Rival Revivals and Liberal Protestant Recovery

Rival Revivals and Liberal Protestant Recovery
Paul Harvey

Just back from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), I had planned on doing an extensive post on the excellent panel I saw there, “Rival Revivals,” featuring papers by Alison Greene, Jarod Roll, and Matt Sutton, and with commentary by Kenneth Fones-Wolf and chaired by Lizabeth Cohen. But now I don’t have to, as we have an excellent summary of the panel from the OAH reporting at HNN, with full videos of the presentations and summaries of the papers. I would just say in addition to what is there that the panel featured the interesting twist of having the fundamentalists of the 1930s/1940s (discussed in Matt’s paper) as the northern, educated elites, in comparison to the various folk preachers, Garveyites, and premillennial radicals discussed in Alison and Jarod’s papers, turning the usual stereotypes about recent fundamentalism on its head.

The material in Jarod Roll’s paper came from his book, out any day now (I saw it at the University of Illinois press table at the OAH, but wasn’t between regular hard covers yet), entitled Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the Cotton South. A bit more about the work here:

In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the South used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century.

On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri’s Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions, workers found common ground as dissidents fighting for economic security, decent housing, and basic health, ultimately drawing on the democratic potential of evangelical religion to wage working-class revolts against commodity agriculture and the political forces that buoyed it. Roll convincingly shows how the moral clarity and spiritual vigor these working people found in Pentecostal revivals gave them the courage and fortitude to develop an expansive agenda of workers’ rights by tapping into existing organizations such as the Socialist Party, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP, and the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union.

Yesterday morning I attended an equally excellent panel of a very different sort: “Putting Faith in American Democracy: Remembering Liberal Protestantism in the Twentieth Century,” featuring papers by Mark Edwards, Matthew Hedstrom, and Bryan Peery, and with commentary by Mark Hulsether. Mark discussed Protestant ecumenicism in the post WWII era, emphasizing how it dovetailed with a one-world liberalism rather than a Cold War realism that we associate with Reinhold Niebuhr. Matt’s paper discussed the Protestant liberal influence on the American Library Association, which created a sort of quasi-canon of books to read each year (sort of a well-publicized “top 50” list), one which pushed a reading public towards Protestant liberal thought and thus exerted more influence culturally than we might recognize looking only at the Protestant liberals and politics. Bryan Peery, a graduate student at George Washington, covered the course of Protestant-Catholic dialogue after WW II and the vital influence of Robert McAfee Brown in the same, who held that “dialogue itself was valuable, even if it only led to more dialogue.” Those views competed with an upsurge of anti-Catholicism signaled in Paul Blanshard’s 1949 screed American Freedom and Catholic Power, which compared the Vatican to the Kremlin.

Hulsether called for more appreciation and respect for mid-century liberal Protestants. Often they are interpreted as being powerless -- thus, nowhere -- or as leading the charge for a “secular neutrality” that was just liberal Protestantism in disguise -- and hence, everywhere. He suggested that the Protestant liberals assumed a position sort of like the UN non-aligned movement in distinction to the choosing up of sides going on in the Cold War, and that their vision should be given more respect and credence than is usual in a scholarship which in recent years has made the Protestant liberals the object of target practice.

Politically radical premillennialists, preachers jumping out of airplanes to call attention to the imminent millennium, Garveyite devotees picking up the cause of radicalism in the South, Protestant liberals demanding alternative visions besides those given to them during the Cold War, northern fundamentalists wondering if the “Blue Eagle” of the NRA was the mark of the best -- who said 20^th century Protestants were boring?

The Black Church(?)

by Matt Sutton

There has been a lot of debate recently among academics about the “black church.” First Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., buried it on the Huffington Post. Then, Religion Dispatches asked some prominent scholars to respond to Glaude. Some dumped more dirt on the grave, others claimed that the church had never died, and others still asserted that it had never existed in the first place. In the midst of the forum Ed Blum inadvertently provoked a firestorm. Now he turns his attention away from the bizarre-o world of the academy to take on a bigger churcher—Barack Obama. See his excellent piece in the Washington Post here. Nice work Ed!

We All Got A Sacred History

Paul Harvey

“Africa is no historical part of the world,” wrote Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the nineteenth century. Blacks, he thought, had no “sense of personality; their spirit sleeps, remains sunk in itself, makes no advance, and thus parallels the compact, undifferentiated mass of the African continent.” In short, Africans were a people without history. The World Historical Spirit that moved history forward never breathed over the continent.

"We all got history . . . It's there. You just got to look for it," said Ellen L. Hazard, descendant of a friend of Amos Webber, a free black Union Army veteran, churchman, political activist, and fraternal order member in mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts (and a personage recovered in 1996 by historian Nick Salvatore; see the link above).

Webber and his family and friends (and his descendants) knew that they lived through some of the most dramatic and revolutionary events of nineteenth-century history: the Civil War and Reconstruction. Black Americans were not just a people with history; they practically embodied American history.

With honorable exceptions, white Americans from the Revolution to the early twentieth century were Hegelians at least in terms of their relegating of Africans and African Americans to the historical dustbin. Black Americans like Amos Webber knew otherwise. And so did the legion of authors, intellectuals, philosophers, poets, schoolteachers, journalists, and sociologists, both educated and self-taught, which Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp discusses with consummate skill in her new (and long-awaited book) Setting Down the Sacred Past: African American Race Histories.

I'll have much more to say about this important work later in the summer when I have the chance to review it fully for Books and Culture. I'll save the full-length review for that venue. For now, here's a bit more from the book's website:

As early as the 1780s, African Americans told stories that enabled them to survive and even thrive in the midst of unspeakable assault. Tracing previously unexplored narratives from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s, Laurie Maffly-Kipp brings to light an extraordinary trove of sweeping race histories that African Americans wove together out of racial and religious concerns.

Asserting a role in God's plan, black Protestants sought to root their people in both sacred and secular time. A remarkable array of chroniclers—men and women, clergy, journalists, shoemakers, teachers, southerners and northerners—shared a belief that narrating a usable past offered hope, pride, and the promise of a better future. Combining Christian faith, American patriotism, and racial lineage to create a coherent sense of community, they linked past to present, Africa to America, and the Bible to classical literature. From collected shards of memory and emerging intellectual tools, African Americans fashioned stories that helped to restore meaning and purpose to their lives in the face of relentless oppression.

In a pioneering work of research and discovery, Maffly-Kipp shows how blacks overcame the accusation that they had no history worth remembering. African American communal histories imagined a rich collective past in order to establish the claim to a rightful and respected place in the American present. Through the transformative power of storytelling, these men and women led their people—and indeed, all Americans—into a more profound understanding of their interconnectedness and their prospects for a common future.

Towards the close of the introduction, Maffly-Kipp makes the following key argument, historicizing the process by which nineteenth-century African Americans set down their sacred past. This sets the stage for a rich and complex analysis to come. A little taste here, to whet your appetite:

"Africans became African American as a necessary response to Euro-American persecution. Yet that same Euro-American society, and particularly evangelical Protestantism in both its intellectual and its institutional guises, also furnished the media necessary to construct counter-narratives of unity and sacred purpose. Ultimately, as is the case with all collective memories, this process of narration resulted in the affirmation of a group identity that came to be seen as 'natural' and inevitable rather than humanly constructed, denying its own genesis in a particular historical circumstance."

Like a lot of scholarship on African American religious institutions recently, Maffly-Kipp historicizes the concept of the "black church" itself; and much like Native American authors and theologians have done with the Old Testament, she explores the complications of taking Old Testament stories into the international political arena of the nineteenth century (as in a full chapter about black Americans' complicated and tortured relationship with Haiti through the nineteenth century). The deeply Protestant, and deeply African American, chronological narratives written through the long nineteenth century provide a rich vein for intellectual history and literary recovery.

Immigration and Religion in America

Paul Harvey

Surveying the books reviewed in the new Journal of American History gives a quick overview of the variety and vitality of American religious history. From the eighteenth-century Moravians, to Catholic feminism, to W. E. B. DuBois, to Holiness/Pentecostalism, to the memory of the Salem witch trials, to religion in the life of George Washington, and much else instead, even a quick scan and assessment of these newer titles suggests continued strength in the field.

Here's a title I was completely unaware of, and haven't seen yet, but looks promising:

Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives. Ed. by Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, and Josh DeWind. (New York: New York University Press, 2009. vi, 407 pp. Cloth, $78.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-0504-9. Paper, $26.00, ISBN 978-0-8147-0505-6.)

The book pairs comparisons of earlier and more-studied immigrant groups (Italians, Japanese, Jews, and northward-migrating African Americans) with newer immigrant communities (Mexicans, Koreans, Arab Muslims, and Haitians). Each pairing comes with an introduction focusing on the religious history of the groups. Here's a bit more, from the review (access required for History Cooperative):

Several essays stand out. The sociologist David Lopez's "Whither the Flock? The Catholic Church and the Success of Mexicans in America" argues that, unlike the Italian case, "it is difficult to point to any important ways in which the church has facilitated their climb up the ladder of success" for Latino Catholics (p. 71). In "The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States," however, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad shows evidence of Islam facilitating the acculturation of Muslim Arabs—much as Judaism did for Jews—by providing women the opportunity to participate in public life. Elizabeth McAlister and Karen Richman's "Catholic, Vodou, and Protestant: Being Haitians, Becoming American—Religious Pluralism, Immigrant Incorporation, and Transnationalism" illustrates the complicated ways that varied religious traditions and history provide meaning for Haitians in a new land.
Two essays challenge the notion that declining participation in religious rituals means that immigrant religious roots are less important to later generations. Despite the decline of traditional Buddhism among the Japanese, Jane Naomi Iwamura's "Critical Faith: Japanese Americans and the Birth of a New Civil Religion" argues that "what has emerged from the collective experience of war and internment is a faith that is tied to no particular religious tradition but that takes racial-ethnic identity as its starting points" (p. 137). Calvin Goldscheider's "Immigration and the Transformation of American Jews: Assimilation, Distinctiveness, and Community" suggests that for Jews the issue is not how much they have assimilated but "what factors sustain ethnic and religious community" (p. 198). He argues that the economic stratification of education and occupation, built on the demography of the first generation, allows this immigrant group to challenge the assumption that Jews (as a group) have become secularized in America.

The Gay History of Gospel

Paul Harvey

The New Yorker this week features a fascinating piece (subscription required) about the gospel singer Anthony Charles Williams II, known as Tonéx, and more broadly about the gay history of gospel as a genre alongside the well-known condemnations of homosexuality from the black pulpit. I believe this could be extended further; this story seems to me a subset of the suspicion of the arts more generally among a lot of conservative Protestants (including the enquiring eyes focused on how the choir director behaves or dresses, and at the waify looking boys playing the handbells). Anyway, the abstract is below, and aside from the specific issue raised by Tonéx's coming out, the article delivers a nice short historical musicology lecture on black gospel. A podcast with the author is here.

ABSTRACT: PROFILE of gospel singer Tonéx. Anthony Charles Williams II has never had a comfortable relationship with the industry that made him famous. Fans know him as Tonéx. His eccentric style and vertiginous high notes helped make him one of the most acclaimed praise singers of the past decade, and, for a time, one of the most successful. He had a certain hip-hop swagger and the status of a sex symbol. A boisterous live double CD, “Out the Box,” won him six trophies at the 2005 Stellar Awards, gospel’s most prestigious event. Tonéx was a welcome guest at all the biggest black churches, a regular presence on BET’s gospel shows, and a headliner at gospel festivals. He has released dozens of CDs, which contain some of the strangest and most seductive Christian pop music since the glory days of James Cleveland; his most evident musical forbears are adventurous pop stars such as Stevie Wonder, Janet Jackson, and Erykah Badu. He made it a habit to tweak old-fashioned, upstanding churchgoers. In 2005, Tonéx was divorced, after four years of marriage to Yvette Graham. This past September, the television host known as Lexi broadcast an interview with Tonéx on the Word Network, a gospel channel, in which he made his clearest public statements about his sexual orientation. He is, within the church world, the first high-profile gospel singer in history to come out of the closet. Within hours, he started to realize what he had done. His relationship with the mainstream gospel industry was effectively over. Tonéx was brought up in the church. The Williams family belonged to the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (P.A.W.), and his father, A. C. Williams, founded Truth Apostolic Community Church. Mentions the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). Nearly all the Pentecostal gospel stars were COGIC. Mentions T. L. Carter. In the nineties, Tonéx was signed by a local Christian label called Rescue, and then by Jive Records. Mentions his first album, “Pronounced Toe-Nay” (2000) and his second album, “Out the Box” (2004). Tonéx sensed early on that he was attracted to other boys, and he spent the better part of three decades trying to figure out what that might mean for him. Along the way, he has honed a style of his own, a sly but ecstatic form of electronic pop. Early last year, he made a major-label comeback with “Unspoken,” but the album was largely ignored by the gospel industry. By going public, and by suggesting that a homosexual relationship can be as godly (or ungodly) as a heterosexual one, Tonéx went from being just another sinner to being a high-profile heretic. Mentions Long Island pastor Donnie McClurkin. As a stock character in African-American folklore, the gay choir director probably predates gospel music. Mentions Alex Bradford, Prophet Jones, and Rev. James Cleveland. In Bishop Yvette Flunder’s view, gospel music is gay music, with vanishingly few exceptions; she estimates that the proportion of gospel performers who are, or have been, same-gender-loving might be as high as ninety per cent. Gospel music has offered generations of same-gender-loving singers a place to call home, in exchange for their obedience, or their silence. By talking plainly about his sexual identity, Tonéx has scrambled his professional identity.

Black Threads

Paul Harvey

The history of African American quilting has received much attention lately, and religious historians should take notice, for it’s way past time to incorporate material artifacts and art into our work more than we customarily do. I've recently been going through a veritable museum of southern religious folk art, astounding in its variety and imagination, sometimes for its sheer weirdness, other times for its heartfelt piety.

Unfortunately, some of the history of African American quilting has been subject to mythologizing and a good deal of assertion without much in the way of evidence (quilts as maps for the underground railroad, that sort of thing). This kind of myth-making, together with the normal obstacles confronting those seeking out solid information on nineteenth-century African American women, makes solid work in pre twentieth-century African American folk art a challenge -- see for example the controversy about the sankofa symbol at the African Burial Grounds in New York, whose African provenance recently has been called into question by scholar Erik Seeman (his article about this has just been published in the William and Mary Quarterly).

Recently author Kyra E. Hicks was kind enough to alert me to her new book This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers’ Bible Quilt and Other Pieces, and it was a fascinating text to peruse. Hicks maintains her own blog Black Threads here, and her relentless researching on her quest to uncover all the information she can about the famous quilter and folk artist Harriet Powers (whose work is displayed at the Smithsonian and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) would put many historians to shame. This I Accomplish mines numerous sources and presents an extensive bibliography for all those interested not only in Powers, but in the relationship of African American Christianity and folk arts such as quilts.

Here’s a description of Hicks’s work which summarizes the contents, and I hope will attract some attention to the work of this energetic researcher:

The powerful quilts of Harriet Powers (1837-1910), a former Athens, Georgia slave, continue to capture our imagination today. Her two-known creations, the Bible Quilt and the Pictorial Quilt, have independently survived since stitched more than a century ago. Over the years, thousands of museum visitors to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have stood transfixed viewing her artwork. Powers' two quilts are arguably the most well-known and cited coverings in American quilt history. But, until today, no one has told the entire, dramatic story of how these two quilts, one of which initially sold for $5, were coveted, cared for, and cherished for decades in private homes before emerging as priceless, national treasures. This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers' Bible Quilts and Other Pieces brings to light new, exciting facts - many never before published: complete exhibition history for both known quilts; proof Harriet Powers was a literate, award-winning quilter, who stitched at least five quilts and promoted her own artwork; profiles of the two nineteenth century women who sought to purchase the Bible Quilt; profiles of the three men who once owned the Pictorial Quilt; unveiling of a young artist who embellished the Pictorial Quilt; and the name of the person who first made the connection in the twentieth century that Harriet Powers stitched both quilts. This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers' Bible Quilts and Other Pieces is the most comprehensive resource guide on this influential African American quilter. The book includes nearly 200 bibliographic references, most annotative, including books, exhibition catalogs, newspapers, plays, poetry, interactive map and more. For the first time ever, readers are provided with clues and encouraged to search for Harriet Powers' lost 1882 Lord's Supper Quilt. This I Accomplish: Harriet Powers' Bible Quilts and Other Pieces is written by Kyra E. Hicks, a quilter whose story quilts have appeared in over forty group exhibitions in places such as the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, NY, the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the American Folk Art Museum in NY. Hicks is the author of Black Threads: An African American Quilting Sourcebook and Martha Ann's Quilt for Queen Victoria. She lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Hicks provides also a panel-by-panel explanation of the Bible Quilt, shown above and on display at the Smithsonian. Here's my favorite, bottom row, second from right: "Christ with his disciples at the Last Supper . . . it is Judas Iscariot who is 'clothed in drab, being a little off-color in character.'"