Faith in Black Power: Reflections on Teaching the Civil Rights Movement in My Place

What happens when you rearrange a civil rights movement class to prioritize the North? The long civil rights movement framework, which has greatly influenced my own writing, explodes the traditional southern-focused, 1954-1965, King-based narrative that has been so dominant in the general American psyche and helps students to see that race has not been just a southern problem (although there are things unique to the South), that Dr. King was not the only leader, that women’s activism and questions of gender are important, and that the movement was not just about integration.  The long movement framework, as Jacqueline Dowd Hall conceived it in 2005, does not adequately account for religion, but there are some great books that do explore religion in the classical and long movements (I have used Charles Marsh's God's Long Summer and Patrick Jones's The Selma of the North in my classroom).

Place matters, and I’m becoming more convinced that institutions of higher education - education which should shape people, not just minds - have a responsibility to help students learn to live well in a place, so they can work for the common good (which includes people and the environment, see Jack Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro on Wendell Berry and Higher Education).  This semester, I rearranged my civil rights movement general education class to prioritize race and movement activism in the North, and in Chicago and Wheaton (where I teach), specifically. 
I did so to help ground my students, quite literally, with the hope that doing so would help them see their current context more clearly.  We dug into the Wheaton College archives to construct a story of its racial history and relationship to the civil rights movement, and we read primary and secondary sources on the North in the course’s third unit, which led many students to write their midterm primary source research paper on questions grounded in the North.  A key question for our focus on the north was how religion – in this case evangelicalism (with Wheaton College) and Catholicism (using chapters from my forthcoming book, One in Christ: Catholics and the Quest for Interracial Justice in Chicago, shameless plug) – both reinforced and tore down racial hierarchies.

Our last major unit was on Black Power, but I failed to offer my students opportunities to really dig into how religion intersected with Black Nationalism in the movement.  Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam offered one entry point.  Marsh’s discussion of Black Power in his chapter on key SNCC leader Cleveland Sellers offered another.  Marsh argues that SNCC’s expulsion of white members in 1967 made SNCC the closed society writ small, a parallel to the white Mississippi religious culture that turned its back on the other, and a far cry from the beloved community that Fannie Lou Hamer helped foster in Mississippi (and that Marsh celebrates).  In keeping with my local theme, we explored the Chicago Police Department’s murder of Fred Hampton, fostered by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, and analyzed the Eyes on the Prize “Nation of Law?” episode, which is excellent but, like the series as a whole, lacks sustained attention to religious questions.  The episode shows an interview of Father George Clements (for the full interview transcript, go here) who talks about holding a mass for Hampton after his murder.  It also shows Hampton speaking in a church to an interracial group (you can see footage of Hampton in the church in the preview for The Murder of Fred Hampton).  But Clements as a Catholic is not a question the film digs into.

Overall, the iterations of Black Power I provided for my students to explore were either not religious (which for many activists was not), or if they were religious, they were anti- Christianity (as with NOI and SNCC’s black power phase).

And yet, I know that is not the case.  There is a powerful tradition of Christian faith, both Protestant and Catholic, in Black Power movements, whose adherents saw their efforts for black advancement as part and parcel with their Christian faith.  My own research on Catholic interracialism is bookended by black Catholic nationalism.  

I want to share some resources I'll be drawing on next time I teach this class to improve our study of the intersections between black nationalism and Christianity: Kerry Pimblott’s Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois and Matt Cressler’s Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration.

Here’s the University Press of Kentucky’s summary of Pimblott’s Faith in Black Power:

In this vital reassessment of the impact of religion on the black power movement,Kerry Pimblott presents a nuanced discussion of the ways in which black churches supported and shaped the United Front. She deftly challenges conventional narratives of the de-Christianization of the movement, revealing that Cairoites embraced both old-time religion and revolutionary thought. Not only did the faithful fund the mass direct-action strategies of the United Front, but activists also engaged the literature on black theology, invited theologians to speak at their rallies, and sent potential leaders to train at seminaries. Pimblott also investigates the impact of female leaders on the organization and their influence on young activists, offering new perspectives on the hypermasculine image of black power.

And here’s New York University Press’s summary of Cressler’s Authentically Black and Truly Catholic:

The sweep of the Great Migration brought many Black migrants face-to-face with white missionaries for the first time and transformed the religious landscape of the urban North. The hopes migrants had for their new home met with the desires of missionaries to convert entire neighborhoods. Missionaries and migrants forged fraught relationships with one another and tens of thousands of Black men and women became Catholic in the middle decades of the twentieth century as a result. These Black Catholic converts saved failing parishes by embracing relationships and ritual life that distinguished them from the evangelical churches proliferating around them. They praised the “quiet dignity” of the Latin Mass, while distancing themselves from the gospel choirs, altar calls, and shouts of “amen!” increasingly common in Black evangelical churches. 

Their unique rituals and relationships came under intense scrutiny in the late 1960s, when a growing group of Black Catholic activists sparked a revolution in U.S. Catholicism. Inspired by both Black Power and Vatican II, they fought for the self-determination of Black parishes and the right to identify as both Black and Catholic. Faced with strong opposition from fellow Black Catholics, activists became missionaries of a sort as they sought to convert their coreligionists to a distinctively Black Catholicism. This book brings to light the complexities of these debates in what became one of the most significant Black Catholic communities in the country, changing the way we view the history of American Catholicism

Both books not only will complicate the relationship of religion and black power, but will also help me teach my students in Illinois, serving the dual purposes of helping them to learn about the place they live and exploring the myriad ways religion shaped race and civil rights activism – including Black Power, and vice versa.

Continue Reading...

Racialized Christianity's Roots: Willie Jennings's The Christian Imagination

Racialized Christianity's Roots: The Christian Imagination

As historians, you all know this, but it's worth stating anyway: we are shaped by our contexts – theological, geographical, class, race, family, gender, national, etc.  Sometimes we begin to really see the water in which we swim by stepping into another stream.  Other times, reading about our stream's origins, its headwaters, can help us see our stream more clearly.  I study American history, my research is primarily in the twentieth century, and I don't read outside my field nearly enough.  But this summer I had the opportunity to do so with a group of Wheaton College colleagues when we read Willie Jennings's The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race.  Jennings, a theologian, has written a historical piece that explores the interconnections between western Christianity, racial hierarchies, capitalism, commodification of bodies and places, and pedagogy.  Those who study religion in American history and have been shaped by – and shape – the academy will benefit from the book (although, if you're an Americanist, the only character that may be familiar is Olaudah Equiano).

Jennings shows how the racial hierarchies westerners imagined in the 15^th century as they interacted with people living in South America and Africa, hierarchies that were inseparable from a theological pedagogy that assumed a one-way transfer of knowledge from the educated to the ignorant, deformed what he called "the Christian imagination."  For Jennings, "Christian imagination" refers to the possibilities of what could constitute Christianity.  These racial and pedagogical hierarchies developed in the context of mercantile capitalism, and the combination commodified bodies and land in new and detrimental ways.  

As a theologian, Jennings argues that this complicated history has mangled the Christian imagination, leading Christians to imagine that God's call on their lives is to relate primarily to Him, not to one another, and so has limited the possibilities of Christians from different backgrounds joining together in intimacy, being with one another in what he calls "spaces of communion."  Jennings reads Olaudah Equiano, for instance, as longing for communion with the white captors and freemen who were his brothers in Christ, as well as his mostly white readers.  Equiano, who controlled the presentation of his book, included an image of himself looking out at the reader on the cover of his The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), which contrasted the stylistic standards of the book's genre, but invited people into relationship.  Nonetheless, when he failed to find intimacy with his fellow Christians, Equiano sustained himself by telling himself that God was all he really needed.  For Jennings the theologian, this theological narrative (common in western Christianity) is wrong.

Jennings grounds his arguments in particular places, with particular people, and pays careful attention to how western Christians commodified places, and thus were able to ignore the details of those places, imagining themselves as transcending place.  I have written about place before.  I learned the importance of where one lives when I moved to Chicago's Austin neighborhood, which was radically different from the wealthy suburb in which I grew up.  In Austin my husband and I attended Rock of Our Salvation Evangelical Free Church, a neighborhood interracial church, and attended closely to what it meant to live in as white people in a black neighborhood with many people living at or below the poverty line.  We were pleased when families moved into vacant houses, we paid attention to who was standing on the corner, and we knew the impact of a homeowner dying, potentially leaving a house vacant.  Perhaps because living in Austin was such a cross-cultural experience, we became immersed in the place, aware of how different it was from our home towns every time we came back into our neighborhood.  We bought a house, and, in my own mind, my identity became intricately tied up in the place we were putting down roots.  When I saw other white people in the neighborhood (besides those I knew), I wondered what they were doing there because they didn't belong.  Perhaps they were up to no good.  I walked the neighborhood daily, either with a neighbor to exercise or going to the bus or the train.  When people asked me in casual conversation why I was there, I responded that we went to church in the neighborhood, we owned a house.  We belonged. 

Chicagoland's racial geographies play a prominent role in my own scholarship, and I know – and want to teach others – that the segregation I experienced growing up and in the Austin neighborhood was created.  It did not just happen.  Its consequences, for wealthy and poor people, Latino, Native American, white, black (and every other racial/ethnic group) are significant.  As Soong-Chan Rah (another theologian) argues in TheNext Evangelicalism, segregated Christianity leads segregated groups to be held in cultural captivity.  Rah explores white evangelicalism in particular, arguing that we – my tradition, my people – are held captive to the broader American culture's history and practice of racism, individualism, and consumerism and materialism.  

For Jennings, Christians must identify as Gentiles, as people grafted into Israel, outsiders adopting a new way of life, submitting themselves to that life.  When we were at Rock Church in the Austin neighborhood, we were part of one of those rare spaces of communion, spaces where people from different backgrounds loved and valued one another as they lived together.  There, my academic work mattered, but was not the only source of knowledge and wisdom.  There I flourished as I submitted to those different from me.  

After Wheaton College hired me, my husband and I moved to Wheaton.  I was pregnant and we left not because we wanted to raise our child in the suburbs, but because I am a working mom, and if we lived close to where I worked, we could integrate our lives our lives more easily with work and neighborhood.  People sometimes think we left because we thought it was dangerous in Austin.  I think it might be more dangerous in Wheaton.  Here, delightful, loving people can easily, and sometimes unintentionally, require those different from its powerful inhabitants to conform.  There are fewer spaces of communion.  Here, what might appear to be flourishing may too often ignore the history of American places, which is a history of race.

In our conversation with Willie Jennings, he called our college to account for its place, to not hover above Wheaton, Chicagoland, and the Midwest, but to be in it.  Why does accounting for place matter?  It's first of all good for our souls.  I am reading a new book, Wendell Berry andHigher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place by Jack Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro (University of Kentucky Press, 2017) that exegetes Wendell Berry's work for colleges and universities (secular and religious alike), arguing that institutions of higher education ought to form students' "imaginations and affections . . . so that rather than desiring upward mobility, they can imagine healthy, placed lives," because "contentment is a virtue that is particularly difficult for those of us in higher education to practice; universities exist to prepare students to lead better lives in better places, and this obsession with something better erodes our ability to be content" (1).  Universities' and colleges' accounting for place also can help reckon with - and perhaps right - the racial histories of their particular places.  Perhaps I am at Wheaton in part to help my students, my colleagues, myself, other evangelicals, to reckon with our racial past, and the ways it can be mapped on to places and spaces.  In doing so, we might be able to live better in this place that is Wheaton.  After all, as the black author James Baldwin wrote in 1963, "to accept one's past – one's history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it."*


*James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, 1992), 81.

Continue Reading...

CFP: Newberry Library Seminar on Religion and Culture in the Americas (Deadline is June 30)

By Karen Johnson.
I am thrilled to announce that the Newberry Library in Chicago is hosting a seminar on Religion and Culture in the Americas this year.  If you're working on a project and would like feedback, please apply.  You'll have the opportunity to share your ideas, to receive formal feedback, and to hear comments from attendees.  The deadline for a proposal is soon: June 30!  I have found the Newberry's seminars (the library hosts a wide range of groups) to be incredibly helpful, both for learning what others are doing in a deep and sustained manner, and for receiving feedback on my own work. 

Read on for the the official description:



The Religion and Culture in the Americas Seminar explores topics in religion and culture broadly and from interdisciplinary perspectives including social history, biography, cultural studies, visual and material culture, urban studies, and the history of ideas. We are interested in how religious belief has affected society, rather than creedal- or theological-focused studies.

The Seminar provides an opportunity for scholars to share works-in-progress, and we encourage papers that use new methods, unveil archival discoveries, or need feedback in preparation for book and journal article publication.

Seminar sessions are held on Fridays from 3pm to 5pm at the Newberry, 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois.

The Religion and Culture in the Americas 2017-2018 Call for Proposals is now OPEN. Proposals for 2017-2018 will be accepted until June 30, 2017. Click here for a pdf flyer of the Religion and Culture in the Americas Proposal brief. To submit a proposal, please visit our webform and upload a one-page proposal, a statement explaining the relationship of the paper to your other work, and a brief CV. Applications will not be accepted via email or in hard copy.

The Seminar’s organizers for 2017-2018 are: Kathleen Sprows Cummings, University of Notre Dame; Karen Johnson, Wheaton College; Malachy McCarthy, Claretian Missionaries Archives; Rima Lunin Schultz, Independent Scholar; and Kevin Schultz, University of Illinois Chicago.

The Religion and Culture in the Americas Seminar is co-sponsored by Albion College, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Wheaton College.

Continue Reading...

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.

Continue Reading...

Place and Scholars' Roles

Karen Johnson

As readers of my posts may discern, I am very interested in questions concerning wherepeople live out their lives, how they live in those places, and the consequences of both.  Housing segregation plays a prominent role in my book project on Catholic civil rights activism (hopefully to be in print in about 18 months!).  In the past year and a half, I've had the opportunity to read widely and think further about the connections between places, religion, and race.  I'd like to share some of my thoughts, and welcome your feedback, as I explore not only Catholicism, place and race, but evangelicalism, place, and race as well.

American society is one in which places have been replaced by space, which has led to a culture of homelessness.*  Homelessness is often conceived as a problem plaguing the poor and marginalized who stay in shelters or live on the streets.  Yet homelessness also includes the affluent who have few ties to a particular place, who do not have a place that can orient them to the world.  According to the writer Wendell Berry, "our present leaders – people who have wealth and power – do not know what it means to take place seriously: to think it worthy, for its own sake, of love and careful work.  They cannot take any place seriously because they must be ready at any moment, by the terms of power and wealth in the modern world, to destroy any place."**  This destruction could be literal, or the severing of ties because one moves to indulge career aspirations.

Evangelical Christians have contributed to America's culture of homelessness by baptizing placelessness with explicit and implicit theologies.***  Explicit theologies are the doctrines a church adheres to formally, while implicit theologies can be determined by observing the practices of a church body.  In terms of explicit theology, evangelicals often downplay the significance of place in Christ's Kingdom, as compared to place's relevance in the Old Testament, with its emphasis on land.  They might read Jesus's discussion with the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well in Sychar about the appropriate place to worship to suggest that in Christ's kingdom, place does not matter because Jesus told the woman, "a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . the true worshippers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth" (Jn 4:21, 23 NIV ).  

In terms of implicit theology, today many people drive out of their neighborhoods passing many churches they agree with theologically along the way to attend the church of their choosing.  They prioritize worshipping with people like themselves politically or socially (other families with young children, or young professionals, or hipsters), want to listen to a particular pastor, or desire to worship with others who share their particular denominational, theological, or doctrinal positions.  The homogenous unit principle of church growth, which became popular among evangelicals in the late twentieth century and emphasizes that groups that are alike one another will grow larger and faster, supports American evangelicals' tendency to drive to churches.****  Mega churches, televised sermons and podcasts, though valuable, can further this amnesia surrounding place.  The implicit theology revealed by these practices suggests a consumer mentality regarding church that (likely unintentionally) can prioritize comfort over rooting in a particular place. 

Many white American evangelicals not only fail to account for place, they think of where people live in the United States as shaped by free choice – a decision made voluntarily and unstructured by systemic forces.  Many considerations go into a person's decision about where to live, such as job locations, proximity to certain activities, church community, neighborhood of origin, quality of schools, community "feel," and where friends are living.  These factors influencing a person's decision can be amoral, but they operate in a larger system marked by racial segregation.  That system has a complex history of sometimes intended, sometimes unintended consequences.  Many blog readers may know the history, which involved restrictive covenants, government-sponsored segregation through the FHA and Home Owners Loan Association, contract buying, and some fascinating baptizing of particular geographies with theological significance (and I can share its contours in a later post, perhaps). *****

What role can scholars play in helping others pay attention to place and its racial consequences?  Recently, Wheaton College installed an art exhibit called "Wrestle On, Jacob," which can be read, in one sense, as a call for evangelicals of all racial backgrounds to continue to wrestle for racial justice and reconciliation.  Willie Jennings, whose book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origin of Race articulates ways Christianity created racial distances between people, gave a lecture to open the exhibit (for open-access reviews of the book, go here, here, and here).  Jennings called the mostly-academic audience to be rigorous in its thinking and scholarship so as to break down the detrimental racial hierarchies embedded in American society.  Based on my interactions with my mostly evangelical students who haven't taken classes on race before, few young evangelicals know the details of this history.  Perhaps this is a place historians can step in and make connections to the present (while still recognizing the foreignness of the past, lest we become presentist!).  I think that when people who are inclined toward justice see that there is a racial and structural history to housing segregation and placelessness, they will be inspired to think about, and perhaps modify, their individual decisions.  What do you think?

*Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh, Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008).

** Berry quoted in Ibid., 6.

*** Nancy Ammerman et al., eds., Studying Congregations: A New Handbook (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998).

****Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity, 97–98.

***** A few helpful books are Kenneth Jackson Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, USA, 1987); Beryl Satter Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (Metropolitan Books, 2009); Thomas, Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crises: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Massey, Douglas, and Nancy Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Continue Reading...