Women & Gender at the Conference on Faith and History

Andrea L. Turpin

I'm getting excited for the biennial Conference on Faith and History held this year at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI October 4-6. My anticipation is not only linked to the hope that this Texan will get to experience some Fall. It is also linked to the large number of promising papers on the program.

This year marks the conference's 50th anniversary and I look forward to hearing reflections on where the field has been and where it is going. Even more so, I look forward to seeing first hand where it is going. One of the things that is so promising about the papers is how much the conference has diversified since I first began attending exactly ten years ago. Every single time slot of panel presentations contains at least one paper on women's or gender history and a couple contain entire competing panels. Notably, the presidential plenary by my Baylor colleague Beth Allison Barr will incorporate women's history.

Equally encouraging is the range of these papers. Recurring topics include the intellectual history of thought both by and about women, the religious lives of women of color, and the religious lives of women from multiple traditions including Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, and Protestant. (I should add that one notable omission is that there are no papers whose main topic is religion and sexuality.)

I have bolded the papers and panels on women's and gender history below. Enjoy!

Note: The careful reader will notice that I have not listed my own panels. I will be presenting on a roundtable Friday at 4:15pm on "Christian Scholarship for Such a Time as This: A Reassessment." Women's and gender history will play a significant role in the discussion but is not the main focus. I am also indulging another of my interests by serving as commentator for a fascinating panel Saturday at 2:30pm on "Religious Education as Cultural Transmission in Twentieth-Century America."



Friday, October 5, 8:00-9:30 a.m.

Session 3: Gendered Faith in Early America: Women as Civil Authorities, Moravian Missionaries, and Disabled Christians
Meeter Center Lecture Hall

Chair: Lisa Clark Diller, Southern Adventist University

• “Flourishing Families or Spit-in-the-Face? Women, the Book of Exodus and Civil Authority in Colonial America,” Kristina Benham, Baylor University

• “Hearing the Gospel in a Silent World: Disability, Gender and Religion in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” Katherine Ranum, University of Cincinnati

• “New Madrid Earthquakes of the Cherokee Nation: Women Shaken and Bonded,” Lucinda Yang, Baylor University

Comment:   Lisa Clark Diller, Southern Adventist University

Session 7: Christian Women and the History Profession
Prince Conference Center, Hickory Room

Chair: Loretta Hunnicutt, Pepperdine University

• Nadya Williams, University of West Georgia

• Meghan DiLuzio, Baylor University

• Elizabeth Marvel, Baylor University

Friday, October 5, 10:00-11:30 a.m.

Session 9: Historical Thinking and Evangelical Institutions
Prince Conference Center, Willow West

Chair:  David Swartz, Asbury University

• “The Role of the Christian Institution in the History of Evangelical Divorce and Remarriage,” Margaret Flamingo, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• “What Has Grand Rapids To Do With Nashville? Christian Historians Examining, Enduring, and Engaging with Popular Christian Cultures,” K. Scott Culpepper, Dordt College

• “Does Evangelical Pietism Undermine the Life of the Mind? The Case of Bethel College, Indiana, 1947-2017,” Dennis Engbrecht, Bethel College & Timothy Erdel, Bethel College

Comment:   David Swartz, Asbury University


Friday, October 5, 2:15-3:45 p.m.

Session 17: Sacred Texts in American History
Commons Annex, Room 214 (upper level)

Chair:  John Turner, George Mason University

• “Reconfiguring the Archive: Women and the Social Production of the Book of Mormon,” Amy Easton-Flake, Brigham Young University & Rachel Cope, Brigham Young University

• “The Practical and Poetic Pietist: John Quincy Adams and the Bible,” Matt McCook, Oklahoma Christian University

• “’The Bible is Assumed’: The Great Books Movement and the Place of Protestants in the ‘Great Conversation,’” Fred Beuttler, University of Chicago

• “The Enlightenment and Modernity in Carl F.H. Henry’s Account of Western Civilization,” Mike Kulger, Northwestern College

Comment:   John Turner, George Mason University

Session 18: Political Hope in the Age of Fracture
Prince Conference Center, Willow East

Chair: Michael Hammond, Taylor University

• “‘That Unageing Spiritual Reality’: Kathleen Raine, Temenos and the Hope of Civilization,” Eric Miller, Geneva College

• “This Town Ain’t So Bad: Spending Heavenly Eternity in Springfield with the Simpsons,” Paul Arras, SUNY Cortland

• “Friendship and Culture War: Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety and its Historical Moment,” Matthew Stewart, Syracuse University

Comment:  Jeff Bilbro, Spring Arbor University

Session 22: Teaching Islamic History and Culture in the Christian University
Commons Annex, Alumni Board Room (upper level)

Chair: Douglas Howard, Calvin College

• “What has Baghdad to do with Jerusalem and Athens? Situating Classical Islam within the Western Tradition,” Anthony Minnema, Samford University

• “We Speak for Ourselves: The Use of Oral History in the Classroom to Cement the Experience of Muslim Americans in the Broader Narrative of U.S. History," Amy Poppinga, Bethel University

• “Fostering Humility and Hospitality through the Study of Jewish and Islamic Fundamentalisms,” Sarah Miglio, Wheaton College

• “How do you Teach Honor Killings? Sufi Transgressive Piety, Lottie Moon, and the Benefits of Comparative History,” Annalise DeVries, Samford University

Comment:  Douglas Howard, Calvin College

Session 23: Legacies of the Protestant Reformation
Meeter Center Lecture Hall

Chair: Ron Rittgers, Valparaiso University

• “Division in Unity: Historiography and the Legacies of the Radical Reformation, ”Joe Super, Liberty University Online

• “Margaret Baxter: ‘Nursing Mother’ of Protestant Dissenters,” Seth Osborne, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

• “Theological Responses to the Synod of Dort in France” (in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the synod), Martin Klauber, Trinity International University

Comment:   Ron Rittgers, Valparaiso University


Friday, October 5, 4:15-5:45 p.m.

Session 25: The Mississippi Delta and the Long Civil Rights Movement
Prince Conference Center, Willow West

Chair: John Giggie, University of Alabama

• “Seek the Welfare of the City Where I have Sent You,” Alicia Jackson, Covenant College

• ““She was Counsellor and Advisor”: Black Women Fraternal Leaders in the Mississippi Delta, 1940s–1970s,” Katrina Sims, Hofstra University

• “Fannie Lou Hamer as Organic Theologian, ”Jemar Tisby, University of Mississippi

Comment:  Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Session 26: Vocation ‘Between the Times’: Catholic Women from Revolution to Council
Commons Annex, Room 214 (upper level)

Chair: Emily McGowin, Wheaton College

• “Vocation ‘Between the Times’: A Rule for the Active Apostolate,” Laura Eloe, University of Dayton

• “Vocation ‘Between the Times’: Mary as a Model for Catholic Mothers in the 1950s,” Annie Huey, University of Dayton

• “Vocation ‘Between the Times’: A Mother and a Mystic,” Joshua Wopata, University of Dayton

Comment:   Emily McGowin, Wheaton College

Session 30: Historians as Social and Moral Critics
Meeter Center Lecture Hall

Chair:  William Katerberg, Calvin College

• “History that Heals: Reflections on Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission from a Settler Historian,” William Van Arragon, King’s University

• "The Historian as Moral Critic: John Higham, Christopher Lasch, Andrew Bacevich," John Haas, Bethel College

• “The Artist as Historian: Carrie Mae Weems and the Photographic Archive,” Elissa Weichbrodt, Covenant College

Comment:  William Katerberg, Calvin College

Session 32: Shifting Evangelical Identities in Secularizing America
Commons Annex, Lecture Hall C/D (lower level)

Chair: Brenda Thompson Schoolfield, Bob Jones University

• “Earthrise: The Religious Politics of a Stamp and the Role of Conspiracy in the Era of Late 1960s Fake News and Its Implications for the Social Media Age,” Bobby Griffith, The University of Oklahoma

• ““Last at the Cross, and First at the Resurrection”: Sam Jones’s Theology of Gender,” Anderson Rouse, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• “Billy Graham’s Northwestern Years (1948-1952) and Emerging Evangelical and Fundamentalist Identities,” Greg Rosauer, University of Northwestern–St.Paul

Comment:  Brenda Thompson Schoolfield, Bob Jones University


Friday, October 5, 7:00 p.m.

Presidential Plenary—Beth Allison Barr, Baylor University
Prince Conference Center, Great Hall
PAUL, MEDIEVAL WOMEN AND 50 YEARS OF THE CFH: NEW PERSPECTIVES


Saturday, October 6, 8:00-9:30 a.m.

Session 33: Defending Black Citizenship: African-American and White Christians on Abolition, Prohibition, and Lynching in the U.S. South and Borderlands
DeVos Communication Center, Bytwerk Theater (lower level)

Chair: Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

• “Black Pastors Defending Black Bodies: Lynching and the Church,” Malcolm Foley, Baylor University   

• “Religious Abolitionism and the Quest for African-American Citizenship in Cincinnati,” Scott Anderson, University of Mary-Hardin Baylor

• “Defending Black Manhood: African Americans’ Religious (Anti-)Prohibition Activism,” Brendan Payne, North Greenville University

Comment:   Pearl Young, University of North Carolina

Session 40: Ideals of Womanhood in American Christianity
Meeter Center Lecture Hall

Chair: Margaret Bendroth, Congregational Library & Archives

• ““Let any anxious and pious mother remember the perils, and the rescue of the son of Monica”: St. Monica as Female Exemplar in Nineteenth-Century Protestantism,” Paul Gutacker, Baylor University

• ““I’m for the ERA”: Faith, Feminism, and the Active Politics of a Southern Baptist First Lady,” Elizabeth Flowers, Texas Christian University

• “The ‘Noblest Career of All’: Housekeeping, Homemaking, and the Ideal of Evangelical Postwar Domesticity,” Adina Johnson Kelley, Baylor University

Comment:  Margaret Bendroth


Saturday, October 6, 10:00-11:30 a.m.

Session 42: Women, Race, and Authority in American Religious Movements
Meeter Center Lecture Hall

Chair: Jeanne Petit, Hope College

• “Unexpected Scope for Work: Black Women Doctors and the Seventh-day Adventist Church,” Lisa Clark Diller, Southern Adventist University

• “Women’s Protests at the American Presbyterian Congo Mission, 1916-1933,” Kimberly Hill, University of Texas at Dallas

•  “Shaping Women of ‘Unsubdued Spirit’: Rebecca Gratz and Female Religious Leadership in Antebellum American Judaism,” Elise Leal, Whitworth University

Comment:  Jeanne Petit, Hope College

Session 47: Versions of Holiness: Saints and Nuns from Medieval England to Africa and the American West
Commons Annex, Room 214 (upper level)

Chair: Jennifer Hevelone-Harper, Gordon University

• ““Present your bodies a sacrifice to the Lord”: The Physical and Spiritual Care of Nuns in Late Medieval England,” Elizabeth Marvel, Baylor University

• “Constructing Houses in the American West: Candlelight, Bricks, and Communion,” Danae Jacobson, University of Notre Dame

• “Women on the Move from a Global Perspective: A Gendered Analysis of Saints’ Lives in Medieval Ethiopia and Europe,” Anna Redhair, Baylor University

Comment:  Jennifer Hevelone-Harper, Gordon University

Session 48: Evangelical Uses of the Past
Prince Conference Center, Willow East

Chair: Jay Green, Covenant College

• ““Everyone is a child of destiny”: Henrietta Mears and the Meaning of History,” Amber Thomas, University of Edinburgh

• “Our City: History Creation and late Nineteenth-Century Urban Evangelicalism,” Andrew MacDonald, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

• “Conservative Resurgence or Conservative Takeover? Usable History at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,” Lisa Weaver Swartz, Asbury Theological Seminary

Comment:  Jay Green, Covenant College


Saturday, October 6, 2:30-4:00 p.m.

Session 52: Beyond the Voting Booth: Evangelicals and Race, Gender, and Memory
Meeter Center Lecture Hall

Chair:  Bill Svelmoe, St. Mary’s College

• “Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Protestant Public Memory at the Billy Graham Center Museum,” Devin Manzullo-Thomas, Messiah College

• “White Evangelicals as ‘a people’: The Church Growth Movement from India to the United States,” Jesse Curtis, Temple University

• “Grooming Evangelical Womanhood: The Pioneer Girls and Gendered Identity,” Rebecca Koerselman, Northwestern University

Comment:  Bill Svelmoe, St. Mary’s College

Session 56: ‘For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning”: Christian Uses of the Past to Shape the Present and Future
Prince Conference Center, Willow East

Chair: Seth Perry, Princeton University

• “Lost Cause Hagiography: Rewriting Saints Felicity and Perpetua as Southern Catholic Martyrs,” David Roach, Baylor University

• “‘Crying out against Conditions’: Protestants and Labor, 1908-1940,” Tori Jessen, University of Alabama

• “‘Beloved prostitutes and rough fishermen’: Appeals to the Early Church in the Emerging Church Movement,” John Young, University of Alabama

Comment:  Seth Perry, Princeton University

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Book List on Women, Gender, and Sex in American Religious History

Andrea L. Turpin
  
This fall I get to teach one of my favorite classes: my graduate course on Women, Gender, and Sex in American Religious History. One of the readings I assign for the first day is quite possibly my favorite historiographic essay of all time, Catherine Brekus's “Introduction: Searching for Women in Narratives of American Religious History,” in The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, ed. Brekus (North Carolina, 2007).

In this ten-year-old essay, Brekus examines why so many synthetic works of American religious history ignore women and why so many synthetic works of American women's history ignore religion. She makes a compelling case that the answer is not that scholarship on American women's religious history doesn't exist--and that both omissions leave our understanding of our collective past significantly impoverished.

Yet five years after the release of The Religious History of American Women, the December 2012 issue of the Journal of American History dedicated to a state-of-the-field analysis of American women's and gender history hardly mentioned religion at all. And as late as 2016 I was still seeing so many book lists for lay readers interested in American religious history that didn't include books by or about women that I was moved to write my first ever blog post on the subject.

But I am encouraged by my class, both the students in it and the books available to assign for it. The course has enrolled a large number of students, and roughly equal numbers of women and men are interested in the topic. (I wrote a guest post last year over at the Anxious Bench reflecting on my experience teaching an earlier version of this course to 6 men and 1 woman!) And even though I last taught the course only a year and half ago, I changed about one-third of the books on the syllabus because so much excellent work has been published in the last two years.

Each week the class reads one book and an additional article or book chapter on a complementary topic. In the readings for the course, I strive for diversity of multiple types: religious traditions, race and ethnicity, historical time period, styles of writing, and classic vs. recent works. In different years the course ends up having slightly different emphases depending on the interests of the students enrolled, my research at the time, what books have recently been published, and the directions in which the field is developing. 

Particularly noteworthy in this iteration is the recent expansion of scholarship on religion and sexuality. And it is a sign of the vitality of the field of women, gender, and sex in American religious history that there are so many excellent books that I could have included that did not make this particular semester's list. Judging from the books on this year's syllabus, shout out to the university presses of Oxford, North Carolina, and Cornell, who have all published multiple titles in this area.

Now without further ado, for your reading pleasure, here are the books for this year: 
 

Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton, 2017) 

Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (W.W. Norton, 1987)

Susan Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics & Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England (Cornell, 1994)

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870 (Knopf, 2017)

Kathi Kern, Mrs. Stanton’s Bible (Cornell, 2001)

Andrea L. Turpin, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837–1917 (Cornell, 2016)

*I offer the book to my students at my author's discount so I don't make a profit. We use this day to discuss not only the topic, but also the process of writing a dissertation and turning it into a book.

Sarah Imhoff, Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana, 2017)

Kristin Kobes DuMez, A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism (Oxford, 2015)

Marie Griffith, Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic, 2017)

Heather R. White, Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights (North Carolina, 2015)

Daniel Williams, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement before Roe v. Wade (Oxford, 2016)

Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (North Carolina, 2017)

James M. Ault, Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church (Knopf, 2004)

As I mentioned earlier, in addition to these books, the class reads several standalone articles and book chapters. I want to highlight three 2018 edited volumes that make helpful contributions to the field and are the source of some of these chapters:

Eds. Gillian Frank, Bethany Moreton, & Heather R. White, Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the United States (North Carolina, 2018)

Eds. Michele Lise Tarter & Catie Gill, New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800 (Oxford, 2018)

Eds. Leilah Danielson, Marian Mollin, & Doug Rossinow, The Religious Left in Modern America: Doorkeepers of a Radical Faith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

I suspect next time I teach this course, several readers of this blog will have produced excellent new work in the field to include!

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Do Catholic Historians Need to Define Catholicism?

Historians of evangelicalism are very interested in defining evangelicalism. It would seem obvious that scholars of a certain field would be dedicated to defining their object of study, but historians of evangelicalism go about this task with an admirable gusto. The act of defining is central to the field. Historian David Bebbington’s famous definition, the Bebbington Quadrilateral – evangelicalism as biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism – has framed the conversation since 1989. As I listened to the excellent papers delivered by historians at the Noll Conference in March 2018, I began to wonder why Catholic historians do not seem so interested in defining their object of study, Catholicism.

Certainly we do not have quadrilateral. But should we have one?



Two answers to the question about the lack of enthusiasm for defining Catholicism pop up immediately. First, Catholicism does not appear to be as controversial in American politics, and as a result, the stakes of defining it are not as high. The conference suggested there is a pressing need to define evangelicalism in order to understand present day voting patterns. The second factor easing any pressure to define Catholicism is the structure of the Church itself. The centralized nature of the Church relieves scholars of the need to define Catholicism. At the conference I asked two colleagues who study evangelicalism why historians of Catholicism are not interested in definitions. Basically, the response I received was that the structure of the Catholic Church – a Pope and a hierarchy – means that less is up for grabs.

We should pause to ask if having a debate about the definition of Catholicism would be productive. I imagine some will think that having such a conversation would only serve as a distraction. But I found the debate about evangelicalism at the Noll Conference to be fascinating and generative. Is it a theology? Is it a politics? Is evangelicalism the media you consume? Is it a set of ideas? Is it worship? Is everyone who likes Billy Graham an evangelical? Is the scandal of the evangelical mind still scandalous?

It is possible to conclude that Catholic historians have been debating the definition of Catholicism implicitly in their books for years. The closest our field comes to The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind might be William Halsey’s classic study, The Survival of American Innocence: Catholicism in an Era of Disillusionment, 1920-1940. Halsey argued that a neo-scholastic worldview allowed Catholics to imagine themselves as existing outside the tragedy of twentieth century American history (the rise of ethical relativism, psychoanalysis, and subjectivity). It is tragic in Halsey’s tale, and rather a scandal, because the static mentality of Catholicism made it obtuse. Other scholars followed his lead and defined Catholicism as static because of the intellectual freeze brought on by the condemnations of Americanism and Modernism. But Halsey makes the important point that Catholicism could be construed as a set of mental categories. He does define his object of study. Jay Dolan’s work implied that only the methods of social history could move scholars of Catholicism closer to a useful definition of what they study. John McGreevy’s Catholicism and American Freedom would say Catholicism is an assent to a set of ideas. His Parish Boundaries would locate institutionalism at the center of what it means to be Catholic. His latest work on the Jesuits suggests any definition of Catholicism must consider the global. Robert Orsi’s work defines Catholicism as a religion of practice replete with longings for connections to the “real presence.” Relationships between heaven and earth are also at the heart this Catholic identity. As is gender, as works by Amy Koehlinger, Kathleen Sprows-Cummings, and Mary J. Henold make clear. The essays in Habits of Devotion on confession (James O’Toole), the Eucharist (Margaret McGuiness), prayer (Joseph Chinnici), and Marian devotion (Paul Kane) identify Catholicism as profoundly ritualistic and sacramental. Peter D’Agostino argues that Rome and trans-nationalism are key to defining American Catholicism. Younger scholars are contributing to this debate and taking it in new directions. Matthew Cressler has raised the question of how the definition of American Catholicism changes when we locate black Catholics at the center of our story. Catherine Osbourne’s new book suggests professionalism and professional identities are important to Catholic life in the twentieth century. Jack Downey makes the point that Americanization of Catholicism and its entrance into mainstream of American life should not stand as the ultimate end point for defining the men and women of the Old Faith. Not all Catholics wanted mainstream status because such an “achievement” entailed an ensnarement in modern materialism.

Catholic historians debate definitions of Catholicism without a central framing device.


This blog post raises the question of whether Catholic historians need a device like a quadrilateral to shape this debate and give it some structure. The question assumes, perhaps incorrectly, that scholars can, in fact, define Catholicism. It also pushes past any reservations about debating a definition rather than figuring out how Catholics shaped American History. But what if we synthesized the works in the field to produce a four-pronged definition?  What would rise to the surface if we made it goal to boil it all down to four categories? Or could we define Catholicism with a broader categorical move? Is it a theology? Is it a set of institutions? Is it an imagination? We might return to some classic sources written by theologians and social scientists. David Tracy’s Analogical Imagination or Andrew Greely’s The Catholic Imagination both spring to mind. Historians might walk the path hewn by the editors of the recently published The Anthropology of Catholicism: A Reader. Scholar of religion Kate Dugan, in her useful review, teases out the questions asked across the volume’s essays: “What counts as a Catholic idea and a Catholic person? Why does Catholicism continue to have influence the twenty-first century? If there is a Catholic imagination, or Catholic imaginations, who acts in it?” Historians of Catholicism might follow the lead of evangelical historians and these anthropologists and then ask a pack of similar questions. Then, of course, we should deliver a satisfying answer.

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