American Church History

The Strange Tale of Pope Formosus

2026-01-30T14:44:00.003-06:00

This is another post from the soon-to-be deleted Hubpages site.

History IS Stranger than Fiction

People often wonder why history is required in school. Isn't it just a bunch of dates and dead people, they think? To some degree, this could be an accurate statement. However, history is interesting. At times, the truth is stranger than fiction. I will confess that I'm a church history nut. I love learning about the history of Christianity. I'm not a Catholic, but I find medieval Catholicism very interesting.

One of the most interesting accounts from medieval church history is the sad tale of Pope Formosus.

The Cadaver Synod

Pope Formosus and Stephen VII by Jean Paul Laurens

Wikimedia Commons (PD-1923)

Formosus: The Early Years

Pope Formosus was the only Pope Formosus ever. Hence, there is no I, II, V, or XIV after his name. The year of Formosus' birth is not certain, but it is estimated around 816. He served as a Cardinal Bishop as early as 864 and first became a candidate for the papacy in 872.

Political machinations in Rome frequently determined who would become pope in these days, so Formosus was passed over. After leaving Rome, John VIII placed an excommunication on the head of the Cardinal. In 878, John removed the excommunication after Formosus reportedly agreed never to return to Rome or perform his priestly duties (although the documents are questionable). In 891, Formosus was elected to succeed Stephen V as pope.

Pope Formosus: The Papal Years

Pope Formosus actually became Pope Formosus on October 6, 891. His pontificate was not terribly memorable. Political wranglings dominated this period in European history. Not much on the ecclesiastical side happened of major note. Therefore, it could be argued that the papacy of Pope Formosus was rather inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

Pope Formosus: The Dead Years

Although being a pope who was elected pope after previously being excommunicated puts Formosus into a pretty rare category, this is not what truly set him apart in history. Formosus is most interesting because of what happened after his death.

Boniface VI immediately succeeded Formosus, but he only lasted 15 days as pope. 15 days is not a long enough time for most people to accomplish much, so we must move to the successor of Boniface VI. In 897, Pope Stephen VI (or VII, depending upon the date of the record being read) brought Formosus to trial. Stephen was influenced by a man named Lambert and his mother Agiltrude, who were apparently mad that Formosus crowned a rival named Arnulf, who invaded Rome. After Lambert and Agiltrude regained power, Agiltrude wanted to get revenge on Formosus, who was already dead.

Stephen convened a gruesome trial now known widely as the Cadaver Synod in early 897. Formosus had been dead for months, but that did not stop the exhumation of his decaying corpse. The trial was held in the Basilica of St. John Lateran with Formosus dressed in all of the papal finery. After some questioning and arguments, Formosus unsurprisingly sat silent. A deacon was appointed to answer for the dead corpse. The court deemed Formosus guilty and his papacy was basically declared null and void. The poor corpse of Pope Formosus was stripped of the papal vestments, three fingers used for giving blessings were cut off, and the body was chucked into the Tiber River (only to be retrieved).

However, the ordeal of Formosus was not quite over. After the death of Stephen VI, Formosus' body was re-buried in St. Peters. Sergius III re-affirmed the judgement against hi and demanded that all bishops consecrated by Formosus be re-consecrated, despite two previous popes viewing Formosus as legitimate. Later rulings found in favor of Formosus because of the political nature of the Cadaver Synod trial.

Review of Mark Kishlansky: A Monarchy Transformed

2026-01-27T09:50:00.002-06:00

I wrote this review for a class in grad school several years ago. I published it on Hubpages, which is about to go kaput. Here it is:

Kishlansky, Mark. A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714. New York:

Penguin, 1996.

Some works of history are groundbreaking studies that investigate new sources or look at old sources in a new way, while others tend to synthesize the body of scholarly literature that already exists. Mark Kishlansky’s A Monarchy Transformed belongs to the latter category.Kishlansky wrote A Monarchy Transformed as the volume on the Stuart period in the Penguin History of Britain series.Kishlansky argued that the Stuart period saw major changes to the British monarchy including: 1) the monarch’s “constitutional position” was far different at the end of the Stuart period than it had been at the outset of the dynasty, 2) the period saw a “continual mutation” because the methods that worked for one monarch quickly became outdated, and 3) “the estate that the Stuarts had inherited was far different from the one they bequeathed.”[1]There is no real novelty to Kishlansky’s thesis, and the themes that he emphasized correspond well to current historical understanding of the Stuart era.Therefore, this book should not be considered a groundbreaking work rather it is a work of synthesis.

Kishlansky focused A Monarchy Transformed upon important people and events.There were chapters on both the political and social milieu of the Stuart period at the beginning of the book.However, from Chapter 3 onward, the work was concentrated upon a general narrative of the Stuart era and emphasized the reigns of the monarchs themselves and the crises that dominated their dynasty.Kishlansky stated that his goal was to provide a general narrative of the Stuart era for those unfamiliar with the period.The book examined the reign of each Stuart monarch from James I to Anne.Kishlansky investigated the English Revolution and the events that led up to it, the Interregnum, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution with an interesting, yet unoriginal, narrative.

There is good evidence that Britain was in better fiscal shape when the Stuart dynasty ended than when it began with the accession of King James I. There was an important change in the way kings raised money during the Stuart era.The early Stuarts had to live off of what their possessions could provide, but this was hardly enough to support the royal family and court under normal circumstances.During time of war, the fiscal situation only became worse.The budget could not absorb the extra costs, and Parliament would force the monarch to grovel for a subsidy to pay for any wars. By the end of the Stuart monarchy, these occasional Parliamentary subsidies changed to annual taxes on land and products that were spread more evenly amongst the population.The monarch was no longer expected to “live of his (or her) own.”Instead, Parliament gave what amounted to an annual budget from the revenue of the state to support the crown.The creation of the Bank of England allowed for the use of the national debt to fund expansion of the British Empire.Military disbursements were funneled through the bank and the new financial institution began to issue notes to facilitate the exchange of goods and services.[2]These changes in government financing were very beneficial to the growth of the empire.

Queen Anne presided over a much larger empire at her death than James I held at his accession.While the coronation of James I in 1603 unified England and Scotland in theory, the passage of the Act of Union in 1707 established the empire of Great Britain officially.The British also took over sizable landholdings in North America during the Stuart era, beginning with the founding of Jamestown in 1607.While Ireland continued to cause problems for England during the Stuart Era, it still remained under English control.In spite of the instability of the Stuart Era, Great Britain emerged as one of the leading European powers by the end of the seventeenth century.

During the Stuart Era, the crown transformed from a divine right absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy that existed by Parliamentary grant.James I and Charles I viewed themselves as God’s representatives on earth, and thus theoretically above any questioning by their subjects.The end of the English Revolution saw the execution of Charles for treason and the establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate.The English people quickly became disillusioned with Cromwell and restored the monarchy under Charles II.However, the Restoration changed the way that the English viewed the source of the king’s power, and after the coronation of Charles II, the king served by consent of Parliament rather than divine right.The removal of James II for Catholicism and the subsequent coronation of William and Mary cemented the prerogative of Parliament in the establishment of the English monarchs.These changes show that the Stuart Era saw the transformation of the monarchy in multiple ways.

A Monarchy Transformed was a decent introduction to the Stuart era, but that is really all that Kishlansky attempted to accomplish.This work was primarily a political history that focused upon the leading figures in seventeenth-century England.Particularly prominent were the monarchs themselves, although Kishlansky paid substantial attention to George Villiers (Duke of Buckingham under James I and Charles I) and Oliver Cromwell because of their significance to the political narrative.The book emphasized the struggle for power between the king and Parliament, especially during the reigns of Charles I and the Restoration monarchs.By the reigns of William and Mary and Anne, such struggles were largely in the past as it became obvious that Parliament largely controlled the actions of the ruler.Many historians have emphasized the economic, social, and religious components of the Stuart era.Prominent Marxist historians produced important economic and social studies that focused the period of the English Revolution in the 1640s.Christopher Hill was a notable example.Scholars such as Nicholas Tyacke have investigated the religious undercurrents of prominent Parliamentarians like John Pym and Oliver St. John. Kishlansky largely ignored these issues in his work.He only emphasized them when they were specifically tied to the political narrative.

Kishlansky pointed out that this book was intended as a very general introductory narrative, and it served that purpose reasonably well.However, this was also A Monarchy Transformed’s biggest weakness.There was nothing terribly novel about the author’s arguments nor was there any new interpretation.There was no real analysis or of primary sources.In fact, there was no evidence that Kishlansky used primary sources at all.He compiled the book entirely from the secondary literature that he had available, and he admitted as much in the preface.Furthermore, Kishlansky admitted that he referred to the leading scholars from each reign in the writing of his work for advice, almost shifting the blame of any errors to those authors, which also belies the lack of originality in the book.The recommendations for further reading section at the end of the book gave a very short historiographical essay for each of the chapters in the book, most of which, except for the two chapters on politics and society, looked at a specific chronological time period from the Stuart period that had important political events or the death of a monarch as the dividing line between them.This section gave examples of the works that Kishlansky used in arriving at his narrative and interpretations and provided a good resource for his readers to investigate the Stuart era in more depth.In the final analysis, A Monarchy Transformed was a good introductory narrative that should be useful to novices wanting to learn more about the political milieu of seventeenth-century England.Those with a general understanding of the narrative would be better served to read specialized books that make more serious contributions to the historiography of the Stuart period.

[1] Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 (New York:

Penguin, 1996), xi..

[2] Ibid, 310.

Late Labor Day Post with Thoughts on the No.9 Mine

2025-09-03T14:39:00.004-05:00

This Monday, many in the United States celebrated Labor Day. The organized labor movement is controversial with many in the US, given its siding (for the most part) with labor over capital. I recently read a sobering book on the No.9 Mine in Farmington, West Virginia, the site of a major occupational disaster on November 20, 1968, that killed 78 miners. The events in Farmington provide a clear example as to why the labor movement arose, and it provided the impetus for more serious regulation of the mining industry at the federal level.

Bonnie Stewart was the author of the book on No.9: The 1968 Farmington Mine Disaster, and she relied partially on interviews with survivors and the families of the dead, along with official reports from government investigations and the company records. The events of November 20, 1968, were not the first time that the mine exploded. A similar event occurred in 1954, but the number of deaths was much lower (16) because of a smaller Sunday workforce. However, it was clear that the company (Consol) ignored safety precautions because slowdowns or shutdowns of production hurt the bottom line. Indeed, there were concerns in the days leading up to the explosion that dust and gas levels in the mine were dangerous. Additionally, the company rigged breakers to keep production up when gas levels supposed to cut power to the mine.

Some of the final miners removed from No. 9 in a bucket (Wikimedia Commons)

There is sometimes a belief that companies will do the right thing, and some (perhaps many) will. However, Consol did not. Safe levels of methane and coal dust were a known factor, and the company decided not to follow safety recommendations in the pursuit of more profits. There was also some evidence that people with ties to the company might have forged some of the log books related to fire boss inspections on the night of the disaster. Because the company would not regulate itself, the US government stepped in with the 1969 Coal Mine Safety and Health Act.

The actions of the company reminded me of an article I read on Don Blankenship and the Upper Big Branch disaster at the Massey Energy mine in Raleigh County, West Virginia, in 2010. Blankenship's mine attempted to dodge federal inspectors, and bosses told men to "run coal" despite dangerous conditions, which shows that the love of money can lead to many evil outcomes. For his part, Blankenship served a year in jail before running for the US Senate in 2018. Disasters like those at Farmington and Upper Big Branch provide clear evidence that labor organizations and governmental regulators are necessary to protect the interests of laborers from the desire to make another dollar at any cost.

I Submitted a Manuscript

2025-07-22T19:52:00.000-05:00

One of my last posts on this blog looked at how long it takes to write a book. The idea I tried to put out into the Interwebs was tied to the belief that small efforts over a relatively long period of time can lead to productivity and completed projects. Near the end of last month, I completed a draft manuscript for a project I'd been addressing on and off for about seven years. The topic is a West Virginia senator from the last century who is not named Robert C. Byrd, although Byrd shows up fairly frequently in the text.

The final manuscript draft was about 110,000 words, counting all notes and a bibliography. I received a confirmation that the editor I'd previously contacted had received the draft, along with a note that it would take a while to review. I fully anticipated that this would be the case. My hope is that he will be able to bring it up at his next board meeting so that the proposed book can be out within the next 18 months or so.

Of course, there is the possibility that the reviewers and the editor decide not to proceed, which would be disappointing. I have to say that I was pretty satisfied with the draft, although I'm absolutely sure that there will be revisions regardless.

I have a few ideas for the next project I'll submit, and I've started thinking/researching a couple of them. One is more theoretical, while the other would focus on the Spanish flu and resemble (at least to a degree) my previous book Big Pandemic on the Prairie. You can buy that book here. (Not an affiliate link.) Both of those would probably be about half the length of the most recent manuscript, so writing 500 words per day on those would lead to about 100 days of writing, although it's likely to take quite a bit longer for me to research and write them. However, looking it in those terms regarding words per day can make the process of writing a book seem much more manageable.

I'll be sure to update the progress of the submitted manuscript, and I may provide updates as to the progress on the other projects I'm looking into.

Thoughts on The Jamestown Brides

2024-12-28T19:43:00.004-06:00

In early November, my daughter's class took a four-day field trip to Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown (along with an evening at Busch Gardens--both I and my daughter dig roller coasters, so that was a fun stop). Being a history nerd, I was more than happy to accompany the group. It was a very interesting trip, and I learned things at each stop. Of course, no stop was complete without a visit to the book section in the gift shop.

One book that caught my eye was Jennifer Potter's work, The Jamestown Brides, published by Oxford University Press.

This book was quite interesting on a number of levels. I'd long found it fascinating that men in early Virginia could purchase brides for the cost of 150 lbs. worth of tobacco. This might seem like a small expense, but each pound of tobacco was worth 3 shillings, so this was more than £20, which at the time was no small expense.

This was a well-reasearched book, and it was fairly amazing that Potter was able to craft such an engaging narrative on such a narrow base of information. Most of the brides who came to the New World in this scheme had few better options in England, which was a major reason for their willingness to cross the pond (or the encouragment they received to do so). Most show up only sporadically before seemingly falling off the face of the earth. The date or reason of their deaths were frequently unknown. Whether some ever married was unclear. Of course, there is the occasional record that shows a maid found a mate and had a child.

These facts show the difficulty inherent in researching and writing about the pre-modern era, especially when looking at people from the lower or middling sort. A baptismal record at a local parish, an occasional court case, a marriage record, and a probate record at death might be all that's available to trace the lives of most people. From the social and cultural milieu surrounding such lives, a narrative can emerge.

This differs from the "big" people in history. For example, I remember having to write a short paper from the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII in my master's program. This particular source included many volumes on microfilm. Today, most, if not all, of those records are available online.

One has to wonder how much will be available regarding many of our lives in four hundred years. Will anyone care to look?

How Long Does It Take to Write a Book?

2024-11-10T19:50:00.004-06:00

How long does it take to write a book? I remember back to my senior seminar class in my undergrade program--Seminar in History. This class required the production of a 20- to 25-page paper, theoretically based upon primary research. I worked all semester for a paper that was, if truth be told, quite mediocre. I knew how to remember random facts at the time, but I did not really understand how to connect the dots to create a historical narrative that was backed up by primary research. Setting research questions and a solid thesis were not really in my repertoire at that point.

I liked the idea of going to graduate school, but the thought of writing a master's thesis approximating 100 pages, not to mention a doctoral dissertation seemed a daunting task. In my DA program in history, I wrote a dissertation that was in the area of 140 pages. My recent book Big Pandemic on The Prairie is listed at 191 pages. I'm currently in the process of writing my next book, which I anticipate will come in around the 100,000-120,000 range. It's a biography of a senator from West Virginia, Jennings Randolph. I've been working at it on and off for the past six years, and I'm currently just north of 150 pages, or about 50,000 words.

I no longer have the view that my younger self did that a book was nigh impossible. I knew that it was not impossible. After all, many people had written books, some series of books that encompassed several volumes. Popular nonfiction authors come out with books every few years (or even more frequently). I thought that this was beyond my ability. However, I should have been thinking about the idea of eating an elephant.

The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. The way to write a book is one word at a time. My initial draft of my book on the Spanish flu took nearly three years to write. There was a delay tied to a cross-country move and setting up classes at a new institution, which took up quite a bit of my time. Otherwise, it would have been completed a bit earlier. The initial draft came in around 50,000 words or 150 pages. The final draft was 197 pages in Microsoft Word, which came to about 63,000 words. From concept to publication, The book took about 4.5 years.

I've written about 70-80 pages since the beginning of summer on my latest project. It's been a little bit here, a little bit there. However, I was just doing some math yesterday. If I wanted to write a 300-page book over the course of a year, It would take a little more than 250 words per day. Writing an average of 250 words per day for 365 days in a year would produce around 90,000 words over the course of a year. That's a good length for a nonfiction book. Of course, there's research, which I could only undertake a day or two at a time for several years because of my distance from the archive. That takes quite a bit of time, but once you have an idea of the direction the research is going to go and the sources that will answer your research questions, the actual writing of a book of a decent length should not be as daunting as it might seem.

Big Pandemic on the Prairie: My New Book on Spanish Flu Published

2024-10-17T10:40:00.002-05:00

Back during the COVID-19 lockdowns in the spring of 2020, I started thinking about possible parallels between that pandemic and the nation's experience with a previous deadly outbreak. I had only a passing interest in the history of medicine at that point, but I knew that claims that lockdowns and masks were unprecedented were completely erroneous.

I started with a new lecture on the Spanish flu, which looked at that pandemic on a nationwide level. It only scratched the surface and looked at the broad contours of what happened in 1918 and 1919. I then wondered how states in which I'd lived dealt with the Spanish flu. Lo and behold, the Library of Congress has a database that has a database of digitized historic newspapers, Chronicling America. I found that the three major dailies in North Dakota were available for the time frame I needed to investigate.

This led to the idea that I could compose a scholarly research article on how newspapers in North Dakota reported on the flu, including the restrictions the state and local governments promulgated. That article came out in North Dakota History in 2021. After finishing up that piece, I still had questions, and I pitched a book on the Spanish flu in North Dakota to Bill Caraher, who was a former professor of mine at the University of North Dakota. Dr. Caraher runs the Digital Press at The University of North Dakota, and this small press sometimes publishes books on local history. He expressed serious interest in such a work, and after I sent a proposal of what I intended to do, he said to send a manuscript when I was done.

On Tuesday of this week (Oct. 15), the fruit of my labor officially hit the market. Here's a link to the Digital Press's post on the topic, along with options for accessing the book (including in a FREE, open-access digital format), titled Big Pandemic on the Prairie: The Spanish Flu in North Dakota. It looks at a general overview of American medicine, provides a narrative of how the flu progressed through North Dakota, and analyzes how the flu impacted religious bodies, Native Americans, and the North Dakota election in 1918. I'm happy with how the book has turned out, and I hope any readers might find it interesting, educational, and accessible.

Reading and Thinking about Imagined Communities

2024-10-02T12:41:00.000-05:00

When I was in a historiography class in grad school, I remember getting introduced to the idea of the imagined community, a term coined by Benedict Anderson in 1983 in his attempt to explain the rise of nationalism. The title of his book was, perhaps not surprisingly, Imagined Communities.

Apparently, this concept has influenced scholars well outside the historical profession. This summer, I started working toward a graduate certificate in human geography to extend my ability to teach undergrad classes in another field. My first class was Political Geography, and the concept of the imagined community came up during a week that focused on nationalism. I'd at least gutted the book in my doctoral program and had a decent understanding of the main point, but I decided to read it again, and it got me to thinking about certain how this concept intersects, or more accurately conflicts, with historically Christian views of ultimate reality.

Anderson noted the universalizing nature of Latin as it was used in medieval Europe. This started to unravel as modern print culture came into being with the use of the printing press, which contributed to the use of the vernacular in print. It also led to the concept of print capitalism as these printing presses needed to sell books and papers in the vernacular to make money.

Anderson writes about the importance of the novel to the concept of empty time and how it created the imagined community of the nation. The novel has multiple characters carrying out different actions simultaneously. Time is not always depicted in a linear manner headed toward a singular end in this construction. Now people could imagine multiple people as historical actors carrying out their lives at the same time in the same community.

Newspapers were important factors as well, because they reported on news from the various parts of a given nation or empire. This allowed people to imagine themselves a part of a broader community that expanded outside their immediate neighborhood. They spoke the same language and sometimes had similar ethnic and/or religious backgrounds. To make a long story short, this provided an important starting point for the idea of the nation as the primary unit of political organization. Prior to the rise of print capitalism, political organization tended to focus on kingdoms (i.e., patron/client relationships) or multi-national empires (keep in mind that the nation in a geographic sense is defined as pretty much synonymous with an ethnic group--it's slightly more complicated, but not by much).

Effectively, Anderson makes the argument that all of this tended to create a world in which people in disparate geographic locations could imagine themselves as members of a nation. These people don't know each other. They experienced life in different lived communities, but they imagined themselves as a part of the nation.

There is a fairly robust literature (including Coakley, 2004) that looks at the ways officials have created national origin myths to contribute to social cohesion within a nation. At times, these are rooted in some historic fact, but sometimes, they are entirely fabricated. While even Anderson would argue that nationalism is ubiquitous, it seems in many ways to be a house built on shifting sand.

There is currently a debate over Christian nationalism, and a few authors, most notably Stephen Wolfe with his The Case for Christian Nationalism, seem to base the Christian nation more on the Christian NATION (in terms of ethnicity) as much, as if not more so, than on the idea of a CHRISTIAN nation (with the emphasis on the Christian part). Wolfe goes so far as to argue that it's good for a Christian nation to keep out Christian refugees who do not look are talk like them. This is only one argument Wolfe makes, but it's salient for this issue of the imagined community.

This has caused me to reflect on the concept of the Christian community, historically speaking. Traditionally, Christians have referred to themselves in familial terms, even when looking back into the New Testament texts. In the first century, both Jews and Gentiles made up the Christian community, and the community had ties that transcended ethnicity or even natural families. Early Christians found their ultimate identity in Jesus Christ, and that was the primary tie that bound them together. If the Christian view of the world is correct, they were correct on ultimate, and even eternal, reality, whereas the current nationalists who focus on a given political entity are focused primarily on a transitory social structure.

Revise and Resubmit

2024-05-29T22:00:00.000-05:00

I remember the first paper I sent off to a peer-reviewed journal. This was way back in 2007 or so. I remember the dejected feeling a got when I received a "revise and resubmit" email. It seemed like a failure at the time. At least I treated it as such in my naivete. I'd just finished a master's degree (without a thesis) at Marshall University, and the paper was the biggest effort I'd made at primary research.

I thought "revise and resubmit" meant that the editor had no interest in the project. I then sent it to a small newsletter tied to a state historical society, which published the paper. Here's a link: https://archive.wvculture.org/history/wvhs/wvhs2203.pdf. It's not close to my best work, but it was probably the best I had done at the point in my journey as an aspiring historian.

In 2008, I received a study grant to go to the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archive to work on a very vaguely defined research project. It's shocking I got the grant, to be honest. I've since had much better proposals rejected. Anyway, I wrote up the paper, and again, I received a revise and resubmit request that said more research was necessary. I was teaching at a small private K-12 school in West Virginia, and the archive was located in Nashville. The travel would entail too much expense in my mind. I proceeded to sit on the paper for about two or three years. Again, this felt like a rejection.

However, while engaged in doctoral studies at the University of North Dakota, I decided to revisit that manuscript and engage with some of the scholarship I'd wrestled with in the ensuing years, including that of Robert Bellah and Harry Stout which interacted with the concept of civil religion. I also utilized interlibrary loan (thanks to UND's Chester Fritz Library) to access some of the books written by the main historical character in my research. After making a major overhaul of the paper, I decided to take a chance and resubmit.

After waiting for a few months (and basically forgetting I'd resubmitted the paper), I received an email indicating acceptance of the manuscript pending a few, very slight, edits. The result was this article:

Price, Christopher. “Social Justice and American Exceptionalism in the Writings of Southern Baptist Statesmen H. Cornell Goerner,” Baptist History & Heritage 47 no. 3 (Fall 2012): 52-64.

When I received my copies of the issue that held my article, I felt like I had a chance at becoming a legit historian.

Tonight, I sent back revisions requested in my most recent revise-and-resubmit email. I've learned since 2007 that revise and resubmit means that an editor finds that a piece might be appropriate for a journal. It just needs some additional work. Sometimes, that work can be pretty substantial.

At present, I have three different articles submitted with three different peer-reviewed journals. Should they all get published, I'll be up to nine peer-reviewed articles in print. Only one of the six that have already been published got accepted without major revisions. It's a part of the process, and hopefully it makes the publications stronger.

Revise and resubmit is not an outright rejection, but rather, a "maybe later." If an editor finds your work entirely unsuitable for a publication, he or she will let you know. Don't give up as easily as I first did.

COVID Aftermath and Scholarly Research

2024-03-15T21:43:00.001-05:00

Earlier this year, I received a couple of journal issues from historical societies of which I'm a member, the Conference on Faith and History and the Baptist History & Heritage Society. The former generally publishes two issues per year; the latter generally publishes three.

I spent much of 2023 wondering when their journals would arrive. The lone 2023 issue for both arrived in early 2024. The Editor's note in Fides et Historia, the journal for the CFH noted that there was a lack of articles in its pipeline at present to publish the normal two issues in 2023. She pointed that Fides was not the only journal in this predicament.

The lack of access to archives was one suggestion as to why there were fewer article submissions, and this makes sense. I had personally planned to spend Spring Break in 2020 visiting the West Virginia State Archive to undertake research on a topic that I've been working on for a few years (and will hopefully become a book). However, that research trip did not take place, and I spent the week at home in northwestern Kansas. The archive closed.

I had also received a small grant to visit an Appalachian archive at West Virginia University just before the pandemic hit. I believe I was the first person allowed to access this archive when I finally made my visit in June 2021. Masks were still required. I had intended to visit a presidential library or two, as well, but these were still closed into 2022.

The lack of access to archives limited the topics which researchers could access. However, online repositories were still available, and the Chronicling America database from the Library of Congress was a major source for my article on Spanish flu that appeared in North Dakota History. Much of that research will appear in my upcoming book on the same topic, and much of my perusal of the secondary literature took place via online repositories to which I have access through a library at an R1 institution.

I also spent a productive week at the North Dakota State Archive for this research. However, that research took place in the summer of 2022. I flew into Bismarck after the removal of mask requirements for flights (although some passengers continued wearing them), and there was no such requirement at the ND State Archive.

Articles can take months (sometimes years) to write, depending upon the amount of background research needed before writing up the paper. Then, the review and revision process can take a year or more, depending upon a journal's publishing schedule. A big gap in research might lead to fewer articles in the near future, but one would assume this should reverse in relatively short order.

What I'm Reading: American Gospel

2024-01-01T18:24:00.002-06:00

Today is New Year's Day, so Happy 2024. I spent a bit of the late morning/early afternoon finishing up a read of Jon Meacham's American Gospel. As this book came out in 2007 and considering the fact that I focused on American religious history in my doctoral program (and my later ThM program), I'm surprised that I had not read it yet.

The book was very readable, although it felt a bit dated because of its origin in the era of George W. Bush, a somewhat less contentious time in American history. Of course, those who remember those days understand that many of the undercurrents that presently engulf social media and the political landscape existed at the time. But this was before the last eight or nine years and the increased emphasis in Christian nationalism by some on the right of the religious landscape, which has largely been accompanied by an increasing hostility to religion by some on the left (although this is not a necessary feature of the American left and some otherwise right-leaning Americans oppose religion as well; additionally, not all on the political right adhere to Christian nationalism).

Meacham borrows the concept of a civil religion (what he generally refers to as public religion) that Robert N. Bellah articulated in his important essay on "Civil Religion in America". I first became aware of this concept when reading Harry Stout's Upon the Altar of the Nation, a book that the author framed as a moral history of the Civil War. Stout pointed to Bellah's influence on his won work. I probably read Stout's work around 2007 or 2008.

Meacham correctly points out that the Founding Fathers attempted to navigate the space between reason and religion and came up with a public religion that focused upon God. While theistic, the "God of Nature" referred to by Jefferson was quite ambiguous. He (or it) was not God the Father of the Holy Trinity, as Meacham notes on more than one occasion. This God (or god) was active in human affairs; some Founders like Washington referred to Providence. However, such a higher being will not meet the theological understanding of very devout, and orthodox, Christians who hold to the deity of Christ and a belief in the Holy Trinity.

The wisdom of the Jeffersons and Adamses of the early Republic lay in the fact that they understood the religious nature of their society and did not wish to overturn it. Indeed, they believed in the deity, albeit in a heterodox way. Yet, they also understood the problems that come with extreme sectarianism when wedded to the power of the state. The Constitution's First Amendment and state statutes like the one supported by Jefferson and Madison in Virginia were attempts to protect religious minorities from persecution which had all too often reared itself in the colonial era, including in Virginia.

This compromise has largely held throughout American history, and even those presidents who would not currently be popular with those on the political (or religious) right felt the need to compose public prayers and bring religion into the public sphere. These included well-known liberals like FDR and LBJ. Meacham basically argues that the "center" of the American populace is happy to allow for religious expression in the public sphere, as long as there is not too much emphasis on specificity or a requirement of a specific view of Christianity (or any other religion). Of course, there have been examples of politicians who have attempted to add explicitly Christian verbiage to the Preamble to the Constitution or otherwise return the US to its Christian roots. The latter are more focused on, to borrow language from John Fea, nostalgia, rather than good history.

American Gospel also notes that the Civil Rights movement largely used religious arguments in making the case for the end of Jim Crow. Martin Luther King Jr. noted the "moral arc of the universe" in arguing for justice, for example. Meacham points to the religious motivations behind John Lewis and the others who endured a severe beating on the Pettus Bridge. Figures on the right and the left have long utilized religious and biblical imagery in making important points.

Meacham effectively provides a narrative account of this "American Gospel". He emphasizes the significance of true religious liberty in American history, pointing to the ways in which Jewish and Catholic Americans have advocated for the concept from the nation's founding. However, it would be interesting to see how an updated edition might view the last fifteen years and the increased desire for dominionism or Christian nationalism that has increasingly become a part of the political and religious discourse. Regardless, it's worth a read.

Recent Presentation

2023-09-20T21:40:00.002-05:00

I wrote earlier this year regarding some research I've done on the Spanish flu and how it intersected with religious bodies in North Dakota. I was able to give a broader talk on the state of my research recently in Colby, Kansas, at the Max Pickerill Lecture at Colby Community College. The college recorded the talk and put it up on its YouTube Chanel. Here is the video of the talk:

First Post-COVID Conference Presentation

2023-05-22T20:39:00.003-05:00

The COVID-19 pandemic upended academic conferences, much as it did industry conferences outside of the profession, along with many other activities we took for granted. I attended a couple of conferences virtually while social distancing precautions were in place, but they did not really have the same vibe, even though the sessions were generally informative.

I attended the Conference on Faith and History for the first time in March 2022. I'd been a member of this professional organization in grad school and rejoined in late 2020. I was living in Kansas at the time, and I flew to Waco to take in some of the sessions. While there, I ran into a professor I'd shared a session with at the now-defunct Missouri Valley History Conference back in 2013. I met some more historians in one of my major fields of interest, i.e., religious history. A few folks wore masks and they were still required on flights, but otherwise, it was very similar to my previous conference experiences.

This past week, I attended the Baptist History & Heritage Society's annual conference. I've been a member since about 2008, before I started my doctoral studies. I'd attended this conference in person a couple of time previously, including one in Sioux Falls in 2014 and the last face-to-face meeting in Raleigh, NC, in 2019. This year, the society held the conference in San Antonio, and I decided to submit a paper proposal, which was accepted. The paper was title "The Landmark Influence on the Ecclesiology of Jack Hyles," and it looked how the ways in which Hyles's teachings largely agreed with earlier Landmark Baptists who believed that the Baptist Church, or rather, Baptist churches, descended in basically a straight line directly from Jesus Christ himself.

The presentation received no negative comments, although the session was sparsely attended outside of the participants and the moderator. We were also limited in terms of time because a lunch session went a few minutes over. This presentation was a part of a longer paper that I'd written on the authoritarian leanings of Hyles and their broader impact on the independent fundamental Baptist (IFB) movement. The major impact came through the status Hyles held as the pastor of the church with the World's Largest Sunday school, along with his annual Pastors' Conferences and his unaccredited Bible college. All flowed from his theology, and this ecclesiology was a major component.

My paper was a capstone for a ThM program I completed late last year, and I decided to submit the entire paper to a journal after tidying it up a bit during an unexpected overnight layover at Chicago's O'Hare airport (in a hotel comped by United Airlines). It will likely be weeks or months before I hear from that journal, if past experience is any guide. I've never published through this journal before, so I'm not entirely sure of the speed at which my submission will progress. If it's not accepted by my first choice, I have a couple of additional journals in mind, although I may have to cut some of the paper for length purposes. Different journals required differing manuscript lengths.

Overall, the conference was an enjoyable experience. I was able to reconnect with a couple of people I'd met before, including one who had also done a dissertation on North Dakota Baptists, and I met a few other folks from a university that's in the neighboring state of Kentucky. I met a couple of editors who I'd worked with in getting a couple of my articles and book reviews through the society's journal, Baptist History & Heritage. Talking history in general, and Baptist/Christian history specifically, with people who are sympathetic with most of my beliefs is aways a positive experience.

Spanish Flu and North Dakota Churches

2023-03-31T23:54:00.003-05:00

Since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, I've been researching the way North Dakota experienced the Spanish flu. North Dakota History published an article that I wrote in 2021. This article looked at how North Dakota's newspapers provided coverage of the Spanish flu to residents of the state. At first, I thought an article would encapsulate basically everything I wanted to address, but there was way more information available the deeper I dug.

Therefore, I decided to keep digging and prepare a book manuscript (a draft of which is already completed and submitted to a potential publisher). One of the chapters deals with how religious groups in the state dealt with the flu. Laura Spinney's Pale Rider and a few other secondary sources have noted that many parts of the world took a religious approach to explain the appearance of the deadly contagion. One bishop in Spain asked for a series of prayers to appease the wrath of God. This impulse was not terribly different than the one that drove medieval flagellants to beat themselves in light of the Black Death. God is mad; we must appease him.

However, when looking at some of the major denomination in North Dakota, there was no real reflection, other than the people lost to the disease (some pastors were among this number) and the ways in which the flu kept the churches from carrying out their organizational plans for the year. There was no attempt to tie the Spanish flu to God's wrath, nor was there any question as to what God might be attempting to tell the world. I found this interesting, given the fact that the world was engaged in a war that was among the more senseless in world history.

Additionally, this varied from the response by Christians to more recent tragedies that have caused some ministers to claim that some natural or man-made calamity was the punishment of God against wayward people. For example, Pat Robertson claimed that Hurricane Katrina was the result of God's wrath, tying this to abortion and the appointment of John Roberts to the Supreme Court.

My primary question for the chapter revolved around the ways the churches reacted to the Spanish flu. The article noted above found that churches were a part of the ban on public meetings. Grand Forks was effectively closed for about seven weeks in the fall of 1918, and churches did not meet from early October to late November. Some churches in the town were actually concerned over the possibility of large meetings when the city's health officials decided to allow for public meetings to resume. Schools in the town did not reopen until January. This reaction to the flu in Grand Forks differed from the one evident in Fargo, where ministers petitioned the city to end the public meeting ban before it did in late October.

Needless to say, these findings were interesting, and they tended to provide some interesting historical context for the actions that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recent Read--Benjamin Franklin:The Religious Life of a Founding Father

2017-11-05T21:53:00.001-06:00

As an academic, it's probably not terribly surprising that one of my favorite pastimes is reading. I recently completed reading a spiritual biography of one of America's founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin. This particular work was written by the eminent Baylor historian, Thomas S. Kidd, who has written extensively on the era of the American Revolution.

In his Autobiography, which is itself an interesting read, Franklin claimed to be a deist. Deism was a term that could describe a range of religious or irreligious beliefs. Franklin called for prayer at the Constitutional Convention, which would indicate that he believed that God was active in human affairs. This contrasts with the commonly taught depiction of deism as a "religion" that viewed God as a cosmic clock maker who built the universe and then stepped away and allowed it to run according to natural law.

Kidd argues in the introduction of his work that Franklin was one of the first to follow a moralistic, doctrine-free form of Christianity that is common in much of American life. Kidd then pointed to Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey as a couple of modern-day examples of this religious point of view.

This book draws extensively from the Autobiography as a source of Franklin's beliefs, but it goes into many other sources such as his other publications and correspondence. Franklin, who grew up in a staunchly Puritan home, was far from orthodox in his beliefs. While he believed in a deity who superintended over human affairs, he questioned many of the tenets of orthodox Christology.

Kidd points out quite well that Franklin had little interest in Christian doctrine. He was more concerned with action than belief. This action usually involved the service of others, and Franklin undertook such activities for the public good. These included the foundation of the Philadelphia Academy (forerunner of the University of Pennsylvania) and one of the first public libraries in the American colonies.

This book included an assessment of Franklin's correspondence with evangelicals such as his sister Jane Mecom an the noted evangelist George Whitefield, the subject of another work by Kidd. Franklin was not above making money publishing both Whitefield's works as well as documents that criticized the English divine. Both Mecom and Whitefield frequently questioned Franklin regarding the state of his soul, to no avail. Franklin would go to his grave maintaining his unorthodox beliefs.

Overall, this is a very engaging read that utilizes a range of primary sources to craft an interesting analysis of Ben Franklin's religious beliefs and how they changed over time (he appeared to in some ways become less skeptical over time). It contextualizes Franklin's life in the social and religious milieu of his day.

Thomas S. Kidd, Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

William Henry Sheppard and King Leopold's Congo Free State

2015-04-06T22:59:00.000-05:00

I'm currently teaching a course in World History since 1600, and when working up the syllabus, I decided to have the students read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, (2006 Mariner edition) which is a story of terror in the Belgian Congo during the decades that straddled the turn of the twentieth century. I read this book a few years ago, but because I had assigned it for this class, I decided to reread it to refresh my memory. The appalling nature of what went on at the time was not a surprise for me to say the least, and my memories were pretty fresh regarding most of the events.

To make a long story short, King Leopold was a king who felt his lack of an empire made his little country of Belgium, well, little. Wanting to increase his standing on the world stage, he was able to use people like Henry Morton Stanley to work his way into the Congo and get the United States to recognize his own personal colony. What followed in this attempt to "improve" the region was a level of death and destruction that ranks up there with that perpetrated by some of the more famous butchers of history. Hochschild and other writers have estimated that nearly 10 million Congolese lost their lives at the hands of the Force Publique and other minions of a variety of companies that traded, first in the ivory, and then in the rubber, that the region produced.

Of course, in addition to civilizing the Congolese, many people in Belgium appreciated that Catholic missionaries would be let in. In many instances, these priests did little to stop the atrocities in the early years. Some of the biggest outcries against the regime came from Protestant missionaries. One of the earliest to attempt to bring attention to Leopold's personal colony of what he termed the Congo Free State (an ironic name considering that forced labor was the rule, rather than the exception in the colony) was a Presbyterian missionary from the United States, William Henry Sheppard.

Sheppard was an African American who endeared himself to the Congolese among whom he worked. He was paired with Samuel Lapsley for the Southern Presbyterians. When his superior, Lapsley, died, Sheppard effectively took over the mission in a capacity he would not have been afforded in his home country. Over time, he became aware of the violence that occurred daily and published an account for his denomination. As it was published in the Congo Free State, Sheppard was guilty of breaking the law, but he was acquitted in the trial. His report, along with others by missionaries and secular humanitarians, eventually contributed to the transfer of the colony to the Belgian people. Sheppard will probably not come up in many of the leading general works on American church history, but his impact on the Belgian Congo was quite important.

Puritanism and Patriotism

2014-10-07T23:02:00.001-05:00

I've just finished re-reading a relatively recent work on the Puritans and how they've impacted American history basically since the beginning of the earliest colonies. Puritans were for reform, and they tended to have a high view of America's covenantal destiny should they live up to their end of their relationship to God. I read this book to get some context for the revision of my dissertation, hopefully for publication. George McKenna noted that a nearly unbroken strain of American Puritanical thought has continued through to the present day, first through the areas the Puritans inhabited in the burned-over district in New York, the Western Reserve of Ohio, and Michigan, as they expanded to look for new lands to inhabit. The Puritan worldview then continued throughout the North during the Civil War and on through the reformers of the Progressive Movement. The Puritan thread then followed through the New Deal, after which it switched to the unlikely amalgam of Catholics and Southern Evangelical Protestants, both of whom took over the idea of the US as a chosen nation.

While McKenna drew upon a wide range of personalities, including such disparate characters as Jonathan Edwards, the Transcendentalist writers of the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Ronald Reagan. The thing that tied these people together was the optimism that things could get better and their reforming impulse. They also tended to have a belief in a messianic destiny for the American nation that could be lost if the people of America did not follow this destiny. McKenna, although not the first to describe it, noted the importance of the political jeremiad in calling the people back to the straight and narrow from their wanderings off the righteous path. McKenna's book is well worth reading and will make the reader think about how much his or her ideas of America might reach way back into the past.

McKenna, George. The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

Serpent Handlers

2013-10-24T22:55:00.001-05:00

One of the more interesting groups that has arisen in American church history since the arrival of Europeans over 500 years ago is the serpent handlers of Appalachia. I grew up less than a dozen miles from a congregation that was reputed to be an authentic serpent handling church in West Virginia, although I have never been to one of their services in my nearly four decades of life. This church is no longer in operation, according to relatives (although I've since moved away from my hometown). Not surprisingly, these groups have never had a large following. Some states have attempted to shut them down and have laws on the books against the practice.

A few years ago, I read a book on the practice that took a relatively sympathetic approach. Fred Brown and Jeanne MacDonald's The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith looked at three of these congregations and the families that dominated them. Some family members had actually died of snake bites, yet their relatives were not deterred. While many people might find their faith well outside mainstream Christianity, few could doubt the sincerity of their faith, as most people tend to think that the only good snake is a dead snake.

I was flipping through the television channels a few weeks ago when I happened upon the National Geographic Channel. I rarely go above channel 48 (the History Channel), but nothing much was on this particular Tuesday night. I ran upon a show called Snake Salvation that was a sort of reality show on two serpent handling pastors. With my interest in American religion, I stayed with it--and watched additional shows on the next two or three Tuesdays.

A National Archives image of Serpent Handlers in Kentucky, 1946, via Wikimedia Commons

The show looks at Jamie Coots and Andrew Hamblin. The former is a member of the Coots family that was included in Brown and MacDonald's The Serpent Handlers, and the latter is a protege of Coots who moved from Kentucky to Tennessee to take over a serpent handling church. The show allows the serpent handlers to tell their story in their own words and follows them around church and on their snake hunts. As of 1997, it was estimated that only 1,000-2,000 of this group existed in the United States in between 25-45 churches, although the legal issues could possibly keep some groups underground. Both of the churches depicted on "Snake Salvation" appear to have between 20 and 40 attenders at most of the church services.

Not only do the serpent handlers pick up poisonous vipers, they also take the additional parts of Mark 16 in a very literal sense. While speaking in tongues is a common, although debated, practice in American (and world) Christianity, serpent handling is not. Neither is "drinking any deadly thing." Yet, the serpent handlers also drink toxic mixtures and handle fire. In one of the latest episodes of "Snake Salvation," an overalled fellow by the name of "Big Cody" drinks strychnine and also mixes up some lye for his co-religionists. He lives to tell his story. I checked the TV schedule for the next week, and it appears that this particular show might be over. Regardless, it was somewhat enlightening as it continued the work of The Serpent Handlers and other works on this system of belief that exists on the fringe of Christianity. I must say that I'll keep watching and reading because I have no real desire to attend a serpent-handling service.

http://home.wlu.edu/~lubint/Touchstone/SnakeHandling-Brooks.htm

Getting a Doctorate and a Full-time History Gig

2013-09-13T23:01:00.001-05:00

The last few months have been a whirlwind. I've just finished the first month of what I started out to get just over three years ago. I started my doctoral program at the University of North Dakota in August 2010, and the three years flew by. I was able to graduate on time with a Doctor of Arts in history. My dissertation looked at the early days of the Baptist communities in North Dakota. The project focused upon archival materials that were in the Chester Fritz library and the state archives in Bismarck. I had a major chapter on the state-level church and one of the local Grand Forks congregation. Fortunately, my committee signed off on it in time for graduation in May.

Just before graduation, I had the second of two interviews that I got from about 30-40 applications to various private high schools, community colleges, 4-year colleges, Bible colleges, small universities with master's programs, post-doctoral fellowships, and just about anything else in between. The school was in a rural community in Northwest Kansas, and I fortunately got the job. I must admit that I was a bit concerned before getting an offer because of the common tales of those holding doctorates in the humanities that have to adjunct for years. I did not really want to become a freeway flyer and try to find as many adjunct jobs as possible.

While my position is basically geared at teaching, as was my terminal degree, I'm hoping to revise parts of my dissertation in the next few months for publication. I'm just happy that I've been able to achieve a goal of becoming a college-level instructor that I had starting back as an undergrad nearly two decades ago.

August Christian Blog Carnival

2013-08-07T11:06:00.001-05:00

I have the privilege of posting the Christian Blog Carnival this month. The submissions come from a wide variety of bloggers and cover a number of different topics. I hope you enjoy this month's topics and the perspectives that they contain in the following general areas:

Theology

Harry Neufeld submitted an interesting post on why we need some help to truly get the full meaning of Biblical passages at his Participatory Bible Study Blog. He writes: We all depend on others, such as scholars, in our Bible study. How effective this is depends on when and how you do that.

Devotionals

Karen Vaughn's blog Karen's Devotions includes a post on the absence of a call for grief over sin in much of current evangelism.

Ridge Burns questions where God lives in his personal blog on the InFaith website. Reading Ezekiel 43:7 caused him to ponder this question, but New Testament passages inform his conclusion.

Silas Eke posts a sermon on his Sermon Notes blog about Zacchaeus and his conversion. He writes: Many no doubt, were converted to the faith of Christ of whom no account is kept in the Gospels; but the conversion of some, whose case had something in it extraordinary, is recorded, as this of Zacchaeus. The name Zacchaeus means pure or justified. He is the man who overcame obstacles.

Other

Dean at the Working on the Mission blog looks at how he was blown away by God's creation. The cause of his wonder is a pretty cool picture of an Indonesian frog. A very brief post, but seriously just stop for a moment and in the middle of all our theological thinking, our critical critiques and our academic understandings let's just marvel at the majesty of God through His creation.

Jennifer Vaughn-Estrada writes a book review on her Chic of Domesticity blog. This post gives a quick review of Douglas Foster's The Story of the Churches of Christ. The book is intended for a lay audience that wants a brief overview of how the Church of Christ began.

Thanks to those who submitted blogs from July. Until next month, when Practical Proverbs hosts, I hope you enjoyed this small sample of Christian blog posts.

Two Years Old--Thoughts on Gilded Age/Progressive Era Baptists

2013-05-05T17:33:00.000-05:00

I just thought that I would note that this blog is turning two years old today. Over the past two years, I've posted 126 posts. This one makes the 127th. I have had over 27,000 page views according to the on-site stats.

Some of the things that I've found most interesting are the things that other people are searching for on the internet. Surprisingly, the most popular post that I've had is related to the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. I would not have figured that nearly 1,600 people would have an interest in this relatively narrow topic, although it is pretty interesting because of the fact that it shows that the Puritans were very interested in education and were actually willing to levy taxes to pay for it.

Much of my work on this site has focused on Puritans. I have other interests, and my recently-approved dissertation actually focused upon Gilded Age/Progressive Era North Dakota Baptists. These folks tended to emphasize many of the same things that the general Protestant establishment did. Prohibition, a Progressive Era reform (in spite of the idea that it was a conservative concept), showed up in the minutes of just about annual meeting of the North Dakota Baptist State Convention--even after Prohibition became the law of the land in 1918.

The North Dakota Baptists would have agreed largely with Rudyard Kipling's idea of the "White Man's Burden" as the idea of evangelizing and civilizing seemed to come together and get conflated at the time. Of course, it is interesting to note that Jesus said to make disciples, not Anglo-Americans, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many believed that these two ideas were one and the same. Some would still seem to think that this is the case.

I'll be interested to see what the next two years has in store as I begin the transition from full-time grad student to full-time instructor.

New Church History Resource from Baylor

2013-04-14T17:50:00.003-05:00

I know that some who might read this blog from time to time might be interested in a new resource collection that Baylor University is about to publish. An individual from the publisher contacted me with the information.

This three-volume series is titled the Baylor American Church History Collection. It includes the following titles that focus upon 18th and 19th century American religious history:

Preaching Politics: The Religions Rhetoric of George Whitefield and the Founding of a New Nation, by Jerome Dean Mahaffey
Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening, by C. C. Goen
Shenandoah Religion: Outsiders and the Mainstream, 1716–1865, by Stephen L. Longenecker

The main site to purchase the series is available at the Logos Bible Software link here. For a limited time, the set can be purchased for a fairly large discount. I do want to note that I have neither read these, nor will I get any type of commission from any sales. I'm merely passing on a few titles that some might find of interest.

Conference Paper in Omaha

2013-03-08T22:47:00.000-06:00

I started my "Spring Break" a couple of days early by canceling my last class before the break. I did this, not to skip out, but because I had a conference presentation. I note Spring Break with quotes because Grand Forks just got nearly a foot of snow last Monday, and there is snow in the forecast over the next week (tonight and tomorrow included).

My presentation took place at the Missouri Valley History Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. I've never actually been in town here before, and the downtown seems to be fairly interesting. My panel dealt with the Great Plains to some degree, and my particular paper tried to cram a few major ideas from about 100 pages of dissertation into ten pages.

I titled my paper "Sin, Superstition, and Socialism: Protestant Sermonizing in Early Twentieth-Century North Dakota. The paper detailed some of my work on the local Baptist history, and included some material from the North Dakota State Archives from the North Dakota Baptist Convention collection that I added to my dissertation work. The superstition in the title was related to the nativist and anti-Catholic worldview that the North Dakota Baptists held. The socialism dealt with the anarchism of the newer European immigrants and the activities of the Nonpartisan League (NPL) in North Dakota.

There was a major opposition to the NPL in the late 1910s, when the organization actually took control of the state government. I noted a couple of sermons that non-Baptists preached that I had the opportunity to come into contact with. The first was at a political rally advertised in the Grand Forks Herald. This rally promised to have a sermon from an ordained minister against the evils of socialism.

The second was a sermon published by F. Harley Ambrose of the First Presbyterian of Grand Forks. Ambrose is noteworthy in a not-so-good kind of way because of his holding the position of the Grand Poohbah (actually it was the "Exalted Cyclops") of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. This "Sermon on Applied Socialism," from my cursory reading of it (I did not include it in the official copy of my paper or my dissertation, so I did not go to great lengths to deconstruct it) seemed to have quite a bit of economic theory, but not much that actually came from the Bible.

The main portion of my paper at the conference actually dealt with the "sin" in the title. Although evangelism was clearly the most important goal of the North Dakota Baptist Convention, moral reform was a not-so-close second. Every annual meeting of the NDBC dealt with the topic of prohibition. They even had a Committee on Temperance set up to promote the cause, and they called for ministers to preach sermons directly related to the topic. Additionally, desecration of Sunday and the "white slave" traffic aroused suspicion.

There were a few good questions related to the paper, and the experience was pretty enjoyable overall.

Article Published and Next Class

2013-01-07T22:04:00.002-06:00

Today, after a three week trip home and abroad for the inter-semester break, I received my latest edition of the journal Baptist History and Heritage. I've been getting this journal for about five years or so, but this edition was a bit different than the others I've gotten. I was looking forward to this issue because I have an article that they decided to publish.

My latest article looks at a conservative Southern Baptist theologian who was a part of the denominational establishment during the post-WWII era in American history. The article, titled "Social Justice and American Exceptionalism in the Writings of Southern Baptist Statesman H. Cornell Goerner" is very close (basically the same paper) to a paper I read at the Red River Valley History Conference last April. This article shows how Goerner was a conservative evangelical who called for Christianizing the masses and the importance of America in the world, but it also shows how the economic attitudes of many have shifted over the past fifty years or so based upon the writings that Goerner had published through the denominational presses.

This Thursday, I sent over my syllabus for printing. My latest class is a class that I am creating titled "Religion in American Politics and Culture." It will be a hybrid class that incorporates aspects of a lecture-based course and a seminar format. I am hoping to engage students with the important place that religion has had and continues to have on American cultural and political traditions. The course will not be a continuous narrative that attempts to be exhaustive, but will rather choose a few chronological topics to emphasize the importance of religion in American history.

The War on Christmas

2012-12-07T21:34:00.000-06:00

We are quickly closing in upon the Christmas season. Many people believe that there is a war on Christmas. I've seen the governor of Rhode Island on television talking about his state's "holiday tree." A large number of Americans are put off by this point. Some Americans would like to avoid having any public displays of religion. However, the purpose of this post is not to talk about the contemporary war on Christmas.

Many Americans trace their religious heritage back to the Puritans in New England (although most Americans today would not fit into the Puritan society). What many Americans do not realize, however, is that the Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic were among the first to start a war on Christmas. During the Interregnum in England, Christmas was banned. There were no holiday trees or Christmas trees. Oliver Cromwell's attempt at a Christian theocracy thought that the holiday was too closely related to Catholic superstition. They also thought that the celebration was nowhere to be found in the Bible. Christmas feasts were replaced by Christmas fasts.

Puritans in the wilderness of New England similarly banned Christmas by legal means. A Massachusetts law actually fined citizens of the colony for celebrating Christmas. It was not until the mother country restored the Stuart monarchy and set up the Dominion of New England in 1680 that laws banning Christmas were repealed. In spite of the new legal status for the holiday, many in New England decided to celebrate quietly to avoid offending the sensibilities of the dominant Puritan cultures. It was actually after the Civil War that Christmas became an official American holiday. Therefore, the idea of a war on Christmas goes back a long way in American church history.