Dispatch from Berkeley: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Elesha Coffman

image credit here

Last week I spent a fantastic, albeit smoky, few days out at Berkeley at a workshop on "Ecumenical Protestantism and Post-Protestant Secularism in the United States," convened by David Hollinger. The elegiac song I've used in my title was inescapable. How does one define ecumenical/liberal/mainline Protestantism? "Something here inside / Cannot be denied." What has happened to it over the past century? "When a lovely flame dies / Smoke gets in your eyes." But wait--is the topic really as nebulous, and the outlook as grim, as that?

Not at all! Well, maybe. It depends on what you're talking about. But scholars are talking about this, and a case can even be made that the center of gravity in the study of American Protestantism is shifting from evangelicalism and fundamentalism toward ecumenical Protestantism and post-Protestant secularism. The "mainline moment" continues!

I can't even try to summarize all of the rich conversations from the workshop or preview all of the really exciting work in progress. Some version of the presentations might be made available in the future. In the meantime, here are just a few things that struck me:


Post-Protestant: I never understood this term before. I read it either as defeatist insider talk (Oh no, we lost the culture!) or triumphal scholar talk (Finally, we can stop being "church historians" and study the more vital, authentic religion that flourishes beyond church walls). In Berkeley, I heard it used differently, to describe the particular kind of secularism that arises when an individual, a group, or possibly a whole society ceases to identify as Protestant but carries forward a lot of Protestant ideas and impulses.

Two moments that clarified this for me: (1) Amy Kittelstrom calling attention to A Rap on Race, the dialogue in which James Baldwin declares himself to have left Christianity and Margaret Mead insists that he hasn't; (2) Kenzie Bok (who writes on John Rawls) describing modern American political philosophy as a jungle gym on which modern political philosophers play without realizing that it was built by Protestants. Or, as the latter discussion continued, maybe post-Protestantism is a house, or maybe it's a prison. At any rate, I am now convinced that this is a very useful line of analysis, and we're going to be hearing a lot more about it in coming years.

Freight and vehicle: David Hollinger used this image in the midst of a discussion about what happens when institutions dissolve or change radically. Was the institution merely the vehicle for a particular kind of (ideological) freight? What happens to the freight without the vehicle? Or are institutions more than vehicles--to use another binary David employed, not merely instrumental, but definitional? Ecumenical Protestants cared so much about their institutions, not just as vehicles for their ideas, but as goods in and of themselves. Why did they care? What happened in those institutions that didn't, perhaps couldn't, happen anywhere else?

Theology: "Did [subject of this paper] have a theology?" I heard that question after my presentation on Margaret Mead, but versions of it swirled around other papers as well. The question wasn't hostile, but its repetition made me wonder, What is "a theology"? Do even scholars of ecumenical Protestantism and post-Protestant secularism have such an old-fashioned understanding of theology (it means quoting Bible verses, describing attributes of God, and name-dropping other theologians, right?) that our research subjects don't qualify as theologians? Considering that my ASCH paper in January is on Mead's theology, I'm going to have to come up with some answers on these questions quickly.

Rest assured, ideas spinning out from Berkeley will be making appearances at USIH later this month and at ASCH/AHA in January. It's a good time to be studying ... whatever we call this.

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Congregational Time Capsules

Elesha Coffman

A mismatch pervades much scholarship in American religious history. Whereas most Americans experience their religious tradition primarily at the level of the individual congregation, most of us who write about religious traditions derive our evidence from other sources: books and periodicals, denominational records, histories of institutions, biographies of leaders, and so forth. The scholarly focus makes sense--microhistory is time-consuming, congregations seldom have robust archives, and the story of one congregation might have limited explanatory power at a larger scale. (There are, of course, exceptions to this observation, such as Stephen R. Warner's New Wine in Old Wineskins.) Still, ever since a fellow grad student asked me, regarding my dissertation, "But how did this play out in individual churches?" I've wondered how to connect historical arguments to that granular level of evidence and experience.

Preparation for a recent lecture led me down a rabbit trail that might prove useful for other researchers, particularly those who work on mainline Protestantism. In 1950, The Christian Century published an article series on "Twelve Great Churches," as selected by a survey of its readers. The magazine sent reporters to visit these churches and write lengthy stories about them, which are now available in digital form to anyone with academic library access. In the early 1990s, Randall Balmer revisited these churches for the Century, and his articles became the 1996 book Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism (the lesser-known follow-up to Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America).

I was unable to visit any of the churches, which stretch from West Hartford, CT, to Hollywood, CA, while steering well clear of Texas, but almost all of them had websites detailed enough to yield information on staffing, ministries, worship, structural relationship to a denomination, and a bit of congregational history. At several, I could get audio, video, and/or a transcript of recent sermons. This approach is certainly no replacement for ethnography, and I hope that the mainline and the Christian Century are around long enough for someone to do a full update in 2030. Nonetheless, my "armchair ethnography," informed by the earlier articles, grounded what I wanted to say about mainline preaching more than research only into published sermons or homiletical texts would have. A researcher, or students in a class, could presumably do the same thing with many of the places Balmer featured in Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.

What other decades-old ethnographies or antiquated "best of" lists might be ripe for digital exploration?

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No Depression in Heaven: Greater at Length

Elesha Coffman

I have a confession to make. I have been promoting Alison Greene's No Depression in Heaven for months, whenever conversation turned to Christians' distrust of "big government," or why the Social Gospel faded, or whether churches could make up the difference for proposed federal budget cuts. (Gee, I dunno--does your church have an extra $714,000 lying around at the end of every year?) I was confident that Greene's book spoke powerfully to these discussions--but I hadn't actually read a page of it.

Now, I had read Greene's essay in the edited collection Faithful Republic: Religion and Politics in Modern America, so I knew both the crux of her argument and her skill as a writer. And I had heard lots of good things about her and her work the way one hears things in our field--at conferences, on blogs, on Facebook, etc. I say this for the benefit of any grad students suffering from imposter syndrome, or professors still suffering from imposter syndrome, especially while teaching four new preps at Podunk University, 100 miles from the nearest research library or in-field colleague. We're all magpies, picking up bits of what we need for teaching and writing and just trying to understand the world. I think it's better to be a somewhat knowledgeable participant in an important conversation than to sit it out for a lack of deep expertise.

Fortunately, Janine Giordano Drake invited me to comment on the book for this blog, making it easy to convince myself that I really should sit down and read it. The argument I had previously encountered was there: That church leaders in the Delta region, utterly unable to provide for the material needs of their communities during the Depression, eagerly sought federal assistance--until they began to feel that the government was usurping their moral authority, at which point they turned against the hand feeding them and denied that they had ever needed help anyway. This is such a potent and timely argument that, if it were all the book offered, it would be enough ... but you could get it from an essay-length piece instead. The whole book, I now know, has even more to commend it, including:

Astonishingly good writing. I exhort my students to write with clarity and charity, and Greene excels at both. Clarity: "The Great Depression gave lie to the toxic notion that responsibility for poverty lies with the poor rather than with systems of oppression that make a mockery of the American dream." Charity: "When starving white farmers marched into an Arkansas town to demand food for their dying children, when priests turned away hungry widows and orphans because they were no needier than anyone else, and when visitors claimed that moonshiners did as much as churches to feed the hungry, southern clergy of both races spoke with almost one voice to say that they had done all they could" (both quotes, p. 2). Page after page, it is that good.

Deft use of sources. The letters from clergy to FDR that anchored Greene's essay in Faithful Republic are treasures, but so are the WPA documents and images, the blues lyrics, and the newspaper accounts of Fighting Joe Jeffers, vaudevillian turned revivalist. And while intimate knowledge of the rhythms of agricultural life isn't exactly a source, Greene has that, too. Certain months were better for revivals or worse for changes in banking policy. This book takes it all into account.

Exploration of the Delta region. Memphis and the farmlands tied to it culturally and economically were a blank, green spot on my mental map of the U.S. prior to reading this book. The political dynamics in a city where the long-ruling boss paid poll taxes for white and black voters; the version of plantation society that grew here mostly after the Civil War; and the religious mix (I had no idea that COGIC is one of the largest denominations in America) are all really interesting.

New questions. Clergy pushback against the emerging welfare state was clearly a product of this historical moment, but Greene cites early on a historical reference to "the un-American system of the dole." So which is the more surprising development, the antipathy toward federal aid, or the aid itself? Also, when it came to perspective on welfare, most (poor) Southern parishioners were in favor, while many of their (comparatively well-off) pastors complained. On this issue in the 1930s, laypeople were more "progressive" than clergy, with clergy conceptions of their own moral authority very much bound up with maintenance of the Jim Crow order. But in her epilogue, Greene asserts that Southern clergy were (tepidly, to be sure) more welcoming of Brown v. Board and desegregation than were laypeople. Is this the switch that it appears to be, and, if so, what explains it?

In sum, this is a great book, and I should have read it earlier. I can at least hope that some of the people I commended it to got there way ahead of me.

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RiAH at 10: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Badges!

Elesha Coffman

I like academic conferences. Always have. Way back when I was the editor of Christian History magazine, I attended a Conference on Faith and History meeting in San Diego and then the American Society of Church History winter meeting in San Francisco, searching for new story ideas and potential authors. My husband, Eric, was with me in San Francisco, and we found ourselves in an elevator with two tweed-coated male historians who were so engrossed in their conversation that they were just riding up and down, oblivious to whatever floor they were supposed to be heading to. When we were out of earshot, Eric asked me, "Are these your people?" and I knew that the answer was "Yes." Soon I had left journalism for grad school in the history of American religion.

This blog has functioned, for me, primarily as an extension of academic conferences. My very first posts, in summer 2011, recapped the Religion and American Culture conference, which had raised two huge questions: "Do Religion Scholars Read the Bible?" and what is the "Future of Religion in America?" In my first job, at a school with just two historians and one religion scholar on faculty, I did not get to have these conversations, and I wasn't ready for them to end when I departed from Indianapolis. The inestimable Paul Harvey allowed me to throw my thoughts onto the blog and keep the ball rolling.

One of my favorite conference photos, from Mainz 2014

In the past six years, I've previewed and reviewed numerous other conferences here, as well as shared updates from the American Society of Church History, of which I became a council member in 2015. (Don't forget to renew your membership and stay at the ASCH hotel in D.C. in January!) People I've "met" through RiAH I subsequently met, and often presented alongside, at real-life conferences, where our interactions were enriched by the sustained conversation made possible at this blog. In New York, or Chicago, or wherever, instead of, "Hello, what is it you work on?" while we squint at each other's nametag, it's, "So good to see you, I loved that book review you posted, you're taller than I expected, and how is that new class going?"

In my view, the whole field functions better because we can meet here even when we can't meet in person. Thanks for this tremendous feat of event-planning, Paul!

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The Recurrent Reinhold Niebuhr

Elesha Coffman

Apologies for the repost, but I thought that a pair of articles at Christianity Today might be of interest to readers of this blog as well. In the main piece, Steven Weitzman describes "The Theology Beneath the Trump-Comey Conflict." In a companion sidebar, I offer five reasons why Reinhold Niebuhr continues to make headlines nearly 50 years after his death. Both articles feature links to other resources that take their ideas to a greater depth. Read up, and be the hit of your weekend barbecue!

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Compassionate Conservatism, We Hardly Knew Ye

Elesha Coffman

The recent Christianity Today story "Evangelical Leaders Challenge Trump's 'America First' Budget" immediately made me think of three things.

One, so much for "compassionate conservatism," a phrase popularized by President George W. Bush. This old talking points sheet unpacks some of what he meant by it:

"It is compassionate to actively help our citizens in need."

"We do not believe in a sink-or-swim society. The policies of our government must heed the universal call of all faiths to love our neighbors as we would want to be loved ourselves."

"Compassionate conservatism places great hope and confidence in public education."

"It is compassionate to increase our international aid."

That was 2002, folks. Even the recent past is a foreign country.

Two, the roster of signatories to the letter opposing Trump's budget provides an interesting look at what constitutes "leadership" in American evangelicalism. This is a big question when you're talking about a movement that tends to eschew denominational structures, looks askance at cultural elites, and engages in a constant internal battle about its own boundaries. ("So what is an evangelical, for the love of God, and why does it even matter?" asked Jonathan Merritt in The Atlantic a couple of years ago.) This list of folks that the "evangelical flagship" magazine Christianity Today dubs "evangelical leaders" includes a bunch of Catholics, heads of several parachurch organizations, pastors, a smattering of academics, denominational figures from a pretty wide range of traditions, and several musicians, notably (to this child of the 1980s) Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. Overall, the list strikes me as a useful window into the institutions and various forms of cultural capital that pertain in the evangelical world--unless these folks aren't actually "leaders" in the sense of having followers.

And that's the third thing the article raises in my mind. In my study of American mainline Protestantism, I argued that mainline "leaders" didn't do a great job of communicating their ideas to laypeople, and that the pronouncements of bishops, seminary professors, magazine editors, and the like rarely represented the views of these folks' purported constituencies. I posited higher education as a key cause for this disconnect. Put simply, once you've gone away to college and, later, seminary or grad school, it's hard to go home again.

I'll assume that the people on Christianity Today's list are more educated than the average evangelical. Certainly the seminary deans are, and most if not all of the pastors and denominational figures would have some kind of seminary credentials. But many of the people listed here have a title such as "President & CEO," and who knows (or cares) what degrees the musicians might possess. These "leaders" have various kinds of credibility, and, as a group, they are not as categorically different from the masses of evangelicals as, say, midcentury mainline leaders were from the masses of mainline laity. (The Catholic clergymen on the list are, by contrast, more categorically different from laypeople than even the high churchiest midcentury mainline cleric. But evangelical affinity for [some] Catholic ideas does not extend to [any] Catholic authority structures, so maybe this doesn't matter?)

Does this lack of a sharp, categorial divide between clergy and laity mean that evangelical "leaders" will have better luck at attracting followers than did my midcentury mainliners? Or are American religious folks just really, really hard to lead?

Of course, there is another possibility: that this list of "leaders" is arbitrary and, well, misleading. After the election, Christianity Today sought responses from "20 Evangelical Leaders," and there's very little overlap between these two lists. There's even less overlap, in names or views, with the folks in Time's article "Evangelical Leaders Celebrate the Day Before Donald Trump's Inauguration." Perhaps there are no true evangelical leaders, or there are so many that none of them has much power, or evangelicalism is headed for a split, or there was never any unified "evangelical" movement anyway. At this point, I genuinely have no idea.

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"It Isn't Entirely Unfortunate Rhetoric"

Elesha Coffman

As part of my research on Margaret Mead, I've been reading a stunning book with the totally 1971 title A Rap on Race. The book is the transcript of a series of conversations between Mead and James Baldwin, touching on race, religion, politics, culture, and more. In honor of the new movie I Am Not Your Negro, the audio has been posted on YouTube. The blog "Brain Pickings" features several sets of quotations, including this one on religion. I'm finding it equally thrilling and disturbing how current the conversation sounds, with its warnings about urban violence, the collapse of a sense of community, the perils of unchecked consumption, and persistent tensions surrounding immigration. Here's a portion that reminded me of Ross Douthat's Feb. 4 New York Times column, in which Douthat wondered how those who praise the Great White Men of U.S. history and those who seek to bury them might ever share a vision of America.

Mead: Well we still think ... have the sort of notion, as expressed in Felicia Hemans' poem, "Ay, call it holy ground,  The soil where first they trod! They have left unstained what there they found--Freedom to worship God."

Baldwin: That is very unfortunate rhetoric.

Mead: It isn't entirely unfortunate rhetoric. When Kruschev came to this country, somebody thought up a radio program of books we would like to send him so he could understand the United States. I picked this poem to show how people in the United States associate religion with freedom. That's what they associate it with; that's what they talk about all through middle America: "Right to go to my church and nobody is going to stop me!" The Russians associate religion totally with oppression. It is a very different picture and it got pickled in these early days when there were so many religious refugees of one sort or another. So this is part of our image of what is American, yours and mine, because our ancestors came here together. We share a notion of a kind of people that formed the ideals of this country and the ideals against which we have always been measuring the country and finding it faulty. But the ideals were here. I mean, Jefferson did postulate ideas of democracy that one could follow.

Baldwin: Yes, but he also owned slaves.

Mead: Sure he did. But he set down statements on the basis of which one could fight for the vote for everybody in this country. The fact that he owned slaves is one thing. The principles he laid down are something else. You can call it rhetoric, but I don't believe you really believe these things are just rhetoric. They made it possible for us to go further and have better dreams. But you see, we have now an enormous amount of people in this country who didn't come here to dream. They didn't have dreams, except just security for their children. And these are the people that we call the silent majority and they are terribly frightened.

Baldwin: Yes, their fear frightens me.

Mead: They are terribly easy to frighten, and their fear is frightening. Though all fear is frightening, and certainly all groups that are frightened are frightening.

Baldwin: Because it may be that their fear will precipitate the kind of social chaos which no society can really survive. This fear can result in a kind of convulsion of apathy.

Mead: I don't think that there is so much apathy. I think there is an enormous lack of knowledge of what to do about anything. There is an enormous sense of frustration, and people feel so strongly in this country that you ought to be able to fix at once anything that goes wrong. Press a button and something happens. Then they try to manage our political system or our economic system in the same way.

I must not be the only person who finds this book valuable, because the current prices for used copies on Amazon are astronomical. It was once a mass-market paperback (my library copy was published by Laurel, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell, copyright J.B. Lippincott 1971, printed 1992; I quoted from p. 143-145). I think it's time for a new edition.

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