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?

Methodists, Elizabeth Warren, the Financial Crisis, and Free Market Fundamentalism

Ask Elizabeth Warren, scourge of Wall Street bankers, how they treat consumers, and she will shake her head with indignation. She will talk about morality, about fairness, about what she calls their “let them eat cake” attitude toward taxpayers. If she is riled enough, she might even spit out the Warren version of an expletive.

“Dang gummit, somebody has got to stand up on behalf of middle-class families!” she exclaimed in a recent interview in her office here.

Yes, it’s true, I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about Methodists lately. Sure, I farmed out John Wigger’s new biography of Francis Asbury out to a couple of our blog contributors, and recently I was surveying a manuscript of a journal article which discussed the red-baiting spewed at some Methodist Church leaders in the 1950s (one of whom responded with admirable humor and restraint, I thought). But Methodists seem so, umm . . , nineteenth century somehow -- that was the Methodist century, after all. Even my several weeks at the Methodist archives at Drew University were spent in the service of a larger project that had less to do with Methodism per se than religion and civil rights more generally. Methodists just aren't that cool.

All this struck me today while reading about one of my contemporary heroes -- Elizabeth Warren, a Methodist Sunday school teacher, professor of law at Harvard Law School, congressional overseer for the TARP program, and the best-known advocate for the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (opposed unanimously by Senate Republicans -- thanks, guys, plus Olympia Snowe and what’s-her-name from Maine, for your heartwarming diplay of bipartisan spirit on a major national issue). The Senator from my home state, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, is apparently too busy fulminating about denying Viagra to sex offenders to worry about a consumer financial watchdog agency. I mean, why spend time worrying about the national housing crash, predatory lenders, pay-day loan scams, and the entire structure of too-big-to-fail “insurance” companies (yeah I’m talking about you, AIG) when there is the slightest possibility that some dude somewhere might snooker his physician into getting him some Viagra. And of course the other congressional wingnuts have been preoccupied egging on the very same Tea Party protesters who hurled racial and homophobic insults at John Lewis and Barney Frank, and are now targeting Rep. Betsy Markey in my current home state of Colorado -- check Sarah Palin's Facebook page, and you'll see that I mean the term "targeting" quite literally. There's a bullseye on you, Betsy, that will make you regret voting for a very modest, limited expansion of health care to some uninsured people.

Apropos of that, I believe it is Warren that I first heard point out that medical costs were the number one cause of bankruptcy in America -- reasonably common knowledge now, not so much a few years ago when I saw her explain that.

A brief description of Professor Warren:

She is an Oklahoma native, a janitor’s daughter, a bankruptcy expert at Harvard Law School and a former Sunday School teacher who cites John Wesley — the co-founder of Methodism and a public health crusader — as an inspiration.

I’ve heard Ms. Warren on the radio, and seen her on television a number of times, and she seems equally at ease on both Jon Stewart and on Dave Ramsey -- the latter being the current reigning guru of radio financial advice. (Confusingly, Ramsey mixes sound financial advice and common-sense platitudes about staying out of debt with near-daily nonsensical screeds against Social Security and in favor of the kinds of market fundamentalism which have, in part, created the legions of people calling into his shows seeking emergency financial advice). Warren seems equally able to piss off the right-wingnuts and Timothy Geithner at the same time, an unusual quality right now.

In her pitch for a consumer financial protection agency, she speaks forthrightly to Congress, fear of failure be damned:

If that happens, Ms. Warren will still have her own platform, starting with her nearly constant stream of television appearances. Hosts and cameramen love her: she has the friendly face of a teacher, the pedigree of a top law professor, the moral force of a preacher and the plain-spoken twang of an Oklahoman.

Historically, Methodists have been pretty resistant to fundamentalism, and perhaps that helps explain why Warren, an old-fashioned and principled conservative in many ways, has emerged as the strongest proponent of consumer protections against free market fundamentalism.

Rival Revivals: Some Religious History at the OAH

Paul Harvey

Those of you going to the OAH in Washington, D.C., April 6-9, should find much of interest in religious history to select from. Just wanted to point you to a couple of sessions of particular interest:

Here's one on religion in the Great Depression, a subject which is undergoing a sustained re-examination in a number of recent works:

Thursday, April 8, 8:30 a.m. (in the Hilton Washington Headquarters Hotel -- does anyone know why the room locations of these sessions are not printed?)

Rival Revivals: Religion, Politics, and Labor in the Great Depression

Chair: Lizabeth Cohen, Harvard University

Revival or Revolt: Religious Foretelling at the Dawn of the Great Depression

Alison Greene, Yale University

“The Gospel Sends You Home Mad”: Rebellious Religion and Rural Protest in the 1930s South

Jarod Roll, University of Sussex

Was FDR the Antichrist? The New Deal and the Rise of Fundamentalist Antiliberalism

Matthew Avery Sutton, Washington State University

Comment: Ken Fones‑Wolf, West Virginia University

I've read Matt and Jarod's stuff that they're presenting here, and word on the street is that Alison's dissertation is terrific, so this promises to be a great session on some of the best new work from this period.

Then, at 1:45 on Thursday April 7 somewhere or other in the Hilton, we're going to have some fun dissecting the concept of religious freedom in American history:

New Approaches to Religious Freedom in American History

Chair: Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University

History and Historiography in Church‑State Relations

Eric Mazur, Virginia Wesleyan College

Religion, Race, and Southern Ideas of Freedom

Paul Harvey, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Native Americans and the Dilemmas of Religious Freedom

Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Comment: Tracy Fessenden

Then, finally, very annoyingly scheduled for EXACTLY the same time (1:45 Thursday April 8), is a great-looking session on teaching religious history; maybe I'll draft the other Paul Harvey to read my paper above so I can sneak off to this session:

Teaching American Religious History:

Challenges and Strategies

Chair: Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

Laurie Maffly‑Kipp, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Deborah Dash Moore, University of Michigan

Rudy V. Busto, University of California, Santa Barbara

Rowena McClinton, Southern Illinois University

The full OAH program can be accessed here.

Chikin Religion and Corporate Capitalism; or, Why Chick-Fil-A and Hobby Lobby Explain a Lot More About Religion than you Realize

Paul Harvey

Some time ago on the blog, I asked, "Why is there so much sex in Christian conservatism, and why is Jerry Falwell in bed with Milton Friedman." and pointed to Bethany Moreton's article, "Why is There So Much Sex in Christian Conservatism, and why Do So Few Historians Care About It,"Journal of Southern History, August 2009, 717-739. Moreton and others seem to be leading a renaissance in studies of religion and corporate capitalism through the course of the twentieth century.

To that intellectually exciting endeavor, we may add our esteemed blog contributor Darren Grem (Deg), who today successfully defended his dissertation, "The Blessings of Business: Corporate America and Conservative Evangelicalism in the Sunbelt Age, 1945-2000." Darren studied with James Cobb and Bethany Moreton, so he's well situated to combine southern history, business history, and religious history as he has in this dissertation.

In my era in graduate school, back in the Paleolithic era of typewriters and mimeographed sheets, we used to talk about "bringing the state back in," the idea being that social history had tended to focus on the lives of "ordinary people" and forgetting that the state shaped their lives immeasurably, and thus that political history could not simply be written off. Maybe people still talk about that -- I don't know -- but certainly the state as an actor has gotten its due attention in more recent scholarship.

There seems to be something similar in religious history now, in bringing economics back in. Follow the money, and you learn an awful lot about the course of American religion through the twentieth century. Darren Dochuk (of Purdue) is doing that with his new project on oil and evangelicalism. In this dissertation, Deg does it this way, from the abstract to his work:

Scholars and pundits have often cast postwar conservative evangelicalism as a kind of doppelganger of liberal activism, as a grassroots expression of populist will against the social revolutions of the 1960s. In contrast, my dissertation argues that the rise of the New Evangelical Right first began as a revolt against the New Deal state in the 1940s and 1950s and, as such, depended heavily on another will—the will of corporations and corporate actors, especially those working out of the economic and social context of an emergent, postwar “Sunbelt.” There, in the midst of a burgeoning regional economy that stretched from Virginia to Georgia to Texas to California, a postwar generation of business leaders worked with evangelical leaders to resurrect the cause of religious and political conservatism in the midst of the early Cold War. In the 1960s and 1970s, as the Culture Wars heated up, they brought their faith, free market policies, and “family values” to the forefront of American public life.

The blessings of business were everywhere—in the ministries of lay evangelists like R.G. LeTourneau and celebrity evangelists like Billy Graham; in corporate-funded missionary groups like Young Life, Campus Crusade for Christ, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and The Navigators; in independent evangelical colleges strung throughout the South and West; in everyday operations at thousands of small businesses and dozens of mass-market corporations; in evangelical-inspired “biblical success” books and in a cottage industry of evangelical-led entrepreneurial seminars attended by millions; in evangelical megachurches, book stores, and record labels; and, most especially, in the careers of evangelical political leaders from Jerry Falwell to George W. Bush. In documenting both the successes and failures of these corporate-evangelical alliances, I explain why conservative evangelicalism reemerged when and where it did. But I also show how corporate power has shaped—and continues to shape—religious growth and politics in modern America.

Deg plans to expand his work before publishing outside the Sunbelt per se, as of course it's a national story.

And what does Chick-Fil-A have to do with all this, you are asking. Deg is the man with the answer, in a piece soon to be published that extracts some of the major themes of his work in examining the growth of the chikin-serving conglomerate: “The Marketplace Missions of S. Truett Cathy and Chick-fil-A," to appear in Darren Dochuk and Michelle Nickerson, eds., Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region in the American South and Southwest, forthcoming from the Penn Press:

Famed for its signature fried chicken sandwich and strict, “closed on Sunday” policy, Chick-fil-A purports a singular mission: “to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to us [and] to have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.” S. Truett Cathy, a devout Southern Baptist who incorporated Chick-fil-A in 1964 and opened its first restaurant in 1967, played the greatest role in the company’s history, although he was not solely responsible for shaping its corporate culture, expansive growth, and broader social influence. Indeed, behind Chick-fil-A lay the history of a region, nation, and world transformed.

"The corporation," Deg continues,

"has been more than a specific arrangement of capital, labor, goods, and services. It has also been an important site of political, cultural, and even religious activism in the Sunbelt’s local and global communities."

While we congratulate Deg on completing his Ph.D., we look forward to the body of extensive work that's going on right now on the deep interconnections of religion and modern American corporate capitalism.