The Evolution of Religion, on The Really Big Questions

Paul Harvey

Can science explain the evolution of religion, or why there is religion at all? The somewhat obscure public radio show The Really Big Questions, hosted by Lynn Neary, explores this. Just caught the show this weekend, and it was a terrific hour of radio which summarizes a lot of the contending thought on applying evolution to the study of religion in human societies. Hear it here. A bit more on the show below:

Wherever we look, in every corner of human history, we find religion. No other living species has it—why do we? How did it evolve, and what’s it for? Scanning the globe, The Really Big Questions explores the power of religion to create nurturing communities and vengeful armies, to console sufferers, and control non-conformists. We meet scientists searching for the underlying causes, and theologians, secular scholars and ordinary believers, who argue that these scientists are asking the wrong questions about the wrong things. Why do religions insist on truths that are either objectively false or unverifiable? Why is science unable to speak intelligibly about God, or Spirit, or the Divine? And can scientists trying to “explain” religion really do what they say?

There are also shows on "consciousness," "emotion," and "death" available for download at the site. You can read more on all of this also at the website The Evolution of Religion: The Adaptive Logic of Religious Beliefs and Behaviours.

Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

Filmmaking Beyond the Film Classroom

by Everett Hamner

We're approaching the lovely season when department chairs start asking for next semester’s textbooks, and while the syllabi themselves may still be months away, it’s never too early to dream up something different. In the spirit of collegial inspiration, and partly to build on recent journalistic treatments of unusual teaching approaches in The Chronicle of Higher Education and The New York Times (not to mention Michael Pasquier’s post from Tuesday), I want to share a nontraditional seminar project I undertook this time last year. While few readers of this blog may work in bioethics, the methodology is easily transferable to American religious history, or whatever else rocks one’s boat.

On the first day of my Genetics, Ethics, and Narrative seminar last spring, I looked around the room at thirteen students and saw not only reasonably strong academic abilities, but also moderately high computer skills and levels of personal responsibility. One student worked part-time cutting video at a local television station; another had shared several short films with me during the previous semester. I had already planned for students to do some kind of creative work in the course alongside their major research papers, and my idea was simple: why not collaborate on a documentary film instead of doing individual projects?

Some may respond, “Why not take your students on a field trip every week and drive them for ice cream, too?” Sure, this is beyond-the-call-of-duty stuff, and it requires that a professor generally likes her students and is willing to deal with surprises. It also helps if one’s institutional context welcomes rather than frowns upon innovation. Given these criteria, though, there are excellent reasons to risk such an unorthodox endeavor. Paramount for me was the way it motivated my students’ curiosity about the subject matter. Knowing they would be screening the film for their peers at an end-of-semester reception, they wanted it to be good, and they had to understand the subject matter well for that to happen.

How does one begin such an undertaking? Fearlessly. Confidently. Even when one feels grave doubts. It is amazing what students can achieve when their professor believes in them. I also think they respond well to a professor working not just in front of them, but also beside them. Too often we hide the boundaries of our expertise, expecting students to collapse in dismay if there is something we do not know. Watch what happens in class, though, when the learning direction occasionally reverses, even in casual chats outside of class time. When my students have a minute to instruct me on the finer points of motorcycle engines, the logic of a baseball trade, the experience of raising children while a spouse is stationed in Afghanistan, or the going rate at local egg donation centers, we become people to each other, not just roles. They begin to care what I think rather than merely submitting to my authority for a time.

There must be a downside to such creative collaboration. Indeed: time. The investment here can be immense, especially on a first go and insofar as one cares about the result. I did, and though the final cut of our film retained minor flaws, it was accurate and cohesive. I moderated discussions, distributed tasks, and signed off on most components. According to my email client, this involved more than five hundred messages. Even so, my students owned the project: they parsed the relevant ethical questions, arranged and conducted interviews, wrote more than ten screenplay drafts, created five times more footage than we used, researched copyright laws and acquired the rights to soundtrack music, completed several edits of the whole, and advertised the screening at nearby campuses.

I’ll add one other thought: even if the final product had self-destructed after the screening, the project would have been worthwhile for its impact on the more traditional academic aspects of the course. When students work together on something they think is cool, it significantly strengthens the course’s more ordinary components. Having decided to look each other and their professor in the eye, it is no longer an option not to do the reading or just to phone in the research paper. Not every essay submitted for the course achieved all it could, but almost. .

For those who would like to view the result, here is our fifteen-minute claim to fame, Imagining Genetic Enhancement. You’ll notice how extensively bioethics and questions of American religion intersect, and that while the future is the explicit focus, past contexts remain inescapable. Whatever decisions we make about testing or modifying human genomes, we need to do so in light of the history of science and technology. And for better and worse, whether we are discussing eugenics or stem cell research, cloning or IVF, these debates have almost always involved American religion.

For those interested in the pedagogical minutiae, I’m happy to provide further details. I’d especially enjoy hearing other ways people have used collaborative or individual art in “non-creative” courses; conversely, I’d welcome skepticism about its ultimate value. Perhaps I’ll follow up in the months ahead with a post on the less time-intensive but still promising creative project I’m trying this semester.

I Hate Methodism; and G. K. Chesterton vs. H. L. Mencken: Battle of the Monogrammed Dudes. Surprising or Otherwise Interesting Primary Sources, Pt IV

Randall Stephens

I’ve been doing some nonfiction pleasure reading that overlaps with my work. (I try to avoid that sort of thing whenever possible, because it could nerd me out beyond all measure.) I like Herbert Asbury’s punch-punch, bludgeon, stab-stab prose. (Asbury sat at the feet of H. L. Mencken, like so many other talented, and even untalented, writers of his era.) So Asbury’s 1926 memoir about growing up in the stodgy Methodist town of Farmington, Missouri (Farmington, Misery for him) drew my eye when I saw it on a bookstore shelf some months back. As an added bonus Roy Blount, Jr. writes the insightful foreword to the 2003 edition of Up From Methodism: A Memoir of a Man Gone to the Devil. (I got it new from Half Price Books for $3.98! Half Price Books, please send the check to my office for that blurb.)

Farmington was no Manhattan. It was no Baltimore, either. In fact, it made Jefferson City, MO, look like the place to be. Columbia, seat of learning, by that logic, was Paris. Asbury—yes, bearer of that famous Methodist name and lineage—skewers the townsfolk with nary a sense of guilt. Locals are slack-jawed faith monkeys, mountebanks, dunderheads, joyless shrews, and worse. No moonshine swilling thrillbillies in pious Farmington. This hamlet was, in Iggy Pop’s words, “No fun to hang around.” Here’s a prime example of Asbury’s barbed prose (note the awesomely spare American style):

Under no circumstance could we play the fiddle in our house on Sunday, because of all music, that which came from the fiddle was the most sinful. It was the Devil's instrument. No fiddling on Sunday had been a cardinal rule of my father's family since Colonial days in Virginia, and later in Mississippi, and in North Carolina my grandmother had compelled her Negro slaves to put up their musical instruments from Saturday night to Monday morning. Eventually I took lessons from the music teacher in Farmington and learned to call the fiddle a violin, and as I grew older I played when I pleased, although not very successfully. But so long as the instrument remained a fiddle it was played in our house on Sunday on only one occasion. And then the performance was a neighborhood scandal, and only the fact that the instrument had been played by a Preacher saved us from getting into trouble with God and His representatives in Farmington.

Something else I recently came across—also written in the Jazz Age, though basically jazzless—was G. K. Chesterton’s shot across the pond. The rotund, witty defender of the faith and champion of the faithful took aim at H. L. Mencken. Mencken had gone a bit too far in his campaign to exorcise religious mania from the land. And, Chesterton wrote, religion could not be reduced to its most grotesque and wild manifestations. Just because America was thick with sawdust trail preachers spitting out idiotic sermons, it did not follow that all Christianity was as insipid or idiotic as the most simple-minded faith healer or snake juggler. Chesteron also set his sights on the Mercury editor’s high esteem of science. “The popular science, that rages in the American Press,” Chesterton mused, “is simply a dance of lunacy more ghastly than a dance of death.” Mencken is a kind of irreligious maniac. Crazed on the subject of irreligion. Sounds amazingly like current science vs. religion debates, doesn’t it?

G. K. Chesterton, “Mencken and the American Mercury,” Illustrated London News, June 23, 1928.

I have already noted that, if there is such a thing as religious mania, there is also such a thing as irreligious mania. Just recently, perhaps, it has been the commoner of the two. But a very interesting study of the matter comes from a country in which we may say, without injustice, that both are fairly common. I had occasion to remark recently, in this place, that an American paper had accused me of being an anti-American writer; and I commented on the curious irony that the American paper was itself an anti-American paper. Anyhow, most of the writers on it were at least more anti-American than I am. But, though I may be permitted thus to parry a purely personal charge, and a highly preposterous one, I should not like anyone to suppose that I do not both enjoy and value the magazine in question. I am quite well aware that Me. Mencken, the editor of the American Mercury, is really doing his duty as an American citizen in being an anti-American critic. I myself have been regarded often enough as an Anti-English critic, when I regarded myself as a patriot. In short, there are immense internal evils for Mr. Mencken to attack, and he is perfectly right to attack them. All is well so long as the good citizen abuses his own city. The trouble begins when the foreigner abuses it—or, almost as often, when the foreigner admires it.

But the particular point about the two types of madmen arises thus. It is very natural that Mr. Mencken should be mostly occupied with trying to restrain religious mania. To what extravagant lengths that sort of devotional demagogy can go in the Western democracy, it is necessary to study his notes to realise. The methods of Billy Sunday arc somewhat notorious; but compared with some of the religious ranters quoted in the magazine, one could almost mistake Billy Sunday for a rather shy and refined gentleman of the Oxford Movement. When theological problems are presented in the form of "Is God a Papa or a Father?" we all feel that the title is enough to tell us all we want to know about the sermon. When another Evangelist says that the American Radio Commission consists of five, but the one that broadcasted the Psalms only of three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. we are, like Queen Victoria, not amused. When he observes cheerily, "We don't know what soap company broadcast in David's day, or what newspapers had a tic-up with the radio, but you are still tuning in on David's programme" ... we feel we have no strong desire to tune in on his programme. But, anyhow, the chief efforts of the American Mercury have to be directed towards this howling wilderness of sectarian sensationalism. It can hardly turn its attention to many other matters while so much of the dialectic on the other side is the multitudinous chattering of Monkeyville. The editor must face the fact: he must recognise the religious atmosphere of a Sabbath as wild as a Witches' Sabbath; he must sit tight and try to survive Sunday, or at any rate Billy Sunday. He must be grimly patient and wait till the Holy Rollers roll by.

But even here there is any amount of evidence of a quite opposite peril or potential madness. Men may be on what side they like in a controversy between Religion and Science. When both are sane, there is not the slightest difficulty about being on the side of both. But when both are insane, it is certain that Science is more insane than Religion. The popular science, that rages in the American Press and local government, is simply a dance of lunacy more ghastly than a dance of death. And an exceedingly valuable and important protest against it can be found in the same number of the Mercury from which I have picked the examples of theological hysteria. The protest is all the better because it is not the sort of protest that I should write, or that any person of my beliefs would write. The critic is writing entirely in the interests of Science, and is perfectly indifferent to the interests of Religion. He is probably quite as much of a materialist as the mad materialist; only he is not mad. And he enters a virile and telling protest against that science, which is his only religion, being dragged through the mire as a degrading superstition. He insists that most of the psycho-analysis of madness is simply mad psycho-analysis. It is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. Nor are there even learned and concentrated lunatics, like those who sometimes harden their hobbies into lunacies in the shadow of libraries. They seem for the most part, both in England and America, to be exceedingly cheap and superficial lunatics, who stick any random notions in their heads, as the others were supposed to stick straws in their hair. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are.

Texas Toast: Christianity and History in the Lone Star State, Part DCLXVIII

Paul Harvey

Today's New York Times magazine features another roundup of the Texas schoolbook controversy: Russell Shorto, "How Christian Were the Founders."

Since we have blogged a bit before about this, and it's been covered much more extensively and thoughtfully by (among many others) John Fea's twenty-five (and counting) posts, I don't have that much useful to add except mainly to call your attention to this very nice piece by Shorto. The public hearings over these standards were a circus defying parody. As John Fea put it, "This is what happens when non-historians try to mess with state history standards."

Just two points to mention a bit further. First, Shorto follows the remarkable career of Cynthia Dunbar, who manages to be a law professor for Liberty University in Lynchburg while residing in Richmond, Texas, and who serves on the Texas board of education which has overseen the textbook standards even while likening sending children to public schools to “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” Shorto writes:

In 2008, Cynthia Dunbar published a book called “One Nation Under God,” in which she stated more openly than most of her colleagues have done the argument that the founding of America was an overtly Christian undertaking and laid out what she and others hope to achieve in public schools. “The underlying authority for our constitutional form of government stems directly from biblical precedents,” she writes. “Hence, the only accurate method of ascertaining the intent of the Founding Fathers at the time of our government’s inception comes from a biblical worldview.”

Dunbar is leading the charge of those who insist on connecting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, then somehow declaring the Declaration to be based on Christian principles, and then from there arguing that those principles became law in the Constitution. Jon Rowe explains and dissects this business further here.

[[Update: Here's Cynthia Dunbar's statement about Obama, just before the 2008 election: "State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar isn't backing down from her claim that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is plotting with terrorists to attack the U.S. . . . In a column posted on the Christian Worldview Network Web site, Dunbar wrote that a terrorist attack on America during the first six months of an Obama administration 'will be a planned effort by those with whom Obama truly sympathizes to take down the America that is threat to tyranny.' She also suggests Obama would seek to expand his power by declaring martial law throughout the country."]]

Secondly, and more importantly as far as I'm concerned, Shorto covers the strategy of the Houston dentist Don McLeroy and other board members who are seeking "transformational change outside of the public gaze," meaning that the real war will be conducted in private with textbook publishers who have to take these general standards and condense them down into textbook bite-sized chunks.

Their model is based on their previous assault on the state educational science standards -- failing to get in their intelligent design theories, they managed to get textbooks to incorporate language about the "strengths and weaknesses" of evolution as a possible "inroads to creationism." In their view, there has been a secularist conspiracy among experts to suppress "truth" in both science and history. Evidently, biology and history professors are united in an alliance to lead schoolchildren down the path of destruction, while the Texas activists seek "an uncovering of truths that have been suppressed." (My blog co-editor Randall Stephens' forthcoming book The Annointed: America's Evangelical Experts discusses the history of this idea, and the creation of an entirely separate evangelical intellectual universe, with great skill).

The conspiracy theory emanating from the evangelical right, and from state legislative proponents of "intellectual diversity," always seems odd to me, for it has been academic historians of the last generation -- evangelical, non-evangelical, Jewish, atheist, and of all other stripes -- who have led the way in creating a vibrant religious history scholarship in all fields, American history and many others besides. The recent American Historical Association poll demonstrated this best; religion led all other categories in terms of historians' fields of interests. Sociologists are busy at this too -- see the article "Sociologists Get Religion," for a rundown on the discussion about the "strong program" of religion as a social force that folks in that field are busy discussing presently.

I had further occasion to think about this recently while contrasting a statement by a regent of the University of Colorado demanding that more conservatives get hired, with a whole host of job applications that I was reading for a position in my History department at the University of Colorado, in European and/or African History. It was exciting to read over explanations of the newest work in fields of which I know relatively little, including quite an explosion of scholarship on religious interactions of Christians/Jews/Muslims in the medieval, Mediterranean, and Iberian worlds. The fact that we can only hire one candidate from this harvest of talent will be painful for sure; but the sheer intellectual firepower these (mostly) younger scholars are bringing to bear on important historical questions left me feeling pretty good about our field. History is just a damn interesting subject, and it's painful to watch (as in Texas) when it's turned into a boring slugfest over number of mentions of our favorite people/groups/religious traditions/whatever. Yawn. No wonder students don't know much about history -- there's no place for the discipline and aesthetics of historical thought.

[An aside: I feel similarly about my second love, biology, which I majored in for part of college and would have pursued had history not called me away. As I've blogged about before, reading On the Origin of the Species is like listening to the Bach cello pieces, supremely simple and complex at the same time].

Did it ever occur to me for one second to "investigate and report on" the (as Colorado radio commentator Mike Rosen, of 850 AM Denver, once expressed about me, his token America-hating left-wing professor, in a bizarre hour-long rant) "ideological inclinations" of these candidates, or to find out who they voted for in the last election and make my hiring decisions accordingly? Please.

What is best and most interesting about this work in history, sociology, religious studies, and other fields is, of course, completely lost in all these ahistorical "Christian nation" debates. The questions are posed wrongly to begin with, and thus the answers come down in ideological sound bites. That's why the complex motivations of people, founding fathers and everyone else, are reduced to categorical ideological slots that must be chosen:

McLeroy remains unbowed and talked cheerfully to me about how, confronted with a statement supporting the validity of evolution that was signed by 800 scientists, he had proudly been able to “stand up to the experts.”

The idea behind standing up to experts is that the scientific establishment has been withholding information from the public that would show flaws in the theory of evolution and that it is guilty of what McLeroy called an “intentional neglect of other scientific possibilities.”

Similarly, the Christian bloc’s notion this year to bring Christianity into the coverage of American history is not, from their perspective, revisionism but rather an uncovering of truths that have been suppressed. “I don’t know that what we’re doing is redefining the role of religion in America,” says Gail Lowe, who became chairwoman of the board after McLeroy was ousted and who is one of the seven conservative Christians. “Many of us recognize that Judeo-Christian principles were the basis of our country and that many of our founding documents had a basis in Scripture. As we try to promote a better understanding of the Constitution, federalism, the separation of the branches of government, the basic rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, I think it will become evident to students that the founders had a religious motivation.”

Perhaps most importantly, the very public discussion of the textbook standards ultimately pales in comparison to the more private campaign to be conducted in forthcoming months and years. Sharing a meal with textbook representatives at the local Tex-Mex establishment probably will have more to do with shaping history than with whatever happened at these public forums. Shorto explains:

It’s possible a wave of religion amendments will come in the next meeting, in March, when American government will still be among the subjects under review. But the change of tone could signal a shift in strategy. “It could be that they feel they’ve already got enough code words sprinkled throughout the guidelines,” Kathy Miller says. The laws of Nature and Nature’s God. Moses and the Bible “informing” the American founding. “The Glory of God and advancement of the Christian Faith” as America’s original purpose. “We’ve seen in the past how one word here or there in the curriculum standards gets seized upon by the far-right members at adoption time,” Miller says. “In the science debate, the words ‘intelligent design’ did not appear, but they used ‘strengths and weaknesses’ as an excuse to pitch a battle. The phrase became a wedge to try to weaken the theory of evolution, to suggest that scientists had serious problems with it. We’ve seen the board use these tiny fragments to wage war on publishers.”

This squares with what Tom Barber, the textbook executive, told me: that in the next stage in the Texas process, general guidelines are chiseled into fact-size chunks in crisp columns of print via backroom cajoling. “The process of reviewing the guidelines in Texas is very open, but what happens behind the scenes after that is quite different,” Barber says. “McLeroy is kind of the spokesman for the social conservatives, and publishers will work with him throughout. The publishers just want to make sure they get their books listed.”

I'm reminded here of the narrative that Edward Larson tells in Summer for the Gods, about the Scopes Trial, and his skillful explanation of the tension played out in Tennessee that summer between democratic/localist ideals of public education and the sometimes conflicting role of a national culture of expert-defined knowledge in shaping educational standards. From this article, it seems that the Christian Nationists on the Texas board have learned their lesson well. The controlling narrative that developed about Scopes was devastating to Christian conservatives, hence their strategic drive to control the narrative now, with the public hearings being something a sideshow for the more important and subtly strategic interventions to come.