Protestant America Research Articles

Appealing to the “Movie Mind”: The 1926 International Eucharistic Congress and the Rise of Epic Film in America

In 1926 Chicago hosted the International Eucharistic Congress, a five-day celebration that drew nearly one million participants. Such congresses had been held regularly since their inception in France in 1881, but this was the first opportunity for the United States to host. Chicago’s Cardinal George Mundelein recognized the opportunity the congress provided to showcase the Catholicity of his city, and both Protestant America and the Church in Rome took notice. The success of the congress, evident by the crowds it attracted and the extensive media coverage it received, clearly indicate that U.S. Catholics were no longer on the margins of society. The question remains, however, how and why this particular expression of the faith— given its potentially divisive denominational emphasis—became a vehicle for Catholic assimilation. Casting the congress in the context of the burgeoning medium of film and the habits and expectations of its viewership can increase our understanding of this unique moment in U.S. Catholic history.

The Confessional and Ex-Catholic Priests in Nineteenth-Century Protestant America

Auricular confession became a major source of contention between U.S. Catholics and Protestants in the nineteenth century. The theological battle over the sacrament of penance stemmed from the Protestant Reformation and, to some extent, reflected the theological pluralism of the pre-Council of Trent era with regard to the necessity of auricular confession and the meaning and form of absolution. In the nineteenth century, however, much of the Protestant polemic against auricular confession focused on the practice’s allegedly evil moral and social consequences. By the 1830s the confessional itself came to be seen as a den of sexual exploitation and perversion and a threat to husbands, the family, and the stability of American society. Several former Catholic priests took advantage of this polemical situation and became exponents of the obscene charges, making confession itself the key to understanding the believed Catholic perversion of Christianity. Their popular public lectures across the country and their widely-distributed publications on the subject appeared credible because of their prior experiences in the Catholic Church and their inner knowledge of confessional practices. These ex-priests, turned Protestant, reinforced the anti-Catholic, Protestant crusade that emphasized the Catholic tradition’s supposedly salacious elements.

Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism by Sally Dwyer-McNulty (review)

Reviewed by: Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism by Sally Dwyer-McNulty Debra Campbell Common Threads: A Cultural History of Clothing in American Catholicism. By Sally Dwyer-McNulty. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 272 pp. $39.95. In the Introduction to Common Threads, Sally Dwyer-McNulty explains “why clothing is important” for those who wish to study American Catholic history and culture. In so doing, she clarifies her method: “I uncover how Catholics came to rely on clothing to negotiate relations between religious authority and laity, men and women, and adults and youth, and how Catholic clothing continues to function as a battleground where Catholics work out issues of power, identity and sacredness in their everyday lives” (1). The first three historical chapters on priests, sisters, and Catholic schoolgirls share a common trajectory: diversity (a response to being Catholic in Protestant America) gradually gives way to uniformity as Catholics become more confident and powerful in American society. By the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884), when the Catholic bishops issued a mandate for a school in every parish, there were parallel mandates for uniform and identifiable clothing for priests, sisters, and schoolgirls. During the early period, from the nineteenth century through the 1930s, prescribed clothing curbed sartorial individualism and increased the hierarchy’s control over priests. Uniforms at parish and diocesan schools performed a similar function, as well as downplaying class diversity and competition at school. At elite convent schools, uniforms had a slightly different function, since they were to reflect the special status of the students and the sisters who taught them. [End Page 63] By far the most complex issues are raised in connection with sisters’ habits. Nineteenth-century sisters traveled in disguise for safety when their work took them outside convent or parish walls. At the turn of the century, when Pope Leo XIII “invited sisters to . . . ‘improve’ . . . their canonical status . . . and become officially ‘religious’” (99), sisters’ lives became much more constrained: a quasi-monastic schedule was imposed and habits were always worn. Dwyer-McNulty argues convincingly that “there was much more to gain [during this period] in wearing the habit than in laying it aside on public occasions.” The habit “ultimately freed the sisters to perform their ministry.” Moreover, “sisters came to dominate the visual landscape,” (84) and became the face of the church for generations of Catholics. Chapter 4 examines the apotheosis of Catholic clothing when the post-World War II generation of female Catholic high school students exported the lessons learned from their school uniforms to the world at large, attempting to persuade stores to provide clothing “a Catholic girl could consciously wear” (138). Chapter 5 explores the changes affecting priests, sisters, and schoolgirls in the wake of Vatican II. The sisters’ attempts to modernize their clothing (with papal support) exposed the larger issues of governance and equality that we still struggle with today. Dwyer-McNulty captures profoundly illuminating moments, such as the speech by Cardinal Suenens at St. Mary’s College (Notre Dame, IN) in 1969, when Suenens told assembled sisters to reject Vatican policy demanding that they have new habits approved by male bureaucrats at the Sacred Congregation of Religious (188). Much more than clothing was at stake. The history of Catholic clothing in America is uncharted territory, and Dwyer-McNulty does scholars and general readers a service by pacing out its boundaries and filling in some of the topography. Her narrative also shows how much remains to be done at this crucial intersection of material Christianity and Catholic Studies. Debra Campbell Colby College Copyright © 2015 American Catholic Historical Society

Baker, Kelly J. Gospel according to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. xiv+326 pp. $34.95 (cloth).

Baker, Kelly J. <i>Gospel according to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930</i>. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. xiv+326 pp. $34.95 (cloth).

“It's the Union Man That Holds the Winning Hand”:

“It's the Union Man That Holds the Winning Hand”:

Bishop James Gibbons, the Bible, and Protestant America

Bishop James Gibbons, the Bible, and Protestant America Mark A. Noll When James Gibbons (1834–1921), Bishop of Richmond, Virginia, and Administrator Apostolic of North Carolina, published The Faith of Our Fathers in December 1876, he stated the book’s purpose forthrightly in its sub-title: “Being a Plain Exposition and Vindication of the Church Founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ.” This relatively short book has been a much-read standard of Catholic apologetics from that time to this day. Yet its publication that year also made a notable contribution to a general shift in the broader history of the Bible in American culture. This article explores the nature of that change set within the context of broader American developments during the 1870s. Gibbons would later become the ninth Archbishop of Baltimore (1877–1921) and in 1886 the second American to be named a cardinal of the Catholic Church. For the last decades of his life he was the most visible American Catholic and one of the most influential voices representing American interests to the Holy See. Attention to the circumstances surrounding the appearance of The Faith of Our Fathers suggests that he began to exert a broad influence early in his career. Besides his explicit religious intentions, Gibbons was also making three large and contentious claims about the place of Catholics in the United States: first, the Bible belonged to Catholics every bit as much as to Protestants; second, Catholicism should be regarded as the normative expression of Christian faith because, among other important reasons, God sanctioned its understanding and use of Scripture; and third, Catholicism should be regarded as a fully American religion. An introduction to the book and its enduring popularity begins this study, but then it is necessary to consider at some length the surrounding contexts in which The Faith of Our Fathers appeared, before returning to examine its exposition. Such an examination of what the bishop wrote in the context of when he wrote it will explain the unusual significance of his effort for the history of the Bible in America. [End Page 77] Click for larger view View full resolution Bishop James Gibbons (Courtesy of American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC). The Bishop and His Book The Faith of Our Fathers arose from Gibbons’ responsibilities as a young bishop in Wilmington, North Carolina, and then Richmond, Virginia. In the course of his duties in these overwhelmingly Protestant regions of the United States, he was often called upon to explain the character of Catholic Christianity. To indicate the dimensions of that challenging assignment, it is useful to remember that when Gibbons in 1868 began his service as the missionary vicar apostolic of North Carolina, the state had more congregations of both Methodists and Baptists than individual Catholics; Virginia enjoyed a larger Catholic population, but when in 1872 he was promoted to the residential see of Richmond, while still maintaining his North Carolina charge, that population represented at most two percent of Virginia’s total.1 For some years Gibbons had been recommending several books to [End Page 78] correspondents and interlocutors who asked for such introductions. These included John Milner’s The End of Religious Controversy in Friendly Correspondence Between a Religious Society of Protestants and a Catholic Divine, first published in England in 1819; The Catholic Christian Instructed in the Sacraments, Sacrifice, Ceremonies, and Observances of the Church which appeared in 1738 from Bishop Richard Challoner, the best known English Catholic of his generation who also revised the Douay-Rheims Bible translation; and a printed series of lectures by Gibbons’ own mentor, Archbishop Martin Spalding of Baltimore, entitled The Evidences of Catholicity.2 During these same years Gibbons’ own speaking before what he called “mixed audiences” had multiplied the opportunities where such resources were useful, “especially on the occasion of a mission in the rural districts” when such talks could be “supplemented by books or tracts circulated among the people, and which could be read and pondered at leisure.”3 The Faith of Our Fathers was the product of those occasions. Before publication Gibbons asked a young man, John B. Tabb, whom he had shepherded into...

Review: The Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930, by Kelly J. Baker

Book Review| May 01 2013 Review: The Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930, by Kelly J. Baker The Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. By Kelly J. Baker. University of Kansas Press, 2011. 326 pages. $34.95 cloth. Jason C. Bivins Jason C. Bivins 1North Carolina State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nova Religio (2013) 16 (4): 138–140. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2013.16.4.138 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jason C. Bivins; Review: The Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930, by Kelly J. Baker. Nova Religio 1 May 2013; 16 (4): 138–140. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2013.16.4.138 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNova Religio Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2013 by The Regents of the University of California2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. Kelly J.Baker. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011.

Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930. Kelly J. Baker. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011.Kelly J. Baker's Gospel According to the Klan examines the religiosity of the second Ku Klux Klan, which was active from 1915 to 1930. Baker's book contributes to discussions of religion and intolerance in American history by underscoring the role of Protestant Christianity in the second Klan's ideologies and rituals. In addition, Baker emphasizes the importance of print culture in the development and maintenance of the second Klan's collective identity. By examining written sources produced by Klan leaders, Baker reconstructs the organization's worldview, which reflected prevailing concerns about industrialism and immigration. Ultimately, this text draws attention to the role of religious ideals in discriminatory social movements in the United States, suggesting a nuanced understanding of American religious history should seriously consider the Klan and similar movements.Historical studies of the Ku Klux Klan have portrayed its members as social outliers, rural or backward people whose white supremacist ideals and violent public displays distinguished them from members of mainstream society. Baker's book advances a line of scholarship countering this notion. Baker's discussion of the role of Protestantism within the Klan emphasizes points of similarity between the beliefs of Klan members and those of non-members from similar geographic, religious, racial and socio-economic communities. For Klan members and many non-members, the national identity of the United States was moored to Protestant tradition. Klan members and others saw threats to their religious and social ideals in the large influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants, as well as in the movement of African Americans to Northern cities after reconstruction. In response to perceived threats to their national and religious identity, Klan members were instructed to lead virtuous lives. Baker argues that, above all, Klan leadership encouraged members to be strong Protestants who stood up for their beliefsand many of their beliefs, Baker suggests, reflected widespread concerns.Gospel According to the Klan is organized historically and thematically. The book opens with the death of Mary Phagan, a young Georgia factory worker, and the lynching of her accused murderer, the Jewish businessman Leo Frank. To emphasize the significance of religion in her narrative, Baker highlights founder William Simmons's emphasis on ritual and religion in developing the structure and rituals of the organization. …

Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. By Kelly J. Baker. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. xiv + 326 pp. $34.95 cloth.

Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. By Kelly J. Baker. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. xiv + 326 pp. $34.95 cloth.

Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 by Kelly J. Baker (review)

Reviewed by: Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 by Kelly J. Baker Tim Gloege Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930. By Kelly J. Baker. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2011. This book examines “the prominent place of religion” in the second order of the Ku Klux Klan. Relying primarily on the Klan’s print culture, but also material culture and ritual, it uses an ethnographic approach to construct the Klan “worldview.” Baker argues that the Klan “was not just an order to defend America but also a campaign to protect and celebrate Protestantism. It was a religious order” (6). Scholars typically place the KKK on the “fringe,” but Baker argues that in matters of faith at least, they “were part of the religious mainstream” (11). This is not to legitimate the KKK; rather she challenges religious historians to recognize hidden intolerance and question the nature of American Protestantism, religious nationalism, “narratives of Protestant progress,” and “relationships between religion and race” (10). The first chapter outlines the broad contours of Klan Protestantism. It “rested on freedom” (41), encouraged tolerance (!), and encouraged members to imitate Jesus—selfless, sacrificing, and brave—and was virulently anti-Catholic. Next she examines the Klan’s construction of a Christian nationalism where “the flag and the cross were artifacts of both religious faith and devotion to the nation” (73). Chapters 3 and 4 discuss gender: the “muscular” dimension of Klan Protestantism and the ambiguities associated with femininity (domestic ideologies and the defense of vulnerable women mixed with calls for social and political equality by the women’s auxiliary, the WKKK). Chapter 5 addresses the Klan’s “theology of whiteness” (164), which claimed “God created race” (178) and thus “racism was divinely mandated” (179). The sixth chapter examines the Klan-Notre Dame riots in 1924. The book clearly demonstrates the compatibility of the KKK with mainstream Protestantism in the 1920s. But this begs its main conceit: that there was a distinct “Klan Gospel.” Baker rightly observes numerous precedents of central ideas and at one point claims “their methods, not their beliefs make…[the Klan] different from their neighbors” (13). But these “methods” are never clearly differentiated from the broader Protestant milieu, leaving its uniqueness in question—apart from the overt hatred and violence that most Protestants condemned. Perhaps the Klan simply borrowed a vacuous “Protestantism” to justify its existence to themselves and others. Most important is the book’s observation that even progressive themes like ecumenism and “imitating Jesus” could be twisted to the Klan’s ends; this rightly raises doubts about the causal power historians attribute to theology. But the book’s claims about the Klan Gospel’s lasting legacy—that it contributed decisively to modern conservatism—are less convincing. It is more likely that both drew from the longstanding discourse of Christian nationalism (outlined in David Sehat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom) that preceded and outlasted the Klan’s prominence in the 1920s. The book’s tight focus on constructing a Klan worldview presumes a fair amount of background knowledge, making it most helpful to scholars of the Klan and of American Protestantism. [End Page 167] Tim Gloege Independent Scholar Copyright © 2013 Mid-America American Studies Association

Kelly J. Baker. Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930.

To fuel our fascination and add depth to our understanding, a steady stream of studies casts new light on the people who lit up the night with their fiery crosses in the 1920s. We know now that the second Klan took root in communities large and small—from Oregon to Louisiana and places in between; too, the Klan wielded powerful influence—in the national conventions of 1924, in the Detroit police force, and in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). We have lists for some communities that make it possible to identify members and describe them—by age, occupation, date of joining, property ownership. Scholars probe diaries offering ordinary people more significance in history than they knew in life—people like Quaker minister Daisy Douglas Barr, who became a “Klan Kluckeress.” Materials continue to surface in attics and barns while new approaches and new searches in old records flesh out men and women who are at once so strange and yet so familiar in our national story.

Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930

How often do students of the second Ku Klux Klan (kkk) use Protestant religious themes as their primary interpretive tool? Fundamentalist and evangelical connections are often noted in passing, but the Klan's broader religious appeal is seldom analyzed. Kelly J. Baker addresses this issue in her unconventional yet informative history of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. The book is simultaneously an extended historiographical essay and a narrowly focused examination of the Klan's print culture. As the title suggests, the emphasis is on the essential role of Protestantism as both catalyst and cohesive bond for Klan members. Baker is concerned that by emphasizing the theatrically visual symbols of robed and masked men and women, burning crosses, and lynch mobs, historians and popular writers obscure the significant religious content of Klan doctrines and activities. Baker cautions that older studies of the kkk are often incorrect and that newer revisionist studies emphasizing a strain of populism appealing to ordinary people can be misleading. With chapters arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the book relies heavily on examination of the textual content and religious meaning of the Klan's print culture. The basic sources are the group's official publications, the Imperial Night-Hawk and Kourier Magazine, state Klan newspapers, pamphlets, official documents, and cartoons. Chapter topics include religious themes in the Klan's early organization, kkk Protestantism, nationalism, gender, and whiteness, and the legacy of the Klan.

Gospel according to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930

Gospel according to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930

Gospel according to the Klan: the KKK's appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930

To many Americans, modern marches by the Ku Klux Klan may seem like a throwback to the past or posturing by bigoted hatemongers. To Kelly Baker, they are a reminder of how deeply the Klan is rooted in American mainstream Protestant culture. Most studies of the KKK dismiss it as an organization of racists attempting to intimidate minorities and argue that the Klan used religion only as a rhetorical device. Baker contends instead that the KKK based its justifications for hatred on a particular brand of Protestantism that resonated with mainstream Americans, one that employed burning crosses and robes to explicitly exclude Jews and Catholics. To show how the Klan used religion to further its agenda of hate while appealing to everyday Americans, Kelly Baker takes readers back to its second incarnation in the 1920s. During that decade, the revived Klan hired a public relations firm that suggested it could reach a wider audience by presenting itself as a fraternal Protestant organization that championed white supremacy as opposed to marauders of the night. That campaign was so successful that the Klan established chapters in all forty-eight states. Baker has scoured official newspapers and magazines issued by the Klan during that era to reveal the inner workings of the order and show how its leadership manipulated religion, nationalism, gender, and race. Through these publications we see a Klan trying to adapt its hate-based positions with the changing times in order to expand its base by reaching beyond a narrowly defined white male Protestant America. This engrossing expos looks closely at the Klan's definition of Protestantism, its belief in a strong relationship between church and state, its notions of masculinity and femininity, and its views on Jews and African Americans. The book also examines in detail the Klan's infamous 1924 anti-Catholic riot at Notre Dame University and draws alarming parallels between the Klan's message of the 1920s and current posturing by some Tea Party members and their sympathizers. Analyzing the complex religious arguments the Klan crafted to gain acceptability and credibility among angry Americans, Baker reveals that the Klan was more successful at crafting this message than has been credited by historians. To tell American history from this startling perspective demonstrates that some citizens still participate in intolerant behavior to protect a fabled white Protestant nation.

Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 by Kelly J. Baker

Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK's Appeal to Protestant America, 1915–1930 by Kelly J. Baker

Robes, fiery crosses, and the american the materiality of the 1920s' klan's patriotism, and intolerance

ABSTRACTRobes, fiery crosses, and the American flag were all material objects of the 1920s' Ku Klux Klan, and the order's artifacts, specifically its material religion, are suspiciously absent from Klan historiography. The Klan's religious nation, its Protestant America, became tangible, in its artifacts, and the order's intolerance emerges as a crucial component of the Klan's religious and national identity. This article explores not only the importance of objects in the 1920s' Klan and the religious and national emphases of the order's origins but also the theological and patriotic content of three Klan artifacts (the robes, the American flag, and the fiery cross). I argue that material religion and intolerance holds a central place in the 1920s' Klan as well as the contemporary Klan movement and assessing material objects allows us to engage more fully the exclusivist presentations of faith and nation in American nationalism.

American Jewish Identity Politics. Ed. by Deborah Dash Moore. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. 336 pp. Cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-0-472-11648-5. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-472-03288-4.)

Deborah Dash Moore, the director of Judaic studies and professor of history at the University of Michigan, has collected most of the David Belin lectures on American Jewish identity politics delivered at the university between 1991 and 2004. Assimilation, individual self-examination, and pluralism emerge as competing themes that have since the 1970s fractured, but also strengthened American Jewish life. Moore's essay (1992) explains how during World War II provincial Jewish draftees acquired new understandings of America and of themselves as they encountered Protestant America in training camps. At war and later at college through the G.I. Bill, they pursued new vocations in new locales and asserted a new Jewish identity. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (1995) examines how, when memorializing World War II's central event for Jews—the Holocaust—American Jews have expressed American values through popular culture both to encourage thought and to invoke the victimhood of identity politics. The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the film Schindler's List (1993) deepen understanding, while the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles and Judy Chicago's art subordinate the Holocaust to lesser considerations. Hasia R. Diner's essay (2004) questions the assertion that American Jews, until the shock of the Six Day War in 1967, subordinated memory of the Holocaust to other issues. Her use of Yiddish-language materials and institutional records demonstrates continuous memorializing, but does not directly address crucial issues raised by other scholars.

&lt;i&gt;A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare John M. Bowers A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare. By Alfred Thomas. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 239, frontispiece and 15 figures. $45. Alfred Thomas began putting Bohemia back on the map for English literary historians with his previous book Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (1998). The kingdom had begun disappearing from the political as well as the mental map of Europe in 1620 with the loss of the Protestant army at the Battle of the White Mountain near Prague, and its position further eroded during the course of the Thirty Years' War. After its nineteenth-century status as a "colonized country," the Czechoslovak Republic emerged in 1918 under the Treaty of Versailles only to fall victim to Nazi occupation in the 1930s, and then to disappear again on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain for most of the remainder of the twentieth century. The Czech Republic's freedom from Soviet domination has liberated cultural historians, too, to envisage more clearly the nation's centrality in Europe, especially during the medieval and Renaissance periods covered by the book under review, when Bohemians and Englishmen tended to view each other's country as synonymous with the utopian ideals of the early Church. In the process of returning the kingdom to the heart of empire, not its fringes, Thomas focuses his discussion upon two fairly well-known but problematic literary connections between England and Bohemia. First, there is the question of Geoffrey Chaucer and Anne of Bohemia. In 1382 Richard II of England wedded the daughter of King Charles IV of Luxembourg, the Holy Roman Emperor who made Prague his residence and capital. The marriage alliance fueled King Richard's own imperial ambitions that survived Queen Anne's death in 1394 but contributed to his own over-reaching and deposition in 1399. She had arrived with a large entourage of Bohemians who brought with them to far-off, "marginal" England the high styles of the Continent, including ladies riding side-saddle and a passion for decorating with pearls, hence a proliferation of art and literature celebrating pearls, including the Middle English masterpiece Pearl (pp. 54–64). In terms of work already begun by Paul Strohm and David Wallace, Queen Anne emerges as a plausible "cultural mediatrix" channeling much of the refinement that would encourage artistic achievements like Wilton Diptych and literary masterpieces like Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Scholars have long recognized Queen Anne as the model for Queen Alceste in Chaucer's later work The Legend of Good Women so that her inspiration, including some important ingredients of Italian humanism in her cultural baggage, can now be reckoned to run even deeper in the poetic brilliance of the age. [End Page 265] Though devoutly orthodox, Queen Anne's alleged practice of reading the Bible in the vernacular languages of German and Czech emboldened followers of the reform-minded theologian John Wyclif to argue in favor of English Biblical translations. The nexus of religious dissent, forged during the fourteenth century, extended into the next century when Oxford scholar Jerome of Prague copied several of Wyclif's works and took them back to Bohemia where they were avidly read by John Hus. During 1407–08, two Bohemian students arrived in England for the express purpose of contacting Lollard centers at Kemerton and Braybrooke in order to acquire more Wycliffite works to take home, with the result that some of the radical theologian's texts would survive only in Prague. Encouragement for Czech reform would continue from the notorious English Lollards Richard Wyche and Sir John Oldcastle, though King Sigismund would prove as ruthless at stamping out heresy as his English counterpart Henry V. Radical Hussites, such as the Taborites with their pacifism and the Adamites with their sexual primitivism, paved the way for the Bohemian Brethren of the sixteenth century with their belief in a strict separation of church and state reaching all the way to Protestant America. One of the gems of this volume is a close reading of the fifteenth-century Bohemian satire "The Wycliffite Woman...

&lt;i&gt;Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature Anne C. Rose Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature. By Tracy Fessenden. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. x + 337 pp. $35.00. The stated purpose of Culture and Redemption is to make religion a standard category of analysis in the study of American literature, but the book defines religion so narrowly that it leaves an impression of the author’s suspicion of religious activity and her inclination to speak quickly and be done with it. Tracy Fessenden argues that although literary scholars gladly embrace a “secularization narrative” that reduces religion to a historical artifact, pious instincts persist today in covert as well as overt forms (3). Alongside evangelical celebrations of Christianity as the American national faith, one finds a “hegemonic Christian secularism,” or what used to be called a civil religion consisting of public commitment to the country’s democratic mission (214). Escape from Puritanism’s intolerance, in other words, has been illusory. This is not a new thesis. Perry Miller spent his career documenting the capacity for self-transformation of the Reformed tradition, as did Max Weber before him, and although neither man explicitly named romantic nationalism or capitalist entrepreneurship a religion, they did not naïvely think of secularism as a simple mood of detachment but rather as a mind-set friendly to potent ideologies descended from faith. What distinguishes Fessenden from them is how dark her vision is. The American Protestant legacy uniformly oppresses, and she offers scholarly cultural criticism as the instrument to unmask popular errors. Her initial pessimism grows, however, from a questionably selective reading of American religious history. Fessenden’s bird’s-eye view of denominational and sectarian disagreements all but erases religious self-reflection and dialogue. After admirably [End Page 376] criticizing the current American habit of instantly equating all “religion” with conservative Christianity, she turns around to lump together Protestants over four centuries by virtue of their shared anti-Catholicism. Her chapter title, “From Disestablishment to ‘Consensus,’” for example, means that the First Amendment to the Constitution inspired an ecumenical Protestant campaign to make public schools places of indoctrination in commonly held views. The degree of truth to this argument should be appreciated along with its presentist orientation: doctrinal differences among Protestants that have seemed increasingly unimportant since World War II were once worth fighting for, and they produced widely diverging political stances. Baptists and Quakers championed religious disestablishment in the early republic, while Congregationalists deplored it. Unitarians joined Catholics, Jews, and Deists after the Civil War to block a constitutional “Christian” amendment, in opposition the initiative’s Methodist and Presbyterian supporters. Elemental as anti-Catholicism was in Protestant America, the behavior of Protestants has not been wholly predetermined by prejudice, and yet Fessenden’s decision to emphasize instances of bigotry makes Protestants seem pawns of destructive convictions. We may reject the religious logic of historical figures, I believe, but we first ought to get close enough to them to discover their reasoning. A book so concerned with the repressive potential of Protestantism at its ethnic and racial boundaries also remains surprisingly focused on the Protestant mainstream. Although Fessenden makes the Catholicism of F. Scott Fitzgerald the historical endpoint of an analysis that begins with the Puritans, she devotes almost no attention in between to non-Protestants. Minority writing, she clarifies briefly, signified “resistance” (106). Catholics and Jews, however, the most visible non-Protestants before the 1960s, supported healthy literatures that were not solely defined by feelings of disadvantage. Mathew Carey (1760–1839), the Philadelphia publisher and a staunch Catholic, chose the Catholic Douai text of the Bible in 1790 for his first edition of scripture, but he used the Protestant King James Version for more than sixty printings of the Bible after 1800. He was not at war with Protestant culture. Jewish immigrants living after 1880 in the crowded poverty of New York’s Lower East Side felt liberated by their tawdry share of American commodities because they remembered far worse deprivation at home. Reform Judaism became the dominant American practice precisely because Jews embraced their new land as nearly free of age-old prejudices. The self...

By the Light of Providence: The Glory Altarpiece at St. Paul's Chapel, New York City

The Glory Altarpiece in St. Paul's Chapel, part of a strategy to rededicate its site to the new republic, represents themes that lie at the very core of the Foundation Myth of America. In conflating nationalism and religion, it recapitulates a defining characteristic of the early American republic itself. Study of the transformation of its French Catholic sources, when imported to Protestant America, helps define what is uniquely “American” about the work. The transmutation of these same sources during the French Revolution provides an example of the capacity of visual symbols to contain radical differences in meaning in different historical contexts.