PBS’ “American Experience” series will debut a new production this fall: God in America, a six-hour documentary detailing “400 years of the country’s enduring quest for religious liberty and its impact on society, politics, and the spiritual experience of Americans.” The doc is set to premiere on October 11, 12, and 13.

Check out the program summaries and the press release. You can also watch the trailer:

With Stephen Prothero, professor at Boston University and author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn’t, as chief editorial consultant, I’m excited about the possibilities this series could have for the understanding of American religious history in the public sphere.

HT = Religion in American History

At Religion in America, we’ve been surprisingly silent on Glenn Beck, the self-styled prophet and demagogue. Since I don’t have a TV and definitely no cable television, I’ve been pretty much immunized from Beck. Someday, though, I’ll give in and write about Glenn Beck and American religion—there is much of interest, however depressing it might be. But here’s a roundup of some good articles on Beck and religion.

• Andrew Murphy, “Beck Plays Prophet—Politics Pervade,” Religion Dispatches. Murphy is the author of a fine book on the history of the jeremiad, which I reviewed on Religion in America. In this article, Murphy compares Beck’s rhetoric to the jeremiad of Martin Luther King Jr.

• Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, “Is Glenn Beck Preaching Mormon ‘Restoration’ Theology?” Washington Post’s On Faith. Stevens-Arroyo speculates on the relationship between Beck’s teaching and Mormon theology, comparing it to Catholic doctrine of revelation.
• Mark Silk, “Beck’s Old-Time Gospel Hour,” Spiritual Politics. Silk asks why Beck’s most recent rally focused “not about what’s wrong with America but with what’s right about America.”
• Russell D. Moore, “God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck,” Moore to the Point. Moore, a dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, criticize’s Beck’s civil religion—an encouraging sign that not everyone in Beck’s core demographic is going along with him.
• Paul Harvey, “Me the People: A Roundup on the Rally,” Religion in American History. Harvey offers a roundup of coverage of Beck and religion.

While we’re on the topic of religion and politics, and especially on the topic of civil religion, here are two more articles worth thinking about:

• Stanley Hauerwas, “America’s God Is Dying,” Religion and Ethics. Hauerwas describes how “for Americans, faith in God is indistinguishable from loyalty to their country” through a mixture of Protestantism, republicanism, and common-sense morality, then argues that this American god is dying.
• Michael J. Altman, “Who Is America’s God?” Altman extends Hauerwas’s article with a quotation and analysis from Émile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Last and least, The Onion reports that a “Man Already Knows Everything He Needs to Know About Muslims.”

New York Times columnist Charles Blow included this chart in his latest op-ed. Countries further to the right are wealthier than those to the left, while countries higher up are more religious than those further down. In general the trend is that wealthier nations are less religious than poorer nations. A decent curve could be extrapolated except for the wealthiest nation included, the United States, which persists in its abnormal religiosity among developed nations.

With this post, Religion in America welcomes Jonathan Newell as an author. Jonathan holds a degree in history and a master’s of divinity, and he is a chaplain in the Army Reserves, as well as an extraordinarily prolific reviewer of books.

Nicolson, Adam. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. 280 pages. ISBN: 0060185163.

With the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version rapidly approaching, one can hear legions of scholars drawing their pens from their scabbards, ready to enter the fray over the Authorized Version. The growth of the King James Only movement over the past decades have hardened opinions among American Christians. Some see it as a fossil; others see it as having come down from heaven.

Though Nicholson does not speak directly to these modern controversies, both sides would benefit from a careful reading of Nicolson’s work. Though most histories of the English Bible are as dry as the manuscripts they describe, this work is full of verve and life. That is because Nicholson tells the story of the KJV by telling the stories of the translators. Using the scant biographical sources available, he presents compelling portraits of Puritans, Anglicans, and the monarch whose varying and often-conflicting motives produced what many consider to be the finest literary work in English.

Nicholson’s major contribution to the KJV debate is placing the translation’s origin back into its human context. He highlights James I’s desire to unify his realm and church. Guided by his directives, the scholars strove to produce a translation that would avoid the controversies of the Geneva Bible, improve the language of previous versions such as the Bishops’ Bible, and above all, reflect the majesty of God in the Word as James strove to reflect it in the kingdom. Nicholas concludes that as a product of Jacobean England, the Authorized Version cannot be understood apart from Jacobean England.

He guides the reader into developing a new frame of reference for approaching the translation’s language. He argues that the language of the KJV was not the common man’s English of the day. Instead, he points out the scholars translated from the Hebrew and Greek, compared previous English translations and then evaluated those translations in the academic’s language—Latin. The translators were seeking a translation that would be read aloud in the services of the Church. The words and rhythms chosen by the translators were intended to create a majestic spoken word. Thus the modern reader of the KJV must remember that the modern idea of silent, personal reading was not the world of the translators where public, oral reading of Scripture was widely practiced.

The book serves as a reminder that the KJV and its attendant controversies must be evaluated in the context of the seventeenth-century. Clergy and laity alike must realize the KJV and all translations bear the marks of the religious, social, and political contexts of the day. Until we pause from the shouting and raving of the recent controversy and allow the translators to speak for themselves, we will fail to appreciate the King James Version for what it really is—a majestic, yet human, endeavor to speak the Word of God in “the tongues of men and angels.” As Myles Smith wrote in the “Preface,” “Others have laboured, and you may enter into their labours; O receive not so great things in vain.”

What is identity? What is a self? How has selfhood changed over time?

Those are the questions that Charles Taylor, a philosopher with a historical method, sets out to answer in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989). His book is an investigation of how the modern sense of what it means to be a person came into being through the influences of philosophers and popular thought. To that end, he first lays a philosophical foundation, then offers a history of selfhood that is somewhere between straightfoward intellectual history and a history of mentalités.

Taylor’s basic argument is that the concept of the self in linked to morality. Morality means not simply a set of claims about what one ought to do or not do to be moral; rather, it means what one ought to be or not be. Morality is related to the self by what Taylor calls a framework. How one thinks about oneself depends (1) on what one considers to be the Good and (2) how one relates to that Good. If this all sounds very philosophical, it is. But the insight is rather simple, though profound: you can only think of yourself as you think of yourself in relation to what is most important.

Taylor’s insight that selfhood is dependent on the Good and on one’s relation to it permits him to ask how those conceptions of self have changed over time, as people held to different goods and related to them differently. The bulk of the book is spent on a sweeping exposition of the changes in the self, running from Plato to Augustine to Descartes to Locke to Montaigne to Protestant Christianity to the Victorians to the present. In brief, the transition the Taylor describes is from an external sense of the self to an interior sense of the self. It is also a transition from finding meaning in extraordinary deeds to one that finds meaning in everyday actions.

I am fairly averse to using theory in the practice of history, but I find Taylor’s work to be extraordinarily useful. At the minimum, it provides a set of questions of interest to the historian of religion. How did people conceive of who they were, and how did their religion influence their conceptions? His work also provides a way of thinking about the question of religion and the self. Taylor argues that the self is undefinable apart from the Good, so it follows that religion, which defines the Good and how to relate to it for many people, is a powerful key to understanding people’s sense of self. This is a way to use religion as a lens to another topic, yet without treating religion as something merely epiphenomenal. Then too, Taylor provides a fairly compelling narrative of the differences in the self over time. I suppose that for myself, it is also appealing that Charles Taylor is himself a Catholic, and so is working to some degree within the Christian philosophical tradition.

I hope in time to make all this philosophizing here a bit more concrete in my own work on conversion. Conversion, after all, is a fundamental change in the self, usually taking the form of new relationship to God, the world, and the community. To take just two examples, what is the difference between a seventeenth-century Puritan in New England undergoing the anguish of conversion and a twentieth-century Cuban Catholic in Miami venerating Our Lady of Charity? The difference is one of ritual and creed and community, to be sure, but also of conceptions of the self.

I’ve been reading through Gordon Wood’s exemplary Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 and noticed something interesting.

During the 1780s and 90s a political division grew between Federalists and anti-Federalists. The Federalist faction supported a strong central government that could act as a check on the democratic excesses of the state legislatures and proposed a standing army to defend that government from riots or revolution, a trenchant fear in the years after the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. The Federalists favored a Constitution that would delineate federal prerogatives.

The anti-Federalists adhered to a liberal tradition which pulled from 17th century Whig thought. These English Whigs believed that absolutist governments aggrandized themselves as the expense of the people. Thus the anti-Federalists feared a strong central government and initially opposed a Constitution that gave the federal government broadened powers.

What Wood does not emphasize, though, is another key difference between these two political factions. The anti-Federalists ascribed to a rosy understanding of human nature. As Wood notes (11-13),

People, however humble and uneducated, possessed a sympathetic social instinct and a moral intuition that told them right from wrong. …

If only the natural tendencies of people to love and care for one another were allowed to flow freely, unclogged by the artificial interference of government, particularly monarchial government, the most devout republicans like Paine and Jefferson believed, society would prosper and hold itself together. …

Many Revolutionary Americans imagined a new and better world emerging, a world, according to some clergymen, of “greater perfection and happiness than mankind has yet seen.” In this New World Americans would build a harmonious republican society of “comprehensive benevolence” and become the “eminent example of every divine and social virtue.”

Anti-Federalists thought that people were essentially good. The bad things which happened, like war, were a result of government corruption, the self-aggrandizing tendency of absolute governments. By dissolving the central government,  Jefferson thought, they would “destroy the strange idea of their being a permanent body, which has unaccountably taken possession of the heads of their constituents, and occasions jealousies injurious to the public good.”

The Federalists were rather more skeptical of humankind’s nature. In 1795 arch-federalist Alexander Hamilton was faced with a crisis between Great Britain and the United States. He advocated increasing the size of the military while negotiating for peace. Anti-federalists feared a large military because they believed that its existence would tempt the government to engage in wars of aggression. But Hamilton did not believe that government was the ultimate source of human ills. Rather, “the seeds of war are sown thickly in the human breast.” Wood writes (195),

Hamilton saw the world made up of competing nation-states, with republics being no more peace-loving than monarchies. The sources of war, he said, did not lie in the needs of funding systems, bureaucracies, and standing armies, as the Republicans assumed; they lay in the natural ambitions and avarice of all human beings.

What is so fascinating about these contrasting views of human nature is that they are thoroughly secularized. The antagonists on either side – most notably Hamilton and Jefferson – were not known for their religiosity. Wood writes (11),

While most clergymen continued to urge Christian love and charity upon their ordinary parishioners, many other educated and enlightened people sought to secularize Christian love and find in human nature itself a scientific imperative for loving one’s neighbor as one-self. “Just as the regular motions and harmony of the heavenly bodies depend upon their mutual gravitation towards each other,” said liberal Massachusetts preacher Jonathan Mayhew, so too did love and benevolence among  people preserve “order and harmony” in society. Love between humans was the gravity of the moral world, and it could be studied and perhaps even manipulated more easily than the gravity of the physical world.

So although religion qua religion plays little role in the discussion, there are certainly religious ghosts in the machine.

This discussion has implications for the modern “Was America a Christian nation?” debate. Although many of the founding fathers were not Christian in a sense that modern evangelicals would recognize, their ideas were clearly influenced by a secularized form of theology.

This story should also be a reminder of the importance of broadening the horizons of religious history. These “religious ghosts in the machine” pop up all over the place. Religion can even be found among the irreligious.

Following up (sort of) on Lincoln’s post about the proposed Muslim community center near Ground Zero, check out Bruce Feiler’s commentary in today’s Huffington Post: “Obama a Muslim! Lincoln a Catholic! FDR a Jew! Why Americans Don’t Like Their President’s God.” Coming on the heels of a report from the Pew Forum that 1 in 5 Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, Feiler’s article points out that campaigns of religious intolerance have targeted U.S. presidents since the nation’s founding.

Here’s a taste:

Americans taking out their discrimination toward minority religions on the president of the United States is as American as apple pie; the custom has been going on as long as there has been a presidency. George Washington was the subject of widespread grumbling that he was a more loyal Mason than he was a Christian.

The entire debate about the “Ground Zero mosque” and the even-wider campaign against Islam in general that’s been waged across the United States this summer misses a larger point: These kinds of campaigns have been waged in the United States since our founding. . . .

But as reliably as Americans have adopted these views, they’ve also moved past them. In every case of religious discrimination in the United States, whether it was Methodists in the eighteenth century, Catholics in the nineteenth century, or Jews in the twentieth century, the once reviled and ostracized “outsider” religion in America eventually makes it into the inner circle.

And odds are the pattern will repeat itself with Muslims in the twenty-first century.

I find Feiler’s argument to be rather compelling, and his historical contextualization helpful. Thoughts and/or responses?

To read the entire article, click here.

HT: John Fea

For some time the news has been filled with debates over a proposed Islamic community center (not a mosque) to be built near Ground Zero in New York City. On the one hand, the usual suspects in the Republican Party and, more surprisingly, the Anti-Defamation League, have opposed the center as an insult to the victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks. On the other hand, American Muslims have defended the center as a perfectly legitimate outreach into the community, as the Islamic equivalent of the YMCA.

The debate, however, has taken a far nastier turn. Opponents of the community center have attempted to use the power of the state to prevent its construction. One attempt has tried to declare the existing building on the site a landmark, to prevent the property from being developed. Another, only slightly less invidious attempt, has offered state funding if the center would be built further from Ground Zero. (It is worth noting in passing the hypocrisy of politicians and voters who rail against state interference in the economy and society yet have no qualms about using state power to interfere in this case.)

The question at issue is not whether one would wish for an Islamic community center to be built at the proposed location. The question is this: Should the state have the power to prevent the free use of private property for a religious purpose?

The answer is no. If that answer is not obvious, then I recommend Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s August 3 speech and Melissa Rogers’s essay for the Washington Post. That answer is required by the basic principles of our republic and, I believe, by the implications of the gospel. To their shame, it is an answer too few Christians, and in particular too few evangelicals, have been willing to give.

Most historians of film remember organized religion as one of American cinema’s classical antagonists, especially in the early half of the twentieth century. They recall the vitriol leveled by conservative Protestant and Catholic groups against the “juggernaut of destruction”¹ known as the motion picture. One writer summed up much of conservative Christianity’s sentiments quite succinctly: “Nothing has ever been introduced to the public, of such gigantic proportions, as a means of poisoning and debauching the mind and morals of the young, as the ‘moving picture show.”²

But not all conservative religious groups and leaders were utterly opposed to the new cultural phenomenon. As Terry Lindvall points out in his well-researched and cleverly written Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry, fundamentalist revivalist Billy Sunday was in fact a promoter of the early motion picture.

Lindvall recounts one of Sunday’s endorsements, this of the D.W. Griffith film The Two Orphans:

The power of the moving picture should be used to inculcate warnings and lessons that the world needs. . . . [The movie is a] sermon of the highest value. Would that every story carried on the screen might have a lesson as powerful, and as useful, a motive as praiseworthy.³

The idea that a movie could be used as a “sermon of the highest value” would not gain significant momentum within much of Evangelical Protestantism until the 1951 release of Mr. Texas, a fiction film produced by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as an evangelistic tool for use in churches, at Christian youth functions, and at Graham’s crusades.

But Sunday’s remarks suggest that, despite mainstream Protestant objections to film in the early decades of the twentieth century, church leaders were able to distinguish between the morally neutral technology of filmmaking and the often violent and sexualized imagery of Hollywood productions—a distinction some other conservative Protestant groups (like Mennonites, Brethren in Christ, and similar Anabaptists) could not draw.

1. George Detweiler, “As to Moving Picture Shows,” Evangelical Visitor, February 5, 1912, p. 2.
2. “Primary Causes,” Evangelical Visitor, August 7, 1911, p. 15.
3. Quoted in Terry Lindvall, Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christ Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 107