Catholics and Evangelicals for the Common Good

The last couple of days I have been participating in a Catholic-Evangelical dialogue at Georgetown University organized by Ronald Sider. This morning I gave a paper on the history of evangelical civic engagement.  I hope to blog a bit more about this meeting in the next day or so.  Stay tuned.

Most Popular Posts of the Last Week

Here are the ten most visited posts this week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

1.  Punctuation saves lives (September 2011).
2.  The Top Ten Most Religious Cities in America (November 2010).
3.  Religion in Jamestown (July 2007).
4.  A Little History Humor (May 2011).
5.  Why We Need Anne Hutchinson (February 2010).
6.  Louis Menand on Why We Have College (June 2011).
7.  Niall Ferguson: Americans Don't Read (September 2011).
8.  Super-Sizing DaVinci's Last Supper (March 2010).
9.  Sunday Night Odds and Ends (September 2011).
10. A Weekend at Fort Ticonderoga (September 2011).

Also receiving votes:
David Brooks on the Moral Individualism of America's Youth (September 2011).
Readings for a Pre-1865 American Religious History Course (September 2011).

Can One Reconcile Hamiltonian National Greatness and Augustinian Humility of Self?

Patrick Deneen, the Georgetown politics professor and one of the head honchos over at The Front Porch Republic, poses a provocative question to New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Earlier this week, Brooks gave a lecture at Georgetown University's Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy (which Deneen directs) entitled "The Era of Self-Expansion." In that lecture, according to Deneen, Brooks spoke of "the transformation of the American understanding of 'self' from one of humility and self-restraint, to a contemporary 'expansive' notion of self-assertion, self-realization, and self-esteem."

During the Q&A following the lecture, a student asked Brooks whether too many people today were attending college.  Brooks responded by praising "widespread university-education in the service of the Hamiltonian (as in Alexander Hamilton) ideal of social mobility."

Deneen was bothered by Brooks's answer to this question, suggesting that his answer "seemed to contradict...everything that he had been arguing in the course of the whole evening."  Since Deneen did not get to ask Brooks a question that night, he decided to include the question he would have asked in a recent post at The Front Porch Republic.  Here is the question:

Can you reconcile your call to Hamiltonian national greatness and your call to Augustinian humility of self? Can you reconcile your defense of social mobility with your defense of familial, cultural and social institutions that cultivate a strong sense of obligation and gratitude? Will not the project of national greatness, and the gigantism in our politics and economics that it encourages, eventually and inevitably undermine the stability and authority of those local institutions that you laud as formative in the cultivation of a more humble self? Doesn’t the ideal of “national greatness” in fact directly contradict the theology of Augustine (and even Niebuhr, though he’s a bit uneven on this point), who urged a self-understanding in which we were to be pilgrims upon this earth, not wholly understanding ourselves to be citizens of this world, and that our humility was derived from the primacy of our devotion to God and not to our investment in the nation? Nations, to Augustine, were essentially large “robber bands”; if he could find anything to praise in political life, it was the classical ideal of the republic – small, limited, modest, devoted to the inculcation of virtue, but certainly not the modern (Machiavellian, and Hamiltonian) project that redefined “republicanism” effectively as indistinguishable from the project of empire.

At the heart of your argument I find a contradiction that seems evident in the heart of America itself. We harbor the ideal of the classical republic – populated by some version of Winthrop’s model of Christian (and Augustinian) charity, the virtuous yeoman farmer of Jefferson and the self-governing ideal urged by the Anti-federalists, among others – and, at the same time, the world-conquering, Hamiltonian expansionist, American exceptionalist, Wilsonian and Bush II ambition to rid the world of evil as a political project. While in your lecture you suggested that we can trace the rise of the “era of self expansion” to the baleful influence of the psychologist Carl Rogers, might not a deeper and more pervasive source be the modern rejection of the Augustinian theology more broadly, a rejection that was substantially realized in the political realm by the work and arguments of (among others) Alexander Hamilton and his vision of making us at home in the world?

How would you answer this?

Punctuation Saves Lives

HT: Marti Eads

"We don't want history to happen again, unless the thing that happened was good."

The Onion strikes again.  This is hilarious. 

WASHINGTON—With the United States facing a daunting array of problems at home and abroad, leading historians courteously reminded the nation Thursday that when making tough choices, it never hurts to stop a moment, take a look at similar situations from the past, and then think about whether the decisions people made back then were good or bad.

According to the historians, by looking at things that have already happened, Americans can learn a lot about which actions made things better versus which actions made things worse, and can then plan their own actions accordingly.

"In the coming weeks and months, people will have to make some really important decisions about some really important issues," Columbia University historian Douglas R. Collins said during a press conference, speaking very slowly and clearly so the nation could follow his words. "And one thing we can do, before making a choice that has permanent consequences for our entire civilization, is check real quick first to see if human beings have ever done anything like it previously, and see if turned out to be a good idea or not."

"It's actually pretty simple: We just have to ask ourselves if people doing the same thing in the past caused something bad to happen," Collins continued. "Did the thing we're thinking of doing make people upset? Did it start a war? If it did, then we might want to think about not doing it."

Read the rest here.

Is Obama a Class Warrior?

Writing at The New York Times, Mark Landler suggests that Barack Obama seems to be embracing the "class warrior" label that Republicans are trying to pin on him.  He is fighting Tea Party and libertarian populism with some good old-fashioned economic populism.  Here is a taste of Landler's article: 

Reprising the populist themes of recent speeches in Ohio, North Carolina and Virginia, Mr. Obama repeatedly challenged Republicans to pass the jobs bill. Extending the cut in payroll taxes would put $1,700 into the pockets of a typical Colorado working family, Mr. Obama said, and refusing to do so would amount to hitting them with a tax increase. Cries of “pass the bill” competed with chants of “four more years.”

Far from rejecting the Republican accusation that he is waging class warfare, Mr. Obama now seems to revel in it.

“If asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher makes me a class warrior, a warrior for the middle class, I will accept that; I’ll wear that as a badge of honor,” Mr. Obama said. “Because the only class warfare I’ve seen is the battle that’s been waged against the middle class in this country for a decade now.” 

As I read this article, and thought a bit more about Obama's job package, I recalled the scene from the movie "Dave" where the title character, played by Kevin Klein, tries get his own jobs bill passed.  You Tube would not allow me to embed the video, but you can watch it by going to the link above.

Digital Humanities: Colonizing the Fields That Were Supposedly Replacing Them

In responding to the increased interest in digital humanities on college campuses, Stanley Fish recently wrote: "While we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them."

I found Fish's quote in an Inside Higher Ed report on a meeting of digital humanities scholars who have received start-up money from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Here is a taste:

“I think there is a real attempt in the digital humanities to broaden beyond academia and make information widely available,” Bobley said in an interview. “Linked open data is a very technical infrastructure, but the result of that is information that’s shared widely for free. A lot of scholarly data over the last hundred years or so is locked up in expensive journals that the public could never afford to subscribe to.

“We’re quite happy about how the digital humanities is, in some sense, opening up the scholarly world to a wider audience,” he said.

That could be the key to winning back support for the humanities, suggested Doug Reside, associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities at the University of Maryland at College Park.

“I think that’s the way we will continue to make humanities scholarship relevant and sustainable into the future,” Reside told Inside Higher Ed. “That really is the way the rest of the world is going, and if we’re not performing those functions, then humanities as a whole are in even greater danger than they already are.”

This Week's Patheos Column: Study History, Save Your Marriage

I am working on a new book about the importance of historical thinking to the creation of a civil society, and I was recently sharing some thoughts from the book with a group of scholars and students. After telling the group that I thought people who study the past learn the skill of understanding people who are different from them, one of the historians at the table said that his work as a student of the past has made him a better husband.

I must admit that I was initially shocked by his statement, but very intrigued. This historian told us that he and his wife did not always see eye-to-eye on issues facing their family, their relationship, and society in general, but the skills he acquired through his work as a historian had helped him to relate to his wife in a more understanding way. When he became aware of the similarities between his vocation as a historian and his married life, he realized that he needed to show empathy before casting judgment. His marriage was better as a result.

Read the rest here.

Is Obama the Antichrist?

Some conservative evangelicals fear that Barack Obama may be the Antichrist.  The Antichrist, according to a dispensational reading of the Bible, is the Satan-inspired world leader who will at first appear to be a popular and charismatic figure, but will eventually turn on Christians and usher in a devastating season of persecution known as the "tribulation."  He will finally be defeated by a returning Jesus Christ at the Battle of Armageddon.

In yesterday's New York Times, Matthew Sutton, a historian of American evangelicalism who teaches at Washington State University, published a piece titled "Why the Antichrist Matters in Politics?" He argues that evangelical Christian fears of Obama are not unlike the kind of fears conservative Protestants expressed about FDR and the New Deal.


Here is his conclusion: 

The left is in disarray while libertarianism is on the ascent. A new generation of evangelicals — well-versed in organizing but lacking moderating influences — is lining up behind hard-right anti-statists. While few of the faithful truly think that the president is the Antichrist, millions of voters, like their Depression-era predecessors, fear that the time is short. The sentiment that Mr. Obama is preparing the United States, as Roosevelt did, for the Antichrist’s global coalition is likely to grow.

Barring the rapture, Mrs. Bachmann or Mr. Perry could well ride the apocalyptic anti-statism of conservative Christians into the Oval Office. Indeed, the tribulation may be upon us. 

Fair enough.  I have no doubt that there are evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in America who believe that Obama is the Antichrist. But I am not yet convinced that this kind of apocalyptic vision will play a major role in the GOP election. We will see if Sutton is correct.   In the meantime, I would like to know which one of the GOP candidates is using such rhetoric.  I haven't heard it yet.

How to Get Your Article Published

I know that a lot of graduate students and people considering  an academic career read The Way of Improvement Leads Home.  So I thought I would call your attention to Eszter Hargittai's post, "From Review to Publication." Those who are making their first forays into journal publishing will learn much from Hargittai' piece.  She walks her readers through the submission and review process that is common among most scholarly journals.  Here is a taste:

After a certain period of time – in my areas about three months – if the journal still has not responded with a decision about the manuscript, it is O.K. to send the editor or managing editor a short polite note to inquire about the paper’s status. It is not always easy to keep track of submission time lines – especially when you have more than one paper under review at a time – so consider creating a reminder (e.g., on your calendar) for 3 months after submission. Once the date rolls around, send a courteous short message to the journal requesting an update on the status of your piece. If receiving a timely decision is of special concern, e.g., you are about to go on the job market or are being considered for promotion soon, then that may be worth mentioning to the editor. It is, of course, important not to abuse this, but if you are about to send off your CV for job applications then it could make a substantial difference to hear back from a journal sooner rather than later and some editors are kind enough to take such special circumstances into consideration when making timely decisions about manuscripts.

Oscar Handlin R.I.P.

I always begin my course on the immigrant experience in America by talking about the work of Oscar Handlin and his book The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People.  It won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1952.  I was thus saddened to hear of Handlin's passing.  Here is a taste of an obituary published in the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Oscar Handlin, 95, a prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose best-known book altered public perceptions about the role of immigration in U.S. history, died Tuesday at home in Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Handlin wrote many scholarly volumes on immigration, race, and ethnic identity during his nearly half-century as a history professor at Harvard University. His work as a chronicler of the migrations of Puerto Ricans and African Americans to cities attracted a generation of scholars to the field of urban studies in the 1950s, when it was considered marginal.

But his best-known work, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People, which won the 1952 Pulitzer for history, was aimed at general readers in making his case that immigration, more than the frontier experience, or any other episode in its past, was the continuing, defining event of U.S. history. Dispensing with footnotes and writing in a lyrical style, Mr. Handlin emphasized the common threads in the experiences of the 30 million immigrants who poured into U.S. cities between 1820 and the turn of the century. Regardless of nationality, religion, race, or ethnicity, he wrote, the common experience was wrenching hardship, alienation, and a gradual Americanization that changed the United States as much as it changed the newcomers.

The book used a form of historical scholarship considered unorthodox, employing newspaper accounts, personal letters, and diaries as well as archives.

Mr. Handlin, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, was among the first Jewish scholars appointed to a full professorship at Harvard, where he taught from 1939 until 1984. 

"All his work tried to capture the voice and experience of people undergoing this uprooting process, this process of immigration," said David J. Rothman, a history professor at Columbia University and a former student of Mr. Handlin's. "He was alert to the fact that every group was different. But this process, regardless of whether you were Irish or Jewish, was something shared."

When Did Evangelicals Re-Enter the Public Square?

As we discussed here yesterday, historians seem to be divided over the exact moment when evangelicals entered the public square. In the recent issue of The Journal of Southern Religion and in his book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts Faith and Threatens America, Randall Balmer argues that evangelicals abandoned public life following the Scopes Trial of 1925 and returned again with force in the 1970s when they forged what we know today as "The Christian Right."  (As I mentioned in my last post on this topic, Balmer is drawing from Joel Carpenter's work in Revive Us Again).

Other scholars--such as Daniel Williams and Darren Dochuk--have argued that evangelicals have never ceased being active in the public and political sphere.  The 1970s was certainly something new, but the Right's activism in this decade and beyond was not without precedent in the 20th century.

Now Diane Winston has entered the fray on the side of Williams and Dochuk (she only mentions Dochuk by name) with her piece over at Religion Dispatches entitled "Tea Party, Circa 1930s: A Response to Michael Kazin." Winston chides Kazin's recent New York Times op-ed on three fronts. 

First, she argues that Kazin fails to take religion seriously in this piece.  (In his defense, Kazin has taken religion seriously in the past.  I am thinking here of his excellent A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.)

Second, she argues, contra Kazin, that Christian political activism was not new to the 1970s.  Rather, evangelicals were politically active through much of the century, especially in their resistance to the New Deal in the 1930s. 

Third, she notes that the American left has not disappeared.  There are still many religious Americans on the left who are crusading for social justice, equality, human rights etc... but we do not hear about them because their stories do not make for the kind of news that is attractive to the large corporations that control the media.

Here is a taste:

So, rather than accept the well-worn narratives of the right’s post-70s juggernaut and the left’s post-60s demise, consider an alternative view of the “facts.” In this scenario, the melding of politics and economics into an implicitly religious worldview dates back to the 1930s. Moreover, the left is alive and well, and corporate media—far from being the tool of liberals—colludes with the right by pursuing its own agenda of covering only the news that’s safe, and profitable, to print.

Paul Lukas: Report Cards Saved My Life

In 1996 Paul Lukas "stumbled upon" nearly 400 report cards from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls.  Most of them were from the 1920s.

If I found these report cards I would probably think of some way to analyze them and turn them into a book or an article.  Lukas has decided to devote his time and energy to tracking down the family members of these former students and returning the cards.  (I do hope that these cards are copied and placed in an archive somewhere).  Most of the girls who attended the Manhattan Trade School were born to immigrant parents--Italians and Jews mostly.

Lukas tells his story in a fascinating article at Slate.  Here is a taste:

I discovered the cards in 1996 (more on that in a minute). I found them fascinating, but I didn't have a good sense of what to do with them, so for a long time I just kept them as curios and occasionally showed them to friends. Eventually, though, I decided to track down some of the students' families (including Marie's). Even after doing it numerous times, I still find it a bit surreal to call a stranger on the phone and hear myself saying, "Hi, you don't know me, but I have your mother's report card from 1929. Would you like to see it?"

While a few people have responded to that opening line with suspicion or caution, most have been gracious, and curious. They've opened their homes to me and shared their family archives. And they've been captivated by the report cards, often learning new things about their loved ones and filling in gaps in their family histories. Most of them knew very little about this vocational school their ancestors had attended.

That school, the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, turns out to have been a very interesting place. And a well-documented one, too. Within a decade of its 1902 founding, a book about it had been written and a 16-minute film about it had been shot. All of which comes in rather handy if you happen to be researching a bunch of the school's students.

Digital History at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association

I already wrote about this last week, but this morning AHA Today tells us that there will be nearly two dozen sessions on digital humanities at the annual meeting in Chicago. 

One could easily come to this year's AHA and attend nothing but digital history sessions.  This is a conference within a conference.

The future is here.

Skyping In

I had my first pedagogical experience using Skype this morning.  One of my former students, Kim Pearce Johnson, teaches Advanced Placement United States History at Susquehannock High School in Glenn Rock, PA.  She asked me if I would Skype into her class and answer some questions from her students related to their recent unit on the Enlightenment and the First Great Awakening.

I was a little intimidated by the whole process since I was not sure how to effectively communicate via Skype.  We had a few technical difficulties, but in the end I found my groove and the students claimed that they enjoyed it.

Kim had the students well prepared.  One of them asked me whether the American founding was informed by Christianity or the Enlightenment.  Another asked whether or not the Enlightenment had any effect on ordinary people in the colonies.  Another student wondered if the Great Awakening could be called a democratic or egalitarian movement and yet another followed up with a question about how the revival affected slavery.

Great stuff.  Though I am not convinced that my teaching style works well with Skype, I do think it is a valuable tool for connecting historians and authors with students and readers.

"When I Saw Your Title I Thought I Would Be Biting My Lip Through The Entire Lecture"

A senior scholar in the field of early American history said this to me following my talk this weekend at Fort Ticonderoga.  He approached me after the lecture to tell me that he was pleasantly surprised by my approach to the subject and found it to be very even-handed an informative--an "excellent lecture."  By the way, the title of my talk was "The Founding Fathers and Religion."  The line in the program read:  "The Founding Fathers and Religion, John Fea, Messiah College."

This is not the first time something like this has happened.  When a retired history professor was consulted by a local historical society as to whether I should be invited to talk about my book Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction he told them that I was probably "crazy."  But fortunately this professor, before turning me away, decided to "google" me and in the process found out that I was "legitimate."

Another host had to reschedule one of my book talks because it was going to take place on a religious holiday and he did not want anyone in the audience to be offended by my topic.  The assumption behind his decision to reschedule was that I would be promoting a particular cause with my book that would be inappropriate on a religious holiday.  Actually, I thought, it would seem that a religious holiday might be a great time to think about the relationship between religion and American identity.

I suffer a lot from this kind of stereotyping. I can understand how people might be skeptical when they see someone from a school called Messiah College speaking on a book about Christian America.  I imagine that they breath a sigh of relief when they realize that I am not a Christian nationalist or a disciple of David Barton.

Maybe some of these historians who are skeptical of my book would do well to act like historians and try to understand my approach to the subject.  Or perhaps they should try to learn something about the school where I teach before writing me off as some kind of lunatic who, after hearing my talk, pleasantly surprises them.

Should I be upset about this?  Or is it an understandable response to my book and institutional affiliation in our age of culture wars?

The New Journal of Southern Religion is Here

This (volume XIII) is one of the best issues of The Journal of Southern Religion I have seen.  Kudos to Luke Harlow, Michael Pasquier, Art Remillard, and Emily Clark for bringing this intellectual feast together.

The issue includes a round table on religion and class in the early 20th century south and twenty-six book reviews.  But my favorite part is the panel discussion on Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right.  (See my review of this book here).  Randall Balmer, Darren Dochuk, J. Russell Hawkins, and Mark Silk all take a crack at Williams's interpretation of the Christian Right and Williams offers a response to his critics.

This discussion, along with Dochuk's review of Balmer's The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond, reveals a major fault line in the interpretation of the rise of the Christian Right in America. 

Balmer argues that American evangelicals withdrew from politics in the wake of the Scopes Trial in 1925 and did re-emerge until the 1970s.  (I made a similar argument in chapter three of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation).  Balmer's view draws upon the work of Joel Carpenter, who made this argument in Revive Us Again and a couple of seminal articles published in the 1980s. 

For Balmer, the event that catapulted evangelicals into the public square was not Roe v. Wade or the feminist movement, but the 1971 Green v. Connolly decision that led to the removal of tax-exempt status at "segregation academies" and colleges such as Bob Jones University.  When Jimmy Carter supported Green v. Connolly, many of his fellow southern evangelicals turned against him.  In other words, Balmer thinks that race played a major role in the rise of the Christian Right.  (Balmer advances this argument more fully in Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament).

Scholars like Williams and Dochuk argue that evangelicals were politically active throughout the 20th century.  There was no apolitical period between 1925 and 1970.  They also offer different interpretations of what triggered the rise of the Christian Right in the 1970.

I highly recommend reading this entire panel discussion in order see how these two historical camps duke it out over the origins of the Christian Right.

A Good Report From a Reader of The Way of Improvement Leads Home

A history professor using my first book The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America sends along this e-mail from one of his students:

Dear Professor X,

I'm not going to lie to you, when I first read the title for this week's assignment I was dreading it. However, after reading the book I'm glad you assigned it. It was an incredible read and I thoroughly enjoyed it! The book was interesting in its entirety and I even got a little emotional at the end. Just thought I would let you know.
 
Respectfully,
Student Y

A Weekend at Fort Ticonderoga

Up in Ticonderoga they just call it "The Fort."  My neighbor, a native of upstate New York, calls it "Fort Ti."  Whatever you call it, there is a renewed sense of energy at Fort Ticonderoga these days.  Under the very capable leadership of executive director Beth Hill, the staff at Fort Ticonderoga is working hard to make the site a first-rate center of history tourism and history education.  They have a new website, new programs and exhibits, and an exciting new business plan for revitalizing the region and bringing more visitors to the fort.

Part of that revived mission is the Seminar on the American Revolution. As I noted in my previous post on this subject, I was part of the program this weekend.  On Sunday morning I shared some material from Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? with a very knowledgeable audience of American revolution buffs.  I thought the talk went well.  I got to make my pitch for historical thinking, share some stuff on the religious beliefs of the founders, and meet many interesting people in the process.  My only disappointment was that due to an oversight by the bookstore staff Was America Founded was not available for sale.  (A few attendees brought their personal copies for me to sign and the bookstore did sell several copes of The Way of Improvement Leads Home).

I also got to hear a few good presentations.

For example, Andrew Wehrman, a former T.H. Breen student at Northwestern who now teaches at Marietta College in Ohio, gave a great talk on George Washington's decision to inoculate the Continental Army against smallpox.  Wehrman traced Washington's initial opposition to inoculation and debunked Washington biographers who assumed he always supported the practice.

Dick Archer, author of As If an Enemy's Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution, argued that the people of Boston were "radicalized" and became, in spirit, a separate nation around the time of the Boston Massacre.   As I listened to Archer speak I thought about recent works by Breen (American Insurgents) and Brendan McConnville, (The King's Three Faces) that have both suggested that a sense of "American" identity did not happen until 1774 and 1775 respectively. 

It was also good to connect with some folks I have not seen in a while such as Bruce Venter from the American Revolution Round Table of Richmond  (check out his historic tour business) and John Nagy from the American Revolution Roundtable of Philadelphia (who gave an interesting presentation on his new book Invisible Ink: Spycraft of the American Revolution). 

On Sunday morning I got to spend some time with Susanna Carey, a former student of mine at Messiah College.  She drove about 90 minutes with her Dad from the Lake Placid area.  It was good to see Susanna and I was excited to learn she is planning on pursuing a master's degree in history education.

If you get the chance, I encourage you to make a visit to Fort Ticonderoga. It is worth the trip.

Dispatches from Graduate School--Part 37

Cali Pitchel McCullough is a Ph.D student in American history at Arizona State University.  For earlier posts in this series click here. --JF

Last week I made my first (of many, I hope) public lectures for History to the People. When I first had the idea for the website, I connected with a local marketing agency for some direction on developing a brand. The agency’s managing director makes himself available for mentoring hours each week at their office, which happens to be a really cool collaborative workspace in Chandler, Arizona, called Gangplank. Gangplank helps to create a “new economic vision comprised of collaboration and community” through sharing workspace, resources, and most importantly ideas.

Fourteen small businesses occupy the space at Gangplank and co-work on a daily basis free of charge. In exchange for space, each anchor business (the marketing agency included) must commit to reinvest into the Gangplank community by planning events such as a weekly brownbag discussion.

After my mentor-session with the agency’s managing director, he suggested that I share my idea with the Gangplank community at a brownbag discussion. The next day I received an email from Gangplank’s Director of Community Outreach, and she put History to the People on the calendar for September 21st. I asked my classmate and co-founder to join me for the discussion. The thought of debuting the idea to the public by myself seemed a bit daunting. She agreed, and together we shared our vision with a group of individuals who work in entirely different industries. Most of our audience were “creative types”—web developers, graphic artists, and social media specialists. The marketing agency team and our graphic designer showed their support, as did my dad (I thought he might be the only one) and a friend who has close ties at Gangplank. Brianna and I were the only “academics” in the building.

Despite our fear of that we might put the crowd to sleep, everyone responded enthusiastically to History to the People. We received great feedback and people raised questions that are important to address as we continue to move forward with our vision. (One attendee even posted a response to the brownbag on her blog!) We learned a lot from the discussion, and most importantly, we discovered that there are people outside of academia who believe thinking historically is crucial to contemporary life.

Our time at Gangplank provided us with that extra impetus to press on. Last week we met with our web designer, and this week I complete our registration with the Arizona Corporation Commission. By the end of next week I will officially be the Director of History to the People. Once the designer finishes the logo I can finalize our executive summary and begin the laborious fundraising process. In the meantime my benefactors (i.e., my mom and dad) generously give of their resources to help me realize this goal.

I believe in the success of History to the People. Most Americans agree that history matters, but not all Americans understand the implications of ahistorical thinking. Through the website we will provide our audience with both the tools necessary to think historically and a plethora of accessibly written and rigorously researched historical material. One day HTTP will encourage thousands of people to think historically, and as a bonus, we might even be able to pay back my parents. 

Sunday Night Odds and Ends

A few things online that caught my attention this week:

Why do Americans love chain stores?

I am really sorry I had to miss this conference.

Paul Berman reviews Michael Kazin's American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation.

James W. Loewen reports on the recent meeting of the American Association for State and Local History.

Carol Faulkner reviews John McGreevy's essay on religion in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr's American History Now.

Ian Toll reviews Laurence Bergreen, Columbus: The Four Voyages.

Harvard's new kindness pledge.

Michelle Bachmann and the history of inoculation.

Rob Bell is leaving Mars Hill Church.

Walter Russell Mead: "The Christianist Nightmare."

Introducing elementary students to history.

Ed Blum teaches the progressive era.

Journal of Women's History graduate student article prize.

Can you have civility without dialogue?

Peter Powers reflects on THATCamp Philly.

Rachel Hermann is on the road doing dissertation research.

Gary Gerstle reviews Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.

Akhil Amar reviews Pauline Maier, The Great Debate: The People Debate the Constitution.

8th Annual Seminar on the American Revolution at Fort Ticonderoga

It has been a long day.  At 1pm I lectured on the American Enlightenment in my U.S. Survey course.  This is always a fun lecture.  I get to historicize the idea of "self-improvement" and talk about Ben Franklin's Junto and try to inspire the students to form one of their own.

At 2pm I led a discussion of chapters 4 and 5 of Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Natural Acts in my "Teaching History" course.  Unfortunately we got distracted watching Lendol Calder's office hours so it looks like we will need to return to Wineburg on Monday.

After class I jumped in the car and drove for seven hours in the pouring rain to Fort Ticonderoga.  The rain was bad, but my rental car had Sirius-XM so I listened to E-Street Radio during the entire ride.  (Happy belated birthday Boss!). The station was replaying a 1974 Georgetown University concert.

I am writing tonight (or I guess it is now morning) from a Ticonderoga, New York Best Western where I am watching Jimmy Fallon and looking forward to tomorrow's Seminar on the American Revolution at "the fort."

A couple of years ago I came to this event and gave a lecture on some of my ongoing work on Presbyterians and the American Revolution.  This year I will be giving a lecture on the religious beliefs of the founding fathers drawn largely from the last several chapters of Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction.

I don't speak until Sunday morning (fitting for a lecture on the religion of the founders), but there is a full slate of presentations scheduled for tomorrow, including a book signing.  Here is the weekend lineup:

• Richard Archer, Whittier College, on the economics, society, and politics of pre-revolutionary Boston.
• Lawrence Babits, East Carolina University, on the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.
• John Fea, Messiah College, on the role of religious beliefs among the founding fathers.
• John Nagy, author, on Spycraft and the American Revolution.
• James Nelson, author, on the Battle of Bunker Hill.
• George Neumann, author, on George Rogers Clark’s western campaigns.
• John Tobin, independent historian and attorney, on the Boston Massacre Trial.
• Andrew Wehrman, Northwestern University, on the smallpox epidemic during the American Revolution.

For more information check out the seminar brochure.

I enjoy this event.  It is very informal and there is always a lot of opportunities for speakers to chat with the revolutionary-war buffs in attendance.  I will try to do some posts over the course of the weekend, but it may be hard since the fort does not have WIFI.  Stay tuned.

Congrats to New Jersey Book Award Winners

Back in 2009, The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America won the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance (NJSAA) book award in the scholarly non-fiction category.  It was also chosen as an "Honor Book" in the New Jersey Council for the Humanities (NJCH) Book Award competition.

The NJSAA and NJCH have recently announced their 2011 winners.

NJSAA Non-Fiction Scholarly Book of the Year:  Ezra Shales, Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Acts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era.

NJSAA Non-Fiction Popular Book of the Year:   Michael S. Adelberg, The American Revolution in Monmouth County: The Theater of Spoil and Destruction.

NJSAA Non-Fiction Reference Book of the Year: Joseph G. Bilby, ed. New Jersey Goes to War: Biographies of 150 New Jerseyans Caught Up in the Struggle of the Civil War.

NJCH Book of the Year: Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.

NJCH Honor Books:

Thomas Belton, Protecting New Jersey's Environment: From Cancer Alley to the New Garden State.

Ann Fabian, The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America's Unburied Dead.

Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People

Michael Perino, The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora's Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance.

Congratulations to all the winners!

Why Joyce Goldberg Can No Longer Teach U.S. Military History

Goldberg teaches United States military history at the University of Texas at Arlington.  She has been teaching this subject for nearly 30 years, but she recently told her department chair that she is no longer willing to teach the class.

More than half of the students who take her class are either "ROTC students, members of the National Guard, students who would soon enlist, retired 'lifers' veterans from the first Gulf War, veterans of one or several recent overseas deployments, or loved ones of service people." Her course stops at Vietnam, but she has found that students tend to use her class to "work through personal issues originating in more recent conflicts."  Here is a taste of her essay from The Chronicle of Higher Education.  (HT: Ralph Luker).

Whether the day's discussion centered on the 17th-century European heritage of the American military, or the managerial revolution of the Progressive Era, it became disturbingly evident that many students could only consider historical questions through the lens of their own personal experiences. I do not blame them one bit, and occasionally their personal insights were relevant. But the emotional needs of those students unrelentingly pushed the class in a direction I was not comfortable with as a historian.

As the semester progressed, it became increasingly clear just how unprepared universities are to deal with the needs of these student veterans or their relatives. As a historian, my pedagogical goals focus on honing cognitive skills through the tool of history. These student veterans and their loved ones were seeking something my class could never provide and that I was not trained to offer.

One student veteran wrote me a harsh e-mail because an assigned book refuted the popular idea that colonial militias defeated their European adversaries by adopting Indian tactics of irregular warfare, especially sniping. That could not be true, the student angrily insisted, because of his own success as an Army sniper.

Most Popular Posts of the Last Week

Here are the ten most visited posts this week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

1.  A Little History Humor (May 2011).
2.  Religion in Jamestown (July 2009).
3.  The Benefits of a Classroom Lecture (June 2011).
4.  Banning Laptops: A Student's Response (September 2011).
5.  My Day at Grace College (September 2011).
6.  How Should Historians Engage the Public (September 2011).
7.  David Brooks on the Moral Individualism of America's Youth (September 2011).
8.  Why September 11th is About Vocation (September 2011).
9.  The Top Ten Most Religious Cities in America (November 2010).
10. Louis Menand on Why We Have College (June 2011).

Also receiving votes:

Why we need Anne Hutchinson (February 2010)
Dr. Calder's Office Hours (September 2011)

Exposing Work Conditions at Amazon's Lehigh Valley Warehouse

This is a nice a piece of investigative journalism by Spencer Soper of the Allentown Morning Call.  It seems that all is not well at a Pennsylvania warehouse of the world's largest bookseller.  Warehouse workers have to deal with excessive heat and over-demanding supervisors.  Here is a taste of Soper's piece:

Over the past two months, The Morning Call interviewed 20 current and former warehouse workers who showed pay stubs, tax forms or other proof of employment. They offered a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what it's like to work in the Amazon warehouse, where temperatures soar on hot summer days, production rates are difficult to achieve and the permanent jobs sought by many temporary workers hired by an outside agency are tough to get.

Only one of the employees interviewed described it as a good place to work.

Workers said they were forced to endure brutal heat inside the sprawling warehouse and were pushed to work at a pace many could not sustain. Employees were frequently reprimanded regarding their productivity and threatened with termination, workers said. The consequences of not meeting work expectations were regularly on display, as employees lost their jobs and got escorted out of the warehouse. Such sights encouraged some workers to conceal pain and push through injury lest they get fired as well, workers said.

During summer heat waves, Amazon arranged to have paramedics parked in ambulances outside, ready to treat any workers who dehydrated or suffered other forms of heat stress. Those who couldn't quickly cool off and return to work were sent home or taken out in stretchers and wheelchairs and transported to area hospitals. And new applicants were ready to begin work at any time.

An emergency room doctor in June called federal regulators to report an "unsafe environment" after he treated several Amazon warehouse workers for heat-related problems. The doctor's report was echoed by warehouse workers who also complained to regulators, including a security guard who reported seeing pregnant employees suffering in the heat.

The Christian Right Loves Rick Perrry

Conservative evangelicals are lining up behind Rick Perry.

Daniel Burke's recent Religious News Service article shows that Perry has the support of Donald Wildmon, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell Jr., and David Barton.

According the latest Real Clear Politics Poll aggregator, if the election were held today:

Obama would defeat Romney by roughly 3 percentage points.

Obama would defeat Perry by roughly 8 percentage points

Obama would defeat Bachmann by roughly 15 percentage points

Obama would defeat Palin by roughly 11 percentage points

Obama would defeat Ron Paul by roughly 3 percentage points

Obama would defeat Gingrich by roughly 15 percentage points.

Obama would defeat Cain by roughly 10 percentage points

Obama would defeat Huntsman by roughly 9 percentage points

Obama would defeat Santorum by roughly 14 percentage points.

This means that Romney and Paul seem to have the best shot at beating Obama in November 2012.  I wonder if the Christian Right will continue to ride the Perry bandwagon when the Texas governor is not the best candidate for ending an Obama presidency.

Let's try to remember what happened the last time Obama ran in an election against a socially conservative candidate.  He trounced Alan Keyes in the 2004 Illinois Senate race.

Prediction:  If Perry, Bachmann, Palin or Santorum run against Obama in 2012 they will suffer the same fate as Keyes.  If Republicans want the White House back in January 2013, they should stick with Romney or Paul.

On the Road in Late September and October

It looks like it will be a busy Fall here at "The Way of Improvement Leads Home."

This weekend I will be in upstate New York speaking on Sunday morning at the annual American Revolution Seminar at Fort Ticonderoga.  My talk will be on the religious beliefs of the founding fathers.  If you have never been to Ft. Ticonderoga during this time of year you should really make a point of visiting.  It is beautiful.  I am actually looking forward to the seven-hour drive through the mountains!

On Monday, September 26, I will Skyping with Kim Johnson's AP US History class at Susquehannock High School in Glenn Rock, PA.  Kim is one of my former students at Messiah College.  I think we will be talking about the First Great Awakening and the American Enlightenment.

On the weekend of September 30 I will be at Georgetown University where I will be giving a lecture on the history of evangelical political engagement to the members of the Evangelicals and Catholic Alliance for the Common Good.  This is a group of moderate evangelicals and Catholics who are seeking informed engagement with public issues from the perspective of Christian faith.

On October 6-7 I fly out to San Bernardino, California to conduct a two-day Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History /Teaching American History Grant workshop on the American Enlightenment with San Bernardino public school teachers.

On October 13th I will be back home at Messiah College doing a very short talk to the college's board of trustees and other friends of the college as part of a larger presentation by the School of Humanities.  I will be talking about the ways that the humanities can cultivate virtue in our lives and contribute to a civil society.  Some of my thoughts will come from my current book project, "The Power to Transform: A Christian Reflection on the Study of the Past."

On the weekend of October 21-23 I will be making my first trip to Birmingham, Alabama for the board meeting and national conference of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts.  We are meeting this year at Samford University.

Finally, the month ends on October 26 with a talk on Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction at the monthly meeting of the American Revolution Roundtable of Philadelphia.  

If you will in the area for any of these talks let me know. Perhaps we could grab a cup of coffee or some other beverage.

Peter Powers on the Tension Between Cosmpolitanism and Local Attachments

Peter Powers of Messiah College has a great piece at his blog Read, Write, Now on the tensions between his cosmopolitan upbringing as a child of missionaries in Papua New Guinea, his identity as a citizen of the United States, and his "fiercely loyal" connection to his home state of Oklahoma.  This is a really thoughtful reflection on these issues and I am not just saying this because he cites me in the post!  Here is a taste:

...I am a loyal citizen of the Papua New Guinea of my memory, and I am a fiercely loyal southerner and southwesterner who takes an ethnic umbrage at the easy sneering about the south that springs unconsciously to the lips of northerners, and I am a fiercely loyal Oklahoman who believes the state has something to be proud of beyond its football team.

I am also, in some sense, a loyal citizen of the heaven of my imagining where all and everyone speak in the tongues of men and angels  and we hear each and every one in our own tongues, a transparent language without translation, a heaven where every northerner finally learns the proper way to say “Y’all.”

What theory of locality and cosmopolitanism can get at this sense that I am one body in a place, but that this body bears in its bones a loyalty to many places, growing full of spirit at the smell of cut grass after rain in the hills of Arkansas, nose pinching at the thought of the salty stink of Amsterdam, remembering faintly the sweat in the air and on the leaves of the banana trees in highland tropics of New Guinea?

Death Elegies from Gettysburg

Daniel Rolph is the author of "HSP's Hidden Histories," a blog sponsored by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.  In a recent post, Rolph quotes from the death elegies written by some of those who lost family members from Philadelphia at the Battle of Gettsyburg.  These elegies offer much insight into the culture of suffering and death during the Civil War.  Here is a brief taste of Rolph's post:

It was a common practice in America, from the Colonial period and well up into the American Civil War era, for family members to express their mourning or grief, in what are referred to as elegies, a written 'lament' or tribute to the dead. Often times these elegies were rhymed couplets, which appear quite frequently in newspapers of the day, revealing not only the bravery, courage, and sacrifices of the soldiers involved, but also the eloquence in writing, of those who paid tribute to the deceased in verse.

Various regiments of volunteer soldiers from Philadelphia, fought at the Battle of Gettysburg in early July of 1863, resulting in the tragic deaths of many of its residents. The newspapers are filled with sorrowful yet proud poems honoring those who'd gave the ultimate sacrifice during that famous engagement in Adams County, Pennsylvania.

For example, Augustus Joseph, of Co. 'H,' 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry, or 'Rush's Lancers' (though his body had not yet been retrieved), had the following poem printed in his behalf, within the Philadelphia Public Ledger, on August 7th, 1863:

"On Gettysburg's bloody field, a wounded soldier lay;
Hist thoughts were on his happy home, some hundred miles away.
A soldier friend stood by his side, a tear stood in his eye,
And cold the sweat stood on his brow, he felt he soon must die.
'When you see my mother dear, be careful how you speak,
The cords of life may snap too soon, her heart may be too weak.
Go tell her that my aching heart, did heave a gentle sigh.
Go tell her that her son so true, a soldier's death did die."

Robert W. Ray, of Frankford, age 37, of Co. 'I,' 121st Pennsylvania Regiment, was honored by the following in an elegy written by his wife:

"His country' s cause, it was his own, before his foes he would not bend.
He stood upon a freeman's throne, for equal rights did he contend.
When husband last was home to rest, I little thought death was so nigh.
He pressed our children to his breast, and said, 'for you and these I'll die.'
From home into the field he went, where armies met a dread array.
Where tyrants and oppressors sent, to beat out freedom's gentle sway.
The Lord of Hosts our army led, and victory on our banner hung,
And when they searched among the dead, my husband amid the throng.
My heart it beats with anguish deep, as o'er the dead, I sit and mourn.
But why cast down my soul and weep, for soon will dawn a glorious morn.
The Saviour will for thee appear, to gather up thy little dust;
Husband, children, and father dear, in Christ our Saviour shall find rest."

Does the Southern Baptist Convention Need a New Name?

Apparently Bryant Wright, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, wants to rename the denomination to make it sound less regional.

Over at Spiritual Politics, Mark Silk plays with a few possible new names  (with a hat tip to David Letterman).

Always ready to help out those in need, the Spiritual Politics blog herewith offers a Letterman's Top Ten list of possibilities.

10. The Convention Formerly Known as Southern Baptist
9. Not Your Granddaddy's SBC
8. Ya'll Come On Over Ministries
7. Mr. Land's Neighborhood
6. Right From the Heartland
5, The Great Commission Convention
4. Nobody Here But Us Christians
3. Some Bodacious Christians
2. The Republican Party at Prayer

And the winner is...

1. America's Church

Niall Ferguson: Americans Don't Read

Niall Ferguson, that good looking and clever historian, argues that the United States is "producing civilizational illiterates" who will soon have no ability to compete against the country's global rivals.  The bottom line:  young Americans do not read.  Here is a taste:

Why does this matter? For two reasons. First, we are falling behind more-literate societies. According to the results of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s most recent Program for International Student Assessment, the gap in reading ability between the 15-year-olds in the Shanghai district of China and those in the United States is now as big as the gap between the U.S. and Serbia or Chile.

But the more important reason is that children who don’t read are cut off from the civilization of their ancestors.

So take a look at your bookshelves. Do you have all—better make that any—of the books on the Columbia University undergraduate core curriculum? It’s not perfect, but it’s as good a list of the canon of Western civilization as I know of.

Let’s take the 11 books on the syllabus for the spring 2012 semester: (1) Virgil’s Aeneid; (2) Ovid’s Metamorphoses; (3) Saint Augustine’s Confessions; (4) Dante’s The Divine Comedy; (5) Montaigne’s Essays; (6) Shakespeare’s King Lear; (7) Cervantes’s Don Quixote; (8) Goethe’s Faust; (9) Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; (10) Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; (11) Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Step one: Order the ones you haven’t got today. (And get War and Peace, Great Expectations, and Moby-Dick while you’re at it.)

Step two: When vacation time comes around, tell the teenagers in your life you are taking them to a party. Or to camp. They won’t resist.

Step three: Drive to a remote rural location where there is no cell-phone reception whatsoever.

Step four: Reveal that this is in fact a reading party and that for the next two weeks reading is all you are proposing to do—apart from eating, sleeping, and talking about the books.

Welcome to Book Camp, kids.

I just took a quick look at my shelves and realized that I only own about half of these classics.  I better rethink my book budget before I take my wife and kids to the cabin in the woods.

Conference on the "Cosmopolitan Lyceum"

This looks like a real interesting conference sponsored by the American Antiquarian Association.  As someone who has done a bit of work in the history of cosmopolitanism in America (a topic I tried to tackle in The Way of Improvement Leads Home), I wish I could attend this weekend.

Check out the conference website, including paper abstracts, here.

Appalachian Mountain Religion

I don't know much about the subject, but I found this recent piece at Scripps News on Primitive Baptists in Appalachia to be interesting.  Religion writer Terry Mattingly explains:

Travelers who frequent the winding mountain roads of Southern Appalachia know that, every few miles, they're going to pass yet another small Baptist church sitting close to some rushing water.

It's all about location, location, location.

Why would a preacher want to baptize a new believer in a heated, indoor tank when he can dunk them in the powerful, living, frigid waters of the river that created the valley in which his flock has lived for generations? There's no question which option the self-proclaimed Primitive Baptists will choose, even if it adds an element of risk.

"Among Primitive Baptists, you almost always see two ministers when they baptize someone -- one to do the baptism and one to hold on. It's even become part of their unique liturgical tradition to have two ministers there," said Baptist historian Bill Leonard of the Wake Forest School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C.

"As the saying goes, you could get baptized and go to heaven on the same day if there wasn't somebody there to hang on so you didn't wash away and drown."

This is the kind of old-fashioned faith that Americans are used to seeing in paintings of frontier life or grainy black-and-white photographs from the days before interstate highways, shopping malls, satellite dishes and the Internet. Appalachian religion has played a dramatic role in American culture, helping shape our folk art, Scotch-Irish history, roots music and a host of other subjects.

The question, for Leonard and many other scholars, is whether the rich heritage of "mountain Christianity" will play much of a role in the nation's future.

"Increasingly," he said, "our modern forms of American religion and our mass media and culture are sucking the life out of one of our most distinctive regions."

Newt Gingrich's New "Contract with America" and Abraham Lincoln

In a desperate attempt to revive his presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich is about to unveil his "21st Century Contract with America."  He claims that his ideas will be "very big, and they're exactly what Abraham Lincoln would have campaigned on."

Eric Kleefeld decided to read the 1860 and 1864 Republican party platform. (These were the years that Lincoln ran for President).  Maybe Kleefeld want to get a quick sense of what Newt's new "Contract in America" might look like.

Here is a bit of what he found out:


This does cause one to wonder how Gingrich’s platform will compare to the Republican platforms of 1860 and 1864, the elections in which Lincoln was elected and then re-elected. Those platforms focused heavily, of course, on the issues of slavery and the Civil War — matters that do not directly apply in our modern times.

But beyond that, those platforms inherited the Whig tradition of what were known at the time as “internal improvements” — government investment in infrastructure. For example, the platforms called for government to aid in the large project of constructing a transcontinental railroad, to improve rivers and harbors, and to have “a vigorous and just system of taxation” in order to ensure the payment of the national debt.

The 1864 platform also declared: “Resolved, That foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.”

Don't Forget To Get Your Star-Spangled Jesus Fish

Order here.

HT:Jonathan Den Hartog via Facebook

Song of the Day

 Do you remember the 21st day of September?

This Week's Patheos Column: How to Get a College Education

One of the books on my shelf that I return to regularly is Mark Schwehn's Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America. It has become an indispensable guide for thinking about what I am supposed to be doing as an academic in the context of a Christian liberal arts college.

There is a lot I could say about this book, but the most inspiring part of it is Schwehn's discussion of the role of risk and wisdom in the educational process. Education, Schwehn argues, requires risk. Real education only occurs when we are prepared to "abandon some of our most cherished beliefs."

Read the rest here.

Providentialism, Free Markets, and Limited Government

According to a Baylor University survey, one in five Americans connect a providential view of God's working in the world with a conservative view that opposes government regulation and champions the free market.

In other words, 20% of Americans believe that Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand" is the Judeo-Christian God.

On the Air Today with John and Kathy at WORD-FM Pittsburgh

At 5:10EST I will be joining the John Hall & Kathy Emmons Show on Pittsburgh's WORD-FM.  I will be discussing my latest Patheos article, "Remember the Pile-men."

Addendum:  The previous guest on the show was Vince Bacote, my divinity school roommate, groomsman in my wedding, and theologian at Wheaton College.  Thanks to John and Kathy for letting me on the air to give him a hard time!

Christian Smith on "Liberal Whateverism"

Christian Smith, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology at Notre Dame, wants to move beyond patronizing and dismissive declarations of "tolerance" and move toward a more robust understanding of religious pluralism.  He explains:

I think we need to reject both sectarian conflict and liberal whateverism and commit ourselves instead to an authentic pluralism. Genuine pluralism fosters a culture that honors rather than isolates and disparages religious difference. It affirms the right of others to believe and practice their faith, not only in their private lives but also in the public square -- while expecting them to allow still others to do the same. Authentic pluralism does not minimize religious differences by saying that "all religions are ultimately the same." That is false and insipid. Pluralism encourages good conversations and arguments across differences, taking them seriously precisely because they are understood to be about important truths, not merely private "opinions." It is possible, authentic pluralism insists, to profoundly disagree with others while at the same time respecting, honoring, and perhaps even loving them. Genuine pluralism suspects the multi-cultural regime's too-easy blanket affirmations of "tolerance" of being patronizing and dismissive. Pluralism, however, also counts atheist Americans as deserving equal public respect, since their beliefs are based as much on a considered faith as are religious views and so should not be automatically denigrated. 

Jon Butler on Putnam and Campbell, "American Grace"

Jon Butler, one of the deans in the field of American religious history, reviews Robert Putnam and David Campbell's American Grace: How Religion Divides and United Us.

Butler notes Putnam and Campbell's failure to historicize religion in America.  Here is a taste:

...I admire the complexity and fascinating ethnographic excursions American Grace offers. I wish I could write as cleanly as Campbell and Putnam do across more than 500 pages. I appreciate the effort at keeping the big picture constantly in focus. At the same time, for a historian, American Grace‘s many and complex “beliefs” float too free from their historical moorings, and not just because I like history, but because history is embedded in contemporary behavior—as in contemporary Mormon views on heaven—even when it doesn’t seem to be.  Maybe part of the general problem is taking the irenic 1950s as the departure point of its historical backdrop. We could debate whether or not the religious peacefulness of the 1950s is itself over-rated, but that’s a different discussion.  Instead, I would suggest that, even if the 1950s weren’t entirely peaceful, they may still have been the most unusual, and indeed relatively irenic, years in American religious history.

But for three centuries, tumult, disputation, and anger— i.e., “polarization” —characterized much of American religion. It is hard for a historian not to remember the hangings of Quakers in Boston in the 1660s, the jailing even of Quaker dissidents by other Quakers in Philadelphia during the Keithian schism of the 1690s, the suppression of much traditional African religious practice among enslaved Africans, even after emancipation, plus virulent American anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, anti-Mormonism, and both polite and impolite ridicule of evangelical fundamentalism, to highlight only some of the contentious, polarizing substance of America’s long spiritual history.

Campbell and Putnam acknowledge this historical religious polarization on the penultimate page of American Grace. Yet they not only trumpet its rarity but assert that “from its founding, America has had religious toleration encoded in its national DNA.” Our DNA?  Here, the episodic, conditional past is annihilated in a paroxysm of essentialist rhetoric. Most historians would say that religious toleration emerged fitfully in America but certainly wasn’t present at its founding; it’s the point of William R. Hutchison’s Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal. We might hope it’s present now. But religiously based homophobia, anti-Muslim tension, and even the quietly continuing evangelizing of Mormons by Wisconsin Synod Lutherans suggest that America’s genetically assured triumph of religious toleration hasn’t yet arrived.