Dispatch from Berkeley: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Elesha Coffman

image credit here

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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Congregational Time Capsules

Elesha Coffman

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

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

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

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

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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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"It Isn't Entirely Unfortunate Rhetoric"

Elesha Coffman

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

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

Baldwin: That is very unfortunate rhetoric.

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

Baldwin: Yes, but he also owned slaves.

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

Baldwin: Yes, their fear frightens me.

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

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

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

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

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