American Religion Research Articles

America’s Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself): Stephen Colbert and American Religion in the Twenty-First Century

America’s Most Famous Catholic (According to Himself): Stephen Colbert and American Religion in the Twenty-First Century

Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence

Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and the Problem of Racial Innocence

Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio by Felipe Hinojosa

Reviewed by: Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio by Felipe Hinojosa Mario T. Garcia Apostles of Change: Latino Radical Politics, Church Occupations, and the Fight to Save the Barrio. By Felipe Hinojosa. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021. Pp. 219. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In fifty years of incredible productivity in Chicano history, surprisingly few studies of religious history were written. One of the exciting new changes in this historiography is the increased study of religion, especially the link between religion and community activism. A new generation of historians is leading the way, and Felipe Hinojosa is a key member of this vanguard. Building on his first major contribution in this effort, Latino Mennonites: Civil Rights, Faith and Evangelical Culture (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), Hinojosa has followed with an even more innovative second book about what he calls “Apostles of Change.” Who are these Apostles? They are lay activists who, influenced by the Chicano and Puerto Rican civil rights struggles, recognized that churches were a major institution within the barrios that needed to be challenged along with political, economic, and educational systems. They ministered to the spiritual needs of their congregations but failed to address poverty, unemployment, inferior schooling, and urban displacement. Some Chicano/Latino activists said basta (enough), and they took the churches on. Hinojosa’s study concerns four cases where activists linked religion to civil rights and community empowerment issues. Based on thorough research, Hinojosa studies the takeover of three churches, and the intervention of a fourth one, in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Houston. In Chicago, a coalition of Chicano and Puerto Rican youth activists, including the militant Young Lords along with Black and White supporters, occupied Presbyterian-operated McCormick Theological Seminary for five days in May 1969. Their main concern was urban renewal. While the takeover did not stop this assault on the area, it did help to initiate a larger struggle that forced both Protestant and Catholic churches to deal with material conditions in the barrios. In Los Angeles, Chicano movement activists organized Católicos Por La Raza, which called on the Catholic Church to do more for its Mexican American parishioners. Shunned by Cardinal James McIntyre, the group forced a confrontation with him during his Christmas Eve Mass in 1969. The intervention led to McIntyre’s resignation and to the Church becoming more responsive to Latino needs. In East Harlem in New York City, the Puerto Rican-led Young Lords occupied the First Spanish United Methodist Church in December 1969 for eleven days and transformed it into a people’s church by providing a variety of social services. Although arrested, the Young Lords inspired others to reconsider church priorities. Finally, and of particular importance to Texas history, Hinojosa examines the occupation of Juan Marcos Presbyterian Church in Houston’s northside barrio in the spring of 1970 for twenty days by the Mexican American Youth Organization [End Page 328] (MAYO). Its efforts to transform the church into a social service agent, while limited, likewise pressured church leaders to reexamine their relationship to the Mexican American community. These takeovers and interventions in churches during the civil rights era reveal that religion was not absent in Chicano/Latino freedom movements and that secular activists more often than clergy led the way in linking churches to the social needs of people. Acting as “apostles of change,” these activists transformed the meaning of church. In successfully resurrecting these histories, Hinojosa has written a significant addition to the growing historiography of Chicano/Latino religious history. Well-written and organized, it should be welcomed by historians of the Chicano/Latino experience and by those interested in American religions. Mario T. Garcia University of California, Santa Barbara Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

“Catholicism Is Getting to Be the Style”: White Women and the Making of Catholic Culture at the Catholic Summer School of America, 1892–1914

ABSTRACTThis article presents a new account of the Catholic Summer School of America (CSSA), founded in 1892 as the “Catholic Chautauqua.” Long relegated to the footnotes of book history and Catholic studies, the Summer School and its reading circle antecedents are here reclaimed for the study of women and American religion. As a Catholic institution, the Summer School was directed by clergy and laymen; men's names fill the published histories of the site as a religious and educational retreat. I argue, however, that it was Summer School women who nurtured a complementary vision of middle-class respectability and intimate association among a white Catholic elite that promoted theirs as the aspirational and ascendant U.S. Catholic “style” at the turn of the new century. Loosened from their parish boundaries, these summer Catholics traveled north to New York's Adirondack region and converged on the lakefront, lecture hall, and ballroom, extending their social networks, and creating an exclusive space of belonging that distinguished themselves from the diverse “immigrant church” at home. With close readings of the traces that Summer School visitors left behind in visual and textual sources—including photographs, postcards, local newspaper reports, and previously overlooked fiction and nonfiction by Catholic women writers—I draw attention to the Summer School during its first decades as a critical site for studying an upwardly mobile white Catholic leisure class concerned with its social and cultural reproduction.

God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan by Jon Butler

Reviewed by: God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan by Jon Butler Mark Granquist God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. By Jon Butler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020. 308 pp. It is a sign of a very good book that it delivers more than it promises, and this is a very good book. It describes the religious life of New York City, specifically the borough of Manhattan, between [End Page 113] 1880 and 1960. It is a deeply researched volume with a wealth of detail and description. But the book is really about much more than this. It is a case study about religious life in a modern American city, perhaps the modern American city, and an examination of the common assumptions and theories about religious life in the modern urban West. Despite the oft-repeated claims of secularization theorists (and many church leaders) that such modern cities are deeply secular and irreligious places, Butler convincingly demonstrates that, in the case of Manhattan, such claims are simply wrong. Butler lays out a rich narrative of the vibrancy, multiplicity, and ingenuity of religious life in Manhattan. Far from being irreligious, Manhattan was awash with both traditional and new religious organizations and was a leader in American religious life in the period when it was the leading city in the United States and one of the leading cities in the world. European secularization theorists at the beginning of the twentieth century saw the migration of people into the cities as the engine of modernism and the beginning of the end for traditional theism. In an unlikely pairing, they were joined in this assessment by conservative Protestant groups who saw cities like New York as hotbeds of irreligiosity. But as religious sociologists Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have demonstrated, this view of urban irreligion in America is really a myth, and rates of religious adherence in America have been higher in urban areas than in rural territories. Cities like New York give inhabitants far more choices of religious groups; in cities, conventional religion was in hot competition with newly developed groups. Butler vividly demonstrates this phenomenon in Manhattan, where mainline Protestants contended with all sorts of New Thought and self-empowerment groups, established Black churches vied with self-anointed store-front preachers, and a whole range of Jewish groups sought to define that community. Perhaps in that competitive market were the roots of a great degree of religious adherence. The first chapter deals with the sources of the idea of urban irreligiosity within American religion, primarily from mainline Protestant leaders who felt that growing religious pluralism threated their hegemony. In the second chapter these same groups are seen [End Page 114] aggressively organizing to bring traditional religion to Manhattan, not only by building scores of impressive churches but also by adapting themselves to the new challenges and opportunities of urban America. In this they were joined by Roman Catholics and Jews, whose ranks were swelled by millions of new immigrants who came to America before the First World War. The third chapter demonstrates how these religious leaders, besides establishing new congregations and synagogues, also set out to sacralize the fabric of Manhattan and put their stamp on urban culture. The fourth chapter examines how these same dynamics were at play in Manhattan's swelling African American communities; though they were greatly constrained by urban discrimination and segregation, they paralleled the other religious groups in energy and approach. A fifth chapter looks at Manhattan as the seedbed of theological thought in the twentieth-century United States, due to the presence of prominent religious leaders such as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Joseph Dov Solveitchik, and Dorothy Day, among others. Perhaps most intriguing is the conclusion, in which Butler examines religious life and organizations in the suburbs of New York City that mushroomed after 1945. Rather than viewing suburban religious life as an antithesis to or escape from urban religion (or irreligiosity), Butler claims that these suburban religious organizations were actually an extension of the religious life of urban Manhattan. This fruitful line of inquiry begs for further investigation. No book can do...

When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture by Jenna Supp-Montgomerie (review).

Reviewed by: When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture by Jenna Supp-Montgomerie Timothy H. B. Stoneman (bio) When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture By Jenna Supp-Montgomerie. New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 312. The tale of the Atlantic telegraph (1858–66) has been told many times (Gordon, A Thread across the Ocean, 2002, Muller, Wiring the World, 2016). The reader need not worry, however, since the title of the current treatment is slightly misleading. The book only tangentially covers the history of the Atlantic telegraph and the electromagnetic telegraph. And it does not concern the missionary or religious usage of the transatlantic cable in any traditional sense. The author, a religious and communications studies scholar at the [End Page 300] University of Iowa, uses her study on the attempt to create the world's first undersea cable connection to pose a larger and arguably more important question. How did the Atlantic telegraph succeed so remarkably in the popular American imagination despite its marked early technical failures? And why did the telegraph experience become the template for how we think about all subsequent networked communication technologies, including the contemporary internet? To answer the question, Supp-Montgomerie forays into new ground by connecting the history of technology with the history of American religion and a range of critical theoretical approaches. For the author, the initial technical failure to lay the Atlantic telegraph was fundamental to its success. The unreliability of the underwater cable, which operated briefly for twenty-three days, prompted American popular imagination of a utopian global community united through communication technology. "Infrastructural religion" in the form of public Protestantism in the United States provided critical resources that proved essential for creating social imaginaries of communication through connection. The early failure of the 1858 Atlantic telegraph cable created a formative and durable template, and as a result, "we broadly define networks as systems of connection." The chapters of When the Medium Was the Mission cover an array of topics that follow the discursive components of the author's argument (rather than chronology). The book begins by recounting the story of the Ottoman telegraph, emphasizing the role of Baptist missionaries, from initial efforts in 1847 to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1919 (ch. 1). Then it considers nineteenth-century alternatives to the electromagnetic telegraph, including the optical, spiritual, grapevine, and teaching telegraphs (ch. 2). A case study of the Oneida Community (1848–81) in upstate New York follows as a stand-in for U.S. religious utopianism around the telegraph (ch. 3). More abstract is the following chapter, which applies structural and post-structural theories of communication to analyze the content of the 1858 cable (ch. 4). An epilogue suggests the continued influence of religious motifs, "protestant dreams for the telegraph," in imaginaries of the internet and social media technology today (p. 32). Readers of Technology and Culture will find this work a frustrating read at times. It draws heavily on media and cultural theory and resorts all too often to seemingly jargonistic language. The author's argument focuses exclusively on a narrow, unrepresentative time period (1858–66) in the history of the Atlantic telegraph characterized by endemic difficulty and prior to longer-term stabilization. Supp-Montgomerie brings no new major archival research to light and relatively little primary evidence, relying on discourse analysis and the forceful elaboration of her conceptual argument to make her central case. In the end, she fails to demonstrate exactly how or why "fractures and failures" are foundational to both nineteenth-century communication-based globalization and network logic more generally. [End Page 301] Nonetheless, When the Medium Was the Mission well warrants the effort to wade through its theory-driven waters. The book serves as a useful introduction to contemporary critical cultural scholarship on media and communication as well as major media scholars. The author shows an adept familiarity with several subfields in the history of technology, while her "infrastructural approach to network media" develops the intersection between media studies scholarship and STS/history of technology (p. 27). Supp-Montgomerie makes...

Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith

Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith

Pedro and Pita Built Peter Priesthood's Mansion and Now They Work the Grounds: Whose Masc Does “the Lamanite” Wear?

Pedro and Pita Built Peter Priesthood's Mansion and Now They Work the Grounds: Whose <i>Masc</i> Does “the Lamanite” Wear?

The consequences of response options: Including both “Protestant” and “Christian” on surveys

AbstractThe term “Protestant” is used extensively by scholars of religion and has been included in surveys about American religion for decades. Yet it is possible that many Americans do not have a full understanding of the meaning of this term and its inclusion may be introducing measurement error on surveys. Two recent survey efforts provide illumination to this question. The Nationscape question on religion replicates all the options included in the Cooperative Survey, but also includes an option for “Christian.” This provides an ideal opportunity to assess the implications of adding this response choice. When the “Protestant” and “Christian” groups are combined in the Nationscape and compared to the “Protestant” group in the Cooperative Election Study (CES), there is a great deal of similarity between the two samples. But, the results from the Nationscape indicate that the term “Protestant” is becoming increasingly unfamiliar to younger Americans, especially for racial minorities.

Melissa J. Wilde, Birth Control Battles. How Race and Class Divided American Religion

Melissa J. Wilde, Birth Control Battles. How Race and Class Divided American Religion

PENTECOSTALS IN AMERICA. Arlene M.Sánchez Walsh. Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 155 + xxix. Paper, $32.00.

Religious Studies ReviewVolume 47, Issue 4 p. 519-519 Short Reviews of Recent Publications: Theology PENTECOSTALS IN AMERICA. Sánchez Walsh, Arlene M.. Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. 155 + xxix. Paper, $32.00. First published: 19 January 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/rsr.15517Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume47, Issue4New Religious Movements and Documentary FilmsDecember 2021Pages 519-519 RelatedInformation

Early American Music and the Construction of Race

Early American Music and the Construction of Race

Birth Control Battles. How Race and Class Divided American Religion, by Melissa J. Wilde

Birth Control Battles. How Race and Class Divided American Religion, by Melissa J. Wilde

The heathen, the plague, and the model minority: Perpetual self-assessment of Asian Americans as a panoptic mechanism

Incidents of racism against Asians have been rising since the COVID-19 pandemic turned global in early 2020. Employing Foucault’s concept of panopticism and Kathryn Lofton’s insights on the function of religion to demarcate group boundaries, this article argues that American religion constructs Asian American stereotypes to limit the discursive space within which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. These discursive limitations have, in turn, buttressed white supremacy. This article examines how some Asians and Asian Americans respond to anti-Asian sentiments during the pandemic by performing a close reading of an op-ed by prominent Asian American politician Andrew Yang in The Washington Post. This reading reveals that Yang’s colorblind solution upholds whiteness as the American gnosis and limits the discursive space in which Asian Americans may negotiate their identities. This article also discusses how the myth of America as a white Christian country withstands challenges from minority groups contesting its dominance.

The Course of God's Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America. By Philippa Koch. North American Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2021. xiv + 265 pp. $39.00 hardcover.

The Course of God's Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America. By Philippa Koch. North American Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2021. xiv + 265 pp. $39.00 hardcover. - Volume 90 Issue 3

Teaching African American Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture at Three Liberal Arts Colleges

Abstract: In this article, Leslie Wingard describes the process and larger significance of teaching an undergraduate course entitled “Religion in Black Film and Literature.” Wingard was the professor for this class at Haverford College, Williams College, and the College of Wooster. All three schools are predominantly white small liberal arts colleges and the participants in each class range from first years to seniors.

Review: Mormonism and White Supremacy: American Religion and The Problem of Racial Innocence, by Joanna Brooks

Over the past ten years scholars have published a profusion of books about institutional racism. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) examines how federal, state, and local governments imposed racial segregation in various cities throughout the United States, creating zoning laws meant to stifle African American mobility. In The Color of Money (2019), Mehrsa Baradaran probes how banking policies affected African Americans and kept them mired in poverty. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2012) evaluates the racial inequities in the criminal justice system, particularly among African American men, who were often stripped of their rights by the courts. Now we have Joanna Brooks’ book Mormonism and White Supremacy, which explores institutional racism within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—a faith with which Brooks affiliates. She provides a penetrating case study demonstrating how the Mormon church created a racist theology that continues to persist well into the twenty-first century. As Brooks states, her purpose is to “identify how anti-Black racism took hold in Mormonism” (13).Part history and part cultural analysis, Brooks provides a sweeping overview of Mormon racial theology. She defines white supremacy as “the entire system of ideas, beliefs, and practices that give white people better chances based on perceived skin color and ancestry” (1) and argues that Mormon leaders instituted a number of policies aimed to discriminate against persons of black African ancestry. In 1852, Mormon prophet-president Brigham Young instituted a priesthood and temple ban, which denied black people access to the faith’s most cherished rituals. Then, even after the ban was lifted in 1978 by Mormon church president Spencer W. Kimball, Brooks writes that black people continued to suffer because the Mormon hierarchy failed to reckon with the church’s racial theology. The governing hierarchy neither condemned its racist teaching, which alleged that God had cursed black people, nor sanctioned interracial marriage, thereby giving the impression that it was still sinful and wrong.Like many Protestant and evangelical Christians, Mormons privileged whiteness, creating an inhospitable environment for persons of color to flourish within the church. An underlying theme in Mormonism and White Supremacy is that Mormons suffered from “racial innocence,” blithely unaware of the harm the church has done to people of color (3). Brooks convincingly argues that rather than confront its history of white supremacy, the governing church hierarchy looked to the future rather than correct the mistakes of the past. It was only recently, Brooks writes, when LDS church leaders repudiated Mormon racial teachings. Prompted by Mormon Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential run and a spate of bad publicity in the national news media assailing Mormon racial teachings, the church hierarchy published an essay on “Race and Priesthood” in which it explicitly repudiated the notion that blacks were cursed. The essay also expressed support for interracial marriage and condemned the decades-old teaching that black people lacked moral purity in a pre-earth life.One of the strengths of the book is that Brooks succeeds in demonstrating the ways in which Mormons created a racial hierarchy favoring white people and how, in turn, that privilege poisoned the church body. She is less successful narrating the history of Mormon racial theology. There is very little historical context in her analysis—ideas are static and relationships and influences are assumed, not probed. Nevertheless, this book is a stark reminder that institutional racism plagues even the best of churches.Finally, the book is a call to action for Mormon leaders to do more to confront the pernicious effects of racism in the church. Scholars of Mormonism and religious studies will find this book both informative and engaging.

Jordon PAPER, Offering Smoke: The Sacred Pipe and Native American Religion, Moscow, Idaho: The University of Idaho Press. 161 pages, U.S. $29.95 (paper)

Jordon PAPER, Offering Smoke: The Sacred Pipe and Native American Religion, Moscow, Idaho: The University of Idaho Press. 161 pages, U.S. $29.95 (paper). An article from journal Culture (Volume 9, Number 2, 1989, pp. 3-104), on Érudit.

After a Critique of Secularism

Turning to the immanent space of contemporary Jewish life, this essay considers what happens after the critique of secularism to explore Holocaust commemoration in contemporary Jewish life. It argues that part of what the critique of secularism opens up are new ways of exploring these Jewish practices. Without the constraints of secularization’s clear definitions of what is either secular or religious, this essay shows how we can begin to make different connections. Appreciating what scholar of American religion Sally Promey has described as sensational religious practices, this essay explores a set of religiously inflected practices that challenge these norms, practices often made invisible by an abiding set of Protestant secular norms that read embodied, sensational practices as atavistic and objectionable.

Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence

Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence