Conference Recap: Religion and Politics in Early America

Jonathan Den Hartog

I've just returned from the Religion and Politics in Early America Conference in St. Louis, and I'm still processing all the great ideas that emerged.

First, the important details: the Conference was convened by the Society of Early Americanists, and the conference organizer was Abram Van Engen, who did a fantastic job in organizing and executing the event. The conference was hosted by Washington University, and significant funding came from the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University and the Kinder Institute at the University of Missouri.

My head-line impression was the significant interest the conference generated. There was significant buzz before the conference convened, and the expectations were well met. The conference had great attendance, with attendees ranging from graduate students to very established scholars. The sessions were full of interested audiences. The success of the conference indicated to me the critical mass of scholars working at the intersection of religion and politics in the "vast" framework of early America. There is much to be investigated, but lots of sharp scholars are doing important work on many parts of the field.

This painting of the Pilgrims from the U.S. Capitol served as an iconic inspiration for the conference.

On a related note, the conference was successful in bringing together both historians and literary scholars. Although disciplinary differences were on display--in one panel: unpacking one sermon vs. treating a long genealogy of ideas vs. considering both physical and written evidence--still good efforts were made to talk across borders and gain greater insights.  Further, presenters showed how different methodologies could illuminate a shared topic.

These two pieces--the critical mass and the conversation across disciplines--point to the energy in the field. These conversations are not only important in 2018, but they point to questions of enduring concern. Those digging into the topic are making great contributions, and I expect we will continue to see great results growing from this conference into the future.

One very fruitful organizational component of the conference was the creation of several panel series, where multiple panels would address the same topic. This allowed for extended conversation and evolving understanding around common interests. So, Brian Franklin organized a series on "Religion and Politics in Early American Missions" and then fought laryngitis to see it to completion. Andrew Murphy planned a series on William Penn and Quaker legacies. Stephanie Kirk organized a series on Colonial and Global Connections, while Caroline Wigginton developed a series on material culture aspects of religion and politics. Although not officially a series, I was impressed with the several panels on Cotton Mather and Politics--Mather wrote enough to justify multiple sessions! I spent much of my time in a series that I designed with Carl Esbeck on the processes of religious disestablishment in the American states.

If you're interested, the entire conference program is here.

In addition to the general percolating of ideas, I take two benefits away. First, I'm glad for all the people with whom I was able to interact. The week-end was an on-going feast of energetic conversation. I'm glad to have met in person several Twitter acquaintances. Second, the intellectual work on the topic of religious disestablishment was very beneficial. It moved the project I'm working on quite a ways down the road. All the panelists I was working with did a great job.

So, it's entirely appropriate to end the recap with gratitude for all those who made the week-end such a success!  

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Recapping the American Catholic Historical Association Meeting: A Guest Post from Stephanie A.T. Jacobe

Stephanie A.T. Jacobe

Stephanie A.T. Jacobe received her Ph.D. in history from American University in Washington, D.C. and also holds an M.A. in art history from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. She currently serves as the Director of Archives for the Archdiocese of Washington and as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Humanities at University of Maryland University College. Her dissertation, a biography of financier and Catholic philanthropist Thomas Fortune Ryan, is currently under revision. Her work has been supported by the Harvard Business School, the Cushwa Center, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the Center for the History of Collecting in America located at the Frick Collection in New York City. She was recently elected chair of the Elections Board of the American Catholic Historical Association, and also serves as the editor of H-Catholic, one of the H-Net networks.

The annual meeting of American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA) began on Friday, January 5, 2018, and included two full days of concurrent sessions. The meeting took place in Washington, D.C.'s Woodley Park neighborhood and was held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA). Sessions included a range of American and European historical topics, and papers were presented by a mix of graduate students and established scholars. Though the meeting takes place among the much larger AHA gathering, the feel of the ACHA is that of a meeting within a meeting. Sessions are held at one of the conference hotels and those registered for the AHA have access to the book room and the job center. But smaller, more intimate, rooms are used for ACHA sessions and you will see many of the same faces in the multiple sessions you attend. It is a welcome haven from the hustle and bustle of the much larger conference.

The conference began bright and early on Friday morning with sessions about Catholic expansion in the western United States, and a new look at the education of girls in Central America. Another session looked at the intersection of politics and Catholicism. This began with Jason Duncan of Aquinas College, who discussed Martin Van Buren's ties to Catholics and his aim at building coalitions that included them even though he received significant backlash for it. Duncan argued that this is how Van Buren helped form the Democratic Party. William Kurtz of the John L. Nau II Center at the University of Virginia followed with a look at Catholic partisanship during the Civil War. I also presented a paper during this session about the influence that Catholicism had or did not have on the political careers of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864) and Chief Justice Edward Douglass White (1845-1921).

Though a winter storm was bearing down on the East Coast and the weather was extremely cold, a group of ACHA and American Society of Church History members embarked in a bus on Friday afternoon to the areas around the Catholic University of America. The group had a guided tour of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land on Quincy Street and of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, where everyone was able to see the newly-installed Trinity Dome along with a drive around the neighborhood.

I missed the 8:30 a.m. session on Saturday morning because a pipe broke in my hotel room late on Friday night due to the cold and I had to move rooms so they could fix it. The first panel I attended was at 10:30 a.m. entitled "Catholic Images, Narratives, and Identities in Early Modern Europe." Jeanne-Michelle Datiles of the Catholic University of America discussed Elizabethan Catholic Martyr literature. She discussed the intense martyr mentality of English Catholics during the Elizabethan period and how martyrologies such as that of Henry Walpole, S.J. were used and disseminated. Juan-Fernando Leon of Wheaton College (IL) discussed the eschatological message found in the plates of Casiodoro De Reina's Biblia Del Oso. De Reina translated the Bible into Spanish despite the Inquisition. The plates placed at the beginning of the book show a forest scene with a bear eating honey from a tree. Honey throughout the Bible is used as a symbol for wisdom. The final paper in the session, by Anatole Upart of the University of Chicago, discussed the Greek Catholic Ruthenians and their search for a home in seventeenth-century Rome.

At the annual luncheon the outgoing president, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the Cushwa Center and associate professor of American studies and history at the University of Notre Dame, gave her presidential address entitled "Frances Cabrini, American Exceptionalism, and Rethinking U.S. Catholic History." Several awards were presented, including the following:

• The Distinguished Award for Scholarship, presented to the Rev. Gerald Fogarty, S.J., of the University of Virginia;
• The Distinguished Award for Teaching, presented to Anne Klejment of the University of St. Thomas;
• The Distinguished Award for Service was presented to the American Catholic History Research Center and the University Archives at the Catholic University of America;
• The 2018 John Gilmary Shea Prize was presented to William B. Taylor for his book, Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain (Cambridge University Press, 2016);
• The Howard R. Marraro Prize in Italian History was presented to John Howe for his book, Before the Gregorian Reform: The Latin Church at the Turn of the First Millennium (Cornell University Press, 2016);
• The inaugural Henry C. Koenig Article Prize, for a biographical study of a Catholic individual (published in 2015 or 2016), was awarded to Paul T. Murray of Siena College, for "'The Most Righteous White Man in Selma': Father Maurice Ouellet and the Struggle for Voting Rights," The Alabama Review 68:1 (Jan. 2015): 31-73;
• The Peter Guilday Prize for 2017 was given to Kathleen Walkowiak of Saint Louis University for her article, "Public Authority and Private Constraints: Eugenius III and the Council of Reims," that appeared in the American Catholic Historical Review 103 (Summer 2017).

After lunch the conference finished up with sessions on faith and doubt in Early Modern Europe, urban Catholic parish life in the United States, and saints and miracles. The session on saints and miracles included a paper by Carole Baker of Duke University on the highly decorated bodies of saints found in Bavaria, Austria, and Switzerland. It continued with Rosario Forlenza of New York University discussing Padre Pio and the cult of miracles that surrounds him and his relics in southern Italy. The final paper was by Mary Corley Dunn of Saint Louis University on Blessed Mary Catherine of St. Augustine, O.S.B., whose disability and constant illness after coming from France to Canada in the seventeenth century was portrayed in her vita as the root of her sanctity.

The conference finished on Saturday with the evening liturgy at 5 p.m. and then afterwards the social, which includes drinks and heavy hors d'oeuvres, for members of the ACHA. Both events bring members together, with the social allowing newer members and graduate students to get to know older, more distinguished, scholars. The ACHA is a very welcoming group and newer members are easily able to get to know the old-timers. Though the AHA annual meeting can be intimidating to new scholars and graduate students, the more intimate meeting of the ACHA is a welcome respite with friendly camaraderie among the participants.

The official program can be found here.

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Democracy, Higher Education, and the Problem of the Common Good

Andrea L. Turpin

A month ago I attended two national conferences on back-to-back weekends: the Society for U.S. Intellectual History (USIH) met October 26-29 in Dallas, TX and the History of Education Society (HES) met November 2-5 in Little Rock, AR. A week and a half of intensive immersion in the current scholarship of two overlapping fields made some common themes jump out. (And also produced fascinating insights into the variable quality of Marriott hotels. But I digress.)

Specifically, I was struck by historians' interest in two topics: the concept of the common good and the problem of how values are, or are not, transmitted to the next generation. I suspect these themes jumped out at me in part because they seem so salient in the current widespread breakdown of civil dialogue. Both of these lenses prove helpful for producing a clearer understanding of U.S. history, especially U.S. religious history—and for seeing how best to frame that history for our students today.

The question of the common good was raised most forcefully in a pair of book panels, one from each conference. USIH dedicated a plenary session to James Kloppenberg’s monumental work Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford, 2016). A fair amount of the panelist and audience questions revolved around the role of religious beliefs, past and present, in forming and sustaining democracy. In answer to one of these questions, Kloppenberg articulated his conviction that some conception of the common good is necessary to ground democracy; otherwise politics becomes a zero-sum game. He asserted that historically democracy in the North Atlantic world grew in large part from Jewish and Christian roots—but that most religious and moral systems advocate some version of the golden rule that provides democracy’s necessary ethic of reciprocity. Therefore, democracy can certainly thrive in a climate of religious pluralism, but he fears it might not survive a devolution of belief in our responsibility as individual citizens to advance the common good. (Though Kloppenberg noted that he is by temperament a cautious optimist about our nation’s ability to rally around this ideal more robustly in the future.)


The question thus arises how past generations of Americans have successfully produced a commitment to the common good—and how we can do so again today. A partial answer comes from the book panel hosted by HES the next week on Charles Dorn’s For the Common Good: A New History of Higher Education in America (Cornell, 2017). Dorn’s book examines the different purposes higher education has served throughout American history—but notes that inculcating civic-mindedness has been present throughout. Instilling in students concern for the public welfare has, however, often been eclipsed by competing purposes. Those he details are the ideals of practicality, commercialism, and affluence. In other words, higher education has frequently been largely valued as an avenue to some sort of worldly success—which makes sense, considering how expensive it can be in terms of both money and time. Nevertheless, the existence of a through line of commitment to the common good among higher educational institutions throughout American history provides a rich heritage for contemporary colleges and universities to draw on.

Dorn also served as one of the commentators for the HES panel on my book, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837-1917 (Cornell, 2016). He rightly noted that I too perceive the question of the nature of the public welfare to have loomed large in the educational debates that underlay our current college and university landscape. He put the question to me of whether the common good was solely in the eye of the beholder during the fractious discussions about the respective roles of gender, religion, and class in higher education that I analyze—or whether there was some criteria that educational founders, leaders, administrators, and boosters could have used to better adjudicate competing claims.

In many ways this is THE question I believe we have to answer as educators today. I responded that for past educators it seems to have been relatively easy to agree that colleges and universities should serve the public good, less easy to agree on the exact nature of that good, and harder still to agree on how to achieve it. Specifically, I think it is fair to say that both past and present Americans have agreed on many common goods plural, but that it has been much harder to agree on their ranking, and hence on which policies, both educational and political, best serve the nation. Additionally, my findings led me to conclude that it is nearly impossible for any one type of institution to do equally well by all types of students. The institutional pluralism of modern American higher education thus indeed seems best for a pluralistic nation. Yet if all these institutions seek to orient their students toward a common good—even if they do not agree on its exact nature—graduates will be primed for the process of democratic discussion.

But how can we know if students have internalized the moral vision their institutions have cast? I care about this question both as a historian and as an educator. I venture an answer in my book with respect to the institutional histories discussed there, but I also note that the question is notoriously difficult. I was therefore delighted to hear scholars at both conferences wrestling with the question of transmitting values. This theme was rarely the topic of an entire panel, but frequently appeared within individual papers. Collectively these papers indicate that attempts to transmit values to the next generation have often been mediated by educational institutions, religious institutions, or both. They have likewise been bound up in the tension between serving a particular religious community and serving the wider community:

Pete Cajka noted how the nineteenth-century U.S. Catholic school system sought both to preserve the faith and to form citizens. Benjamin Park noted how both Catholics and Mormons of that era shared a concern to stabilize American democracy by grounding Christian values in a religious hierarchy that could constitute a court of final appeal throughout time. I highlighted in my USIH presentation considerable concern within early twentieth-century mainline churches for how to retain the involvement of a new generation of college-educated women who were finding more opportunities for their talents outside the church. John Compton examined how J. Howard Pew’s father tightly controlled his education to inculcate in him a more conservative view of the relationship between Christianity and economics than characterized the bulk of his fellow Presbyterians. Daniel Williams noted how mid-twentieth century mainline apologists sought to defend Christianity not primarily for its own sake, but rather because they believed its values sustained the democratic political order.  Mario Rewers determined that students of the pioneer American studies classes actually valued and internalized their intended lessons in critical thinking. Elesha Coffman described how Margaret Mead wrestled with the problem of revising the baptismal liturgy of the Episcopal Church: if it changed too much, it wouldn't pass on the essence of the faith to the next generation, but if it didn’t change enough, that new generation would refuse to receive it. Matthew Bowman discussed how Robert Bellah’s concern with cults—very successful at transmitting their values and beliefs—focused on their separatist lack of interest in the common good. And Milton Gaither detailed what factors have correlated with successfully transmitting religious beliefs to the next generation and analyzed why the contemporary homeschooling movement did not actually succeed in doing so at a higher rate than average.

So where does all this leave me in my dual roles of historian seeking to understand changing American religious and moral values and educator seeking to instill in my students a desire to pursue the common good? I would say these conferences have challenged me to think more carefully in my own scholarship about how generational continuities and changes occur within educational and religious communities. And they have encouraged me to frame my teaching even more clearly around the pursuit of a common good throughout American history.

Perhaps there is hope: I stole an end-of-semester exercise from my colleague Elesha Coffman and asked students to list (anonymously) one thing they’ll do differently as a result of the class. Student answers included: “After this class, it will be easier for me to understand/appreciate others’ opinions,” “I cannot allow assumptions, fear, or ignorance to cloud my perspective,” “Be careful when discussing certain topics and always do my research first,” and, finally, “What I will do differently is analyze presidential candidates from a more unbiased, neutral perspective rather than putting them exclusively in the box of their political party.”

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Paperwork Secularism and the Governance of American Religions

Charles McCrary

Today I want to offer a few brief thoughts toward a theory of “paperwork secularism,” inspired by some AAR panels and recent blog posts. But first, an anecdote.

In May 2010, the North Dakota Department of Transportation denied Brian Magee’s request for a personalized license plate reading “ISNOGOD.” Like many states, North Dakota had no specific legal restrictions for what type of messages may be included in a personalized license plate, thus opting to handle each request on a case-by-case basis. Explaining the decision to reject Magee’s plate, Department of Transportation representative Linda Butts said, “We are trying our best to serve the citizens of North Dakota and try to protect [against] what would be offensive.” But offensive according to whom? And, more to the point, who makes that call? According to state law, the Department of Transportation “may, in its discretion, provide special license plates marked with not more than seven numerals, letters, or ampersands, or combinations of numerals, letters, and ampersands, at the request of the registrant, upon application therefor and payment of an additional fee of twenty-five dollars per registration period” (ND State Law 39-04-10.3 “Personalized plates”). But whose discretion, exactly? Who were the agents of the secular state determining what was offensive?

Some years ago, I was writing a seminar paper about this case, and so I called the North Dakota Motor Vehicle Division to find out. The employee with whom I spoke told me that they had guidelines for what would be offensive, but they were not publicly posted. In fact, they did not have a digital copy, so far as she knew. She made a physical copy and mailed it to me. The document states: “The Motor Vehicle Division retains the right to refuse to issue any license plates with any combination of letters or numbers, presented in any language and when read forward or backward, that may carry connotations that are offensive to good taste and decency, or would be misleading, including but not limited to…” an eleven-point list. The list includes specific prohibitions, such as “a word or term that refers to illegal drugs,” as well as some less clear, such as “a word or term that is patently offensive or contemptuous, prejudicial, or incites lust, depravity, or hostility.” And, curiously, “a word or term that could be reasonably expected to provoke a violent response from viewers.” This anecdote leads me to two related analytical points: 1) The secular state is not a unified entity, so scholars should focus more on agents of the secular state; and 2) Secular governance often occurs at highly localized levels, and so these secular state agents should be found in perhaps unexpected places, like the DMV. We might call this “paperwork secularism.”

I thought about paperwork secularism a number of times at the recent AAR meeting. In an excellent panel on “America’s Bureaucracy of Transcendence: Government Legitimation of American Religion,” Kathleen Holscher, Mike Graziano, Brad Stoddard, and Sarah Dees offered papers on the bureaucratic procedures by which a variety of state and state-affiliate actors define, regulate, and govern religions. Mike McVicar’s thoughtful and thought-provoking response keyed on these dynamics in the creation and contestation of classificatory systems that are always intersectional, never isolable even when they purport to be (as religion often does). The response followed the themes of governance, ignorance, and bureaucracy. On the final point, McVicar noted that knowledge—or ignorance—has bureaucratic uses. When producing or consuming knowledge about religion(s), state agents have a reason, an application, a use. During the question and answer segment, someone (I’m sorry I didn’t write down who) proposed that we differentiate between administrative and judicial epistemologies. Judges have clerks, and they have time to think and write. They read other opinions and consider decades of case law. Other agents—Catholic hospital workers explaining the nature of “charity,” CIA agents trying to understand Buddhism, prison chaplains deciding whether there’s enough space to accommodate a Wiccan meeting, Bureau of American Ethnology anthropologists devising terminology to name Native American practices, North Dakota DMV employees determining what’s “offensive”—often must make these decisions on the fly, with the information available. And their purpose is often different. Courts have to interpret legislation, uphold the constitution, defend the principles of religious freedom. Other agents sometimes are just trying to finish their paperwork.

Recently, The Religion Factor, the blog of the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalization at the University of Groningen, has been running a series on the legal mechanisms that shape religious practice. In the first post, Helge Ǻrsheim argued that this “machinery” of the bureaucratic state, often ignored by scholars, is where and how religious freedom is produced. “Far removed from the spotlight of the news cycle, critical scholarship or political discourse, civil servants from a broad and growing array of modern nation states determine the proper nature and scope of religion, oftentimes as a small, even happenstance part of their jobs.” In his contribution to the series, Richard Amesbury nicely summed up Ǻrsheim’s approach to bureaucratization: “God is in the machine, and the devil in the details.” The details can be boring. So Ǻrsheim calls for us to push through the boredom, for it’s “exactly because bureaucracy is massive, unwieldy and boring [that] it usually escapes the critical gaze of scholarship developed for more high-profile and immediately comprehensible cases involving controversy and conflict.” We should look at “paperwork secularism,” investigate the workings of what we might call the “deep secular state,” but not just to find some exciting, unexpected archival gem (though we’ll find those too), but because bureaucracy is important and massive, and a close, detailed, boring look at it will give us a sense of its import and mass.

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R&AC Proceedings, Experiences as a Grad Student

Today, the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture made its Proceedings available. This publication allows those who were not able to make it to Indianapolis in June to access the ideas shared at the conference. Or, for those like me, it helps attendees view those ideas with fresh eyes. 

In conjunction with the the publication of the Proceedings, today's guest post reviews R&AC's 5th Biennial Conference from the perspective of a first-year PhD student. Our guest author is  Melanie Monteclaro Pace, a Ph.D. student in American Religions at the University of Virginia. Readers can follow her on Twitter: @monteclaro_pace

Melanie Monteclaro Pace

In June, I drove from Charlottesville to Indianapolis to attend the 5th Biennial Conference on Religion & American Culture. As a first-time conference attendee, I wasn’t sure what to expect—especially at an event that typically draws only a handful of graduate students, and even fewer first-year Ph.D. students like myself.

And, you might well ask: Why would a graduate student want to attend a conference like R&AC?

However, I’m happy to report that being a graduate student at R&AC 2017 was such a cool experience. And by that, I mean it was a professional development opportunity that I would recommend to any graduate student in the field of American religion. Here are some reasons I found attending this conference so valuable:

Connection. At R&AC, I got to meet the scholars whose work I’d been getting to know over the course of the past year—an opportunity unique to a small gathering that is difficult to come by at larger conferences. Nothing beats getting to chat with the folks who are writing the books you’re reading as a way to feel more connected to the field. And connecting to the field in meaningful ways is one of the primary tasks of an early-career graduate student.


Many early-career graduate students struggle with knowing how to position our own scholarship in the field. Attending conferences like R&AC can help with this. At R&AC, I was able to watch scholars engaging with one another in real time, giving me a panoramic view of the state of the field. This year’s sessions included a range of papers addressing cutting-edge topics in the study of American religion, such as the category of religious “nones,” the use of digital methods, and the question of how we might situate American religion in a global context.

Conversation. R&AC is all about conversation. It’s a conversation that begins with the first panel on Day 1, as presenters and audience members settle into the format in the round at 8:30am with their first, second, and possibly third cups of coffee. This conversation not only carries through to the final panel on Day 2, but at lunch, in the hallways, and over snacks at the catered “Nourishment Hub”—which, I’ll pause to observe, included gummy bears and Reese’s Pieces. (I helped myself liberally to both.) 

At R&AC, I got to take part in these conversations about critical issues in religious studies with some of the leading scholars in the field. As an early career graduate student trying to carve out a space of inquiry for myself within scholarship on American religion, it was particularly helpful to witness these conversations between scholars. I was also privy to real talk about the academic job market, teaching in diverse contexts, and the challenges that face early-career faculty. This alone was worth the nine-hour drive.

Community. Networking is important for all early-career graduate students. Even the most well intentioned and generous of the leading scholars in our field don’t have time to review the writing of every aspiring student. So, when we as graduate students are trying to get feedback on a manuscript or, eventually, navigate the job market with the support of influential faculty, it helps if those faculty are able to put a face to a name and a piece of work. R&AC, an unusually intimate conference, can help this happen.


Furthermore, as is the case in much of the academy, religious studies as a discipline is slowly diversifying but remains predominately white and male. This can make it challenging for minority students and women to find peers and faculty who share their experiences. As a first-generation graduate student and woman of color, one of the best parts of R&AC for me was getting to talk with early-career scholars who could share their experiences as women and minorities in the academy. Not only did I benefit from their insights, but I look forward to staying in touch as I continue my studies.

In closing, I’m really glad that I attended R&AC this year. I’d like to offer an additional thank-you to the folks who helped make R&AC a positive experience for me as a graduate student (I’ll do my best to pay it forward!).

And to my fellow graduate students in American religion: I know how challenging it can be to work out the logistics of conference travel and funding. But, if you can, I’d encourage you to attend the 6th Biennial Conference in Religion and American Culture, which takes place in June 2019.

In the meantime, don’t miss the informative—and occasionally entertaining!—Twitter conversation on this year’s conference at #RAAC2017.

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Reflections on SHAFR @ 50 Annual Meeting

Lauren Turek

This past weekend, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations celebrated its fiftieth anniversary (as well as the fortieth anniversary of the journal Diplomatic History) at its annual meeting in Arlington, VA. Just as I reported last year, the conference included a number of panels and roundtable discussions on the topic of religion in American history and foreign relations. There were, in fact, so many good panels on religion that I could not even attend all of them owing to my unfortunate inability to be in multiple places at once! As such, in addition to providing my own overview of the exciting work that scholars showcased at the SHAFR meeting this year, I have included some reflections from other attendees as well.

Most of the panels that I attended reflected in some way on missionaries and missionary work, though the listing of panels that I have included at the end of this post does make clear that there were many panels at the conference that examined religion and foreign relations beyond missionary work (and that there were papers on a diverse array of faith traditions, including Judaism and Islam).


The first religion-themed panel that I attended was a roundtable discussion about David Hollinger's forthcoming book Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, which is due out in October. Daniel Immerwahr organized the roundtable, with Hollinger offering an overview of the project, Melani McAlister, Madeline Hsu, and Andrew Preston providing commentary on the book, and David Engerman moderating. Hollinger outlined his argument that the mainline Protestant missionary project played a key role in "deprovincializing" America, fostering multiculturalism in American life and ecumenicism in American churches in the years between 1890 and the Vietnam war. He suggested that missionaries, the children of missionaries, and the organizations that supported missionary endeavors created what he termed "missionary cosmopolitanism," which contributed to a nascent embrace of other cultures and a strong critique of colonialism—a critique which spurred debates about the missionary project itself and a turn toward more humanitarian aid. Hollinger also revealed how the missionary project, and the cosmopolitanism it inspired among the groups he examined, led these missionaries to engage in debates over the role of the United States in the world in this period. He argued that the alliances some of these Protestants developed with colonized peoples through their missionary work pushed them to embrace an idealism about the potential for U.S. foreign policy to act as a force of morality in international relations, advancing humanitarian and anti-colonialist goals. Hollinger shared a number of wonderful, engaging anecdotes about missionaries such as Kenneth Landon, who ended up briefing Franklin D. Roosevelt and working for the OSS during World War II because he was one of the only experts on Thailand the State Department could find, and about the role some missionaries played in enforcing humane interrogations of POWs in the Pacific theater. Yet, as he concluded, the Vietnam war "shattered their idealism" about the "morality of American policy."


Melani McAlister (and indeed all of the panelists) praised Hollinger's book, and dove into a deeper discussion of the critique these particular Protestants leveled against the missionary project. She noted that Hollinger's argument about how the de-emphasis of proselytism and focus on humanitarian aid in the post-World War I era provided the "fuel" in the split between modernists and fundamentalists not only placed this split in a global context, but that it also contributed to decline in the mainline churches. Madeline Hsu discussed the power dynamics that existed between missionaries and those peoples that they evangelized, particularly in China, which Hollinger explores in the book. Andrew Preston closed out the commentary by describing how the Protestants Hollinger discusses challenged and complicated the typical image of "missionaries as the tip of the imperial spear," due to the critiques of imperialism they leveled. Preston also highlighted Hollinger's emphasis on the relationship between ecumenicism and internationalism. In his response, Hollinger picked up on the thread that McAlister and Preston raised about the significance of the ecumenical movement, arguing that even though he believes that much of the historiography on American Protestantism has sought to "diminish the gap between evangelicals or fundamentalists and ecumenicals," the divide grew extreme in the period he covers in his book and that divide emerged because of the missionary project itself. All in all, a very exciting glimpse at what promises to be a defining book.

Later, I attended a panel entitled "Faith and Foreign Affairs: Religion, Non-State Actors, and U.S. Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century," which featured three exciting papers. Kelly Shannon shared research from a brand new project on U.S. relations with Iran in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project is to be about a range of non-state actors, not just religious actors, but for this panel she gave a fascinating paper that explored the crucial role American Presbyterian missionaries played in developing official diplomatic relations between the two states. She also shared the wonderful story of Howard Baskerville, a Presbyterian missionary who resigned his post to join in the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1909, as part of a larger exploration of how missionaries shaped perceptions that the American public developed about Iranians and that Iranians developed about Americans. Jonathan Chilcote gave a paper on the efforts that American missionaries in Bombay engaged in to spur contributions to help those suffering from the Spanish influenza in India in 1918-1920. In this compelling piece, Chilcote suggested that these missionaries "saw the flu as an opportunity to remake India in America's image." Denise Jenison rounded out the panel with a presentation of research from her dissertation, giving a paper on Arab-American efforts to influence official U.S. policy towards Palestine in the aftermath of World War II. Her excellent paper delved into the creation of the Institute of Arab-American Affairs, which sought to win support for Palestine by convincing American Christians of the link between Christian missionary work and Arab nationalism, as well as by stressing the close relationship that Palestinian Christians and Muslims shared.

I was also really excited for the "Foreign Religions and Foreign Relations: U.S. Engagements with the World in the Nineteenth Century" panel, in part because SHAFR does not feature nearly enough panels on pre-twentieth century foreign relations. The three papers on this panel, which Tisa Wenger chaired, were exceptional. Kathryn Gin Lum started out with a paper on mapping and geographic imaginings of the "heathen world" as lands that were "wild and overgrown because of the sin/heathenism of their inhabitants." She linked this tendency to view the regions of the world populated by non-Christians as undifferentiated and wild to the development and propagation of racist ideologies, including scientific racism, and to the belief that Westerners should intervene in these regions in particular ways. Emily Conroy-Krutz also examined maps in her fascinating paper on what she termed "missionary intelligence," or the information that missionaries shared about the countries they evangelized. She noted that the maps and information that missionaries discussed at monthly prayer concerts "contributed to the creation of a mental map of the world" for nineteenth century Americans, acting as a "source of knowledge production" about the wider world. Kate Moran turned her focus to late nineteenth century Protestant travelogues to examined the changing depictions of the Pope and Catholic authority in Rome during a period of bewildering social change in the United States and upheaval in Italy. She compared the positive descriptions of Pope Pius IX to the negative depictions of earlier Popes and the virulent anti-Catholicism of antebellum travelogues, making a riveting argument that in recasting their views of the pope in light of the Risorgimento, "Catholic power became a way [for Protestants] to understand their own concerns about social order in [their] present." This panel spurred excellent discussion of the role of religion in society and of the interrelationship of race and religion.

Dan Hummel also attended SHAFR (he presented on a fantastic new open source online U.S. foreign relations primary source reader, Voices & Visions, that he helped develop), and sent in the following report on one of the panels he attended, "American Zionism and U.S.-Israel Relations from the 1950s to the 1990s.":

"This excellent panel explored numerous facets of the U.S. relationship to Israel and the development of Jewish Zionism. Salim Yaqub aptly summarized that the panelists overlapped precisely in their study of the changing relationship between American Jews and Israel. Doug Rossinow traced the origins of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC, originally American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs) to a crisis in Israel’s public image after the IDF’s massacre of civilians in the village of Qibya in October 1953. He examined how AIPAC’s founder, I.L. Kenan, sought to unite American Zionists and Jewish non-Zionists. Rossinow concluded that the staunch support of the Israel lobby since 1953 is unsurprising given its origins in defending Israel’s largely indefensible actions at Qibya. Sara Hirschorn spoke about American Jews who have become leaders in the settlement movement in the West Bank. As her recently-published book, City on a Hilltop (Harvard Press, 2017), expounds upon, American Jews make up a large and ideologically potent segment of the current settler movement and hold more diverse religious, political, and economic motivations than we normally assume. Seth Anziska recounted the history of the opening of dialogue between the U.S. and the PLO in December 1988 and emphasized the role of American Jewish actors breaking with organized American Jewish attitudes toward the PLO. While the Reagan administration opened dialogue with the PLO, its intent was not necessarily to pave the way for independent Palestinia statehood. The differing agendas of American Jews, Israelis, the U.S. government, and the PLO poin to the ways that the U.S. government and PLO were pursuing incommensurate policy goals, even as they began to talk to one another."

Clearly, the religious turn in U.S. foreign relations history over the past decade has led to a proliferation of exciting work in this area. SHAFR is an incredibly welcoming place for scholars of religion (scholars of a wide variety of historical subfields, actually, as U.S. foreign relations history intersects with many aspects of domestic and international history as well as a number of methodological approaches) and the presentations are always of the highest quality. I am very much looking forward to next year's annual meeting, which will be held in Philadelphia in June 2018. Happy 50th Anniversary to SHAFR and here is to the next 50!

Below, I have listed all of the panels and individual papers that reflected in some way on religion and American diplomatic history, broadly defined. A link to the full program is available here.


Panel 12: Roundtable: Wilson and World War I: New Perspectives

Paper of Particular Interest:
Beyond Belief: Religion in Woodrow Wilson's Internationalism

Cara Burnidge, University of Northern Iowa



Panel 18: Christian Mission, U.S. Power, and Domestic and Foreign Publics from
the Early Republic to the Cold War

Chair:
Emily Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University

Papers:
Protestant Mission, American Empire, and the Uses of History in Hawaii and the
Philippines, 1880-1920
Tom Smith, University of Cambridge

Foreign Missionaries and the “Spirit of Benevolence” in the Early Republic
Ashley Moreshead, University of Central Florida

Contending Christianities: U.S. Catholic and Protestant Missions in Central America
and Political Advocacy at Home during Henry Luce’s American Century, 1941-1960
Charles T. Strauss, Mount St. Mary’s University

Comment:
Emily Conroy-Krutz



Panel 37: Black Internationalism and Black Freedom Struggles

Paper of particular interest:
Bishop Ralph Dodge: Africa’s Unwanted Missionary
Luke Shief, University of Missouri



Panel 40: Roundtable: David Hollinger’s Protestants Abroad

Panelists:
Daniel Immerwahr, Northwestern University
Melani McAlister, George Washington University
Madeline Hsu, University of Texas, Austin
Andrew Preston, Clare College, University of Cambridge
David Engerman, Brandeis University
David Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley



Panel 52: Faith and Foreign Affairs: Religion, Non-State Actors, and U.S. Foreign
Relations in the Early Twentieth Century

Chair:
Cara Burnidge, University of Northern Iowa

Papers:
“I am Persia’s”: Howard Baskerville, American Presbyterian Missionaries, and U.S.-
Iranian Relations during the First Iranian Revolution
Kelly Shannon, Florida Atlantic University

The Principles of Relief: American Missionaries and the Remaking of Indian Lives after
the Spanish Influenza Pandemic
Jonathan Chilcote, Florida College

Arab-American Efforts to Influence U.S. Policy on Palestine, 1944-1948
Denise Laszewski Jenison, Kent State University

Comment:
Cara Burnidge



Panel 73: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, a Retrospective:

Promoting Democracy in the Cold War

Paper of particular interest:
“A Human Rights Policy Means Trouble”: Ecumenical Activism, Civil Religion, and the
Forging of Ronald Reagan’s Human Rights Policy
Shannon Nix, University of Virginia



Panel 76: Beyond State Power: Non-State Actors, Aid, and Development Programs
and the U.S. in the World in the Twentieth Century

Paper of particular interest:
A “Little Cuba” in the Jungle: Priests in Ixcán, Guatemala, 1965-1976
Sarah Foss, Indiana University



Panel 80: Foreign Religions and Foreign Relations: U.S. Engagements with the
World in the Nineteenth Century

Chair:
Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Papers:
Heathen Geographies in the Nineteenth Century
Kathryn Gin Lum, Stanford University

Foreign Missions and Foreign Information in the Early Republic
Emily Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State University

Reimagining Catholic Power in the Wake of the Risorgimento
Katherine Moran, St. Louis University

Comment:
Tisa Wenger



Panel 85: American Zionism and U.S.-Israel Relations from the 1950s to the
1990s

Chair:
Peter Hahn, Ohio State University

Papers:
The Origins of America’s Israel Lobby, 1951-1956
Doug Rossinow, University of Oslo

City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement since 1967
Sara Yael Hirschhorn, Oxford University

American Jews and Arafat: Citizen Diplomacy and the PLO Recognition of Israel
Seth Anziska, University College London

Comment:
Salim Yaqub, University of California, Santa Barbara

Panel 88: Missionaries, Technicians, and Tourists: Cold War Public and Cultural

Diplomacy in Action 

Paper of particular interest:

Mormons in the Lion City: Religious Cultural Exchanges, 1968-1990

Keshia Lai, Ohio State University

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The R&AC Conference: Taking Religion "Seriously"

Adam Park

"Why so serious?"--The Joker

With tongue perpetually in cheek, admittedly, I get a little nervous when people get "serious." My skittish ears are therefore perked at the very mention of the s-word. In all its stern demand, the s-word happened a lot this weekend at my favorite conference ever--the Religion & American Culture Conference. And, not incidentally, the s-word happens a lot in Religious Studies. "Taking religion seriously," so it goes. As Michael Altman Twittered (sp.?) the first morning of the conference: "what does it mean 'to take X seriously'? I've heard a lot of that this morning." I second that Twitter query. Though testing my incessantly satirical nerves, I think it worthwhile to explore the nature of our cultivated tone, our asserted imperative, our assumed position, our seriousness. 

Here's what I think is going on. As Charlie McCrary suggested in his previous post, "taking religion seriously" has much to do with assertions of proximity or intimacy to our subject(s). And as Elizabeth Pritchard so insightfully argued, the scholarly injunction to take religion "seriously" is laden with secular liberal assumptions about the existence of a power-neutral space within which to discuss a given topic. Both points taken. Additionally, here's some other things I think we mean when we issue calls to take X "seriously." 

1) I'll start with a mostly benign/obvious point. Serious means both good and thorough. Since the First Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture in 2009, Philip Goff has introduced the purpose of the conference to begin a "serious" dialogue. A serious study is a quality one. With ever the analytic, loquacious, and nimbly nuanced minds, then, serious conversation is how we academics enjoy ourselves. Serious is a scholarly word for fun. A little sad, but whatever. Conferences are our spring breaks. I got so serious Saturday that I could only eat a couple bites of granola and some Advil Sunday morning. But what happens in Indianapolis, does not stay in Indianapolis. 

2) Serious functions to maintain academic boundaries. What is not serious? To take X seriously is to contrast one's seriousness with other unlearned, popular, un-footnoted, or media soundbite discussions of X. In a room full of serious types, Besheer Mohamed had to justify his Pew-ish penchant for brevity and simplification. Cara Burnidge wondered if "history" was code for "legitimate." Probably. Serious certainly is. Language of seriousness is the rhetorical "hallmark of sound scholarship," Pritchard reminds us. Serious is not truthiness. Serious is not Trump tweets. Serious is our academic hegemon's lingua franca. Greek to others. 

3) Serious marks importance ... particularly for an embattled discipline and a presumed neglected topic. Is anyone listening? Historians? Once king in the academy, Kathryn Lofton noted, religion is now lowly pauper. Political scientists and quantitative sociologists don't take religion seriously, but we do. For it is special. To take religion seriously is to protect it. Pastoral. But one is left to wonder, we may take religious "nones" seriously, but do Pastafarians evoke our sense of seriousness? Does Kirk Cameron's acting in Left Behind? Perhaps, partial pastoral. Some things get protected by our seriousness. Other things, well, get left behind. Serious hegemony.

4) Serious is a moral posture. Seriousness is an academic ethic with a (Christian-inflected?) preoccupation with truth and pure intention. To be serious is to be a proxy to the authentic, a voice for the real. To evoke seriousness, Pritchard writes, is "rather like an instance of good manners." Though the source of all this taking religion seriously is somewhat unclear to me, I think a primary wellspring for seriousness is "lived religion." Ahlstrom didn't need serious language. Ethnographic turn. As Robert Orsi spoke at the first R&AC conference, "To take religious experiences of real presences seriously means understanding imaginary beings as having historical life and agency of their own." To believe as they is the serious mantra. Caretaker more than critic. However, as scholars of religion, Orsi adds, this "does not entail ignoring questions of social power." Somewhere between heaven and earth, to be serious is to be disoriented. To be serious requires a certain self awareness, a high degree of introspection. To be serious is to, at least partially, oppose reductionism or simplification. To take religion seriously is to enact an imperative that obliges a certain kind of relation to our religious subject and our inner selves. Charlie got it right. To be serious is to be sincere, honest, true to self and others.

Doing little more than writing a dissertation for the past three years, I've been thinking more unseriously all the while about the place of irony, satire, and humor in writing, in the academy. Levity in analysis. I think there's room. Mama Lola can take it. I would like to see more. I would like to laugh more as I learn more. I'm betting our audiences would like that too. Courtney Lacy Tweeted how "Katy Lofton's speech was a whirlwind of laughter and critique." She wondered "how will this room of traditional intellectuals respond?" Well. Encore. There is, however, a catch. Just as seriousness includes as it excludes, so too does comedy. Muhammed cartoons can kill. Just as seriousness presumes a power-neutral space for dialogue, so too does humor appeal to modern secular liberal assumptions about the right to laugh. There's an impasse here, an irony.

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