5 Questions With James Chappel about How the Catholic Church became Modern in the 1930s

I recently corresponded with historian James Chappel about his new book, Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church (Harvard, 2017). Chappel is the Hunt Family Assistant Professor of History at Duke University. For more information on his research and teaching visit his website. 

You define modern as accepting “the split between the public sphere of politics and the private sphere of religion.” You argue that Catholics accepted this spilt between public and private in the 1930s. How did you come to see what it means to be “modern” in this split of public and private?

For years, I avoided the term “modern” altogether. It seemed too normative and value-laden to bear much interpretive weight. The concept has a gravitational pull to it, though, and over the years I circled back to it. It helped me to solve a particular problem that arose in the course of my research. As I immersed myself in the archive of mid-century Catholicism, it became increasingly clear that something dramatically transformed in the 1930s (I hope that readers will understand that my book focuses on France, Germany, and Austria—I’ll say “Catholicism” as a shorthand, but I can’t say that the story was the same everywhere). Texts written in the late 1930s inhabited a different conceptual universe from those written ten years before. Through the 1920s, Catholic intellectuals were still dreaming of some kind of Catholic restoration, which might save Europe from the wounds of World War I. A decade later, this project had fizzled. Catholics were no longer struggling to convert a continent, but to save some semblance of their Church in a continent that was playing host to dangerous new political forces. A new set of keywords came into vogue: human rights, anti-totalitarianism, human dignity, and a few others. And a new set of commitments arose, too. Most prominently, many Catholics were more concerned with the health and security of the family than they had been before.




I struggled for a long time over how to characterize this shift, which seemed to me monumental. This led me back to the concept of modernity. I started reading scholars of religion like Elizabeth Pritchard, and queer theorists like Michael Warner. This helped me to three realizations. First, “modernity” can be a useful heuristic so long as it is rigorously defined as a real and imagined split between a private sphere and a public sphere. Second, this split is always contested, and can be investigated as a historical problematic. Third, and maybe most importantly, this split is always gendered, insofar as the modern split between public and private tends to code both the familial and the religious into the private sphere. Understood in these ways, the concept of “modernity” came to seem like a useful rubric to understand what was going on with my figures. It helped to explain both the shift towards human rights and individual dignity, while also allowing for a conceptual integration of the concomitant turn towards a particular familial order.

Your book helpfully identifies two different strands of the Catholic modern. A paternal modernism that accepted a robust state that protected and promoted the family, and a fraternal modernism that envisioned the private sphere as a space for civic associations governed by solidarity. Can you offer a brief explanation of the two modes of Catholic modernity for our readers? Where do the two modes overlap and where do they diverge?

This goes right to the heart of the book, and also to the explanation of the “modern” that I just gave. If we imagine that the split between public and private can be negotiated in all sorts of ways, we can tell a story of Catholic “modernization” that allows the Church to remain a space of contestation—as it has always been, and always will be. One of the most surprising aspects of my research is that I found surprisingly little contest between anti modern and modern Catholics. What I found, instead, was a long set of debates about how to oppose modernity, coming to a close around 1930, and a new set of debates about how to shape modernity, which began around 1930 and continue into the present. By the end of the 1930s, in other words, most Catholics accepted that a truly Catholic society was off the table, and that the Church’s mission was to influence a modern, interfaith world.

The basic theoretical question was this one: how do we define the private sphere? If we accept that religious jurisdiction only directly applies in private, then how is “private” to be defined? This framing of the question helped me to see what was really going on in the 1930s debates. The majority solution at the time, and probably still today, was to define the private sphere as the space of reproductive families. States and economies, in other words, can be left to their own devices, so long as the Catholic family is secured, and so long as Catholic teachings about the family are translated into law. As this already indicates, this understanding of the private authorized an activist politics (the privatization of religion never counsels an abandonment of the political, but only shapes what sorts of public action is legitimate). According to this view, the Catholic mission should focus on the health of the heteronormative family, and should call on the (secular) state to ban abortion, divorce, and homosexuality, while also adopting substantial welfare measures to provide a living wage (one that would allow the mother to stay at home).

I called that view “paternal Catholic modernism,” drawing attention to its gendered and hierarchical account of the private sphere. It has been extremely influential, and it has allowed the Church to play a significant role in shaping modern societies. Specifically, it helped to legitimate the curious mixture of robust family welfare and conservative family legislation that we see in postwar Europe, where Christian Democratic parties mobilized some version of paternal Catholic ideology.

As we can see in the headlines today, other Catholic visions are afoot. I refer to their competitors as “fraternal” Catholic modernists. They were always in the minority, but it’s important to recover their stories because they show that there have always been multiple, legitimate ways to conceptualize a Catholic modernity. They argued, and quite rightly, that the focus on the family to the exclusion of all else had led the Church into unsavory alliances with all sorts of evil political doctrines (most notably, fascism). They did not reject Catholic family teachings, and they were not feminists in the contemporary sense. They did argue, though, that family ethics should be seen as only one part of a more capacious and emancipatory Catholic vision. Healthy families, they argued, were impossible to imagine in a world of war, racism, and capitalism—Catholics, therefore, could not focus on the family alone. In some ways, they were more beholden than their competitors to the ancient Catholic dream of conquering society and redeeming the age. They hoped to do so, however, in a more modern and interfaith key, forging alliances with socialists, Protestants, and Jews in a struggle for justice.

 You introduce readers to a wide range of fascinating characters. You deliberately make your book a history of lay Catholic thinkers. Which was your favorite to write about and why?

This is an interesting question. I’ll answer it in two ways, saying first whose story was most interesting to track, and then whose ideas I found most compelling. To the first question: one of the characters I follow was a German Catholic economist named Theodor Brauer. I found him to be a sympathetic figure: he was one of the first working-class Catholics to receive a doctorate in economics, and his early writings (from the 1910s and 1920s) show us a man who was genuinely trying to see how modern capitalism could be made compatible with the ethical demands of the faith. He was a major figure in the Catholic trade unions, in an era when the very idea of trade unions was still controversial in some circles. Then the Depression hit. For reasons that I go into in the book, but can skip over here, the Depression made all of the old Catholic solutions to economic injustice seem inappropriate. Catholic social thinkers, Brauer included, were casting about for new solutions. And Brauer, specifically, was prolific enough, and enough of his archives were salvaged, that we can watch him month-by-month grapple with the realities of a Germany that was falling apart. He ended up becoming a Nazi sympathizer, before being thrown into prison by the Nazis themselves. The brevity of his affiliation does not save him, morally: the Catholic flirtation with Hitler, however short-lived, was crucial to his coming to power. He does, though, help us to see how a basically humanist Catholic thinker could be pulled into the fascist orbit. It was sad to watch, but it was instructive to see in granular detail how an apparently decent man could be pulled towards fascism, even if only briefly.

Brauer was not, though, my “favorite.” The answer to that question might be an unsurprising one for readers here. Over the years, I became entranced with the figure of Jacques Maritain. At first I did not want to write about him at all. He seemed too well-studied, too banal, and too enamored with America. Those preconceptions were all wrong, especially for the Maritain of the 1930s. Maritain has, I think, been misremembered as a liberal democrat with a vague interest in social injustice. From his first (monarchist) writings to his last ones, in which he grappled with the Cuban Revolution, he was much more radical and mercurial than that. The Maritain of the 1930s was an absolute firebrand, as excoriating towards liberal democracy as he was towards the paternal modernism that was, in his view, leading the Church towards heretical alliance with sovereign authorities. Maritain arrived at a form of Catholicism that was rigorously anti-racist and anti-capitalist, and one that was more in dialogue with Marx than with Mussolini. It took, I think, incredible creativity and bravery to arrive at such a position at such desperate times.

You describe Catholic Modern as a conceptual history. What does that mean? How did you track the changes in ideas over time?

I am trained as an intellectual historian, and there is no getting away from the fact that my book is mainly a study of intellectuals and texts. I think, though, that the Catholic Church is especially amenable to this type of study. Because what is the Church, in the end? Especially in the twentieth century, it relies for its power on the plausibility, attractiveness, and utility of a certain set of ideas about what it means to live a good and moral life. The historian of the Church, therefore, can focus on those ideas. I came to prefer the term “conceptual” history, though, because this is not really a story of particular “ideas” or “philosophies” (neo-Thomism, say). I tried to tell a richer story of how the meaning of the Church, and of the faith, evolved along multiple dimensions: race, sex, gender, and citizenship evolved together. One of my findings was that neither the papacy nor famous theologians were as important to this process as I thought they would be. Catholicism lives and breathes in local contexts, and the ideas are forged in spaces and venues that the Holy See cannot control very well.

My project began as a history of theology, but became a conceptual history of Catholic modernism. This inflected my method in two ways. I focused, first, less on monographs than on periodical literature and newspapers, which in an era before television and Twitter seemed to me to be the crucial venues. I gathered together literature from trade unions, women’s groups, youth organizations, employer’s associations, and more, in an effort to gather as capacious of a source base as I could. This begs the question, secondly, of what to do with such an unwieldy archive. I focused less on specific debates and controversies than on the slower, but more certain, introduction of a new set of assumptions and keywords into the debate. Conceptual change does not really happen via “debate.” It is not as though Catholics wrote books in favor of, and against, human rights. And yet, over the course of a few years, human rights became a lingua franca of Catholic discourse. I was more interested in that process, and contextual reconstruction of its motivations, than I was in genuinely intellectual or theological change.

What are the implications of your study for US Catholic modernity? Did American Catholic thinkers embrace modernity on similar terms?

I recognize that this is a blog in US history, but I am firmly a historian of Europe. I sincerely hope that my approach casts some light onto what is happening in American Catholicism. One thing I learned, though, is that it is perilous to make claims about a context that you have not specifically studied in depth. The story that I tell in the book is not the story that I set out to write. The European sources surprised me, in a way that I have not allowed American sources to do. My hunch is that some version of this story did take place in the United States. It squares with what I’ve learned from historian like Lizabeth Cohen, Kenneth Heineman, and John McGreevy. The stories were certainly connected: as McGreevy shows, European émigrés like Maritain had outsized influence in Catholic circles, and journals like Commonweal and the Catholic Worker are clearly in dialogue with European ideas. Meanwhile, the economic and political crisis of the 1930s was global in nature, and it seems to me that Catholics like John Ryan and even Charles Coughlin responded in ways not dissimilar to their peers in Europe. Catholics were entering the Democratic coalition in the USA just as they were entering similar political alliances in Europe (and with similarly complex alliances between economic progressivism and racial nativism). But do the models of fraternal and paternal modernism that I uncovered in Europe exist, in the same ways, on this side of the Atlantic? Were the 1930s as crucial to American Catholics as to European ones? I could hazard guesses to these questions, but if I’ve learned one thing in studying Catholic history, it’s that the guesses we hazard are likely to be wrong. I would be very interested, then, to hear what American historians make of the story I tell in the book.

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Interview with Adam Laats on Fundamentalist U

Andrea L. Turpin

As you might imagine given my scholarly interests, I love to see good work come out on the history of religion in American higher education. That's why I was delighted to interview Adam Laats on his new book Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Adam is a scholar I highly admire not only for the depth of his research but also for his commitment to rigorous fairness to historical characters from across the ideological spectrum. So without further ado, here is Adam weighing in on everything from the nature of evangelicalism to why religious historians should care about the history of education to what to do about the culture wars:

AT: What led you to write Fundamentalist U?

AL: The most interesting questions for me are pretty basic: What are schools for? What counts as “good” when it comes to education? From that perspective, there is nothing more fascinating than the network of evangelical colleges, universities, institutes, and seminaries. In the twentieth century, they represented the most significant dissenting type of school in the United States.

AT: Why is studying the history of education important for historians of religion?

AL: When it comes to religion (and politics, too, but that’s another story), education is where the rubber hits the road. There is no better way to understand a religious group as it truly is than to examine the ways it tries to pass itself on to every new generation. Beyond creeds and catechisms, curriculum represents the unvarnished truth of what a religious group considers absolutely vital for children to know.

AT: Your book is entitled Fundamentalist U, but you cover colleges and universities you label “fundamentalist” and those you label “evangelical.” How would you define the difference?

AL: By the middle of the twentieth century, a group of fundamentalist Protestants hoped to reform their movement, to introduce what Carl Henry called in 1947 “progressive Fundamentalism with a social message.” To my mind, the neo-evangelical reform, which eventually became known simply as “evangelical,” is still best described in Henry’s terms; the theology of fundamentalism is still there, but some of the non-theological conservative cultural ideas are scraped away, the inward-looking exclusivity is abandoned in favor of engagement with the outside world.

When I began this research, I was expecting to find a hard, clean institutional break between “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” institutions in the middle of the twentieth century, the kind George Marsden described at Fuller Seminary. In fact, even at schools most firmly associated with either the “fundamentalist” side of the evangelical family or the “evangelical” side, I found lingering connections and associations to the other side. As with all family feuds, the division between “fundamentalists” and “evangelicals” was never as clear as some historians and partisans would like it to be. Fundamentalists never gave up on claiming higher academic and scientific standards, though they often despaired of ever achieving the mainstream recognition of their academic superiority they thought they deserved. Evangelicals never abdicated their fundamentalist religious purity, though they abandoned their insistence that only fundamentalists could be trusted intellectually or morally.

AT: What did you find to be the relationship between theological and political conservatism at these institutions?

AL: This is something evangelical intellectuals don’t like to hear, but I’ll say it: Many times, political conservatism—or, more precisely, a vague but powerful cultural traditionalism that included political conservatism—became a more influential popular measure of “true” fundamentalism than did theological conservatism. Colleges and universities were subjected to endless, ruthless scrutiny by the broad evangelical public. This scrutiny sometimes included theological notions, but more commonly dealt with issues such as student behavior, faculty affiliations, and political or social conventions. Any whisper that a school had slipped from full-throated dedication to key traditional ideas or norms could cause panic in that school’s administrators, alumni, and trustees.

My favorite example of this ever-present tension came in 1936 when President J. Oliver Buswell of Wheaton College confronted J. Gresham Machen about his new Westminster Seminary. Professor Machen had recently left Princeton Seminary to open his new school, and Buswell was concerned about rumors Buswell had heard. Was it true, Buswell demanded, that Westminster students were allowed to drink alcohol? Machen confirmed it. There was no theological reason to prohibit alcohol, Machen insisted. In his considered opinion, teetotalism was not a Christian imperative, but a bland bit of Main Street prudism. 

AT: You observe that fundamentalist and evangelical colleges challenged some of the epistemological assumptions of mainstream higher education, but very closely mirrored the institutional forms of mainstream higher education. How, in turn, would you say that fundamentalist and evangelical colleges and universities have affected more mainstream American higher education?

AL: Most significantly, I’d say, conservative-evangelical colleges and universities (both those that called themselves “evangelical” and those that called themselves “fundamentalist”) influenced mainstream American higher education by offering an intellectual and institutional haven for an alternative epistemology, one that didn’t immediately dismiss the influence of the supernatural.  How did that impact mainstream higher education? In at least two significant ways. First, students from evangelical colleges often also attended mainstream schools, either as transfer students or graduate students. The training those students received in their conservative-evangelical colleges—intellectual training, but perhaps more importantly a sense of themselves as dissenting scholars—must have had an enormous influence on their work in mainstream institutions.

Second, scholarship supported by evangelical institutions has had its own direct impact on mainstream thinking and institutions. We see the results in several fields. Though many secular scientists dismiss it, the work of evangelical scientists has made significant inroads in both the popular mind and in mainstream institutions such as the National Institutes of Health. In the field of academic history, too, the best work on the history of evangelicalism has been nurtured by the network of evangelical institutions themselves. When I studied twentieth-century religious history as a graduate student at the very unreligious University of Wisconsin, for example, we began and ended with the work of historians such as George Marsden, Mark Noll, Edith Blumhofer, Joel Carpenter, and many other scholars nurtured by evangelical institutions of higher education.

AT: Would you say the record of twentieth-century fundamentalist and evangelical institutions on race, class, and gender inclusivity is better or worse than the record of mainstream higher education? Why?

AL: In the most obvious senses, in my opinion, the record of most evangelical institutions of higher ed has been much worse when it comes to questions of racial and gender inclusivity. Most obviously, a few fundamentalist colleges such as Bob Jones University clung desperately to racial segregation and insisted on traditional gender hierarchies. If we only get to tell one story from the history of evangelical higher education, that is it. But if we can take time to dig beyond the obvious, we see a more complicated story. At many evangelical schools, for instance, activists from a variety of racial backgrounds used the long history of evangelical anti-racism to help move their institutions in a more positive direction racially. After all, American evangelicals had a long tradition of anti-racist activism and many institutional activists were able to draw on that history to call for reforms. When it comes to questions of sexual identity and gender identity, though, twentieth-century evangelical schools—ALL of them—have a much worse record of inclusion, from my perspective (though that was not true in the nineteenth century).

The question gets more complicated when it comes to issues of class. For theological reasons, many evangelical institutions actively reached out to non-elite populations, often explicitly and repeatedly rejecting elitist academic standards in favor of spreading the Gospel message as widely as possible. But across the course of the twentieth century (at four-year liberal arts colleges more than schools from the Bible-institute tradition, though all evangelical colleges participated in this trend to some extent) evangelical institutions moved toward mainstream ideas about academic elitism. Part of that process was due to nuts-and-bolts questions of accreditation. Part was due to a more nebulous pursuit of academic prestige. For whatever reasons, many evangelical institutions in the twentieth century became less focused on reaching all people and mimicked the elite academic standards of mainstream and mainline colleges.

AT: You note, “[O]ur culture wars are not between educated people on one side and uneducated people on the other….Rather, our culture wars are usually fiercest between two groups of people who have been educated in very different ways.” Given this, what would you see as the way forward toward creating a more cooperative and productive American political culture?

AL: The challenge, as I see it, is to abdicate positions of privilege when none of us is willing to even admit we occupy those positions, and when we certainly don’t trust our culture-war foes to do the same. From the conservative side, many of the white conservative evangelicals in the institutions I studied wouldn’t like to admit it, but they really do yearn for an imagined past and a fantasy future in which America was somehow truly Christian and can somehow be “made great again.” There is a palpable sense among white conservative evangelicals of being kicked out unfairly of positions of power and privilege. On the other side, secular progressives like me can suffer from a similarly unacknowledged sense of privilege in academic and intellectual life. Secular academics often delegitimize and demonize any sort of thinking that does not proceed from secular, materialist grounds.

No one will like this prescription, but I think conservative evangelicals—of every racial background—need to get over their implicit assumption that they should be able to dictate social policy to match their religious beliefs. At the same time, progressive secular folks need to wrestle more profoundly and more humbly with the fact that people of good will have honest and important differences when it comes to basic assumptions about the ways we know things and the ways we define good and evil.

AT: What do you see as the most significant contribution of your research to our historical understanding of fundamentalism and evangelicalism? AKA, if we could make one change to how we teach these topics based on reading Fundamentalist U, what would you want it to be?

AL: We need to stop teaching that American evangelicalism can ever be properly defined by theological lists. Yes, Bebbington’s four distinctives (conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism) can help people understand the gist of evangelical theology, but they can never define American evangelicalism as it really is. It is impossible to understand American evangelicalism in the twentieth century without grasping the feeling of usurped proprietary interest in America shared by many white evangelicals, just as it would be impossible to understand American Catholicism without understanding its immigrant history. Looking at evangelical educational institutions forces us to acknowledge the obvious fact that theology is only one part of the evangelical experience.

AT: Thanks, Adam!

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Interview with Max Perry Mueller on Race and the Making of the Mormon People

Andrea L. Turpin

As I have written elsewhere on this blog, I love Mormon history. That's why I was delighted to interview Max Perry Mueller on his new book Race and the Making of the Mormon People (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). I actually happened to be teaching the Mormon unit in my American women's history course concurrently with reading this book, and it helped me answer several student questions! So without further ado, here is Mueller (lightly edited for length and clarity) on everything from the relationship between history, theology, and race to how he hopes we'll teach Mormon history differently:


AT: What led you to write Race and the Making of the Mormon People? 

MPM: I’ve shared a bit of my professional and confessional history elsewhere. Let me just add that I’m an outsider—at least superficially—to experiences of Mormonism and “race.” (To be sure, to say that I haven’t experienced “race” is a sign of my privilege. As I hope my book shows, the power and privilege of “whiteness” is the assumption of its ubiquity and universality.) But the experiences of growing up among Mormons in Wyoming and North Carolina, and later coming of age with family members for whom race and religious marginalization were ever-present realities, informed the way I see the world as a person and as a scholar. 

As for Mormonism, other scholars have observed that, like the Jews, the Irish, and the Italians, Latter-day Saints were once racial and religious others who succeeded in becoming “white”—in fact exemplary “white” Americans. In Race and the Making of the Mormon People, I wanted to tell a story about non-white Mormons—in particular, to examine how they set down their own “sacred pasts,” to borrow from Laurie Maffly-Kipp. These sacred pasts have long been excluded in both the official Mormon narrative as well as the narrative that outsiders have imposed upon the Mormon people. And when we examine these narratives, we find a handful of African-American and Native-American Mormons who wrote themselves into the “Mormon archive”—which I conceptualize as the written and oral texts that compose the Mormon people’s collective memory. They did so in order to claim their place among the prophets and pioneers that mark membership in early Mormon history.

AT: You state in your introduction: “History makes theology. But theology makes history, too.” What do you mean by this?

MPM: What I mean directly relates to the question of race in American history. What are the origins of America’s racial (racist) views that seem so impossible to unseat from our collective consciousness and, perhaps more importantly, from our institutions? We know that antebellum Americans often justified divisions between white and black Americans by pointing to their Bibles. Proslavery advocates declared that people of African descent were cursed to be the “servants of servants.” At the same time, enslaved and free African Americans saw themselves as a chosen people, akin to the enslaved Israelites awaiting liberation out of the American Egypt.

Historians often claim that such interpretations on both sides of what Du Bois famously called “the color line,” are historical, not scriptural. That is, Americans wrote race into scripture when scripture actually has little to say on the subject. The book of Genesis, for example, makes no explicit mention that the curse to be “servants of servants” that Noah pronounced upon the supposed African descendants of Ham is a curse of dark skin. In my book, I invert the usual focus on how America’s racial history influenced scriptural interpretation. I pose the question: What would a history of race look like if we examined how scriptures created theological lenses through which Americans viewed the nation’s various racial populations?

The Book of Mormon provides us with a unique opportunity to answer this question. It presents itself as a new—or more precisely newly restored—scripture that claims to contain all the “plain and precious” parts (1 Nephi 13) of the gospel that had been lost in the “Old World” gospel due to inept or unfaithful translators and scribes. As such, it’s a better “archive”—a key concept in my book— of Christ’s true teachings than the Old World gospel. And the main thrust of Christ’s true teaching is one that calls believers to end schisms—religious, political, and racial—within the human family. As such, I argue that drawing from the Book of Mormon, the earliest Mormons challenged the view that racial identities were fixed, written into law books, into scripture, and increasingly into scientific fact.
   
AT: How can better formulating this give-and-take help us better grasp how Mormons understood race, particularly the division between whites, Native Americans, and African Americans?

MPM: Let me give two data points to answer this question: one related to “scientific” epistemologies and the other related to political epistemologies of what we might call the three original American races, “black,” “white,” and “red.” In 1830, the same year that the Book of Mormon was published, the founder of the University of Louisville’s School of Medicine Charles Caldwell published a racial origins treatise in which he claimed that the book of Genesis account was limited to the origins of the “Caucasian” race. Caldwell, one of the pioneers of “craniology”—which claimed that human races could be classified into hierarchies based on the size and shape of skulls—argued that the roots of racial differences were found in the biological archive, not the biblical one. And not surprisingly, Caldwell found that Caucasian crania were the grandest, while the “African” crania were the smallest and least developed. The “American Indian” was somewhere in between. According to Caldwell, the Indian however was most noted for “his radical unfitness for civilization.” Caldwell’s views supported those of Andrew Jackson and the U.S. Congress, who also in 1830 passed the Indian Removal Act. Jackson asserted that no matter what they did to demonstrate assimilation and acculturation to the signifiers that defined American (Protestant) whiteness—literacy, Christianity, private land ownership, legal codes—by dint of their Indianness, there was no place for Native Americans in the American republic.    

When it was published in 1830, the Book of Mormon exploded these ideas of racial fixity. Race is not real, not an eternal truth authored by God, the Book of Mormon taught. “Race” (as in dark skin) enters into history as the result of sin. The Book of Mormon’s first adopter believed that it mandated believers to restore the human family to its original racial unity. However, the Mormons were not racial egalitarians. Instead, “whiteness” (the race that is raceless) became an aspirational identity non-whites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism.

AT: Does your book also change how we should understand non-Mormon ideas about race in the nineteenth-century U.S.?

MPM: I hope so! Two related points: First, what I hope to show is that race is about storytelling. Explicit in the nineteenth-century U.S., and more implicit today, racial origins were narrated, often based on interpretations of religious scriptures. The early Mormons foregrounded these narrations about both the history and destinies of the different races. This is particularly true for the people most “white” antebellum Americans called “Indians,” and the Mormons called “Lamanites”—descendants of the lost Tribes of Israel who were oblivious to their true origins, but who would one day be restored to their true knowledge and their true place as central figures in the “New Jerusalem,” to be built in the latter days before Christ’s return.

A second point is the “secularization of race”—a topic that I allude to in the book, but hope to tackle in future books! The narratives of racial origins have moved from common text to subtext, or even into common subconscious. Today, when certain politicians announce the renewed war on drugs, when they describe “inner cities” as sites of unchecked violence and depravity, when police officers who shoot and kill unarmed black American men and boys justify their use of force by describing them as “beasts,” we can understand this rhetoric as cynical attempts to stoke racial anxieties. But it’s more pernicious than that. The ideology that the black body is a threat to the white order of things still exists on the epistemological plane of faith, the sources of which were religious, and in particular the religious origins stories that Americans narrated in the nineteenth century. There is a direct line between the rhetoric of “convicted felon” and “cursed slave,” between the rhetoric of innate black criminality and inherited “African” accursedness.  It’s critical that we re-present these religious origins stories—move them from subtext to text in order to begin to dismantle the epistemological and institutional structures of racism. 

AT: The book prominently features black Mormon Jane Manning James. What role does gender analysis play in your narrative?

MPM: Jane Manning James’s story is the thru-line of the book. That’s because her story is so captivating. It’s also because we have the most documentation of her singular life.

James is truly an intersectional figure: black, Mormon, and a woman in the nineteenth century, when all three of those identities placed her on the margin within and outside her community. As I detail in the book, James’s gender cuts both ways for her as she tried to gain acceptance among the Mormon people to whom she dedicated her life. For example, because she was a woman, James could not—on her own authority—enter the temple and perform sacred ordinances that Mormons believe essential for eternal exaltation. She needed to be connected to a priesthood holding man (only men are ordained to the priesthood in the LDS Church, and from around 1850 to 1978, black men were barred from holding the priesthood). Thus, in the last decades of her life (she died in 1908), James petitioned the church leaders to grant her temple access based on an offer of spiritual adoption that she claims Joseph Smith Jr. and his wife Emma Hale Smith made to her when she lived with them in Nauvoo, Illinois in the 1840s. Her petitions were denied until 1894 when she was allowed to be spiritually adopted by Joseph Smith—with the exception that she be “adopted to the Prophet” not as his child, but “as a servitor for eternity.” This is the first and last such “servitor adoption” in Mormon history. James was not permitted to enter the temple to participate in her own circumscribed adoption; a “proxy” stood in for her during the ceremony—another unusual occurrence, since proxies were exclusively employed for dead participants. 

And yet today, James has become the unofficial face of black Mormonism—the spiritual matriarch to a growing number of African-American Mormons in the U.S., in the African diaspora, and in Africa, where the church has seen significant growth. This past General Conference—the semi-annual worldwide gathering of the church—for the first time since then church president Joseph F. Smith’s eulogy of her in 1908, a church general authority mentioned James by name. Displaying her carte-de-visite, Elder M. Russell Ballard singled out James as an exemplar of faith. James can be remembered—and celebrated today—because of her gender, while black priesthood holding men from her era, like Elijah Abel, could not be. Celebrating them would raise the issue of why black men were banned from holding the priesthood for more than a century.

Many applaud the fact that the church is finally celebrating James, myself included. And yet others worry that moving her form the margins of the Mormon historical narrative to its center is not without peril. The power of James’s story comes from its marginality. That is, James’s marginalization meant that she actually could not see the world through the same lens as her fellow white Mormons. Her lenses were corrective, so to speak. They provided what Du Bois called a “second-sight,” which forced her to see herself reflected in her church’s history of decline from its original promises of what I call “white universalism” to “white” and “black” as fixed identities. 

AT: How would you like religious historians to teach Mormon history differently as a result of reading this book?

MPM: First, I hope we, as historians of American religion, take the Book of Mormon more seriously. I hope we read it and understand it on its own terms, without getting (too) bogged down in the debates about its origins. After all, the Book of Mormon is third only to the Quran and the Bible as the world’s most reproduced religious text. The publication of the Book of Mormon spawned a global religious movement with today 16 million members spread across six continents. For Mormons, the text creates a communal mode of reading human experience. For non-Mormons hoping to understand this Mormon mode of reading, the actual text of the Book of Mormon cannot go unread.

Second, and relatedly I hope scholars can approach Mormonism’s foundational text as the earliest Mormons did: as creating a radical new lens to view antebellum America’s predominant racialized populations, namely Americans of European, African and Native American descent. By studying the Book of Mormon as a text that theologizes not only the “white” and “black” races, but also—and in fact especially—the “red” race too, I hope my book moves the scholarship of the color line beyond the black/white binary.

Finally, I hope we study—and critique—the Mormon archive, a place where religion and race histories aren’t just preserved. Race and religion histories are made in the archive. We must ask whose voices and stories are written down and whose are not; what gets included and what gets excluded. Relatedly, writing always involves self-fashioning, editing, embellishing, conflating, excluding. I think we need to be humble and cautious when it comes to claiming that we can describe the “lived experiences” of all historical peoples, but especially those whose experiences were so circumscribed by racial, religious, and gendered boundaries. Such humility, I believe is important intellectually but also ethically: we must respect the literary selves that the people we study create for themselves, especially since often these people's literal selves were excluded, controlled, abused, and violated. Their agency thus exists on the page, even or especially when this agency could not always be enacted in their flesh and bone bodies.  

AT: Thanks, Max!

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9 Questions with Matthew J. Cressler

I recently interviewed Matthew J. Cressler about his new book Authentically Black and Truly Catholic, published in 2017 with New York University Press. Matthew is no stranger to this blog -- he wrote regularly for RiAH for a few years -- and we are pleased to see his book in print. He is currently Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. 


PC: Your book tells the story of a profound transformation of what it meant to be Black and Catholic. Where does Authentically Black and Truly Catholic begin?

MC: Though the introduction provides some background in Black Catholic history, the story really opens with encounters between Black southern migrants and white Catholic missionaries in the Gre
at Migrations in the 1920s. It is hard to overstate the significance of Black migrations in the making of the twentieth-century U.S. Catholic history. Cities across the urban North were veritable Catholic metropolises at the start of the twentieth century. So when Black migrants from the rural South, most of whom were evangelicals and many of whom had been touched by the Holiness-Pentecostal revivals sweeping the South, began arriving cities like Chicago by the hundreds of thousands it had a profound impact on the urban religious landscape. The first three chapters of the book tell the story of what happened when predominantly white and Catholic neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago became predominantly Black and non-Catholic in a matter of years. It focuses on the fraught relationships missionaries and migrants forged in these years. Missionaries reimagined these neighborhoods as “foreign mission fields” full of heathens in need of conversion and worked to repopulate empty pews with Black converts. And many migrants also found Catholic rituals and relationships quite compelling, especially as they and their children were introduced to them in parochial schools. This resulted in a period of unparalleled growth. There were approximately 300,000 Black Catholics in 1940. By 1975 there were almost 1 million, a 208% increase, and the Black Catholic center of gravity had shifted from the coastal South to the industrial North.





PC: One of the key interventions you make in your book is showing how historians need to focus less on white interracialists and more so on white missionaries. You bring to our attention the missionary priests and sisters who worked to convert African Americans in the twentieth century and you unpack the strategies they used to accomplish these ends. On page 12 you write: “White missionaries had a far wider impact on Black Catholic communities than white interracialists.” Explain what you mean by this. Why are white missionaries in Chicago so important? 

MC: To be a bit more precise, I think that if we want to understand the lives of Black Catholics themselves (and, frankly, the lives of innumerable Black people who encountered Catholics and didn’t convert themselves), it is more important to focus on white missionaries than interracialists. “Interracialists,” a term often used interchangeably with “Catholic [racial] liberals,” were white and Black Catholics committed to the fight for an interracial, integrated America. Since John McGreevy introduced us to them in his ground-breaking book Parish Boundaries (1996), interracialists have been the main focus for studies on Catholics and race. And this is understandable. They set the terms of Catholic engagement with race, such as there was any, from the 1930s through the mid-1960s. As such, they’ve represented an attractive subject for scholars searching for Catholic models for racial justice. However, I argue that an overemphasis on interracialists has obscured the lives of most Black Catholics. Most Black Catholics didn’t engage in interracialist activism. (As a sidebar, this shouldn’t come a surprise. The vast majority of Catholics didn’t engage in interracial activism. Activism is, by definition, the exception rather than the rule.) If we want to understand why so many Black people became Catholic in the first half of the twentieth century, we are better served by studying the relationships between missionaries and migrants. Now, this can bring us face-to-face with uncomfortable truths like, for instance, the fact that most missionaries were more concerned with the eternal salvation of Black souls than with the alleviation of “temporal ills” like poverty and racism. This discomfort, the fact that white missionaries may be unpalatable to twenty-first century scholars and readers alike, may have something to do with why they’ve gotten short shrift (they’re present in Parish Boundaries, for instance, but certainly not the heroes of the story). But I think that if we want to understand why so many African Americans converted to Catholicism in this period, we have to dive deep into the fraught relationships migrants and missionaries formed in neighborhoods, in parishes, in parochial schools. Missionaries are so important to the story of Black Catholics in Chicago (and across the country) in the Great Migrations because it is missionaries (an exceptional few, but missionaries all the same) who invited Black women, men, and children into Catholic churches and schools, who introduced them to Catholic rituals and relationships, and who facilitated the conversion of tens of thousands of Black Catholics.

PC: African Americans converted to Catholicism in large numbers in the mid-twentieth century. But Chapter 2 slows the reader down to show how the subjects you study help us to understand the nature of conversion. Conversion is not just a choice, you argue, but a process of coming to feel and know – in one’s body – that the Catholic Church was “the One True Faith.” How does your book help us to understand conversion? How does it provide an alternative to previous understandings?

MC: Though this is starting to shift among scholars, popular conceptions of conversion still tend to imagine it as a choice among religious options. This stems from still deeper assumptions about what “religion” is in the first place, assumptions that real religion is rooted in sincerely held and deeply personal beliefs that then manifest out in the world in the form of ritual, worship, etc. What I found in my research, especially in a treasure trove of the letters written by Black converts to Catholicism collected in the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament archives, was almost the opposite. Conversion didn’t begin with intellectual assent to propositional beliefs, after which came a commitment to new rituals and relationships. Actually, most converts decided to, in the words of one letter-writer, “do what others were doing” first. They learned new prayers, they attended Mass, they formed relationships with Catholics as well as with Catholic saints, they practiced new ways of moving their bodies – all of which, along with catechetical classes, eventually contributed to a deeply embodied sense of knowing that the Catholic Church was the “One True Church.” This was especially true in parochial schools, where Catholic and non-Catholic children alike were disciplined (literally and figuratively) in new ways of living in the world. Parents of parochial school children, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, were required to attend religious instruction classes and Mass so as to assure that the educational work of the women religious and priests were not being undermined in the home. Together this lead to mass conversions, often with entire families being baptized on the same day. Now, a natural critique of this arrangement (and one forwarded by both contemporaries and later scholars) is that it coercive. That the missionary model that required students and parents to practice Catholicism (even if they were not themselves Catholic) precludes the free choice that is necessary for a conversion to be sincere and true. What I’m trying to do here – and I’m drawing on Catherine Bell and Talal Asad and Robert Orsi and others – is move us away from thinking about conversion as either choice or coercion and, instead, to think of it as an educative process by which people are inculcated in a new way of being in the world.

PC: What were some of the costs and anxieties that came with an African American’s conversion to Catholicism?

MC: This is directly connected to my comments on conversion above. First of all, certain costs and anxieties might lead someone to convert in the first place. Perhaps you’ve fallen in love and your fiancé is insisting you become Catholic or the marriage is off. Maybe you fear your children will not receive an adequate education in a public school setting and so parochial schools are the best options for you and your family. Or, like many a parent, you worry about losing relationships with family members if they become Catholic and you don’t. So costs and anxieties and all the contingencies and coincidences that make up human life can and do play an essential part in the making of conversion. (And, again, this does not render their conversions less authentic. It simply allows converts to be human.) Now, once you became Catholic, a whole new set of costs and anxieties came with it. Becoming Catholic in the first half of the 20th century, in the age of the “One True Church,” meant that you were committing (at least in theory) to never stepping into a Protestant church (since Protestants were heretics). Considering the fact that most African Americans who were religious were evangelical Protestants, this could mean severing familial ties. Not attending weddings, funerals, and reunions. Not being able to be buried in your family cemetery – there were quite a few conflicts between Catholic priests and the surviving families of deceased Catholic converts who refused to give their family members a “proper” Catholic burial. If you converted to Catholicism and your immediate family members had not, this could lead to even greater anxieties about nothing short of the salvation of your father or mother or brother or sister’s soul.

PC: Catholicism offered African Americans a different regime of rituals, doctrines, and bodily exercises than, say, Pentecostalism or the Holiness Movement. Why is this important, especially in the urban context of Chicago?

MC: I like that way of putting it – “different regime of rituals, doctrines, and bodily exercises.” This different regime is important because it was happening at precisely the same moment (i.e. in the midst of the Great Migrations) that another regime was not only becoming more popular in Black churches across Chicago and the urban North, but also coming to be understood by scholars and popular audiences alike to be the essential way of being Black and religious. As Wallace Best put it in Passionately Human, No Less Divine, the Great Migrations gave birth to a “new sacred order in the city” as southern evangelical Black Christianity – distinguished by what W.E.B. DuBois characterized as “the preacher, the music, and the frenzy” – came North and combined with the exigencies of the city to produce new ways of being Black and religious. This new sacred order spread through storefronts and institutional churches, transforming the religious landscape of the Black Metropolis. A significant minority of Black religious communities sought to distance themselves from these new religious lifeways. Black Muslims, Black Hebrews, Moorish Americans, and, yes, I would argue Black Catholics all shared in the same impulse to create alternative ways of being Black and religious beyond the boundaries of what has traditionally been conceived as “the Black Church.” I dive into this argument in depth in Chapter 3 by highlighting a particularly dramatic example of this, a Black Catholic performance of the Living Stations of the Cross on the South Side of Chicago. For the better part of 30 years, Black parishioners at Corpus Christi Catholic Church performed a silent pantomime of the passion of the Christ and drew pilgrims (white and Black, Catholic and non-Catholic) from across greater Chicagoland. This performance, built on scripted silence, disciplined movement, and the recitation of wrote prayers, was contrasted with (sometimes self-consciously) the growing sense that “authentic” Black religious life was about ecstasy, emotion, and spontaneity. Black Catholics, for this reason, provide a great case study in what Curtis Evans called “the burden of black religion.”

PC: Okay, if the Great Migrations and conversion is where the book begins, where does it end? What explains the momentous shift in what it meant to be Black and Catholic over the course of the twentieth century? 

MC: If the first half of the book is a story of conversion, the second half is a story of revolution. One of the things that is so remarkable about this history is that the Catholicism that so many Black converts found so compelling in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s no longer existed by the end of the century. This is because the Black Power movement and the Second Vatican Council transformed about what it meant to be both Black and Catholic. This is what Chapters 4 and 5 are about. Black Power galvanized a generation of Black Catholic activists who fought for control of Catholic institutions, representation in the U.S. Church, and incorporation of what they took to be “authentically Black” ways of being religious in Catholic life. Vatican II provided these activists with the resources (theological, liturgical, political) to make these arguments within the Church. This convergence revolutionized what it meant to be Black and Catholic in the U.S. On the national level, it gave rise to an unprecedented wave of Black Catholic institution building – the Black Catholic Clergy Caucus, the National Black Sisters’ Conference, and the National Office for Black Catholics were all founded between 1968 and 1970. These institutions and the activists that gave them life came to be known as the “Black Catholic Movement.” On the local level, it sparked struggles for the control of Catholic institutions and produced some surprising alliances – uniting, for example, the young revolutionary Fred Hampton’s Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party with Concerned Black Catholics fighting for the pastorate of activist-priest Fr. George Clements. And on an individual level, it led to bitter debates about whether it was even possible to be both Black and Catholic. On one side, the Catholicism that attracted converts in the first half of the twentieth century came under attack as a “white religion.” On the other side, many of the biggest critics of those activists were Black Catholics themselves. The result was that, over the course of the 1970s, much of the Black Catholic Movement was devoted to “converting,” as it were, fellow Black Catholics to a new way of being Black and Catholic. The book effectively ends in 1984 when the ten Black bishops in the United States (whose rise to power is indebted to this very movement) famously declared that Black Catholics had “come of age” and that it was possible to be both “authentically Black” and “truly Catholic.” This bishops’ statement, “What We Have Seen and Heard,” is where the title of my book comes from.


PC: How did the Black Power movement in the Catholic Church change its relationship with the Black Church? How does your study of Black Catholics challenge or force us to revise some of this history?

MC: Great question! In the first half of the book, Catholics really see themselves as the “One True Church” in contrast to, to quote one particularly provocative missionary, the “religious quackery” of the plethora of Protestant churches proliferating around them. This went for Black Catholics as well. Converts understood themselves to be joining the Church Universal, a church that transcended the vicissitudes of the temporal world and the particularities of race. So converts very much did not see themselves as part of the Black Church. With the rise of a particular mode of Black consciousness in the Black Power era, this all changes. Activists in the Black Catholic Movement start to argue that Black Catholics, by virtue of being Black in America, are inheritors of a distinctively Black spirituality with roots in Africa as well as of the legacies of the Black Church. They engage in conversations with Black Catholics across what could be called an Afro-Catholic diaspora – from North America to the Caribbean to the African continent – about what it means to be “authentically Black,” whether that is compatible with being “truly Catholic,” and how best to go about actualizing an “authentically Black” Catholicism. They turn to Black Protestant leaders and emergent programs on Black Church studies to be educated in new ways of understanding what it means to be Black and religious, whether that means worshipping in different ways or reorienting one’s sense of the past in connection to the present. They experiment with new Black liturgical practices and repopulate parishes with Black saints and African iconography. All of this makes it possible, really for the first time in their history, for Black Catholics in the U.S. to think of themselves as Catholic and as members of “the Black Church.” (Though, by no means did all Black Catholics conceive of themselves this way. As I’ve mentioned, many actively resisted this reading.)


PC: You note in the final chapter the fascinating story of how the Black Power movement within Catholicism continued to draw upon the tactics of missionary Catholicism. These churches, specifically Holy Angels, were unapologetically Black churches, and integrated Black pride into the official curriculum. Yet they required the parents of the children to attend mass and catechism classes! Could we say that there is profound continuity within this profound transformation?

Yes, I found this fascinating too. On the macro level, when we’re talking about the Black Catholic Movement, what comes to the fore is a critique of the “missionary mentality” the Church had in regard to Black Catholics – how the U.S. Church treated Black people as “foreign missions” to be converted, rather than as full-fledged members. This critique is spot-on, historically speaking, and remained quite compelling for Black Catholics on the local level as well. But what is interesting is that, strategically speaking, it is clear that many of the missionary “tactics,” so to speak, remained essential to the thriving of Black Catholic communities even as they rejected other logics of the missionary mentality. So students attending Holy Angels School on the South Side of Chicago learned both about transubstantiation and about who Angela Davis was; parents whose students enrolled at Holy Angels had to attend religious instructions and Mass and, in a sense, take ownership of the life of the parish, even if they were not themselves Catholic; the community celebrated a Catholic Mass dedicated to the memory of assassinated Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. So yes, I think you’re right. If you’re focusing on the macro-level, it would be easy to read the rise of Black Catholicism in the Black Power era as an outright rejection of the (white) Catholic past. But when you examine Black Catholics in the idiosyncrasies and contingencies of particular communities, the answers become more complicated. Yes, this period gave birth to new ways of being Black and Catholic. But, no, this did not entail a wholesale rejection of all that came before it. Often, it involved the creative combination of the missionary past with the Black Power present.

What are you working on next?

I’ve got a few things going right now, but the most immediate one is an article manuscript tentatively titled “Categorizing Catholic Racism.” It draws on an extensive archive of Catholic hate mail collected in archdiocesan archives across the country. It seems that whenever the Catholic Church engaged in (or, even more so, was perceived to be engaging in) efforts to desegregate parishes, homes, and schools, slews of white Catholics wrote letters to their archbishops that expressed rage, disgust, and a deep sense of betrayal over the direction of what they took to be their Church. This piece seeks to take the voices of these white Catholics seriously as central subjects in U.S. Catholic history and categorize the different dynamics (social, political, theological, etc.) that shaped the contours of white Catholic racism, in particular. I’m also engaged in a collaborative project on “Colonialism, Catholicism, and Race in the Lands that Became the United States.” This project has gathered a number of scholars, from across different disciplines, who study Catholics in a variety of different times and places in the history of North America. What unites us is a commitment to thinking through how the study of Catholicism might shift if we were to consider colonialism and race as constitutive categories for the field of Catholic Studies, rather than as merely isolated interests of those of us who study non-white Catholics.

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Crossing Parish Boundaries: An Interview with Tim Neary

Karen Johnson

Tim Neary's recent book Crossing Parish Boundaries: Race, Sports, and Catholic Youth in Chicago, 1914-1954 traces the decades of interracial contact between Chicago's youth in Bishop Bernard Sheil's Catholic Youth Organization (CYO).  Tim complicates the argument that working-class white ethnics were some the most anti-black people in the urban north at mid-century, situates black Catholics' experiences squarely in the Black Metropolis, illuminates how black Catholics created their own places, and speaks to the civil rights movement historiography, as it merges urban and religious history wonderfully.  Recently I interviewed Tim, and I have posted our conversation below.  You can also see a recording of Tim's recent talk the Cushwa Center here.

KJ: I’m fascinated by your arguments that Sheil and black Catholics assumed that social change would come by working “within the system,” rather than challenging it.  Could you speak to this dynamic in and beyond your book's time frame?

TN: When I first started doing research in the late 1990s on African American Catholics in Chicago, I began noticing that disproportionate numbers of Chicago’s African American political and business leaders during the twentieth century were black Catholics—or at least educated in Catholic schools. While only a small percentage of African Americans were Catholic, they seemed to pop up everywhere in the historical record as civic leaders. The first African American elected to citywide office in 1971—City Treasurer Joseph Bertrand—for example, was a Catholic who attended Corpus Christi grade school and St. Elizabeth’s high school in the Bronzeville neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side before attending the University of Notre Dame on a basketball scholarship. And there were many others like him, including the first African American president of the Cook County Board, John Stroger, a black Catholic who grew up in Arkansas and moved to Chicago in 1953 after graduating from the nation’s only African American Catholic university—Xavier in New Orleans. Ralph Metcalfe, a Chicago native, was another example. Metcalfe attended Marquette University in Milwaukee on a track scholarship, starred in the 1932 and 1936 Summer Olympics, and rose through the political ranks to become a U.S. Congressman representing the Illinois First Congressional District during the 1970s.

In addition to sharing the same race and religion, each man was a product of Chicago’s Irish Catholic Democratic Party political machine.

Political scientist and Harold Washington campaign advisor William Grimshaw dubbed them Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “loyalist black elites.” Daley, not known for racial enlightenment, needed African Americans to represent political wards in the city’s segregated, all-black neighborhoods. He chose black Catholics, because they were “part of the system” by virtue of attending Catholic schools and participating in Catholic parish life. In this symbiotic relationship, a premium was put on loyalty and knowing one’s place in the system. Blacks were supposed to serve the machine and not rock the boat, what activist and historian Timuel Black has called “plantation politics.”

Within this arrangement, it was difficult for the loyalist black elites to challenge the white power structure on the issue of civil rights. Metcalfe, for example, remained a faithful foot soldier for the machine in 1966 when Martin Luther King came to Chicago. Publicly siding with Daley, Metcalfe said Chicago could work out its race problems without the presence of King, encouraging the civil rights leader to return to the South. Even after the rise of the Black Power movement and King’s assassination, Metcalfe remained within the fold. When Metcalfe ran for Representative William Dawson’s vacated Congressional seat in 1970, for example, he campaigned on a “law and order” platform, fully aligning himself with Daley. 

Metcalfe finally broke with Daley in 1972 over the issue of police brutality in the African American community, transforming himself from machine loyalist to black activist. Infuriated, Daley stripped Metcalfe of his Democratic Party ward leadership positions and ran an opponent against him in the 1976 primary, but Metcalfe won the primary and held on to his seat. In a 1976 Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine feature entitled “Docile No More,” the black Catholic Congressman is quoted saying, “It’s never too late to be black,” and “I am the same Ralph Metcalfe. The only difference is that I no longer represent the 3^rd Ward and the 1^stCongressional District but all oppressed people.”

I think Metcalfe’s story speaks to the difficulty that many African American Catholics had embracing civil rights and black pride movements. While black Protestant churches in the South and North produced significant numbers of African American clergy who led on the issue of civil rights, most Catholic clergy were white Euro-Americans who failed to challenge publicly the status quo of race relations during the civil rights era. There were notable exceptions, but they were in the minority.

KJ: You do a wonderful job describing the places black Catholics created in worship. Could you speak broadly to the importance of paying attention to place for scholars of religion, as well as scholars of race?

TN: Karen, I agree with you and other scholars of race and religion—like historians Arnold Hirsch, John McGreevy, Robert Orsi, Ellen Skerrett, and Thomas Sugrue, among others—that place is essential to understanding people’s experiences and subsequent worldviews. Where we live, work, learn, and play shapes us in so many ways.

In the book, I try my best to recreate the world in which African American Catholics grew up during the 1920s and 1930s in the parishes of St. Elizabeth, Corpus Christi, and St. Anselm in Chicago’s Bronzeville. This is the same neighborhood described by sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton in the 1945 classic, Black Metropolis. Bronzeville has received significant attention by scholars of African American history and culture during the past 50-60 years, including works on religion. Catholicism, however, has been virtually absent from the literature, despite the major institutional presence of the Catholic Church in the neighborhood during the mid-twentieth century as noted by Drake and Cayton. More recently, some historians—like Suellen Hoy, who has written on the ministry of Catholic sisters in Bronzeville—have begun to fill the gap. It is my goal to place Catholicism side-by-side other well-known Bronzeville institutions, like the Savoy Ballroom and Wabash YMCA, so that readers can see that neighborhood kids who participated in the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) lived lives as blacks and Catholics simultaneously. That is, when they stepped into Corpus Christi’s grand, Cathedral-like church building at 49^th and South Parkway (today Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive), they brought their “Bronzeville-ness” with them. In the same way, when they walked out of Corpus Christi onto the streets of Bronzeville, they carried with them their Catholic sensibilities.

We have a tendency as scholars to separate and isolate various aspects of our subjects’ lives. While difficult, I think it is well worth the effort to try to understand, as best we can in a holistic way, the entirety of their lived experiences.

KJ: The CYO had an impact in that it provided hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans and Americans opportunities for interracial contact that were outside their jobs and often in settings that could be seen as pretty intimate (i.e. swimming pools – the cover is so suggestive!). But the CYO ultimately declined, and its message did not persevere in the broader culture. What is its significance, then, for us as historians? For people who might want to speak to racial and religious issues in contemporary life? You say it can offer a model for us – can you speak further to that?

TN: I believe that the story of the CYO—which served as a national model for youth ministry between 1930 and 1954 under the direction of its founder Bishop Bernard Sheil—is instructive for us today. In February, I spoke to a national gathering at Notre Dame of Catholic youth sports directors. While many of their Catholic programs use the name “CYO,” most of them had never heard of Sheil or the organization’s origins during the Great Depression in Chicago. Like other audiences whom I’ve addressed, they were surprised to hear that a Catholic bishop ran a nationally-known, large-scale youth sports and educational organization which was interracial and ecumenical a generation before the modern civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council. At a time when segregation—racial, spatial, and economic—is stark and continues to grow, Sheil’s expansive and inclusive approach is worth reexamining.

As an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Sheil understood his responsibility for pastoral leadership to extend to every resident of the 350 parishes within Cook and Lake Counties—whether they were Catholic or not. In this particular case, Catholicism’s parochial system ironically served to cross boundaries of race, religion, and class throughout the Chicago metro region. Parish boundaries replicated neighborhood boundaries, which demarcated segregation, but Canon Law recognized each parish as equal. Therefore, when CYO boxers competed before tens of thousands of fans at Soldier Field, CYO basketball teams played before hundreds in gymnasiums across the city, or CYO swimmers met in Washington Park before much smaller crowds, blacks and whites, as well as Catholics and non-Catholics, participated as competitors on an even playing field. The winners then went on to travel on interracial squads to compete against CYO champions in other cities.

In creating the CYO, Sheil followed four simple principles: 1) respond to an urgent need (the rise of juvenile delinquency, secularism, and materialism during the era of Al Capone); 2) be pragmatic (choose a glamour sport like boxing to attract tough kids); 3) include everyone (in the spirit of Catholic universalism and New Deal pluralism); and 4) meld religious virtue with civic engagement (e.g., holding summer vacation schools in public parks staffed by both Catholic nuns and New Deal government workers).       

Today, we might use terms like public-private partnerships, faith-based initiatives, youth mentorship, community engagement, social responsibility, and social capital to talk about such a model. Not unlike the 1920s when Bishop Sheil’s boss Cardinal George Mundelein charged Sheil with developing a comprehensive program to respond to the social ills plaguing young people, cities today—in particular Chicago—face high levels of poverty, violence, and racism. I think we need a model that works in a coordinated way on both the macro (citywide/diocesan-wide) and micro (neighborhood/parish) levels. While by no means a panacea during its time, Sheil’s CYO did improve lives, and I believe that we can learn from it.

KJ: Your book has opened up so many research possibilities for future scholars.  What subjects do you think are ripe for research?

TN: There is so much that we still do not know about the intersection of African American life and Catholicism in U.S. history. Historians of black Catholicism, like the late Cyprian Davis, Cecilia Moore, and Dianne Batts Morrow among others—have filled in many of the gaps in what religious studies scholar Albert Raboteau has called the “minority within a minority.” And scholars of Catholic interracialism—including R. Bentley Anderson, John McGreevy, and Stephen Ochs, among others—have taught us much about the history of African Americans’ encounter with the “white” Catholic Church. Yet, there is much more work to do. Part of the challenge is avoiding the parochialism of our respective scholarly fields. It shouldn’t just be religious history scholars but urban, labor, sports, cultural, and political historians who “take religion seriously” as a category of analysis. We’ve seen tremendous growth in this area over the last generation, and I’m cautiously optimistic about the future.

The impact of Catholic schools on African Americans, particularly in northern cities during the twentieth century, is just one example where further research could pay big dividends. How did parochial education affect African Americans? In what ways did it help? In what ways did it hurt? What effect did it have on the economic status, political views, and interracial interactions of black alumni from Catholic schools? Likewise, how did Catholicism’s large-scale encounter with African Americans during the twentieth century affect the Catholic Church? Did it alter teachings on racial justice, liturgical practices, or political party affiliation? The potential number of research questions appears to be endless.  

KJ: You had to do a lot of creative searching for your sources.  Tell us about them, especially for Sheil and black Catholics.

TN: In his time, Bishop Sheil was a nationally-known figure, meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt at the White House, featured in national publications like the New York Times and Time magazine. When Cardinal Mundelein died in 1939, many thought Sheil, his second-in-command, would become Chicago’s next archbishop. He was passed over for the job, however, and, although he remained a popular public figure through World War II and the immediate postwar years—speaking out on issues of racial justice and workers’ rights—his position within the American Catholic Church never regained the prominence it had held during the Depression. By the early 1950s, declining health, a growing CYO debt, and run-ins with his ecclesiastical superior plagued Sheil. In 1954, a few months after a public feud with U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, Sheil resigned from the CYO. The Archdiocese of Chicago largely dismantled the program and stepped back from Sheil’s progressive social agenda. The “Apostle of Youth” remained in Chicago for another twelve years as pastor of a North Side parish, but he became a sort of persona no grata among the leadership of the archdiocese. In 1966, after Cardinal John Cody forced him to step down from his position as pastor, he left the only city he had ever lived in for retirement in Tucson, Arizona, dying in 1969 at the age 83.

I mention all that to explain why relatively little has been written on Sheil. No full-length biography exists, for example. It is rumored that he burned his personal papers out of bitterness. This was a challenge for me doing research. I relied on limited CYO records in the archives of the Archdiocese of Chicago, journalistic accounts, and oral histories. Historian Steven Avella has a chapter on Sheil in his book on mid-twentieth century Chicago Catholicism, This Confident Church (Notre Dame, 1993), and Cardinal George Mundelein biographer Edward Kantowicz describes the relationship between Sheil and Mundelein in Corporation Sole (Notre Dame, 1983). Otherwise, Sheil is largely forgotten. Besides his name attached to the Catholic student center at Northwestern University and a small Chicago park, there is little memory of the bishop and his substantial influence on Chicago and the nation during the mid-twentieth century.

Likewise, sources of African American Catholics can be difficult to come by. Catholic sisters, who encountered thousands of black students in schools across the country, were typically modest to the point of anonymity, unlikely to write memoirs or commemorate their selfless works. Oral histories can be excellent sources of information—and were for me—but require significant investments of time and energy. Moreover, we’re losing more and more of those voices each day as black Catholics born in the first half of the twentieth century pass on. Nonetheless, parish records, diocesan archives, school yearbooks, government documents, newspaper accounts, and many other sources are out there for those willing to search for them.

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