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.

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.

New Media and the Reshaping of Religious Practice

Paul Harvey

Following up on its recent report "The New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere," which features discussion of our little blog here along with many other more prominent ones, the SSRC and Immanent Frame have posted short responses from a variety of folks (including myself and more knowledgeable people in the area such as David Morgan and Stewart Hoover) on the question of how (or whether, or if) new media will reshape religious practice. More precisely:

how are new media—from blogs and social networking sites to mobile technologies and other forms of digital connection—shaping and reshaping the practice of religion?

My response (posted again below) speculated on blogging as an updated form of spiritual journaling, a practice familiar from the medieval world to the Puritans and to the evangelicals of the era of the awakenings (keep in mind that this was prepared for Immanent Frame's "Off the Cuff" series, and I take the series title seriously: these reflections are based on nothing more than vague impressions, written "without fear and without research," as somebody once said of a particular history text that we liked to trash in graduate school):

Blogs are becoming something like a combination of spiritual journals and diaries together with personalized newsletters, allowing for people to publicly express their daily thoughts and spiritual practices, for ministers to reflect on sermons past and present, for church members to discuss what their preacher talked about last Sunday, and for intellectuals to issue prompt analytical verdicts on religion in the news and religious trends as reported in the media. The result, I believe, is a continuation of a familiar theme in American religious history—the democratization of religious expression, the relative flattening of authority, and the basic impulse to internalize religious traditions in a personal way. Social networking may have some of that effect (I’m less familiar with religious social networking sites), but may work at cross-purposes as well. For example, Facebook fan clubs for religious celebrities accentuate, rather than flatten out, authority and promote well-known religious spokespeople, as opposed to the decentralized and anarchic world of blogging. Many bloggers, I have noted, keep a list of exercises (personal, academic, spiritual) and give daily or weekly accounts of how well they’ve kept up their disciplines—much like Sarah Osborn did in her personal writings in the eighteenth century, and countless evangelical believers did in the nineteenth. The difference, of course, is that the blog is there as a form of private confessional that holds one publicly accountable.

The technologies are new, but the impulse to personalize, record, and measure one’s spiritual devotion has gone on a straight line from the Puritans to the present.

But maybe, as usual, I'm just late to the party, having arrived after the cool people have left. That at least is the implication of the post by Elizabeth Drescher, who quotes surveys showing the decline of blogging among the younger set, and among those who tend to predict the future of media consumption. She continues:

For one thing, it seems to mean that if we want to understand how digital media practices are impacting emerging religious practice, looking at the religious blogosphere probably isn’t the first place to start. Demographically speaking, with the important exception of gender, the religious blogosphere as it’s mapped in the SSRC report is largely an articulation of mainline religious and academic institutional establishments. Wonderful as the blogs and blogsites studied may be as gathering places for academic and religious thought leaders with a lingering passion for reasonably extended reflection, their very inclusion means that they have participated in a process of institutionalization that is undermined again and again by the very nature of Web 2.0 practice and culture. Fan though I am of many of these blogs, their very status in the various rankings cited in the report places them at the top of a hierarchy that is relatively meaningless in the shaping of religious practice in America. The report, then, picks up the trail of religious change just at the place where it seems to be going cold.

Where might we pick up the scent? The answer, I think, is small: small clusters and communities centered around more or less exclusive and more or less organized social networks, and small communication forms like Facebook status updates and, especially for younger teen girls and young adults of all genders, Twitter feeds. Attending to these micro-forms is something we learned from Steven Johnson’s influential book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. An emergence, Johnson teaches, is lead by ants, not by queens. Small is where we’ll find the contours of new religious identity, community, and practice.

Also included here is a response from our own Randall Stephens, who as usual finds the most amusing quote and is generally wittier than everybody else.

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.

New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere

Paul Harvey

While the tsunami of the semester rushes over my office and has made it hard to keep up at ye olde blogging, a couple of substantive links to explore. Some of the editors at Immanent Frame have prepared a full-length survey, summary, assessment, and critique of the religion blogosphere. It's an interesting, if daunting, read. Here's a snip which surveyed religion bloggers on gaps in the religion blogsophere:

When asked about gaps in the field, perhaps understandably, some bloggers didn’t come forth with a great many suggestions; after all, most of them started their blogs in order to fill the gaps they perceived. Fredrick Clarkson says, on the other hand, that there are “Too many to count.” But the group had a number of more concrete ideas as well:

• “High quality academic writing from known experts in the field is still missing.” (Robert P. Jones)
• “I’ve had a hard time finding good writing in English about Islam as a lived religion.” (Jeff Sharlet)
• “It seems to me that, just as foundations have been stepping forward to underwrite investigative reporting, so thought ought to be given to doing the same for reporting on religion.” (Mark Silk)
• “At least among theology blogs, there’s an overwhelming predominance of white males; and I think the bigger blogs only represent a relatively small variety of theological viewpoints. So it would be good to see some a lot more diversity.” (Benjamin Myers)
• “I wish that there were more and stronger progressive religious voices, but that’s just me.” (Daniel Schultz)
• “It is a shame that Christianity Today’s daily round-up of news links [by Ted Olsen] has stopped running.” (Richard Bartholomew)
• “Good blogs on the history and philosophy of religion, I think, are still missing.” (Salman Hameed)
• Perhaps it is time to “convene bloggers with a goal of enhancing and expanding their impact and outreach.” (Diane Winston)
• As the blogosphere survey of 100 religion blogs points out, the fact that there is much "missing" means that there is "more data to consume" yet, a daunting conclusion since most everyone feels the surfeit of data and "to be read" pieces is enough already. The piece concludes:
• The key variable for the future of the religion blogosphere is the same as for the Internet as a whole: connectivity. In what ways will people interact, share ideas, form hierarchies, and gather social capital? There are certainly content areas that need to be filled, as the bloggers quoted above suggest. But just as important is the kind of infrastructure within which they work. There likely is, somewhere on the Internet, the great writing on Islam Sharlet is looking for, or the diversity Myers sees as lacking, yet they don’t have the means for finding it. While Web 2.0 brought vast, user-generated content-creation, the challenge of Web 3.0 will undoubtedly be finding ways to make all that information even more accessible, useful, and social—“taming the deluge of data,” as one observer puts it (Griner 2009). Even the nearly 100 blogs discussed in this report are more than most people can afford to keep track of on a daily or weekly basis. The bloggers’ suggestions—more diversity, more investigative journalism, more metro coverage, and so on—all amount to more blogs, more data to consume. The question then becomes: what to do with it all?
• And if that isn't enough for you, the Huffington Post has gotten religion, and has come out of the gate with a strong lineup:
• The bloggers who will be posting on HuffPost Religion will be a great mix of religious heavyweights and up-and-coming voices in the field. Today's thought-provoking lineup includes Rev. Jim Wallis on the spiritual crisis of the recession; Deepak Chopra on the continued importance of spirituality; Eboo Patel on the crucial importance of interfaith relations; Sister Joan Chittister on the future of the Roman Catholic Church; Rabbi Or Rose on the role of religion when it comes to the environment; Dr. Eddie Glaude on the declining power of the Black Church; Sharon Salzberg on Buddhism's "middle way"; Brian McLaren on 'new Evangelicals'; and Steven Barrie Anthony on technology and spirituality.

Everywhere and Nowhere

Paul Harvey

In "Everywhere and Nowhere," in today's Inside Higher Education," Kevin Schultz (of the University of Illinois, Chicago) and I summarize some of the basic points made in our new article (of the same title) just out in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion -- you can access that article (free access) here, or in PDF form here. In the shorter piece and the article, we explore the paradox that "In a sense, religion is everywhere in modern American history, but nowhere in modern American historiography," as well as the two major exceptions to that generalization -- in the historiographies of civil rights and modern conservatism:

our general thesis that religion has been everywhere in history but nowhere in historiography has two major exceptions: in historical works on the civil rights movement and the religious right. When it comes to civil rights historiography, religious interpretations have vitally influenced scholarship; indeed, those who downplay the influence of religion tend to be the “heretics,” rather than the other way around. Meanwhile, we now have a small library of books on contemporary figures of the Religious Right, from Jerry Falwell to James Dobson to Phyllis Schlafly.

Noting these two exceptions raises important questions. For example, since these are two groups that have been historically racialized and/or marginalized, does that make it “safer” to incorporate religion more centrally into their intellectual trajectories? And to what degree do they influence the mainstream narrative? In other words, when we move from the mainstream to the margins, does it become safer to introduce religion as a central actor in people’s lives? And if so, will that scholarship focusing on the margins find its way into the mainstream narratives? The almost complete absence of religion from David Kennedy’s Freedom from Fear and James Patterson’s Grand Expectations, the two Oxford History of the United States volumes covering the period from 1932 to 1974, provides just cause for such reflection.

For an interesting companion piece looking at similar developments in the field of sociology, "Sociologists Get Religion," Inside Higher Ed., Feb. 9. A brief bit of it:

The new study on sociology arrives as a working paper of the Social Science Research Council, based on analysis of 587 sociology journal articles on religion, published between 1978 and 2007. The paper -- by David Smilde, a professor of sociology, and Matthew May, a graduate student, both at the University of Georgia -- finds much that would encourage scholars who want to see more research on religion. But the paper also raises questions about whether American sociologists may be too narrowly focused on some religious groups over others, and over the impact of outside funding, which is growing.

Among the key findings:

• The most important general sociological journals have been publishing a modestly growing number of articles about religion over the period studied.
• The articles show "a strong program" emerging on the role of religion in society. At the beginning of the period studied, religion was rarely the independent variable in the research, but by the end of the period, more than half of the articles had religion as the independent variable.
• For most of the period studied, there was an upward trend in positive findings about the role of religion and a downward trend in negative findings. The last five years have seen an increase in negative findings.
• American sociology's study of religion is dominated by religion in the United States and Christianity, with relatively little work on non-Christian religions or the Christian faith of non-Americans.
• Private funding has increased significantly for sociological research on religion, notably from several foundations.
• A positive correlation was found between receiving outside funding and positive findings about religion, although to the surprise of the authors, the strongest correlation was not from private sources of funds but from public sources. (The authors do not have a definitive theory on the source of this correlation and suggest it as a topic for further research.) The changes outlined in the report "are pretty significant" and show "a realization on the part of sociologists and other academics, too, of the enduring significance of religion in the modern world," said Neil Gross, an associate professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. Gross studies the sociology of academic life, and while he noted "the stereotype that most professors don't pay attention to religion," he added that it has "never really been true."

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.