American Protestantism Research Articles

Knowledge and the Fall in American Neo-Calvinism: Toward a Van Til–Plantinga Synthesis

Abstract Cornelius Van Til and Alvin Plantinga represent two strands of American Protestant philosophical thought influenced by Dutch neo-Calvinism. This paper compares and synthetizes their models of knowledge in non-Christians given the noetic effects of sin and non-Christian worldview commitments. The paper argues that Van Til’s distinction between the partial realization of the antithesis in practice and its absolute nature in principle correlates with Plantinga’s insistence on prima facie–warranted common-sense beliefs and their ultimate defeasibility given certain metaphysical commitments. Van Til endorsed more radical claims than Plantinga on epistemic defeat in non-Christian worldviews, the status of the sensus divinitatis, and conceptual accuracy in knowledge of the world. Finally, an approach to the use of evidence in apologetics is developed based on the proposed synthesis. This approach seeks to make more room for evidence than is generally recognized in Van Tilianism, while remaining consistent with the founder’s principles.

Utopia and Civilisation in the Arab Nahda, By Peter Hill

This book is an important contribution to studies of the cultural and intellectual revival, the nahḍa (Renaissance or, more accurately, Risorgimento), which the Arab world witnessed in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. It takes issue with two well-established narratives of this movement, one seeing it as a founding moment of Arab modernity, and the other as the period where indigenous Arab and Islamic traditions yielded to the Western project of colonization. It also rejects the teleological approach which considers the period it examines, 1830–70, simply as a prelude to the more substantial events starting in the mid-1870s; instead, it studies this period in its own right. And it places the contemporary projects of class- and state-building in a global perspective. The opening chapter sets the scene. It first presents the intensification and expansion of capitalism in the early nineteenth century as a complex phenomenon in which global and local economic realities interacted and sub-systems emerged round capitalist nodes. One of these nodes was Beirut with its new bourgeoisie, many of whom were bureaucrats, professionals and intellectuals. Some of them gave the impulse for the formation of cultural and scientific associations, the best known of which was the Syrian Scientific Society, inspired in its organization by American Protestant models. Hill outlines its membership and debates. In Egypt, by contrast, the main centre of nahḍa activity was the Languages School, set up by Muḥammad ʿAlī as part of his state-building project and headed by Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī. The functioning of the School, the translators who worked in it and the circulation of the books printed are sketched. Another centre of the early nahḍa, less well-known than Beirut and Cairo, was Aleppo. There informal circles of discussion round the Greek Catholic Dallāl and Marrāsh notable families continued a tradition of Christian cultural activity which had started some two centuries earlier and which had ties to Muslim cultured circles. The chapter concludes by suggesting that a still wider perspective of the nahḍa might be envisaged, geographically, socially and linguistically.

African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church

African Catholic is, at once, a historical, religious, political, and social treatise on French Catholic evangelization of Africa within the crucible of the obnoxious colonial project. This is a fantastic book, and so captivating that putting it down is difficult. It is a thoroughly well-researched, integrated bricolage of competing religious and social forces, woven beautifully together with the dexterity of an author possessing a mastery of navigating both the African and European terrains, as well as the ecclesiastical and sociopolitical climate of the day.Set at the height of French colonization of West and Central African countries between the 1940s and 1960s, this important book describes French activities in the colonies, with Catholic missionaries as its fulcrum. Positioned against this is the agitation of African Catholic intellectuals (laity and priests), with the support of liberal French clerics, to decolonize the Church, thereby exerting enormous influence on and making an invaluable contribution to Vatican II.What the author describes as the “Franco-African Catholic World” (6) at mid-century was characterized by competing powers and ideologies (colonization versus decolonization, imperialism versus independence, assimilation versus Africanization, racism versus negritude) and the pivotal role of religion, Catholicism to be precise, in the thick of it all. The question that loomed large on the minds of those at the center of the Church (the Vatican) was, how could the Church extricate itself from the trappings of colonialism under whose patronage it evangelized the world? This question was particularly important during the said period of increasing African rejection of European political and cultural control, impelled by the wave of independence sweeping across the African continent.French Catholic missionary activity in West Africa, as espoused by the book, was perceived as an arm of the colonial project. By means of its education to eradicate Africa’s “backward culture,” the Church would be said to be that instrument of change, par excellence. Consequently, some missionaries would paint a negative picture of Africa to promote the image of a dark continent in order to garner financial support from France in aid of missionary work upon which the so-called French civilizing mission depended. Perhaps some comparative analysis, in the book, with missionary activity in the neighboring British colonies in which members of the same missionary societies worked, albeit of different nationalities, would have substantiated the author’s argument even further regarding the agency of French missionaries in pursuing that goal.The ensuing tensions between the French state and the Vatican were inevitable. While the former sought to assimilate people in its colonial territories, profiting from the agency of missionaries to execute this task, the latter endeavored to insert such missionary territories into the one Catholic (universal) Church. This contestation would feed into Vatican II. Notable architects of French mission activities and cultural colonization, like Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, “the most powerful French prelate in Africa for most of the postwar period” (7), would see Vatican II “as a betrayal and self-destruction of the church” (264). Whereas African Catholic intellectuals, such as Alioune Diop, saw in the Council a unique opportunity to infuse “African culture, values, and spirituality” (71) into the Church as a means to redeem both Africa and Europe. The quest of the latter group, and later Vatican II, was to see Christianity “incarnate itself in the cultures and civilizations of all peoples if it was going to be true to itself” (83). Herein lies what these Africans professed to be their “duty”: “to be the conscience of the church and confront its colonial hypocrisy, along with colonialism itself” (88).The reader gets the impression that the scramble for Africa was not the one-time episode of a well-executed partition in Berlin in 1884/85, but rather an incessant process sequestering the continent, with missionaries entrenching the political weal of Western powers. This is exemplified in the struggle between French Catholic missionaries and American Protestants that rendered Africa a playground of the West. The complex relations between Catholicism and Islam also receive a prominent place in the discussion, whether to build bridges or foment animosity between them.Noteworthy is the progress achieved through this struggle to the point of Vatican II emphasizing the recognition of the dignity of all peoples. Amidst the dwindling numbers in the Church in France, a touted reverse mission involving African migrants and clergy contributing to its vitality pays lip service to a total inclusion of Africans in the Church. The paternalism and blatant racism exhibited at both the mission and metropole are far from over.

Loving My New Neighbor: The Korean-American Methodists’ Response to the UMC Debate over LGBTQ Individuals in Everyday Life

The recent nationwide debate of American Protestant churches over the ordination and consecration of LGBTQ clergymen and laypeople has been largely divisive and destructive. While a few studies have paid attention to individual efforts of congregations to negotiate the heated conflicts as their contribution to the denominational debate, no studies have recounted how post-1965 immigrants, often deemed as “ethnic enclaves apart from larger American society”, respond to this religious issue. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a first-generation Korean Methodist church in the Tampa Bay area, Florida, this article attempts to fill this gap in the literature. In brief, I argue that the Tampa Korean-American Methodists’ continual exposure to the Methodist Church’s larger denominational homosexuality debate and their personal relationships with gay and lesbian friends in everyday life together work to facilitate their gradual tolerance toward sexual minorities as a sign of their accommodation of individualistic and democratic values of American society.

Who Owns the Pilgrim Fathers? American Protestants and a Contested Legacy

This article charts a century of competition among American Protestants over the Pilgrims’ legacy. The tug-of-war began in the 1820s, pitting Congregationalists against Unitarians, and grew to include other denominations with fewer reasons to celebrate the original Plymouth settlers, from Episcopalians and Baptists to Quakers and the AME Zion. It culminated in 1920, when ecumenists upheld a band of dissenting separatists as the true architects of Christian unity. This article argues that all of the back-and-forth helped to create American Protestant denominationalism, fine-tuning a competitive and often unwieldy system and providing a regular practice in the human intricacies of religious pluralism.

‘We’re Just the Gravel on the Road.’ The Dissenting Music of Tom Waits

ABSTRACT This article proposes a historicisation of the songs of Tom Waits in the context of the social transformation of the United States in the era of neoliberalism. Through an analysis of music and lyrics – form and content, the article explores questions of poverty, materialism, social injustice, and other issues referable to the impact of neoliberal politics on everyday America. Those issues are particularly evident in the songs composed by the singer-songwriter with his wife and artistic partner, Kathleen Brennan, since the mid-1980s. Using a Rortyan framework, this study finds a place for the music of Tom Waits in the American protest song, arguing that it mirrors the fall of American society into extreme individualism and materialism, while celebrating the solidarity and human warmth of a utopian social hope.

Singing Our Way to Freedom (Paul Espinosa, 2018)

Reviewed by: Singing Our Way to Freedom by Paul Espinosa Karen Mary Davalos (bio) Singing Our Way to Freedom. Paul Espinosa, 2018. Espinosa Productions. 87 mins. Writer, producer, and director of Singing Our Way to Freedom, Paul Espinosa offers an important history of Chicano musician Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez. This documentary is an intimate life story of Sanchez, from his childhood in Blythe, California, to the pivotal moments that crystalize his consciousness and musical trajectory. Truly a life history visual narrative, the film ends with the National Endowment for the Arts ceremony to recognize Sanchez as a National Heritage Fellow in 2013, three years before his death. Narrated by Alma Martinez, the documentary appeals to audiences of American history, ethnic studies, social justice movements, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and labor studies. It is also a complement to the scholarship about the role of the visual arts in the Chicano Movement, particularly since those narratives favor the binary that artists must choose between the market (read success) and politics. Ramon “Chunky” Sanchez’s music proves otherwise: he consistently made music in support of social justice while fostering broad appeal among diverse audiences and transforming people’s lives. Singing Our Way to Freedom is an excellent story about the cyclical formation of a politicized identity. Espinosa is able to use the format of the life history narrative while punctuating the moments that reinforce Sanchez’s political consciousness. By emphasizing the cyclical reiterations of Sanchez’s critical awareness of himself and his Mexican American community, the documentary threads and builds on the several moments during which Sanchez learns to identify as a Chicano or as a pocho. Espinosa points to this subjectivity as a “third space” that is neither aquí o allá, illuminating the complex, transnational, and durational experiences of self-determination. In this way, the intimate family home movies of Sanchez and his siblings playing in their yard and also posing for the camera indicate that self-determination begins at home, not just at the protest or rally. Similarly, long before the Chicano Movement, Sanchez was witnessing and celebrating microvic-tories of self-determination in the schoolyard. His retelling of the widely viewed StoryCorps recording that animated his elementary school memory of “Facundo the Great”—the one Mexican child whose name was not Anglicized by the teachers and school administrators—reveals the children’s revelry over Facundo’s ability to [End Page 253] retain his name. Other moments, such as when Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta visit Blythe during their tour of the California Central Valley, allow viewers to witness Sanchez’s growing attention to music as a pedagogical and political tool. As further reinforcement of Sanchez’s desire to create music that inspires, viewers learn that it was immediately after the 1973 musical festival for Latin American protest music that Sanchez decided to create a new band, Los Alacranes Mojados, although Espinosa does not specify why the previous musicians do not follow Sanchez. Was it an artistic or ideological split? At this and other moments, Espinosa gives clues that there is more to this man’s story. For example, viewers learn that Sanchez’s mother taught him to harmonize as a child and that she would sing with her brothers who played guitar. Yet, Sanchez’s sister describes their father as a traditional patriarch who relegated women and girls to the domestic sphere. Since Sanchez’s wife never speaks in the documentary, Espinosa leaves viewers to conclude that Sanchez may have been the same. A life of protest music did little to transform household and gender politics. But we cannot be too sure of this interpretation. A similar gap appears in the documentary when Sanchez’s family and colleagues enlist the familiar narrative of artistic sacrifice, but Sanchez only half-heartedly supports this rhetoric, focusing instead on his contentment and only briefly providing a tale about self-doubt. Espinosa is careful to record Sanchez’s awareness of his role as a pedagogue and performer. For instance, Sanchez tells the story of the battle for Chicano Park in San Diego’s Barrio Logan. He states that picket lines can be “boring,” so he and his friends brought their guitars, turning the mobilization into a...

Saving the Overlooked Continent: American Protestant Missions in Western Europe 1940–1975. By Hans Krabbendam. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020. 248 pp. $59.00 paper.

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Nonoverlapping Magisteria

There is no conflict between science and religion. Creationism is only a local movement, prevalent only among the few sectors of American Protestantism that read the Bible as an inerrant, literally true document. Creationism based on biblical literalism makes little sense in either Catholicism or Judaism, for neither religion maintains any extensive tradition for reading the Bible as literal truth. The lack of conflict arises from a lack of overlap between the respective domains of professional expertise of science and religion. No conflict should exist because the magisteria of science and religion do not overlap. According to the principle of NOMA — “nonoverlapping magisteria” — science covers the empirical universe, while religion covers questions of moral meaning and ethical value. This principle was obeyed by both Pius XII and John Paul II. They both saw no conflict between Catholic faith and a theory of evolution. However, there is one important difference between their positions. Pius XII admitted evolution as a legitimate hypothesis, but at the same time he proclaimed that the theory of evolution had not been proven and might well be wrong. On the other hand, John Paul II stated that evolution can no longer be doubted. Now, he stated, evolution must be accepted not merely as a plausible possibility but also as an effectively proven fact. This fact is no threat to religion if one accepts the principle of NOMA. As a consequence of this principle, religion can no longer dictate the factual conclusions that belong to the magisterium of science, nor may scientists decide on moral truths.

The effect of socially supportive church ministry on children’s prosocial behavior: An experimental study of Latin American Protestant Congregations

The church is commonly assumed to scaffold individuals’ socially supportive relationships and prosocial behavior. If true, that would make the church an important support for individual development and community change, facilitating and fostering healthy relationships and positive interactions with others. In this study, we analyzed experimental data collected from 30 churches in three Latin American countries to assess the impact of an intervention targeting relational ministry practices on 6- to 14-year-old children’s perceived support and prosocial behavior. Data were collected from children before (n = 710) and after (n = 612) the intervention in treatment (n = 25 churches) and control (n = 5 churches) conditions. Results indicated that the introduction of socially supportive practices in church children’s ministries increased children’s prosocial behavior, an effect mediated by changes in perceived support. Implications for children’s development and the church as a means of community change are discussed.

Erik R. Seeman, Speaking with the Dead in Early America

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 169–174 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.19 Book Review Erik R. Seeman, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) Ava Chamberlain Wright State University, Dayton, USA While reading this fascinating new book I sensed the presence of the dead all around me. Deceased loved ones appeared repeatedly in my dreams. In the family photographs and heirlooms displayed in my home, I recognized my own desire to communicate with the dead. To feel the loss wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, I began keeping a tally of the relentlessly increasing number of COVID-19 deaths. As Erik Seeman perceptively observes, “the living almost always miss the dead, and some mourners will pursue continuing relationships with the deceased” (272). Taking this ordinary human experience as his object of analysis, he surveys early American history from a fresh vantage point that reveals important new dimensions of Protestant lived religion. In Speaking with the Dead in Early America Seeman aims to write “a history of Protestant communication with the dead before the advent of Spiritualism” (5). Having explored African and Native American death ways in two earlier works, he limits the scope of this history to white residents of America’s northern colonies and states. This seemingly conventional focus belies the book’s truly innovative character. By employing new source material and reading well-known sources in new ways, Seeman reveals an unobserved dimension of the lived religion of early American Protestants. American Religion 2:2 170 Seeman finds evidence of communication with the dead in a variety of interesting locations. He approaches the burial grounds scattered throughout New England as a “physical archive” in which the voices of the dead are preserved on “talking gravestones” (73). These voices speak through the epitaphs engraved on the gravestones. Often written in the form of direct address to the viewer, they suggest that the bereaved regularly visited graveyards to hear their loved ones speak and to feel their presence. Similarly, needlework stitched by young women during periods of mourning facilitated communication between the living and the dead. Although commonly written in the third person, these embroidered epitaphs spoke to the viewer by giving “lasting material expression to feelings of grief, loneliness, and resignation to God’s will” (194). Displayed within the home, they provided bereaved family members a tangible connection with their dear departed. Seeman locates evidence of communication with the dead in a wide variety of texts. If you enjoy a good ghost story this book is for you, for it is filled with accounts of “shades,” to use a popular early American term for ghost, appearing at bedsides and in graveyards to comfort the living, to reveal visions of heaven, and to avenge secret crimes, especially murders. Read widely on a popular level, these stories likewise fascinated educated male elites determined to demonstrate the reality of the supernatural using an empirical methodology. Ghosts also made regular appearances in elegiac verse written to commemorate the dead. Seeman observes that the dead frequently speak directly to the living in this popular literary genre, which mourners read at graveside funerals effectively giving voice to the soon-to-be interred corpse. Elegies also permit dead women to speak with an authority often denied the living. Although less commonly the subject of mourning elegies than men, “when [women] did get such attention, nearly half of them spoke from beyond the grave” (67). Seeman emphasizes women’s persistent interest in communication with the dead. As elites increasingly questioned the veracity of supernatural tales appearing in popular print, publishers began catering to a female audience. Stories about guardian angels illustrate this trend. Seeman traces the emergence of the belief that humans become angels in heaven, who in turn return to earth as guardian angels. Women eagerly consumed these stories, especially when the angels were infants returning to comfort their grieving mothers. Women’s letters and journals testify to the sincerity of this belief, thereby revealing that a “dialectical relationship existed between imaginative literature and lived religion” (242). More important, Seeman argues, women’s engagement with the dead “drove important...

“God Cannot Do Without America:” Matthew Simpson and the Apotheosis of American Protestantism

“God Cannot Do Without America:” Matthew Simpson and the Apotheosis of American Protestantism

Joey + Rory

Joey + Rory

Saving the Overlooked Continent. American Protestant Missions in Western Europe 1940-1975 Hans Krabbendam

Summary This book presents research into North-American evangelical missionary initiatives in Europe between 1940 and 1975. It investigates the motives and aims of the American interest in Europe and describes the further development of the American-European relationship among evangelicals. Regarding the first decades, the author deals with the competition within the conservative American camp between traditional fundamentalists and evangelicals for influence in Europe (which the fundamentalists lost) and contrasts developments in the evangelical space with those of traditional inter-church relations in the context of the World Council of Churches between North America and Europe. Krabbendam makes an important contribution to the history of the evangelical movement in Europe and the influence of North America. Zusammenfassung Dieses Buch präsentiert nordamerikanische evangelikale Missionsinitiativen in Europa in den Jahren zwischen 1940 und 1975. Es erarbeitet Motive und Ziele des amerikanischen Missionsinteresses an Europa und schildert die verschiedenen Phasen der weiteren Entwicklung des amerikanisch-europäischen Verhältnisses unter Evangelikalen. Dabei geht der Autor hinsichtlich der ersten Jahrzehnte auf den Wettstreit innerhalb des konservativen US-amerikanischen Lagers zwischen traditionellen Fundamentalisten und Evangelikalen um Einfluss in Europa ein (den das fundamentalistische Lager verlor) und stellt die Entwicklungen im evangelikalen Raum denen traditioneller zwischenkirchlicher Beziehungen im Umfeld des Weltkirchenrates zwischen Nordamerika und Europa gegenüber. Krabbendam legt einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Geschichte der evangelikalen Bewegung in Europa und des Einflusses Nordamerikas in diesen Jahrzehnten vor. Résumé Ce livre traite des initiatives missionnaires évangéliques nord-américaines en Europe entre 1940 et 1975. Il examine les motifs et les objectifs de l’intérêt américain pour l’Europe et décrit le développement de la relation américano-européenne dans la sphère évangélique. S’intéressant aux premières décennies, l’auteur étudie la compétition opposant, au sein même du camp américain conservateur, fondamentalistes traditionnels et évangéliques pour le gain d’une influence prépondérante en Europe (compétition perdue par les fondamentalistes) et compare les développements perceptibles dans l’espace évangélique à ceux des relations inter-Églises traditionnelles dans le cadre du Conseil Œcuménique des Églises entre l’Amérique et l’Europe. Krabbendam apporte une contribution importante à l’histoire du mouvement évangélique en Europe et de l’influence nord-américaine.

Protestantisms and the Design of South Korea

The blueprint for the Republic of Korea was drawn up in large part by northern Protestants who moved south following the division of the Korean Peninsula. This paper elucidates the profoundly important role they played in nation-building, highlighting the existence of multiple, functionally distinct Protestantisms. Far from constituting a uniform field, Christianity in Korea was shaped by tensions among three different Protestantisms originating in three different locations: the conservative Protestantism of the Northern Presbyterian Church in the United States, the progressivism of Canadian Protestantism, later nurtured by the Germans, and Japanese Protestantism, which entered Korea in the 1920s and left behind a deep imprint despite its relatively limited reach. While the most recognizable form of Protestantism has become inseparable from America itself, a significantly less conservative Protestantism hailing from Hamgyeong-do province and eastern Manchuria served as the core of anti-government dissidence in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet another Protestantism, concealing the word “Japan” from its genealogy in the charged atmosphere of post-liberation Korean society, survived as a powerful rival to and opponent of conservative American Protestantism in presenting a coherent vision of social reform. The existence of such different Protestantisms also reveals the presence of different modernities in postwar South Korea.

Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff

Reviewed by: Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff Michal Raucher (bio) Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life. By Zev Eleff. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 311 pp. Boundary-policing has become a defining feature of Orthodox Judaism. Social science research reveals the elusiveness yet realness of these boundaries. Historians have largely presented a picture of Orthodoxy in America as a "slide to the right," wherein Orthodox Jews have moved to more stringent religious attitudes over the last century, thus pushing out many of those who might otherwise consider themselves Orthodox. However, amidst a sustained focus on how American Orthodoxy has changed despite an internal narrative of stasis and adherence to a singular tradition, we can now identify more clearly the many ways Orthodoxy has transformed, responded, and divided over the last century. [End Page 435] Authentically Orthodox demonstrates that throughout the twentieth century, Orthodoxy has not shifted its boundaries to the right but moved them in different directions depending on surrounding cultural and religious factors. Zev Eleff takes a broad view in developing a theoretical framework for thinking about how Orthodoxy has defined itself in twentieth-century America. Diving into nine case studies, Eleff argues that authenticity is what determines whether something—peanut oil, Binyan Blocks, or women's prayer groups, for instance—remains within the boundaries of Orthodoxy. Authenticity is subjective, contested, and a moving target. It is a feeling that is determined by "a web of experiences mediated by any number of cultural forces" (3). Those cultural forces come from a combination of what Eleff terms America's "indigenous religious culture" (by which he often means Christianity), European immigrants, and leading Israeli Orthodox rabbis (22). He argues that this quest for authenticity is what defines the boundaries of American Orthodoxy. Eleff illustrates how American Orthodox Jews have dealt with tensions over authenticity. The first case study concerns the permissibility of eating peanut oil on Passover and the influence of Hasidic emigres from Eastern Europe. The second chapter shows how bat mitzvah ceremonies became an accepted practice within Orthodoxy. The third chapter details the authentication of a religious norm for men—wearing a yarmulka in public. Chapter four focuses on how Modern Orthodoxy enlivened their youth with Mighty Mites, the Yeshiva University quiz squad. Next, Eleff looks at how the Orthodox right produced a faith-based youth culture through the Bracha Bee and rabbi trading cards. Chapter six tracks the rise and fall of Yeshivat Rambam, a Modern Orthodox day school in Baltimore that was ultimately rendered inauthentic because of the "religiously inhospitable soil" of Catholicism and the Orthodox right (143). The next three chapters focus on gendered spaces. Chapter seven explores the struggle over female college students at Yeshiva University. Chapter eight tracks the acceptance of women's Talmud study, as Eleff argues that this counterintuitive authenticity was due in large part to the decoupling of women's Talmud study from feminism. Chapter nine shows how this decoupling was not successful among women's prayer groups, which ultimately led to the elites not granting them authenticity. Eleff does important work in rooting Orthodoxy in its American framework. One powerful example of this can be seen in the chapter on peanut oil. Eleff shows how American consumerism of the early twentieth century "purchased more than a modicum of religious authenticity and helped peanut oil secure its foothold in Orthodox homes" (38). However, Hungarian Orthodox opposition to peanut oil ultimately influenced [End Page 436] American Orthodoxy only because of the conservative turn in American Protestantism. Hungarian Orthodoxy was deemed a more authentic expression of Orthodoxy in America because the American religious context had an anti-modernist, separatist, and conservative trend. The concept of authenticity is a productive theoretical approach to thinking about how boundaries are constructed. The case studies highlight the malleability of the concept. What ultimately authenticates a practice or innovation is not whether it is considered in line with Jewish law. Instead, the book reveals that at times the question was whether something was authentically Orthodox, like a bat mitzvah ritual, while at other times, the question was whether Orthodox Jews could be authentically American, like when they...

Imagining an Anti-Racist Cosmopolitanism: Localization, Imperialism and Transnational Women's Activism in Interwar Japan

Imagining an Anti-Racist Cosmopolitanism:Localization, Imperialism and Transnational Women's Activism in Interwar Japan Noriko Ishii On 18 April 1934, Kobe College, one of the first women's colleges in Japan founded by the American Congregational women missionaries, celebrated the dedication of its new Okadayama campus, built in a beautiful Mediterranean style. This was a product of a thirty-year transnational collaboration of American Protestant women's networks across the Pacific. Japanese women of the Kobe College alumnae association provided the land and American women of Protestant churches provided the buildings for the one-million-dollar expansion. At the dedication ceremony, Mrs Hazel Thorne Wilson, representing the Kobe College Corporation in Chicago, declared that the corporation would continue promoting Kobe College as "a symbol of international friendship and goodwill."2 Hashimoto Hatsue, Class of 1926, speaking on behalf of the Japanese women alumnae, said the alumnae's success was due to "a burning love for the college" and "the loving kindness of many American friends,"3 inferring Japanese women's deference to American women's friendship. This case study of the Kobe College expansion campaign provides us a window to examine how the notions of internationalism, friendship and cosmopolitanism were imagined and used as we historicize the campaign against the backdrop of the shifting world order and the changing landscape of the American foreign missionary movement between 1905 and 1934. The thirty years of the expansion campaign coincided with the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the 1924 US Immigration Act prohibiting Japanese immigration, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and the emergence of uneasy tensions between the United States and Japan, each with their Pacific empires. Both Japanese and American missionaries were forced to face the controversial question of how to deal with the Japanese empire's religious policy of encouraging the three major religions, Shintoism, Buddhism and Christianity, to evangelize among the colonized in order to assimilate them into the Japanese empire. In addition, during the 1920s, women of the American foreign missionary movement faced an internal crisis in which most of the separate women's mission boards were merged with their male-led denominational parent boards. These mergers epitomized the decline of female autonomy in American Protestant foreign mission enterprises.4 Robert also points out that after the First World War, "'World Friendship' decisively replaced 'Woman's Work for Woman' as the missiology of the woman's missionary movement." Robert explained that "World Friendship assumed that western culture no longer had a monopoly on virtue" and that "what was needed of missions was not paternalism, but partnership and friendship: united work for peace and justice,"5 suggesting that such partnership entailed an equal relationship between the western missionaries and their Indigenous counterparts. This article argues that in the Japanese mission field, the transition was more complex. In the Kobe College expansion campaign, the nineteenth-century mission ideology of Woman's Work for Woman remained salient and coexisted with the ecumenical notions of internationalism, friendship and cosmopolitanism. David A. Hollinger links the concept of what he called "missionary cosmopolitanism" or liberal internationalism in the missionary movement to Wilsonian internationalism. He also called for more attention to study the role of missionary-connected individuals in postwar American diplomacy, including the so-called "mish kids" or the missionary children, because they served as the informants of prewar Asian history and culture, and became the key purveyors of liberal internationalism in the United States.6 This article argues that such was the case in the Kobe College expansion campaign, for both American and Japanese women often used the notions of Wilsonian internationalism and friendship and the concept of Christian internationalism interchangeably. Moreover, Kobe College was imagined to be an ecumenical space of aspirational cosmopolitanism and friendship by both American and Japanese women, especially under the leadership of missionary president Charlotte B. DeForest, herself a "mish kid" born in Japan. Drawing on the conceptual framework of "aspirational cosmopolitanism" defined as "the pursuit of conversations across lines of difference, between disparate socio-cultural, political and linguistic groups, that provisionally created shared public worlds,"7 this article examines how the Kobe College expansion campaign...

The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West by Jennifer Graber

Reviewed by: The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West by Jennifer Graber Thomas D. Hamm The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West. By Jennifer Graber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xxii + 288 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. The past two decades have seen a shift in the study of Native American history. Influenced by work done in other disciplines, and by the activism of Native American scholars, historians have increasingly turned to non-documentary sources, especially oral traditions. This is controversial, as an exchange in the April 2020 American Historical Review shows. But when done well, it produces excellent history. Jennifer Graber’s The Gods of Indian Country is a prime example. Graber’s focus is the Kiowa people, who in 1800 lived and hunted over what are now the states of Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Kiowas faced relentless pressure from white settlers, state and territorial governments, and the government in Washington to dispossess them of most of their lands and confine them to reservations. Graber sees spiritual practice as key to Kiowa resistance. Central was the Sun Dance, which the Kiowa had learned from the Crow and other Plains Indians. It acknowledged the centrality of the sun in Kiowa life and was a way of giving thanks for abundant buffalo, which were not only the center of the Kiowa diet but also of the Sun Dance’s rituals. In 1869, the Kiowas first encountered Quakers. The new administration of Pres. Ulysses S. Grant embarked on a “peace policy” of attempting to “civilize” and assimilate Native Americans by turning administration of Indian agencies over to religious denominations. American churches answered this call enthusiastically. As Graber notes, since the early nineteenth century, many American Protestants had been what she calls “friends of the Indians,” critics of involuntary removal and dispossession and fraudulent treaties. They were fervent believers that Native Americans, if educated and Christianized, women introduced to habits of domesticity and men changed from hunters into farmers, could become assimilated into American society. Quakers had been involved in such projects since the 1790s, and both Hicksite and Gurneyite Friends accepted agencies. Gurneyites took responsibility for the Kiowa, Arapaho, and Cheyenne through the Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs (AECFIA). Friends Thomas C. Battey, James Haworth, and Lawrie Tatum, agents to the Kiowas, are central to Graber’s account of the 1870s. [End Page 89] Many Friends will find the portrayal of these Quaker Indian agents disturbing. While critical of white encroachment on Native lands, these Friends largely accepted government policies. They urged the Kiowas to remain on reservation lands, to give up the hunt and become farmers, and to send their children to school, including boarding schools that have gained such an evil reputation over the past generation. They viewed traditional Kiowa spirituality as ignorant paganism. Ultimately Friends supported the severalty policy that broke up tribal landholdings. While sympathetic to the Kiowas, Graber is candid. They were a warlike people for whom violent raids against other tribes and whites were a way of life. Kiowa prophets, claiming the ability to bring back the buffalo after 1870 or to turn aside enemy bullets with special spells or shields clearly failed. Graber notes divisions among American Friends. Since the Hicksite agency in Nebraska lies outside her focus on the Kiowa, she dismisses the theological disputes among Quakers as not crucial to her story. But many of the Gurneyite Friends involved in AECFIA were in the midst of a dramatic transformation of their own in the 1870s, laying the foundations of the pastoral system. That theology would lead them, unlike the Hicksites, toward a missionary impulse of their own that included Native Americans and has continued to the present day. This is a minor criticism. The Gods of Indian Country is engaging, widely researched, elegantly written, and convincing. Thomas D. Hamm Earlham College Copyright © 2021 Friends Historical Association

The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran

Reviewed by: The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire by Katherine D. Moran Michael Skaggs Katherine D. Moran, The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). xiv + 311 pages. Katherine D. Moran, The Imperial Church: Catholic Founding Fathers and United States Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020). xiv + 311 pages. It is tempting to save a review's highest praise for the end, but The Imperial Church is too significant a book to delay the obvious: Katherine Moran has written a landmark book that opens a new era in the historiography of American religion and empire. The tensions between Roman Catholicism and its American adherents and the rest of American society have been explored at great and fruitful length by many; leading voices in both the American past and the contemporary scholarly conversation have highlighted Protestant anxieties over the growth of Catholicism in North America. While Moran modestly situates herself within a growing cadre of scholars taking note of a more nuanced engagement between the two largest segments of Christianity, up to now most attention has been paid to the antagonism between Protestants and Catholics in the United States. Moran notes that despite some gains in a more complicated historical narrative, "at the center of the historiography of American Catholicism is a story about the rise and fall of American anti-Catholicism" (12). With The Imperial Church, Moran acknowledges and then sidesteps this long arc of historiography, instead calling on three vivid case studies to illustrate how American Protestants looked eagerly to Catholicism for lessons in empire, assimilation of a native Other, and imposition of order inflected by Christianity. Furthermore, while the role of Catholics in the eighteenth-century rebellion against the United Kingdom remains a growing area of study, Moran utilizes well the stories of Jacques Marquette in what became [End Page 135] the Midwest, Franciscans in Southern California, and friars in the Philippines to advance an ambitious, and accurate, claim: when it comes to American imperialism, Catholics make up the leading founding fathers. She notes that viewing American history from this perspective also destabilizes longstanding periodizations, writing that "in the U.S. Southwest and Far West, and in overseas colonies such as the Philippines, the 'Immigrant Church' label breaks down. In these places in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Protestant Americans were often the newcomers" (16–17). And while historians of Catholicism have often suggested pushing the founding date and site of United States history much earlier—1565 in Saint Augustine, Florida, for instance—Moran takes this reconfiguration a step further, arguing that "paying attention to this Imperial Church [sic] … requires, in the end, that scholars recognize that Los Angeles and Manila are as important to the history of American Catholicism as are Boston and New York" (17). The structure of The Imperial Church also indicates that not only history but memory is a constituent component of the American Catholic story. The book's first section focuses on Jesuit missionary and explorer Jacques Marquette, whose statue has been in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, D.C., as a gift from Wisconsin since 1896. Marquette's influence on the history of European-American empire in the Midwest hardly can be overstated, and memories of the man did yeoman's work after his death for boosters of American empire. Moran offers three ways Marquette's memory was put to work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, it molded American history into a "common European Christian project of advancing religion and civilization," contra the imperial ambitions of the British and the French and the existential fact of numerous Indigenous societies (26). Second, it broadened a previously narrow definition of "white" into "a capacious racial term, inclusive of what were considered various racially distinct European groups" (26). This broadening consolidated into one group the non-indigenous—thus clarifying, with long-lasting consequences, those who were not white. Finally, glorifying Marquette, known both in life and death for his piety, "cast him as a spiritualized midwestern brand"—contributing to the growth of the notion of the Midwest as inherently more religious than other parts of the country...

Speaking with the Dead in Early America by Erik R. Seeman

Reviewed by: Speaking with the Dead in Early America by Erik R. Seeman Kirsten Fischer (bio) Death, Protestantism, Spiritualism, Cult of the dead, Religion Speaking with the Dead in Early America. By Erik R. Seeman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 344. Cloth, $39.95). When the Protestant Reformation abolished purgatory, the place between heaven and hell where the majority of souls were cleansed of sin before ascending to heaven, it also eliminated the ability of the living to [End Page 310] use prayer to aid the souls of their beloved dead. Communication between the living and the dead ceased for Protestants, or so we have thought. In this delightfully surprising book, Erik R. Seeman shows that Protestants were not so easily separated from their dead. Through imaginative literature and material culture, they retained their relationships with the deceased, speaking to the dead and sometimes, although less often, with them. Seeman initially set out to explain the 1850s boom in séance Spiritualism whose sudden popularity seemed as odd as the rapping sounds on parlor tables with which the dead communicated with the entranced living. But he did not write the pre-history of Spiritualism as he had intended because the archives revealed a much broader and less known phenomenon: long-standing customs of communication with the deceased within many strands of Euro American Protestantism. Seeman makes clear that the practice of sustaining active relationships with the dead—he calls this the "cult of the dead" and its followers "cultists"—did not require two-way communication. Even imagined conversation, he argues, served as a deeply meaningful way to retain relationships with those who had died. Granted, some Protestants believed they actually interacted with and could influence the fate of the dead. Swedenborgians, for example, understood that their founder, Emanuel Swedenborg, conversed with people who in death had become angels. Shakers made communication with the dead a central part of their religious practice, and Mormons used proxy baptism, baptizing a live person on behalf of someone deceased, to bring the dead into the Mormon fold. These believers claimed a direct exchange with the dead. Seeman, however, is more interested in indirect (because imagined) relationships, making the case that these, too, belong in our conception of the Protestant "cult of the dead." In eight loosely chronological chapters organized by type of source material, Seeman introduces the reader to the different means by which Protestants spoke to or imagined hearing from the dead. Some texts come from a familiar yet overlooked archive: the cemetery. "Talking" headstones with carved messages from the departed held visitors in suspended moments of imagined connection. In this way, Protestants experienced cemeteries as sites of immanence that supported communion with the dead. Graveside elegies, like those written by Phillis Wheatley, gave voice to the dead in verse and prose. Popular literature, especially Gothic fiction with its interest in the supernatural, helped Protestants explore the [End Page 311] boundary between the living and the dead. Seeman makes especially creative use of material culture, namely the objects that expressed and maintained post-mortem connections. Corpses, most immediately, became sites and means of communication. More lasting were household objects with spiritual significance, such as hair jewelry made with locks from the deceased, daguerreotypes and portraits made shortly after the death of a family member, and mourning embroidery that ventriloquized the dead. Bringing home the larger argument, Seeman shows that Protestantism—frequently described as a religion of creeds rather than embodied practice, of interiority rather than materiality, and of the absence rather than presence of spiritual beings—was not as self-contained as scholars have thought. In fact, Seeman says, a full "three centuries of Protestant popular belief in burial grounds as sites of haunting, two centuries of talking gravestones, a century of Graveyard School poetry, and many decades of sentimental and Gothic literature" had prepared the way for a bereaved Protestant in the mid-nineteenth century to think her mother's spirit hovered in the cemetery or might coming knocking at the parlor table (227). Many kinds of religious texts and objects, "taken together, point to the emergence of a cult of the dead decades before the advent of séance...