White Protestants Research Articles

Sacraments, Veils, and the Altar of Democracy: Calvinist Rhetoric in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”

Abstract: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) often speaks in terminology that resonates distinctively with New English Protestant discourse. Souls does so partly because of a growing indifference among formerly animated Northeastern white abolitionists, which imperiled Black voting rights at the turn of the twentieth century. This article argues that Souls articulates a Black literary identity through metaphors reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” a text that takes on new meanings in light of the hermeneutics practiced within Souls . Du Bois reminds white Protestants that all America’s souls, regardless of race, remain bound by a sacramental force in New English visions of American democracy, while simultaneously drawing on Calvinist rhetoric to insist on the importance of liberal education to the personal and social transformation of African Americans.

“No Place Is So Dear to My Childhood”: Evangelicalism, Nostalgia, and the History of an American Hymn

AbstractThis article tracks the surprising history of a love ballad about a lost sweetheart that went on to become a celebrated gospel hymn about the rural roots of America's greatness. Titled “The Little Brown Church,” but sometimes called “The Church in the Wildwood,” the song's evolution speaks to the ways in which nostalgia became central to the social and religious imagination of those American Protestants call themselves “evangelicals.” Though it first appeared in college songbooks after its publication in 1865, “The Little Brown Church” eventually became a favorite of evangelists, revivalists, and other gospel singers at the dawn of the twentieth century. For these new singers, “The Little Brown Church” spoke to more than just the simple faith they wished to restore. It also illustrated the centrality of white Protestants to the American experience at a moment when the hold these believers had on the nation was beginning to slip. And they would alter both the lyrics and the church's history to bring the two in line. The process not only reveals how nostalgia for a bygone era became vital to those who think of themselves as evangelicals in the twentieth century, but also how evangelicalism itself is something of a historical construction.

Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt

Reviewed by: Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism by Nicholas T. Pruitt Kristofer Allerfeldt Open Hearts, Closed Doors: Immigration Reform and the Waning of Mainline Protestantism. By Nicholas T. Pruitt. (New York: New York University Press, 2021. Pp. 296. $45. ISBN: 9781479803545). When we encounter Protestantism in the US immigration debates of the early to mid-20th century, it is usually backing up Nordic supremacy and anti-Catholicism. In this context, Protestantism equates with nativism and restriction. This book argues that as well as fuelling anti-immigrant sentiments, over the 40 years between the harsh quotas of 1924 and their overturning in 1965, moderate, mainline, Protestant activists played a leading role in promoting religious and racial tolerance and multi-culturalism. When Pruitt calls his subjects “mainline”, he’s referring to “a collective label applied to numerically predominant, largely white denominations driven by ecumenism.” Their Protestantism was driven by “home missions, mid-century sensibilities, and internationalist views . . . to confront long-standing racial prejudice . . . and incorporate diverse immigrant groups into their churches” (p. 3). Driven by humane theoretical and practical responses to the refugee crisis of the 1930s, WWII, de-colonisation and the Cold War, they were highly instrumental in dismantling restrictions on both European and Asian migration. One of the central themes of the book is the irony that the cultural pluralism inherent in opening US borders to increased diversity was the inevitable decline in the influence of Protestantism itself. Yet, as Pruitt points out Protestantism retained its key role in defining the national identity, even as its authority seemed to wane. The shift in Anglo-Protestantism’s leadership from cultural, racial and religious gatekeepers to staunch advocates of E Pluribus Unum reflected, reinforced and drove the post-war Liberal consensus. Yet as Pruitt also points out, this was not necessarily the stance of the rank and file. He cites a Harris poll taken in 1965. On the eve of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which largely did away with the discriminatory quotas of the 1920s, 65% of American Protestant Americans objected to any increase in immigrant numbers. This thinking highlights—to my mind—one big gap in the book’s coverage of the declining influence of Anglo-Protestantism. If white Protestantism lost authority [End Page 218] over these years, the influence of African-American Protestantism powered ahead. Yet, this is barely mentioned. There is some attention paid to Mexican and Latin American immigration and migration. There is some commentary on Asian immigrants and Asian Americans. This is in spite of the fact that more than two-thirds of African Americans still identify as Protestant—and the figure for the period of the study was undoubtedly higher—their influence is largely skated over. It is also important because although church attendance generally declined over these years, that trend was slower in Black churches than in white. This is an anomaly. For if, as Pruitt argues, Anglo-Protestantism’s liberalism cost it influence, Black Protestantism’s humane stance made it far more visible and powerful, far more important, both within its own communities and on the national stage. Not only were Black churches and Black ministers vital to first the defense, then advance of civil rights, but they also formed crucial communal links in the continuing Great Migration from the Deep South. There is no analysis of liberal Protestantism’s failure to support federal anti-lynching measures, or the Federal Council of Churches for Christ’s (FCC) and National Council of Churches’ failure to make any significant inroads into integration. Professor Pruitt makes no mention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. While these are not immigration policy matters, they do show that vaunted ideals of racial equality only went so far. This omission is serious, but in general, this is a keenly observed book. It is richly researched and clearly—if densely—written. It represents a vital counterargument and revision of the standard narrative of nativism and its reverse in the twentieth century. I will certainly order a copy for Exeter University’s library. Kristofer Allerfeldt University of Exeter Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel

Reviewed by: America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest by Stephen T. Kissel Marcus Gallo (bio) Keywords Old Northwest, Midwest, Religion, Protestantism, Religious development America's Religious Crossroads: Faith and Community in the Emerging Midwest. By Stephen T. Kissel. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 268. Cloth, $110.00.) Examining the Old Northwest until 1848, the year that Wisconsin became a state, Stephen T. Kissel describes the religious "bonds, networks, and relationships that allowed these isolated western settlements to evolve in their regional unity and identity" (2). Kissel tackles a variety of topics, including home worship and hospitality, religious literature and schooling, church-building, camp revivals, Bible societies, and social reform movements. These religious undertakings helped develop the Old Northwest, providing structure to the region prior to the establishment of "stable civic and political infrastructures," when "the separation of church and state became more clearly defined by civic and political policies" (145–46). By midcentury, as the pioneer period ended, the Northwest was home to a "religious mosaic" encompassing a variety of sects that still flavored local society (145). [End Page 650] Kissel's chapters all follow a similar structure: Each looks extensively at how mainline Protestant sects handled the aforementioned undertakings, then touches briefly on similar developments among northwestern minorities: Catholics; Blacks and Indians; and Mormon, Shaker, and Rappite utopians. The repetition of this structure can leave these sections on minorities feeling tacked on; the book offers far more to readers interested in the experiences of white Protestants than to those seeking to learn about Black churches or missionary efforts among Native American communities. While not overly focused on religious violence, the rough-and-tumble nature of the Old Northwest emerges from numerous examples. In Kissel's words, "Being able to hold one's own in a fight was regarded with equal value to honesty, because it proved a man could stand his ground and defend his principles" (119). In some instances, the dividing lines could be between believers and unbelievers. Most of the inhabitants of Jackson, Michigan, and Vermillion County, Illinois, resented the presence of itinerant preachers wishing to spread religion. In Plainfield, Michigan, the settlers threatened to ride the preacher out of town on a wooden horse for insulting their integrity by preaching about the evils of prostitution. Perhaps in response to this sort of hostility, one intrepid preacher rode his circuit "with a loaded pistol and a dirk," causing the Western Methodist Conference to publicly reprimand him, then eventually drive him out of the church (116). Similarly, camp revivals attracted throngs of all sorts, including liquor salesmen, to the consternation of religious participants. Revivals could become sites of vandalism and violence when rowdy crowds of youths sought to entertain themselves by disrupting proceedings, prompting the faithful to arm occasionally themselves to maintain order. In other instances, mainstream Protestants moved beyond the defensive, targeting minority sects with violence. In 1810, convinced that local Shakers had been seducing children to run away and then abusing them, a crowd of five hundred armed men entered Union Village, Ohio, and demanded that the Shakers there renounce their faith. The vigilantes left after the Shakers convinced them that they had not, in fact, been maltreating the children of the village. What emerges is a picture of a society that lacked a monopoly on violence; religious organization helped fill the void of authority. Kissel's investigation of church disciplinary procedures is most revealing of the ways in which religious structures overlapped with civil structures in the Old Northwest, providing something of a surrogate for the state. [End Page 651] When forming, Protestant churches adopted strict rules of decorum. For example, Methodists banned "swearing, drunkenness, profaning the Sabbath, failing to attend public worship, fighting, gambling, transacting dishonest business, participating in the slave trade, and 'the putting on of gold and costly apparel'" (107). Enthusiastic lay members formed committees to strengthen the faith of the spiritually conflicted and investigate unacceptable behavior among their congregations. They punished the guilty by demanding public confessions or, for more extreme behavior, suspending or expelling members from the church. Over time, churches expanded their scope to handle disputes that blurred the line between religious...

“Bring Your Straight Friends”: Anti-Gay Religious Stigma and Black and White LGB-Affirming Church Members

Abstract This comparative study of Black and white members of LGB-affirming churches finds that race plays a major role in shaping the socio-temporal contexts in which American Protestants come to understand anti-gay religious stigma and make meaning of their affiliation to LGB-affirming churches. Through interviews with 13 Black and 14 white members of churches that actively describe themselves as affirming and inclusive of LGB people, I find that Black church members made efforts to distinguish their churches from “gay churches” and that LGB inclusion functions as a potential source of stigma for Black-affirming church members. Conversely, white respondents articulated a valuing of LGB inclusion tied to broader conceptions of inclusion and social progress. These findings suggest that Black and white Protestants encounter distinct cultural landscapes when evaluating the legitimacy and status of their religious institutions and that Black LGB-affirming church members internalize stigma related to their religious affiliations.

Rabbi Balfour Brickner, Interreligious Dialogue, and the Ironies of Liberal Zionism in America, 1967‒1980

After the June 1967 Middle East war, liberal Zionism in the United States was transformed from an assumption into an embattled claim. From the 1940s to the 1960s, most Americans had assumed that liberalism and Zionism went together naturally. Only under pressure of criticism did liberal Zionists emerge as a self-aware faction within American Zionism. Starting in 1967, among the first to question the assumption of liberal Zionism were progressive Protestants, and fissures around Zionism among American progressives appeared in interreligious dialogue between Reform Jews and liberal white Protestants. Rabbi Balfour Brickner, a leading liberal Reform rabbi and a key interlocutor for such Protestants, stood in the thick of this dialogue, and his negotiation of liberal Zionism's passage from assumption to claim reveals that transformation vividly.

Amicus Curiae Briefs and the Competing Legal Agendas of White Protestants in the United States, 1969–2020

AbstractWe use Supreme Court amicus curiae briefs filed by seven religious groups—four liberal and three conservative—to understand the changing nature of political conflict between American religious groups in the predominantly White Protestant tradition from 1969 to 2020. Religious groups on both sides of the ideological divide have increased the frequency of their amicus filings, and increasingly become involved in issue areas which were once primarily the concern of groups on the other side. These findings suggest that the culture war that redefined party politics in America has also shaped religious activism, including legal activism. We argue that these groups have increased their involvement in a wider range of issues for two reasons: their rivalry for influence over the nation's moral center has become more encompassing and overtly political, and their appreciation for and consciously developed ability to tap into the courts' influence on American politics has grown.

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era by Daniel R. Bare

Reviewed by: Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era Daniel R. Bare Curtis J. Evans Daniel R. Bare, Black Fundamentalists: Conservative Christianity and Racial Identity in the Segregation Era (New York: New York University Press, 2021) Probably no religious groups in American history, with the exception of Puritans, have received as much attention and scholarship over the last decade or two as white evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants. Beginning with George Marsden’s groundbreaking Fundamentalism and American Culture, the scholarship has continued to flow. Two books serve as bookends of one era of this scholarship: Joel Carpenter’s Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (1997) and Matthew Sutton’s A History of Modern Evangelicalism (2017). Before Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism (2017) came out with its fuller treatment of black fundamentalism, Sutton’s book was the only synthetic account to take seriously the experience of African American fundamentalists. One of the most striking insights from Sutton’s book is how seemingly little shared theological positions between white and black fundamentalists mattered for white fundamentalists insofar as their political and civic responsibilities toward African Americans. White fundamentalists supported segregation, espoused and propounded racist and buffoonish caricatures of black religiosity, and almost universally rejected any attempt to reform American society according to a Social Gospel model that found a notable [End Page 128] and important following among black (liberal and conservative) and white (liberal) Protestants. Daniel R. Bare’s Black Fundamentalists stands squarely in the midst of this historiographical debate and argues that black Americans have been excluded from the scholarship on Protestant fundamentalism. He seeks to correct that lacuna by examining the ways in which some African Americans accepted self-identification as fundamentalists and adhered to a number of “fundamentalist” doctrines. Bare argues for the salience of theological doctrine as a marker of identity and as a “meaningful analytical category.” The latter argument is a driving force in his narrative, though its plausibility is less compelling as it lays out the details of what the fundamentalist label meant apart from opposition to certain modernist positions. Unfortunately, we learn very little about the details of the lives of these black fundamentalist leaders. They appear like spectral figures; we know almost nothing of their educational background and the kinds of church contexts in which they preached. Bare makes no significant mention of the Great Migration as a force in catalyzing these divisions within black Protestantism. Even when social context comes into play, Bare tends to misconstrue the power dynamics of racial oppression by insisting that “the different social and cultural circumstances facing black and white communities often led to substantially different social actions and applications, even among those who would commonly agree on the most important fundamentalist doctrines” (15). To speak of black confrontations with racism as merely “different social actions and applications” of theological doctrines indicates at best a serious misunderstanding of the harshness and circumscriptions of social existence for blacks, as though the two groups were equal in merely “applying” doctrines to the circumstances of their lives. Black Fundamentalists has five chapters and a helpful introduction that points out the ways in which race and African American fundamentalism have not been adequately addressed in the existing scholarship. Bare makes a compelling case for the inclusion of African Americans in narratives of fundamentalism, but his specific doctrinal approach to black Protestants leaves a lot of missing parts. The first chapter uses African American weekly newspapers as a source for discussions about the prevalence of fundamentalism in black communities. Given the complicated, critical, and sometimes adversarial perspective that black newspapers took on black religious life, it seems doubtful that their claims about fundamentalism as a widespread phenomenon among black Protestants should be taken as the last word. Calling someone a fundamentalist was often a way to denigrate their entire religious perspective, and black newspapers and secular critics often resorted to this tactic (a point that Bare notes in respect to claims about what was best for black civic and political life). [End Page 129] Bare’s second chapter looks at the five fundamental doctrines across black Protestantism and compares black...

Run for Your Life

Run for Your Life Kim McLarin (bio) In the years after my divorce I underwent a prolonged emotional crisis, one which involved bouts of depression, great batches of French fries, and a stubborn habit of falling in love with men who did not love me in return. For the most part these men were not bad people, were not, as they hacked their way through the swamp of midlife dating, deliberately destructive, or at least no more so than I. There was, however, one person whose bad behavior was intentional, who was—in his dealings with women in general and me in particular—selfishly, gleefully, actively unkind. This person reveled in the notion of having an upper hand in relationships, of power as aphrodisiac. Alternately attentive and dismissive, lying and truthful, nastily disparaging and lavish with praise, he kept me off-center and I allowed it, drawn to the treatment like a cat towards catnip. Catnip sprinkled on coals. It was a messy, painful, damaging connection, not good for anyone. My friends, watching from the sidelines, frequently registered their concern and disapproval, but I remained unhearing and unmoved. Eventually one said, “You know, this is an abusive relationship.” I bristled. An abusive relationship? The summation rankled. The man in question had never hit me, never become physical, never so much as threatened violence. Yes, he was a jerk, a selfish user without remorse. But an abuser? Wouldn’t that make me a victim? Wouldn’t that make me weak? The definition of abuse is this: to use wrongly or improperly, use to bad effect or for a bad purpose, to misuse; to hurt or injure by maltreatment; to treat a person or animal with cruelty or violence. Not all of these things were true about the relationship, but a few of them were. Enough to fail to ease my discomfort. Enough to make me think. If the situation was not precisely abusive, it was certainly dys-functional, and the primary distinction, I came to realize, was the issue of power. In my case, the only power this guy had over me was power I handed to him. In summer 2020, after police officers in Wisconsin shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times as he leaned into the car where his children sat, I came across a video clip on the internet. It wasn’t the shooting; I have not watched a video of police shooting or ramming or kneeling on the necks of Black people since Rodney King. The clip I stumbled across was an interview with Doc Rivers, coach [End Page 146] of the Los Angeles Clippers. He sat on a bench after some game, discussing not fouls and shots but the police shooting of Mr. Blake and other Black people, the cynical fear-mongering of then-President Donald Trump and other Republicans, the way peaceful Black protest is met with force while violent white protest is met with shrugs. Forcing back tears, Coach Rivers said: “It’s amazing why we keep loving this country and this country doesn’t love us back.” Well, there you go, I thought. That is an abusive relationship. _______ According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, a person experiencing abuse may be embarrassed or fear judgment and stigmatization; love the person who is abusing them and believe that they will change; deny that anything is wrong; and/or excuse the other person. The person may also behave in ways that can be difficult for people outside the relationship to understand. These behaviors include refusing to leave the relationship; believing that the other person is powerful or knows everything; idealizing the person who carried out the abuse during periods of calm; and believing the abuse is deserved. _______ When I was a child the Fourth of July passed with little fuss. Maybe my mother burned some hotdogs on our small charcoal grill, maybe my uncle brought over some sparklers and we ran around fizzling in the dark. Even the Bicentennial, which swept up the nation in a fervor of nostalgia and self-love, meant to us mostly televised fireworks and tall ships (both disappointing) and everything in the supermarket suddenly packaged...

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering

“Part of God’s Plan for My Life”: How Conservative Protestant Students Make Sense of Social Forces and Social Inequality

Research shows that White conservative Protestants’ individualistic views impede their pursuit of structural solutions to social injustice. When introduced to a structural perspective through a sociology course, what religio-cultural tools do conservative Protestant students use to interpret the impact of social factors on their lives? Through an analysis of student reflections, I found that the primary way they made sense of social factors was through a lens of divine control, and this did not vary by social location. A secondary way was viewing them as unfair, a view that was more common among advantaged students than disadvantaged students.

Evangelical Internationalists and Human Rights

In 2019 U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched the Commission on Unalienable Rights, a council charged with defining human rights for U.S. foreign policymakers grounded in the founding documents of the United States. Few were surprised with the resulting emphasis on religious freedom and property rights, as announced by Pompeo in a 2020 speech. In the past several years, scholars of religious studies, historians, and political scientists have scrutinized the emergence of “religious freedom” as a signature issue for white U.S. evangelicals in domestic as well as international politics. Lauren Frances Turek’s To Bring the Good News to All Nations offers an essential background through an analysis of the ideology and networks of conservative-leaning white evangelical internationalists in the late-Cold-War era of the 1970s and 1980s. Turek's evangelicals are white Protestants (she focuses primarily on Baptists, Presbyterians, and Pentecostals as well as a number of ecumenical organizations) who, in...

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison

Reviewed by: Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South by Elizabeth L. Jemison Pearl J. Young (bio) Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South. By Elizabeth L. Jemison. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 242. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $29.95.) Many scholars have considered the reluctance of white southerners to come to terms with emancipation and the efforts by freedpeople to exercise political and social power after the Civil War. Few, however, have considered the shadow of proslavery theology and the extent to which southerners, both Black and white, continued to wrestle over the theological assumptions at the heart of American slavery in the postemancipation era. In Christian Citizens, Elizabeth Jemison argues that the mind-set of proslavery theology—particularly its outlooks on patriotism, the past, and the norms surrounding family, gender, and sex—played a significant role in the trajectory of racial hierarchy and segregation in the postemancipation South. Using published political and denominational records together with sermon notes, curated narratives, and private writings, Jemison offers compelling evidence that Black and white Protestants in the lower Mississippi valley embraced Christian citizenship in their political and social endeavors after emancipation, eventually creating two distinct communities in conversation and debate with one another. Jemison argues for ideological continuity between the antebellum southern world of slavery and the postemancipation reality of violence and racial suppression, a continuity often discounted by scholars focused on the Civil War as a turning point rather than a point of inflection. If the proslavery mind-set endured beyond 1865, then the narrative that abolition triumphed through the Civil War is less meaningful. Additionally, its endurance suggests that proslavery Christianity was about much more than defending slavery, something scholars, such as Charles Irons and [End Page 589] Mitchell Snay, have suggested. What distinguishes the postemancipation era is that Black Christians had a political and religious voice in debates over belonging and power and challenged the fundamental assumptions of white southerners and their theology. As a result, the white "Redemption" of the South, a project to restore the racial status quo of the antebellum era, focused on suppressing the voices of Black men, convincing white northerners to abandon their support of freedpeople, and returning the control of politics, society, and narratives of the past to white southern men. Importantly, Jemison's study restores Black Christians as equal players in the postbellum world and demonstrates repeatedly that, as much as white southern Christians promoted paternalism and the dependent status of freedpeople, they were forced to debate and engage with Black Christians who challenged them by advocating for their own self-interests. Jemison, in particular, prompts historians of American religion to confront their assumptions of evangelicalism and Christian behavior by subtly suggesting that these norms are themselves grounded in assumptions of white supremacy. For example, she juxtaposes white southern Christians, who argued for the separation of religion and politics and the place of men in public debates, with Black Christians, who argued that Christian piety qualified them for citizenship and eventually celebrated women who fought against lynching. To interpret Black Christians as departing from orthodoxy erases the fact that both sides used religion to justify their political action and that legal disenfranchisement and extralegal violence impeded Black men in their activism against racial injustice. Furthermore, Jemison challenges the narrative of the Black church fighting an uphill battle toward legitimacy; she highlights Black citizens' accomplishments following the Civil War and the systemic efforts of white southern Christians to unseat their fellow Christians and erase their voices and actions from the narrative. In her introduction, Jemison makes an unusual comment about the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, stating, "I argue against an accepted reading of CME Church history as complicit amid white supremacy" (7). The notion that a Black denomination sponsored by the white southern Methodist church endorsed white paternalism seems so obvious as to be tedious, particularly in contrast to the Black-founded, abolitionist-leaning African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. While seemingly significant only to those mired in the minutia of denominational histories, this methodological choice demonstrates Jemison's willingness to reject traditional interpretations of the...

The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors by John W. Compton

The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors by John W. Compton

위상의 정치에서 본 백인 복음주의 개신교도의 트럼프 지지

위상의 정치에서 본 백인 복음주의 개신교도의 트럼프 지지

How Liberal Protestant Church Historians Helped Turn “Christianity” into a Good White Protestant American Religion in the Twentieth Century

From the three historians of early Christianity whose lives and careers Elizabeth Clark discusses inThe Fathers Refounded—Arthur Cushman McGiffert of Union Theological Seminary in New York, George LaPiana at Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case from the University of Chicago Divinity School—there breathes a palpable air of white, upper-middle-class liberal Protestant complacency and intellectual superiority. Modernists all, they know they are on the winning side of truth because they are confident that they are on the winning side of time. Summarizing McGiffert's distinction between ancient and contemporary Christianity, Clark writes: “Only in modernity, when God's immanence was championed, was the dualism between human and divine in Christ overcome.” “Christ, if he was human,” McGiffert believed, “must be divine, as all men are.” McGiffert's historiography shimmers with Emersonian confidence and ebullience. In his assumption—his assertion—of “only in,” we hear the ringing sound of modernity's triumphant temporality.

Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia's Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970, by Stanley Keith Arnold

<i>Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia's Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970</i>, by Stanley Keith Arnold

Reconfiguring the Boundaries of American Religious Studies

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 10–13 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.03 Reconfiguring the Boundaries of American Religious Studies Abtsam Saleh Harvard University, Cambridge, USA Why is American Islam is so Rarely Framed as an “American Religion” in the Field of Religious Studies? Despite existing in America long before the establishment of the United States, Muslims have been largely left out of discussions on American religion within the field of religious studies. In order to answer the question of why, one has to ask what scholars of religious studies have understood “American religion” to be. According to most surveys of American religious history, the term has been used to denote the history of Christianity in America, white Protestantism more specifically, some dating the origins of American religion back to the Protestant Reformation.1 Narratives surrounding American religion were constructed to center Protestantism and the ways it has dominated public religious life in the United States, reified by legal and political actors.2 Considerations of what fell under the category of American religion were largely based on proximity to mainline Protestant churches, casting all other denominations and/or religions outside of the category. Over time, however, 1 For more recent work on this topic see John Modern, “Marshall McLuhan, Playful Prophet” in “Forum: The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 2),” Religion and American Culture 29, no. 2 (2019): 153–162. 2 See Marie A. Failinger, “Islam in the Mind of American Courts: 1800 to 1960,” Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice 32, no.1 (2012): 1–29. Abtsam Saleh 11 historians of American religion have begun to expand on this narrow definition. R. Laurence Moore’s Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans,3 although working with this mainline definition of American religion, expands on the category by examining its relationship with denominations and/or religions deemed as religious outsiders on the basis of dissenting from mainline Protestantism. Moore concludes that this categorization based on consensus-dissent is inadequate in expressing the plurality of American religious life in-so-much as it continues to center mainline Christianity as the religion of the US as a nation. In the more recent “The Study of American Religions: Critical Reflections on a Specialization,” Finbarr Curtis critically examines the category of American religion as a specialization within the discipline of religious studies, including its history of Protestant bias. Curtis highlights how despite attempts at expanding American religion to include narratives of underrepresented religious groups, these inclusions remain peripheral despite being recognized.4 This precise centering of Protestantism as the American religion and the locating of those not in proximity to it in its periphery is a reason why American Islam is so rarely framed as an “American religion” in the field of religious studies. Narratives of American religious history place American Islam in the periphery, dismissing its influence on American culture and American culture ’s influence on it. American religionists reify this categorization both in their scholarship and institutionally when American Islam is positioned as peripheral to the construction of the American nation and religion. Can Islam be “American religion”? If we move away from an understanding of American religion that centers white Protestantism and expand the category to mean religions who have both shaped and been shaped by this nation, whose understandings are put in conversation with the legal, social, political, economic, and cultural life of the United States, then Islam is certainly an American religion. American Muslims are part of the patchwork of American social-religious life, preceding the formation of the United States. Enslaved African Muslims were brought to the Americas centuries prior to the American Revolution, bringing with them their religious traditions, many maintaining them in conversation with their new surroundings, and some preserving them over generations.5 Over centuries, Islam lived and grew within 3 R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 4 Finbarr Curtis, “The Study of American Religions: Critical Reflections on a Specialization ,” Religion 42, no. 3 (2012): 365. 5 See Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, (New York: New...

Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory by Christopher C. Moore

Reviewed by: Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory by Christopher C. Moore Paul Yandle Apostle of the Lost Cause: J. William Jones, Baptists, and the Development of Confederate Memory. By Christopher C. Moore. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2019. Pp. x, 300.) Christopher Moore’s work, published as part of the University of Tennessee Press’s series America’s Baptists, stands at an intersection of historiographies, informed by scholars of white southern memory including Fitzhugh Brundage and David Blight as well as historians of American religion and nineteenth-century culture such as Mark Noll and Beth Barton Schweiger. Part biography and part survey of J. William Jones’s parallel careers as Baptist clergyman and Lost Cause apologist, Apostle of the Lost Cause traces how Jones’s roles developed in tandem, beginning with his days as a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in the late 1850s. Jones’s original plan for his life—to serve as a missionary in Canton, China—was permanently interrupted by the Civil War. Ordained in the summer of 1860, he received his appointment to Canton and was scheduled to set sail that December. When South Carolina seceded from the Union, however, Jones’s mission board delayed his departure, and he took a temporary appointment at a Baptist church in his home county in Virginia. When that state decided to leave the Union, Jones became first a Confederate chaplain and later an army evangelist, a role that tied his financial support directly to Southern Baptists. Destined to stay in the United States, Jones became pastor in 1866 of a Baptist church in Lexington, Virginia, the town where Robert E. Lee settled after accepting the presidency of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). Working as one of the clergy who served on rotation as chaplain at the school, Jones got to know Lee and his family. His acquaintance with the Lees led him to his alternate career as a Lost Causer, which began with his publication of a biography of Lee after Lee’s death in 1870. For the remainder of the nineteenth century and well into the first decade of the twentieth, Moore pursued his twin careers with vigor, his peripatetic life in the Southern Baptist Convention interspersed with his publication of defenses of the Lost Cause. Beyond his own publications, Jones’s work with [End Page 55] the pro-Confederate Southern Historical Society, which included a full-time position for a few years after Reconstruction, marked his determination to build a foundation of sanitized and vetted information upon which he hoped future historians would rely. Early in his work, Moore reveals his two primary goals for his study of Jones. One is to present Jones’s work as a Southern Baptist as a challenge to the scholarly argument that the popularity of Lost Cause literature reflected a muting of doctrinal differences among southern white Protestants that began during the Civil War and continued afterwards. A second is to reveal how Jones spanned the transition between two often-cited Lost Cause iterations discussed by Thomas Connelly and Barbara Bellows. The first, “Inner Lost Cause,” common in the years immediately after the war, largely involved a spirited proclamation of the superiority of the Confederate Army and its leadership over its northern counterparts. The second, “National Lost Cause,” centered on the construction of a historical narrative that would, Jones and others hoped, allow younger generations to participate in the larger life of the United States while remaining unapologetically true in heart to the Confederacy. Moore concludes from examining Jones that scholars have overestimated the degree to which Protestant denominations merged efforts toward promoting the Lost Cause in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a Southern Baptist confronted daily with the immediacy of death during the war, Jones, like most of his Protestant colleagues, was able to found common ground with other Protestant denominations, trading preaching duties and, if they so desired, referring newly converted soldiers to chaplains of other denominations amid the periods of revival that took place in the army camps in which he served. Moore argues, however, that Jones remained a champion of Baptists...