists, among them Princeton's Nobel Prize-winner - and venerable New York Times columnist - Paul Krugman.

Ferguson is a promoter of Chancellor George Osborne's cut-to-growth economic philosophy. Krugman is a spend-to-grow man, as is President Obama.>>>

An interview with Victor Davis Hanson on his essay "There is No One California," Forum, KQED, August 20, 2012

California has become a target of mockery in the presidential campaign, with GOP challenger Mitt Romney holding the troubled state up as an example of where the country is headed under Barack Obama. Historian and conservative columnist Victor Davis Hanson also slams the state in a recent article entitled, "There is No One California." He joins us to talk about the piece, and to give us his take on the presidential campaign.>>>

Rebekah Higgitt, "(Pseudo)scientific history?" Guardian blog, August 16, 2012

There have been many writers who have claimed that history can be, or should be, scientific. Different things are meant by this, of course, and such statements are provoked by different motivations, although generally they trade on the perceived successes, rewards, professionalism and certainty of the sciences.>>>

"Historian Taylor Branch Critiques College Sports," Only a Game, WBUR (rebroadcast), August 25, 2012

The NCAA is facing growing scrutiny from college athletes, coaches and the people who follow college sports. The September 2011 issue of the Atlantic Monthly featured an article by Pulitzer-prize winning historian Taylor Branch — author of Parting the Waters, The Clinton Tapes, and others — entitled “The Shame of College Sports,” which criticizes the corruption within the NCAA.>>>

Roundup: The Trials and Tribulations of David Barton

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Elise Hu, "Publisher Pulls Controversial Thomas Jefferson Book, Citing Loss Of Confidence," NPR, August 9, 2012

Citing a loss of confidence in the book's details, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson is ending the publication and distribution of the bestseller, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson.>>>

Chris Beneke and Randall Stephens, "Lies the Debunkers Told Me: How Bad History Books Win Us Over," Atlantic blog, July 24, 2012

Earlier this month, George Mason University's History News Network asked readers to vote for the least credible history book in print. The top pick was David Barton's right-wing reimagining of our third president, Jefferson's Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson. But just nine votes behind was the late Howard Zinn's left-wing epic, A People's History of the United States. Bad history, it turns out, transcends political divides.>>>

John Fea, "What Can We Learn From the David Barton Controversy?" Patheos, Anxious Bench, August 15, 2012

In case you have not heard, last week Thomas Nelson, a Christian publisher based in Nashville, ceased publication of David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson, saying it has “lost confidence in the book’s details.”>>>

Paul Harvey, "David Barton: Falling from Grace?" Religion Dispatches, August 10, 2012

This has been the summer of discontent with David Barton. First, in a poll taken by History News Network, Barton’s newest work, The Jefferson Lies, topped the list of “least credible history works in print.” The same work met a unanimous chorus of refutations from Jefferson public humanities scholar and radio personality Clay Jenkinson, from religious historians ranging from Martin Marty to John Fea, and (in the full length work Getting Jefferson Right) from Grove City College professors Warren Throckmorton and Michael Coulter.>>>

Jennifer Schuessler, "Hard Truth for Author: Publisher Pulls ‘The Jefferson Lies’" NYT, August 14, 2012

Last month the History News Network voted David Barton’s book “The Jefferson Lies” the “least credible history book in print.” Now the book’s publisher, Thomas Nelson, has decided to stop publishing and distributing it.

The book, which argues that Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic orthodox Christian who saw no need for a wall of separation between church and state, has attracted plenty of criticism since it appeared in April, with an introduction by Glenn Beck. But the death knell came after Jay W. Richards, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author, with James Robison, of “Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family and Freedom Before It’s Too Late,” began to have doubts and started an investigation.>>>

David L. Chappell Responds to Ross Douthat on Religion and the Civil Rights Movement

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On April 8 the New York Times published Ross Douthat's op-ed "Divided by God." In part Douthat argued that "religious common ground has all but disappeared" in modern America. (In response, Mark Silk penned a step-by-step rebuttal here.) Toward the end of Douthat's op-ed he discussed the common theological ground that blacks and whites once shared, which he thinks helped end desegregation. In an aside Douthat mentions the work of David L. Chappell, Rothbaum Professor of Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma.

In this guest post Chappell responds to Douthat's reading of Chappell's A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (UNC Press, 2003). Along with that award-winning book, Chappell has written a number of articles and essays (some with the Journal of the Historical Society and Historically Speaking) on religion in modern America, the civil rights movement, politics, and race. He is also the author of Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). His next book, Waking from the Dream: The Battle over Martin Luther King’s Legacy (Random House), will be out in 2013.

Setting the Record Straight
David L. Chappell

I am grateful that Ross Douthat mentioned my book, A Stone of Hope, favorably. ("Divided by God," April 8.) With the best of intentions, however, Mr. Douthat got my story wrong. According to him, I claim that civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s used "moral and theological arguments to effectively shame many [white] southerners into accepting desegregation." That is a familiar version of the story, but the record does not support it.

Civil rights leaders did not shame white southerners but rather undermined their social foundations. The white South's churches could not defend segregation with a straight face, and that hurt the segregationist cause. There is a big difference, however, between being unable to muster a unifying and inspiring defense of an institution and being "shamed" into dismantling it. From beginning to end, I argued in my book, the civil rights movement used political coercion: with boycotts and mass demonstrations, the movement forced white southerners to give up their special privileges against their will.

The civil rights' leaders religious fervor inspired their own black, southern, Christian ranks to rise up out of their despair, fear, and in many cases resignation. But that is as far as the persuasive power of the leaders’ words carried. Rank and filers in the movement earned the respect, and often the awed admiration, of northern black and white liberals, because they were willing to risk their lives, to do jail time, and to endure the clubs, dogs, and fire hoses.

The organized force of black southerners' collective economic power produced the movement's first great victories. Further sustained demonstrations induced the federal government to apply the full force needed to end Jim Crow. The government realized that the only way to restore order and a good investment climate in the South was to enforce the Constitution, nearly a hundred years after it was amended to include black southerners. Thus religion played a key role, but political force carried the day. (So I wrote in my book, at any rate, and I felt I had to correct the record.)

The Genesis of Jesus Rock: An Interview with David W. Stowe

[Crossposted at Religion in American History]

Randall Stephens

David W. Stowe is a professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He has written on jazz history, hymns, and rock music. Stowe is the author of a wide range of books and articles, including Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Harvard University Press, 1996); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard University Press, 2004); and, most recently, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (Harvard University Press, 2011). Below I interview Stowe about his excellent new book and his insights into Jesus rock and the culture of conservative evangelicalism.

Randall Stephens: What drew you to the topic of the roots of Christian rock?

David W. Stowe: I was intrigued by the historical moment of the early Seventies—1971 to be exact—when it seemed popular music and youth culture were saturated in allusions to Jesus Christ: Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, several Top 40 songs with Jesus in their titles or verses. Why had the Son of God seemingly taken over U.S. popular culture at just that moment—when the countercultural energies of the Sixties were metamorphosing into something new? And did this music play some role in reshaping American culture during the Age of Reagan and beyond?

These struck me as questions worth trying to answer. There was a personal angle as well. I came of age during the Seventies and have always been fascinated by that decade, which I remember now as if it were some kind of dream. So Christian pop music—of which I was completely oblivious until about 15 years ago—was a lens through which to make sense of that strange interlude between Kent State and the Reagan Revolution.

Stephens: Why did a Christian analogue to rock music develop when and where it did?

Stowe: Like many forms of the Sixties counterculture, Christian rock first emerged in California. More precisely Orange County, the epicenter of what was dubbed the Jesus Movement. It was at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa where Chuck Smith famously teamed up with über-Jesus freak Lonnie Frisbee. Larry Norman came out of the Bay Area and had a major impact as well. But it’s important to note that the West Coast didn’t have a monopoly on Jesus music. The Rez Band (still in business) originated in

Milwaukee and made a very successful debut run across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. CCM guitar hero Phil Keaggy did a stint at Love Inn in upstate New York. [Check out the McCartney, Ram-esque Keaggy song in the youtube clip here.] So this Jesus Movement—and the music that went with it—was a national phenomenon.

Stephens: You focus quite a bit of attention on apocalypticism. How did end-times views shape Christian rock and, even, politics?

Stowe: Apocalyptic themes had bounced around in American pop music since early Dylan—“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—and Barry McGuire’s surprise number-one hit of 1965, “Eve of Destruction.” A sense of living in end times tinged the late Sixties counterculture—a certain Cold War fatalism permeated American society for decades--so it made sense that an apocalyptic mindset would filter into the Jesus Movement. Among other things, it makes a catchy theme for a lyric. Witness Larry Norman’s most famous song: “Children died, the days grew cold/A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold/I wish we’d all been ready. . . .” read on>>>

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

KKK Books and the Direction of History

Randall Stephens

[The following is a cross-post from the Religion in American History blog.]

Over at the New York Times, Kevin Boyle reviews two books on the Klan. Fellow blogmeister Kelly Baker's Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 is one of them along with Thomas R. Pegram's One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

The authors take different tacks. "While Pegram builds his book up from the experiences of ordinary Klansmen," writes Boyle, Baker "builds out from the Klan’s official declarations of religious devotion drawn from K.K.K. newspapers and magazines." What did the Klan's rise and fall mean? Was it an anomaly of the era or did it represent something darker, more continuous with America's past?

"Yes, the Klan had a very short life," says Boyle. He goes on:

But it has to be understood, [Baker] contends, as of a piece with other moments of fevered religious nationalism, from the anti-Catholic riots of the antebellum era to modern anti-­Islam bigots. Indeed, earlier this year, Herman Cain declared that he wouldn’t be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet. It’s tempting to see those moments as Pegram does the Klan: desperate, even pitiful attempts to stop the inevitable broadening of American society. But Baker seems closer to the mark when she says that there’s a dark strain of bigotry and exclusion running through the national experience. Sometimes it seems to weaken.

These books and Boyle's review bring up some weighty issues within American historiography.

How do historians and religious studies scholars generally see these episodes within the context of the arc of American history? Whig historians, of one variety or another, view them as bumps or potholes on the road to freedom and greater equality. Prigs look at them as something more, throwing the whole idea of progress up into the air. (Of course there are all sorts of opinions on the spectrum, shading from one end to the other. Historians need not even be aware of their own views on the subject. See Christopher Shannon's critique of the profession, which we published in Historically Speaking some months ago.)

Take Slavery. How does it fit into the narrative of US history? In 1980 historian John David Smith wrote in the Journal of Negro History that "The importance of slavery in the racial thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been vastly understated by scholars. Yet slavery held an unusual attraction for historians, popular writers, editors, and polemicists in these years." His piece marked a trend in the field. Slavery, historians now wrote, should be taken seriously as integral to the economy and to life in the 19th century. The PBS series Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery spelled out this theme for a wider audience and included talking head historians like Eric Foner, James Horton, and Nell Irvan Painter. Says Foner, "Slavery was an immense political power in the country, as well as an economic power. The three-fifths clause of the Constitution gave the slave South far greater representation in Congress, and a far larger number of electoral votes, than their white population really would have been entitled to. So the South really had an iron grip on the federal government, down to the middle of the 19th century."*

Other historians have been grappling with the issue of religious freedom/intolerance in ways that parallel Baker's approach. How does one chart the story of religious pluralism and religious bigotry? On this matter David Sehat sees a bleak side to America's past. "What if U.S. religious history was not a history of progressive and unfolding freedom?" he asks in his The Myth of American Religious Freedom. "What if, instead, it was a history of religious conflict? And what if that conflict involved extended periods of religious coercion and the continual attempt to maintain religious power and control?"

On the 19th century Protestant establishment an essay by Ronald P. Formisano and Stephen Pickering sheds some light (or, I guess I should say darkness?): “The Christian Nation Debate and Witness Competency,” in the Journal of the Early Republic. Most importantly, they note:

Historians have examined closely the Founders’ intentions regarding the First Amendment’s religious establishment clause as well as the influence of Protestant Christianity in the public life of the early republic. The new national government, and particularly several states, often breached Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state. . . . In courtrooms across the country, well into the nineteenth century, judges allowed witnesses to be questioned regarding their religious beliefs, with some requiring belief in the “future state” doctrine of divine rewards and punishments before permitting them to testify.

Of course, one generation's dark moments are another's beacons of truth. From where we stand in 2011, we judge and think about the past in ways that are profoundly different from the perspective of historians and religious studies scholars half a century ago. (Think Mircea Eliade.)

If we pull back and gauge the whole, what is American history in general or American religious history in particular about? Do either have a direction or a larger point? What if--as Paul Harvey asked in his review of the PBS documentary God in America--"American religious history [is] about coercion and authority? . . . [W]hat if we make coercion, establishment, and repression as central to our narrative as freedom, disestablishment, and expression? What if this is a show in which Americans’ self-understanding as derived from Exodus is more critically examined than celebrated?"

Building Bridges from "Muscular Christianity" to "The Tebow Thing"

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Art Remillard is an assistant professor of religious studies at St. Francis University in Loretto, PA. His book, Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era will be out this December with the University of Georgia Press. His current research looks at religion and sports in the American South from the Civil War through World War II. In this his first post for the H.S. blog, Art explains how his course on religion and sports offers a "bridge" for students to better understand broader themes in American religious history and theories of religion.

Building Bridges from "Muscular Christianity" to "The Tebow Thing"
Art Remillard

Before teaching my first college course, a friend recommended that I read Marilla Svinicki and Wilbert J. McKeachie's Teaching Tips. I recall taking to heart the book's repeated emphasis on developing learning strategies, "that help students to build bridges between what they already know or have experienced and what they are trying to learn." Once I started teaching, I found sports to be an effective "bridge." Truth be told, I'm not much of a sports fan (except for college football—then I get weird). But I follow closely enough so that, for example, I can compare the Steelers and Browns rivalry to that of the Dominicans and Franciscans. Trust me, it makes sense.

In between my first teaching experience and now, I have taken a greater academic interest in sports, to the point where I have developed a course titled "Religion and Sports." Here, I use sports to investigate major trends in American religious history, while also touching on some theories of religion. I've taught it twice now, and student responses have been quite positive. Yet, many who enroll don't know what to expect. Some anticipate a course on what sportswriter Frank Deford has called "Sportianity," or when self-described Christian athletes, "endorse Jesus, much as they would a new sneaker or a graphite-shafted driver." Think: Kurt Warner. The course does mention the Sportians (via Deford's article), but I'm more interested in the creative ways that people have inscribed religious meaning on to athletic pursuits.

So on "opening day," I invite students to cross a bridge from their hometown YMCA to "muscular Christianity." I cite Luther Gulick, his efforts to institute athletics at the Y, and his lifelong quest to understand "the relation of good bodies and good morals." I then turn to his colleague, James Naismith. On January 20, 1892, the Presbyterian minister gathered eighteen young men at a YMCA gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, to play his newly invented game called "basketball." Practically, Naismith hoped that basketball would give restless young men a suitable indoor activity for the long winter months. More importantly, as theologian Michael Novak summarizes, "The idea behind the game was moral, Christian, and hygienic: active clean living through vigorous exercise." Right from the gun, then, students discover the religious roots of a familiar game. Later in the course, drawing mostly from Bill Baker's Playing With God, I locate Gulick, Naismith, and other "muscular Christians" within the social gospel tradition, and discuss how they sought to Christianize all corners of society, from the schoolhouse to the gymnasium.

Another bridge brings students to the land of religious pluralism. I reference Julie Byrne's O God of Players to show how the female Catholic cagers at Immaculata College invented religious practices to express their newfound role as athletes. Richard Ian Kimball's Sports in Zion helps me to define the contours of "muscular Mormonism." From Steven A. Riess's edited volume, Sports and the American Jew, I recall the fascinating careers of great Jewish athletes, from the championship boxer Benny Leonard, to the great slugger Hank Greenburg. To examine "seekers," I talk about Phil Jackson, whose Sacred Hoops adds to Naismith's game a spiritual soup complete with Buddhist and Native American flavors. As for American Muslims, I feature marathoner Khalid Khannouchi and his twin challenge of running 100 mile weeks while also observing the Ramadan fast.

Alongside the course's historical conversation, I build bridges to some basic theories of religion. This is actually easier than I had first anticipated. Most of my students are from western and central Pennsylvania. They have been in (or live in) houses with rooms devoted to the Steelers. They have seen (or own) trucks painted black and gold. And they have observed (or participated in) the curious tradition of wearing Steelers jerseys to church. So I try to make sense of these and other activities by using the intellectual resources developed by religious studies scholars. This semester, I might mention Tim Tebow—not as a Sportian—but rather, for his persona that one Denver Bronco recently labeled, "the Tebow thing." From what I can tell, Tebow's "thing-ness" matches with Max Weber's definition of charisma, "a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities."

The weeks always seem to pass too quickly and I never make it to every bridge that I had hoped to go over. Still, the bridges that we do cross transform students' understanding of how religion and sports fit within American history and culture. I hope that professor McKeachie would approve.

After the Historical Revolutions: Or, When the Tree Falls in the Historical Paradigm Forest, Does Anyone Listen?

Paul Harvey

The following cross-post comes from my fellow blogmeister at our Religion in American History blog. Paul is a professor of history at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. He's the author or editor of a number of acclaimed books on American religious history, including Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (UNC, 1997); Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (UNC, 2007); and the forthcoming Jesus in Red, White, and Black, co-authored with Edward J. Blum.

A review of (and an announcement of) some challenging new works in earlier American History, and the history of the American West, got me thinking about the changing of the historical paradigm guard–or whether those guards get changed at all by scholarly revolutions. These are questions which affect the course of American religious history, but bear with me for a short detour before discussing that further.

My thoughts first came from reading Charles Mann’s review of Daniel K. Richhter’s new book Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past (Harvard University Press) in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (yes, Virginia, I do read the Wall Street Journal! But I'm not sure if the link will let in non-subscribers; if it doesn't and you want to read, I'm happy to send it to you).

I know nothing about this book other than this review, but I am a big fan of Richter’s earlier work Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, a favorite of mine to use in class for its wonderful illustrations of how changing one’s angle of vision creates an entirely different historical sense of a period. Richter also engages in some deft analyses of early American documents of religious history from the European-Native encounter, including John Eliot’s bizarre but fascinating Indian Dialogues, of course the Jesuit Relations, Indian conversion narratives, and various ceremonial encounters at treaty negotiations.

In his review of Richter’s new book, Mann writes:

Every few decades, historians develop a new way of looking at the past. I am not talking about ‘revisionism’ but unifying conceptual schemes, the sort of mental framework that Frederick Jackson Turner created in his argument for the importance of the frontier to our history or that Bernard Bailyn established in his studies of the American Revolution’s ideological origins. Historians debated Turner for a long time and continue to debate Mr. Bailyn. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were arguing with Mr. Richter a decade from today.

When I become King of the World I will permanently ban the word "revisionism" and its variant "historical revisionism" (as I have already banned the words "bias" and "politically correct" in my classrooms, since they have become barriers to thought and discussion), since they have been rendered meaningless for precisely the reason Mann explains there.

But the revolution in understanding is not just in the early America of Richter. My longtime friend Anne Hyde, Professor of History at my sister institution Colorado College, is about to publish her magnum opus for the West of the first half of the nineteenth century, Empires, Nations, Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860, part of University of Nebraska’s outstanding series History of the American West series. If this this means anything to you, as it will to some of you, the immediate predecessor to Anne’s book is Colin Calloway’s monumental work One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark.

(As a brief aside, when Anne and I were in graduate school, she always made it to the library at 8:00 a.m. sharp, while I was lucky to drag myself, half hungover and ears still ringing from some too-loud jazz concert the night before, by 10:00 or 11:00 at best, which explains a lot about the great scholarly discipline it took for Anne to finish this huge work, while I was busy watching the Mavs beat the Lakers).

Anne’s work may suggests a paradigm for understanding the history of the West in that era, in a way such as Richter and Colin Calloway have done for earlier American history. Her work also features chapters fully integrating the Mormon West into the larger picture, and too much else of interest besides to even begin to summarize here.

All of this is exciting as an historian. But all of it also makes me wonder how, whether, and when any of this affects public consciousness of earlier American history. Lately historians have been riled by the amateur scholar David Barton, and of course the bookshelves at your Barnes & Noble are full of everything Founding Father related. I understand that, but considering the impact of the works above–great on historians, perhaps little on anyone else–makes me wonder about similar questions for religious history.

The older paradigm of American religious history will be familiar to a few blog readers, and some are familiar with its more recent challengers, summarized in works such as Tweed’s edited volume Retelling U.S. Religious History. . . .

Much of the newer paradigm seems to come from removing religious history from the specific story of the American nation-state, and using categories that engage religious experience at its own level rather than as some proxy for political parties or current day culture wars. We've blogged at Religion in American History extensively about some recent classics that move American religious history/studies well down this path. Entries on Leigh Schmidt, Robert Orsi, Kathryn Lofton, and numerous others come to mind.

Again, however, for religious history as for the studies of earlier American history mentioned above, one wonders whether and how this affects any sort of public consciousness or discussion, and whether it’s the job of religious historians to evangelize for these perspectives that challenge or disrupt how we perceive the American religious past (and present). Or maybe scholars should just do their work, let popularizers who are good at popularizing disseminate this stuff to the general public (like what happens in science all the time–neuroscientists do their thing, and then someone like Oliver Sacks explains a little bit of it to us), and trust that over a generation or two it will find its way into the more general understandings. That's a comforting and easy role to take, but it leaves not much excuse for complaining about why some pseudo-historians advise presidential candidates while the rest of us get to advise freshmen how to raise their grade from a D to a C.

As usual, I have no answers, only questions.

Look Back in Anger: The 1960s and Evangelical Conservatives

Randall Stephens

The rightward turn of voters in the 2010 elections and the traction that conservative candidates have gained has a variety causes. Certainly, a number of Americans are unhappy with health care reform, unemployment, and a president that they feel is far too liberal. But one group, white conservative Christians, is particularly up in arms.

The Pew Research Center reports that "Two of the largest religious groups in the electorate followed the same basic voting patterns in the 2010 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives as they have in prior elections: white Protestants voted overwhelmingly Republican and religiously unaffiliated voters cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Democrats. . . . However, among all white voters who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians -- a group that includes Catholics and members of other faiths in addition to Protestants -- 78% voted Republican in 2010, compared with 70% in the last midterm election."

At least since the 1960s, many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians have felt besieged by new currents in the larger American culture. The upheaval of the swinging sixties shocked and frightened believers. Evangelicals and fundamentalists were horrified by campus riots, the counter culture, and what they saw as the excesses of the liberal political establishment. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Christianity Today, the chief magazine of American evangelicalism, published article after article on the terrors of the Left and the end of Christian civilization. Their world, so it seemed, was crumbling around them. (See Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt and Dan Williams recent God's Own Party for excellent insight into these and earlier developments.) The 1970s bestselling work of nonfiction, Hal Lindsey's Late Great Planet Earth, wove an evangelical end-times drama out of the explosive issues of the age. (Though Jesus People wore beads and Roman sandals and grew their hair "all long and shaggy," as Merle Haggard put it, they were in step with the apocalyptic temper of the times and drank in the anti-60s brew of the day.)

James Dobson, one of the most influential evangelical leaders of the modern era, described this anti-1960s view bluntly in 2008. Much of the wickedness of modern society, Dobson thundered, could be traced to that era of moral decline. The so-called Summer of Love in 1967 unleashed a whirlwind of hedonism and vice, he said. In his multi-million selling parenting manual, Dare to Discipline (1970), Dobson wrote: "In a day of widespread drug usage, immorality, civil disobedience, vandalism, and violence, we must not depend on hope and luck to fashion the critical attitudes we value in our children. That unstructured technique was applied during the childhood of the generation which is now in college, and the outcome has been quite discouraging. Permissiveness has not just been a failure; it’s been a disaster!"

Long after the bong smoke and tear gas have cleared, conservative American Christians--some in the Tea Party and many more who are happy enough with the Republican Party--continue to register post-60s fears. A number want to reclaim their America from secularists and godless liberals. They fear that an overpowering government wants to curtail their rights to raise their children as they see fit. They worry that their freedom to express their religious beliefs in the public sphere continues to come under attack. In other words, many are uncomfortable with a post-60s pluralism that has reshaped the nation and with a secular notion of the public good.

Such concerns are not lost on savvy politicians. Christine O'Donnell, Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Ken Buck, and a host of others are intimately aware of constituents' fears. When such candidates lash out at secular experts and laud commonsense Christianity, they know perfectly well that they are tapping into a powerful counter ideology, one that has been decades in the making.

Dirty Words of the Academy

Randall Stephens

This past weekend I was down in Atlanta for the American Academy of Religion meeting. The sessions I attended on history were dynamic and produced some terrific discussions and debates.

The field of religious studies tends to be far more grounded in theory than history, as far as I can tell. (Is it true that all "studies" programs are theory driven? Peruse the conference programs of the AAR and the AHA. Do a word search for "performative" and "postcoloniality." See also the pluralization of concepts: "hybridities," "boundaries," "theologies.")

As I listened to several papers in various sessions at the AAR I thought about how scholars in the humanities employ certain words to discredit a range of views. So, I've compiled a list of dirty words. This list could certainly be extended.

Essentialist
Homogeneous
Dualistic
Static
Monocausal
Top down
Metaphysical
Teleological
Simple
Uncomplicated
Exceptionalist
Bianary

What does it mean that historians and humanists in other fields use these words almost always as code for bad or wrong?

Religious History at the American Academy of Religion Meeting, Atlanta, Oct 30-Nov 1, 2010

Randall Stephens

I paste below some of the history-related sessions at the 2010 AAR meeting. There are quite a few others, but this gives an idea of how history plays out at the meeting. The program is searchable here.

Saturday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L405-406
Missionary Innovation: African-American Religion and the New South

Presiding
* Josef Sorett, Columbia University

Presenters
* Lerone Martin, Emory University
Selling to the Souls of Black Folk: Atlanta, the Phonograph, and the Transformation of American Religion and Culture, 1920–1941

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing and Righting Race: Women’s Interracial Cooperation in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church, South

* Brandi Hughes, University of Michigan
(En)Gendering the Trans-Nation: The Missionary Sojourns of Black Womanhood from Atlanta through Monrovia

* Brandon Winstead, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
“We are Responsible to God”: Black Nazarene Women’s Theology of Evangelistic Responsibility and Its Relationship to Their Contributions to the Church of the Nazarene’s Gulf Central District, 1953–1969

Responding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover E
Author Meets Critics: Thomas A. Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling (Harvard University Press, 2008)

Presiding
* Daniel Ramírez, University of Michigan

Panelists
* Richard Callahan, University of Missouri
* Marie Marquardt, Agnes Scott College
* Grant Wacker, Duke University

Responding
* Thomas A. Tweed, University of Texas

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover FG
Defining Religious Freedom: Reading Tisa Wenger’s We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

Presiding
* Ines M. Talamantez, University of California, Santa Barbara

Panelists
* Quincy Newell, University of Wyoming
* Greg Johnson, University of Colorado
* Kenneth Mello, Southwestern University

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover C
The Lutheran Tradition: New Theological and Global Perspectives
Presiding
* Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg

Presenters
* Farisani Elelwani, University of South Africa
The Challenges Facing Lutherans in South Africa

* John Reynolds, Union Theological Seminary
The Heart in Sixteenth Century Physiology and the Role of Luther’s Theology in the Life of the Believer

* Hans Schwarz, University of Regensburg
Martin Luther’s Reception in Korea

* Cecilia Nahnfeldt, Karlstad University, Sweden
Lutheran Vocation and Gender Relations

Saturday 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L507
Seminar on Religion in the American West

Presiding
* Jane Naomi Iwamura, University of Southern California

Presenters
* Travis Ross, University of Nevada, Reno
Sectionalism in California’s Religious Periodicals: Place in Religious Rhetoric

* Jonathan William Olson, Florida State University
“Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan”: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West

* Barry Joyce, University of Delaware
Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science, and the Sacred at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park

* Brett Hendrickson, Arizona State University
Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University


Sunday 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover AB
Keywords in the Study of North American Religion: Anthropomorphism, Agency, and Vernacular

Presiding
* Gary M. Laderman, Emory University

Presenters
* W. Clark Gilpin, University of Chicago
Anthropomorphism: Human Connection to a Universal Society

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing Agency: Reconsidering Agency in the Study of American Religion

* Rachel Lindsey, Princeton University
The Light of the World: Vernacular Photography and American Religion, 1839–1910

Monday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M101
The Future of Southern Religious History

Presiding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Panelists
* Alison Greene, Yale University
* Michael Pasquier, Louisiana State University
* Randall Stephens, Eastern Nazarene College
* Curtis Evans, University of Chicago
* Ted Ownby, University of Mississippi

Responding
* Lauren Winner, Duke University

Monday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M103-104
How Has Orsi’s Madonna of 115th Street Affected the Way We Think about Religion?

Presiding
* David Harrington Watt, Temple University

Panelists
* Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University
* Stephen J. Stein, Indiana University
* Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
* Leigh E. Schmidt, Harvard University

Responding
* Robert Orsi, Northwestern University