Secular Americans Research Articles

The First Century of the U.S.–China Philanthropic Partnership: Impetuses, Obstacles, Strategies, and Contributions

The First Century of the U.S.–China Philanthropic Partnership:Impetuses, Obstacles, Strategies, and Contributions Qinghong Wang (bio) Mary Brown Bullock. The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy in China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. xv, 242 pp. $39.95, isbn 978-0-8047-8503-7. The U.S.–China philanthropic partnership dates from 1913, the year that the net worth of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller (JDR Sr.) reached an unprecedented $900 million, dwarfing the mere $715 million in the U.S. annual national budget. It was also the year in which his only son, John D. Rockefeller Jr. (JDR Jr.), formally launched the Rockefeller Foundation. JDR Jr., also known as the “Oil Prince,” envisaged this new enterprise as embodying the passionate mission of bringing Rockefeller-style philanthropy to China and other foreign shores. This marked not only the starting point for a modern U.S.–China philanthropic partnership, but, to a large extent, signaled the genesis of international philanthropy by modern foundations as well. In the century since then, [End Page 513] Rockefeller family members have also transformed themselves into the first family of modern international philanthropy and have become important trailblazers in Sino-American relations. Mary Brown Bullock traces a clear trajectory for multidisciplinary and multi-institutional Rockefeller philanthropic activities in China across the twentieth century in The Oil Prince’s Legacy: Rockefeller Philanthropy in China. This volume may be considered as an in-depth elaboration of her first book, An American Transplant: The Rockefeller Foundation and Peking Union Medical College (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). This earlier work concentrated on the history of Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) prior to 1951. Her new narrative chronicles the relationship between Rockefeller family members and their philanthropy in China, as well as recounting personal stories of the Rockefeller staff, faculty members, graduates, and associates. It is based on exhaustive research, taking advantage of recently opened archives, supplemented by comprehensive interviews. Furthermore, the author moderates her earlier skepticism about the Rockefeller mission in China and identifies the core thesis of this book: the “Rockefellers’ sustained philanthropic emphasis on elite science and medicine in China legitimated a secular American scientific presence and nurtured a tradition of professional relationship that survived even the upheavals of Mao Zedong’s era” (p. 2). At the same time, the author recognizes the great contributions of the Rockefeller philanthropic network in promoting the American understanding of China and other Asian cultures over the past century. In the book under review, Bullock also adopts a more neutral and nuanced perspective, drawn from Akira Iriye’s concept of cultural internationalism, to view Rockefeller’s efforts at China philanthropy. Unlike the two prevailing but timebound and one-dimensional tropes for Rockefeller international philanthropy — as “robber baron” and “cultural imperialist” — this cultural internationalism-based lens not only focuses on nonstate actors that influence the character of U.S.–China relations, but also takes into account the continuous and mutual shaping process between Rockefeller philanthropy and the Chinese people and their culture, science, and politics. From this perspective, the impetuses, obstacles, strategies, and contributions of Rockefeller philanthropy in China, which survived four wars (World War I, World War II, the Chinese Civil War, and the Korean War) and three revolutions (the Nationalist Revolution, the Communist Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution), can be reexamined within four periods: the Republican era (1913–1951), the Maoist era (1951–1979), the reform era (1979–2008), and the transformative era (2008 and beyond). Although the original connection between the Rockefeller family and China through the oil business and Christian missionary activity dates to 1863, when JDR Sr. first sold kerosene to China and made his first gift to the China missions, Bullock attributes the major impetuses for the Rockefeller family to initiate its [End Page 514] China philanthropy in the Republican era to its belief in scientific internationalism, its progressive movement mentality, and its interest in China’s arts, culture, history, and people. Through a clear understanding of the limitations of missionary work in China, Rockefeller philanthropy in China emphasized the “secular rather than the spiritual, science rather than theology” (p. 40). The upshot was that, although willing to cooperate with missionary organizations, Rockefeller...

Religion and Scientific Literacy in the United States

ObjectiveThis study examines how commitment to sectarian Protestant religious groups and fundamentalist beliefs in the inerrancy of the Bible influence basic scientific literacy.MethodsI analyze data from the 2006 General Social Survey (N = 1,780), which included a 13‐point examination of scientific facts and reasoning. Ordinary least squares regression models are estimated to determine the impact of religious affiliations and beliefs net of other control variables such as race, gender, education, income, region, and rural residence.ResultsAnalyses show that sectarian Protestants, Catholics, and people with fundamentalist beliefs in the inerrancy of the Bible have significantly lower levels of scientific literacy when compared with secular Americans. Religious differences are identifiable in multivariate analyses controlling for other demographic factors.ConclusionsReligion plays a sizeable role in the low levels of scientific literacy found in the United States, and the negative impact of religious factors is more substantial than gender, race, or income.

Democratic Peace or Clash of Civilisations? Target States and Support for War in Britain and the USA

Research on public support for war has shown that citizens are responsive to the objectives of military action, the chances of success, the interests at stake and other strategic factors. Less attention has been paid to the nature of the target state: are some states just “the kind of countries that we should/should not be attacking”? In this comparative study we look at two features of the target state – regime type and dominant faith – in order to test whether the ‘democratic peace’ and the ‘clash of civilizations’ these are reflected in US and British public opinion on the use of force. The same survey experiment was administered over the internet to American and British samples. Our main results show little difference across the two cases: both publics were somewhat more inclined to use force against dictatorships than against democracies, and against mainly Islamic than against mainly Christian countries. The clash of civilizations seems to trump the democratic peace, with citizens in both countries readier to use force against Islamic democracies than Christian dictatorships. Religion played no moderating role in Britain: Christians and non-believers were alike readier to attack Islamic than Christian states. However, in the US, the dominant faith effect was driven entirely by Christians; it seems that secular Americans refuse to take part in any clash of civilizations. The results suggest that public judgements are driven more by international images and identities than by strategic calculations of threat.

Secularism, Fundamentalism, or Catholicism? The Religious Composition of the United States to 2043

We provide a cohort-component projection of the religious composition of the United States, considering differences in fertility, migration, intergenerational religious transmission, and switching among 11 ethnoreligious groups. If fertility and migration trends continue, Hispanic Catholics will experience rapid growth and expand from 10 to 18 percent of the American population between 2003 and 2043. Protestants are projected to decrease from 47 to 39 percent over the same period, while Catholicism emerges as the largest religion among the youngest age cohorts. Liberal Protestants decline relative to other groups due to low fertility and losses from religious switching. Immigration drives growth among Hindus and Muslims, while low fertility and a mature age structure causes Jewish decline. The low fertility of secular Americans and the religiosity of immigrants provide a countervailing force to secularization, causing the nonreligious population share to peak before 2043.

Revelation All

תולגתה Agi Mishol [End Page 98] [End Page 100] Revelation Agi Mishol (bio) Translated by Lisa Katz (bio) Everything stoppedwhen the angel of two split seconds appeared. I stood, my face to the window,preparing salad. The knife was about to woundthe tomato's smooth skin. My cells electrifiedand my body was continuously present, my spine rising tallout of my hips heavy as a flower stand. [End Page 99] When the angel approached, I breathed through gillsI didn't know I had,in the presentwhich is all tenses. What blew over me was not windwhat blew over me was the lightfor which everyone longs. I spoke the hummingbird's lineswhile the angel sucked my heart'sbrandy filling, just the angel and meisolated from time's courseinside handcuffs like parentheses. At the other split secondI returned to the sound of the dogs barking, the tomato cut in two,its juices continued to bleed, the clouds at the windowcontinued to practice shapes, and if I'm shown pure marble –I'll still call it water water1. Agi Mishol Agi Mishol is one of Israel's most popular contemporary poets. Her latest volume of poems, House Call, following on a dozen earlier ones, was published in Israel in summer of 2009; the title poem deals at length with her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her next book will be a selection of essays on writing and literature, including the figure of the muse. Look There, a selection of her poems in English, was published by Graywolf Press in 2006. She has two children and two new grandchildren. Lisa Katz Lisa Katz won the 2008 Mississippi Poetry Prize. Reconstruction, a volume of her poetry translated from English into Hebrew, as well as poems written in Hebrew, was published by the veteran Israeli press Am Oved in 2008. A secular American, in 1983 she moved from her native New York to Israel, where she now works as a translator. In addition to Mishol's Look There, she is the translator (with Shlomit Naor) of the forthcoming Approaching You in English (Zephyr Press), poetry with a focus on gender and religious practice by Admiel Kosman. She is the mother of two bilingual adults in their 20s. Footnotes 1. In Tractate Hagiga 14b, Babylonian Talmud: four sages entered an orchard/paradise (pardes): Ben Azzai, Ben Zoma, the Other, and Rabbi Akiba. Rabbi Akiba warned them, "When you enter near the stones of pure marble, do not say 'water. water,' since it is written, 'He who speaks falsehood will not be established before My eyes.'" (Psalms 101:7). [End Page 101] Copyright © 2009 Bridges Association Copyright © 2009 Bridges Association

Secular Americans and Secular Jewish Americans: Similarities and Differences

This paper explores similarities and differences between Americans of Jewish heritage who profess no religion and the general population of Americans who profess no religion. The “no religion” group may be the vanguard of secularism. In degree of secularization, Jews and non-Jews of no religion come from different starting points and are on different trajectories. Data sources are the American Jewish Identity Survey (AJIS) 2001 for the Jewish population and the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) 2001 for the general population. While the socio-demographic profile of a person who professes no religion in the general population is quite distinct (a young, single male who resides in the West or the Northeast), the no-religion segment of Jews is demographically much like the religious segment. One explanation might be the relatively larger share of “no religion” Jews in the total Jewish population so Jews professing no religion are not a fringe group. Another is American Jews’ unique social history and greater exposure to secularism.

Memory, war and American identity: Saving Private Ryan as cinematic jeremiad

The American jeremiad long has been an established rhetorical form that operates as a corrective to conditions gone awry. In response to a “falling away,” the jeremiad issues a call to the community to return home to idealized foundational principles. The American experience in Vietnam produced in the national community a crisis of faith in foundational principles and precipitated a crisis of representation of national identity. This essay argues that the secular American jeremiad emerges prominently in Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan. Through a close reading of the film, contextualized by the preceding twenty years of popular cinematic lamentation following Vietnam, I argue that the film operates, in part, as a rhetorically skillful response to the post-Vietnam crisis of national identity. I further argue that Spielberg both acknowledges and appropriates the crisis, offering viewing audiences a “way home” to mythic America. The essay concludes with a discussion of the tensions between the conservative mandate in the jeremiadic form and the possibilities for social transformation.

Health care as an essential building block for a free society: the convergence of the Catholic and secular American imperative.

As the twentieth century closes, marked by triumphal strides in medical advances, the American society has yet to ensure that each person has access to affordable health care. To correct this injustice, this article calls on the nation's political and corporate leaders, providers, and faith-based groups to join all Americans in a new national conversation on systemic health care reform. The Catholic faith tradition is one that compels both a proclamation to ministry values and a commitment to speak out against the challenges or threats to what are essential to the well-being of individuals and society. The Catholic health ministry must therefore be both a voice for the voiceless and an agent of transformation. The nation's goal should be to "reposition" health care from its status as an important, but ultimately optional building block to one that is essential.

Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (review)

BOOK REVIEWS3O5 commonwealth." Instead we are told that For most Southerners the war represented "an assertion ofracial and economic prerogatives." Ifthe affinity school of thought is going to provide a better understanding, then this begs the other half of the question: why did the North fight? Now its back to the garden to differentiate the roots. John M. Ysursa San Diego State University Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. By Richard J. Cawardine. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Pp. 512. $25.00 paper.) Nineteenth-century America seemed a pious hope in the best sense. That only makes it all the stranger that an earlier generation of historians, in studying politics from the backrooms to the polling-booths, halted cautiously at the church door. Yet as Richard Cawardine's excellent study shows, we cannot understand how the parties broke and reconfigured in the antebellum period, norhow the war itself came, without seeing the fervor unleashed in the Second Great Awakening. Cawardine's study may well preach to the converted. Recent scholars have known well the connection between religious and political loyalties, and the moral dimension of the breakup of the Jacksonian party system has become a commonplace. But no book has made the thorough examination thatEvangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America, nor used such a wide array of religious tracts, sermons, and ecclesiasticaljournals. Where most scholars have looked at religion from a party perspective, Cawardine sets forth politics from a religious perspective. In doing so, he places it closer to the center of political debate than anyone has done before. Each party tried to get right with the godly. Evangelicals, as Cawardine makes clear, could findjustification for every position, from slavery's Scriptural blessedness to its incarnate evil to its presence as one of those wrongs better acquiesced in than removed at the cost of disunion. Still, one side always seemed to have the stronger battalions. While partisans roared for 'Tippecanoe" and guzzled hard cider in front of ersatz log cabins, ministers assured their parishioners of the candidate's credentials as an abstainer and warned how Democracy meant free thinking, blasphemy, and subservience to the Pope. Whiggery could never escape the nativism, temperance, and anti-Catholicism that its evangelical legions gave it. In the end, those forces helped weaken the party on the state level, while the moral case against slavery brought its disruption and complete destruction nationally. Laws against activity on the Sabbath and liquor-dealing any time shaped the secondAmerican party system and became a component in the third. At the same time, Southern evangelicals found in their faith a new backing for an aggressive proslavery position. By 1 860 evangelicalism, Northern and Southern, had made the differences between slave and free states 3?6CIVIL WAR HISTORY virtually irresoluble, and turned the conflict that followed into something of a holy war. Cawardine makes a good case, but certain cautions to readers too hasty to read the caveats in his measured prose are in order. To show that evangelical Protestants reacted to events does not show how far they actually influenced them. Limitations are built into the sources that this book uses—as there are to any sources. Not a bit surprisingly, religious magazines and ministers, when they dealt with the secular world, brought religion into it. That does not necessarily show that when their parishioners responded to events, they put the moral dimension foremost. Something more than we see here is needed to show that the church people were themselves driving forces in public debate. A good case in point would be the i860 campaign. Clearly, all parties were glad to have backing in the pulpit, and Republicans went out of their way to earn their nickname, "the party of moral ideas." But looking at their campaign as a whole, the hosts of virtue look somewhat less prominent than they would seem from readng Cawardine's chapter 9. A party deep-dyed in piety could have chosen praying Salmon Chase; it chose Lincoln, a non-churchgoer. But that hardly mattered to the delegates in Chicago. Assembling a majority in the North, Republicanism had to appeal to self-interest, fear, patriotism, and to the skeptical and secular Americans. Fierce...

Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-45 (review)

3?6CIVIL WAR HISTORY virtually irresoluble, and turned the conflict that followed into something of a holy war. Cawardine makes a good case, but certain cautions to readers too hasty to read the caveats in his measured prose are in order. To show that evangelical Protestants reacted to events does not show how far they actually influenced them. Limitations are built into the sources that this book uses—as there are to any sources. Not a bit surprisingly, religious magazines and ministers, when they dealt with the secular world, brought religion into it. That does not necessarily show that when their parishioners responded to events, they put the moral dimension foremost. Something more than we see here is needed to show that the church people were themselves driving forces in public debate. A good case in point would be the i860 campaign. Clearly, all parties were glad to have backing in the pulpit, and Republicans went out of their way to earn their nickname, "the party of moral ideas." But looking at their campaign as a whole, the hosts of virtue look somewhat less prominent than they would seem from readng Cawardine's chapter 9. A party deep-dyed in piety could have chosen praying Salmon Chase; it chose Lincoln, a non-churchgoer. But that hardly mattered to the delegates in Chicago. Assembling a majority in the North, Republicanism had to appeal to self-interest, fear, patriotism, and to the skeptical and secular Americans. Fierce Protestantism would scare off groups that the party could not do without. So it was in other years. Whigs could always try to earn churchgoers' blessing for their nominees by appropriate political packaging. But it seemed rather an afterthought. They tended to choose people who would need pretty diligent justifying, infidels and the heroes of wars that many Northern evangelicals deplored . Any evangelical could tell the managers that one with God was in the majority; the managers might admit it, but as they knew, many a martyr burned at the stake while the votes were still being counted. Mark Wahlgren Summers University of Kentucky Frederick Douglass: Freedom 's Voice, 1818-45. By Gregory R Lampe. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 350. $45.00, cloth; $22.95, paper.) Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-45 represents an interesting and valuable contribution to understanding the career of this important historical figure. Gregory P. Lampe reexamines prevalent notions about Douglass's early years as abolitionist orator, specifically, that Douglass had enjoyed little training as a public speaker before becoming a full-time abolitionist activist in the early 1 840s and that during the first years of his career he displayed little if any independence from the white abolitionists who sponsored him. Lampe shows BOOK REVIEWS3O7 that Douglass was better prepared for an oratorical career and a more autonomous figure in his early years as full-time abolitionist than previous biographers have acknowledged. Lampe comes to these conclusions by emphasizing those elements in Douglass's background that helped prepare him for a career as a public speaker and by probing to an unprecedented extent newspaper accounts and other sources that document Douglass's activities between 1839 and 1845 (the years during which he came into prominence). In fact, the author is quite critical of other Douglass scholars, such as John W. Blassingame, Benjamin Quarles, Raymond Gerald Fulkerson, and William S. McFeely, accusing them of committing numerous "errors and omissions when documenting Douglass's oratorical activities during this period" (xi). Frederick Douglass himselfdoes not escape criticism in this regard. Lampe indicates that throughout his career, Douglass, with a sense of false modesty, downplayed his preparation as a public speaker. In other words, while acknowledging Frederick Douglass's considerable oratorical gifts, Lampe demonstrates that they did not spring forth spontaneously in the early 1 840s. Instead, he shows the importance of oral culture in the slave community and how it sensitized the young Douglass to the power of the spoken word. Lampe then moves on to Douglass's years as a youth in Baltimore. In this urban setting, Douglass became literate and by accident discovered Caleb Bingham's Columbian Orator, a prescriptive book on public speaking. Literacy...

FANTASY WORLDS AND SELF‐MAINTENANCE IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LIFE

Abstract. Because actual social experience is often damaging to conceptions of self, individuals in all societies engage in identity work beyond ordinary social interaction. For people in religious groups, identity work may involve the subjective experience of interactions with spirit beings as in altered states of consciousness such as dreams, reverie, or trance. In memories, anticipations, and fantasies, secular Americans, too, may experience gratifying imaginary social interactions when they gain recognition and acclaim from imagined others. Unlike spirit relations these fantasies are not culturally defined as “real.” However, like spirit relations, they may have very real effects on self‐maintenance.

The New England Soldier: A Study in Changing Perceptions

The vision of the role of the soldier-patriot in this ode would not have been understood in New England a century earlier. Important modifications in the public's perception of New England soldiers occurred between the Pequot War in 1637 and the War for Independence. During this era the image of the military man in New England changed from the Christian Soldier of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century's more nationalistic and secular American soldier, the fighting man whom subsequent generations mythologized as the selfless minuteman of the Revolution. The earliest Puritan migrants to New England labored under no illusions about the travail they would encounter in their quest for regeneration. A zealous Anglican archbishop across the Atlantic posed a threat, but more forbidding, perhaps, was the New World wilderness. The emigrants expected conflicts with the natives. The grisly experience of the Virginians in the previous generation and the bloody history of the Spanish colonies were well-known. Moreover, common sense indicated that conflict was likely if the settlers planned to carve a society from the wilderness that was an Indian homeland and hunting ground. Even before leaving England the migrants were cautioned by their ministers to Neglect not walls, and bulwarks, and fortifications, for your owne defense. . ..

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

REVIEWS OF BOOKS Get access A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF EARLY SECULAR AMERICAN MUSIC (18th Century). By Oscar George Theodore Sonneck. Revised and enlarged by William Treat Upton. (The Library of Congress, Music Division, 1945. For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U. S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C. Pp. xvi, 617.) JOHN TASKER HOWARD JOHN TASKER HOWARD Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Musical Quarterly, Volume XXXI, Issue 4, October 1945, Pages 536–538, https://doi.org/10.1093/mq/XXXI.4.536 Published: 01 October 1945