7 Questions with Lilian Calles Barger: The World Come of Age

I corresponded recently with Lilian Calles Barger about her new book, The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press). Lilian is a historian, author, women and gender consultant. She is currently a podcast co-host for New Books Network covering women and gender, religion, intellectual history and American Studies. Her research interests include the historical development of social, religious and feminist thought in modern America with a particular expertise in women and gender history. Visit her website (www.lilianbarger.com) or follow her on twitter (@lilianbarger)

Tell us about how you became interested in liberation theology

I have been thinking about the history of theology in general for a long time. Women’s history and feminist theory was something I was interested in and reading in the 1990s. I found feminist theologians referring to Black and Latin American liberation theology and curious to find out more about that connection. My own background as a Latin American immigrant to the U.S. and my interest in feminism gave me two legs of a three-legged stool. The exposure to African American history completed the triad and deepened my interest in the question of how and why these three theologies of liberation emerged independently and yet simultaneously in the late 1960s. That was a historical question no one was addressing and I found intriguing.



Because I have read a lot of theology across traditions I know it’s not nailed down or unchanging. The theological field is one that since the early twentieth century has gone on its merry way largely ignored by other humanistic disciplines. I think that is a mistake because of its vast influence over individuals and communities. We tend to concentrate on the social and political effects rather than on the source. As historians, I think we can bring some outside accountability to that field through our critical examination. I say this with all due respect to the many professional theologians I know.

Could you tell the blog readers a bit about your method? You call your work a "cultural history of liberationist ideas" and also "a cultural history of thought." The method hones in on specific texts written by liberationists, but it also provides deep political and social context going all the way back, in some places, to early modern political theology. The chapter on the social sciences and liberation theology engages pragmatism, Comte, and Marx. I found this very effective. It would be great to hear more about how you developed this approach.

I went into history, and specific intellectual history, because I was interested in how ideas, emerge, change, adapt and influence people’s lives socially, politically, and culturally over long spans of time. This interested arose from a life-long practice of observation. A cultural history of thought was a method I gained from my brilliant graduate advisor Daniel Wickberg. It fit with my already formed interest in the history of ideas.

A cultural history of thought supported my interest in getting beyond abstracted philosophical or theological arguments of a few “great “ thinkers. It allowed me to view ideas in the context of lived culture giving them concrete on the ground significance.  My other influence came from the sociology of knowledge in which ideas are cultural artifacts or create the environments in which we all live. It does take a strong anthropological approach to historical change. This way of approaching the continuous generation and regeneration of ideas is something that I will continue to apply.

The origins of liberation theology are geographic, chronological and intellectual. In your chapter “The Political is the Total” you also show that the origins of the movement are in the realization that theology is not autonomous from the political and that “politics constituted all theology.” Tell the blog readers about this realization among thinkers like Cone, Gutierrez, and others.  How does this connect to the argument that God is with the oppressed?

The idea that all theology is political is one of the most significant challenges to modern theology that the liberationists as a group took up. They did not believe that elite white male thinkers, who constructed modern theology in Europe and the U.S., could read the Bible with pure openness. Their position of social power created a bias. They found in the text what they were looking for to justify their political and social position.

Liberationists turned it around. They did not believe that theologians, like anyone else, could escape ideology (capitalist, racist, or sexist) that colored their reading. Recognizing that ideology was inescapable, what mattered was the nature of ideology and whether it furthered freedom or subjugation. As liberation theologians, they brought to the text a prior commitment to the oppressed and applied Marxist and critical race and feminist theories and found within the text the idea of a holistic salvation for blacks, women and the poor overlooked by other theologians.
During the turmoil of the 1960s and 70s, liberationists came to identify the oppressed as knowing something about God arising from their own experience. What oppressed people heard or read in the Bible was significantly different because of the situation of oppression. An example I like to give: If two people are praying and one is a rich and male Wall Street banker and the other a poor single black mother, how are their prayers different? What they find by way of religion differs because of their individual social positions. This is obvious to us now, but theology had virtually ignored it believing that classic and modern hermeneutical tools were sufficient to discover the meaning of the text.  Liberationists sought to validate a reading “from below” by recognizing it as a valid theology. For them, a theology that ignored oppressed people in their struggle was ultimately an abstraction that made it irrelevant to the social or political situation and could not bring about the radical social change they saw as necessary.

How would taking theology more seriously change the fields of American Religious History and US Intellectual History?’

Religious history and intellectual history are close siblings. When we think of historians of American religion such as Perry Miller, Sydney E. Ahlstrom and Mark Noll, they are all concerned with religious ideas and how they shaped the nation’s political and social life. Recently, Molly Worthen and Christopher Grasso have followed in those footsteps. For historians of religion attending to theology in both formal and popular forms, not just lived religion or institutions, can expand the field to demonstrate how religious ideas combine with other systems of thought to bring about disruption and continuity.

As the work of applying a specific hermeneutic to the biblical text, Christian theology, particularly of the Protestant kind, is continually changing and adapting to social and political environments and influencing them in return. For example, the Protestant Reformation’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers and justification by faith became a basis for the ascendancy of modern democracy. It’s not the whole story, but surely part of it.

It’s easy to think that the theology of a conservative evangelical like Carl F. H. Henry, considered the theological father of the Christian right, remained strictly within an unchanging dogma. More attention needs to given to Henry and how his theology changed and its political ramifications. I only touch on this in my book but intrigued by its possibly for illuminating the theological foundation for the rise of the Christian right. Like any other field of thought we might investigate, the language of theology is learned.

The field of intellectual history has experienced a revival in the last couple of decades but it has also narrowed by often excluding theological thought in understanding movements like pragmatism, critical theory, feminism and political conservatives and radicals. We tend to understand these in non-religious terms. By attending to change in theological thinking, intellectual history can offer a fuller more robust description of the constitution and dissemination of ideas. Maybe because the fields of intellectual and religious history have produced a huge amount of scholarly work they have forgotten that they need each other.  We need to bring these back closer together and I see good signs this is happening.

Of all the thinkers you write about, both secular religious, both more contemporary and distant, do you have a favorite?

I don’t think much about individual thinkers but rather I pay attention to ideas and always have. Asked if I have any intellectual heroes, my answer is generally no, but I’m impressed by the power of certain ideas and their eloquent expression. I admire a probing mind that offers insight for understanding the social world especially that of William James, Karl Mannheim, Simone de Beauvoir, Juan Luis Segundo, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and James Cone. I’m generally interested in how cultures are constructed and the embeddedness of individuals so I have a keen interest in social theory. Those thinkers who take that on have my full attention.

Your book recovers a very important and unexpected chapter in the history of secularization. Tell the blog readers about how the liberationists' efforts to secularize religion changes the way we think of modernity. 

Our work in intellectual and religious history needs to be continually suspicious of the categorical secular/sacred split. Asking what counts as religion, or theological thinking, is the first step. That’s not settled. Instead of seeing religion as under assault by secularizing forces or of religious incursions into the secular state, I think the main story is about them being mutually constitutive. Modernity has been a movement toward a unified political order in which there is no room for a challenge by any other realm or interest. The field of political theology is critically examining the phenomena and offers historians a theoretical scheme.

Liberationists, as political theologians, marked a critical historical junction as theology was breaking through its artificial sequestering and  “secular” thinkers were recognizing its power to both legitimate social structures and challenge them. This was the end of private religion and the start of recognizing that religion(s) offered competing social visions for society that often clashed with the goals of a liberal state. America is now again at another critical point in which a new “war of religions” has emerged between the religious right and the religious left. The religious left has gained strength and visibility. This is a political conflict in which different views of God and God’s will is at the center in regard to human sexuality, the meaning of social justice and the nation’s self-definition. The question now is whether the liberal state can negotiate that conflict and maintain its preeminence.

What are you working on next?

I’ve started a research project on the long cultural history of feminist thought and how it led to the gender revolution we are experiencing today. I have wanted to do this work for a long time. I set it aside for the topic of liberation theology for a variety of reasons.

Of course, the relationship between feminism and changing gender norms is both one of affinity and conflict in which the political, scientific and philosophical come into play. I believe that religious ideas play a significant part in redefining what it means to be a woman, a man or non-binary. Ultimately, questions of gender equality are moral questions on how we will live and organize society as gendered and sexual being. There is much to do in the way of research but the field literature is vast and extremely fruitful.

Thank you!

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Interview with Adam Laats on Fundamentalist U

Andrea L. Turpin

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

AT: What led you to write Fundamentalist U?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AT: Thanks, Adam!

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Is there such a thing as working class religion?

Janine Giordano Drake

Is there such a thing as working-class religion? 

In his recent book, The Making of Working Class Religion, Matthew Pehl argues that there is such a thing. For Pehl, "worker religion," is a pattern of idioms and symbols that are co-constituted in the workplace and in religious communities. When we assess working people's religious experiences through the category of "working class religion" (rather than "faith" or "belief," which differ by tradition), we come to see the ways that Catholics, Protestants and Jewish workers had common experiences which informed their religious identities. That is, Pehl argues, workers experienced class through their religion, and religion through their class. The one category cannot be understood without recognizing the way the other category helped constitute it.

How does this theory impact the way we read the history of the working classes in Detroit?

According to Pehl, it was partially religion that brought workers into the labor movement and kept them there. White, ethnic Catholic workers came together under iconography that celebrated Christ-the-worker. Black Protestant migrants from the South came together under Southern idioms and cultural symbols that deeply connected with agricultural work and Southern religion.... Pehl convincingly argues was not just workers who were organized by the UAW, but whole working class religious groups which the United Auto Workers shaped and was ultimately shaped by. Their balance of left-wing but not Communist politics, for example, was deeply shaped by the Detroit Archdiocese. The Detroit Archdiocese, however, was also deeply shaped by the number of Catholic workers in Detroit. 

When the heyday of the Detroit UAW fell (with the automation of the car industry and the de-industrialization of Detroit), so also did the heyday of "worker religion." Class-based religious consciousness, held together in large part through the UAW and the common experience of the shop floor, fragmented in the 1960s. As large number of working class whites left the city for white collar jobs and the suburbs, Detroit's religious consciousness was remade along the lines of race rather than class. 

The book balances theory and social history extremely well. I would highly recommend it for any class in Religious Studies or Working Class History.

For a critical discussion of the book, however, I'd love to assign this book alongside Kate Bowler's Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. Both books are fantastically well-written, but they each address poverty and the prosperity gospel/ Word of Faith movement of the 1930s through a very different lens. Bowler addresses the role of class and material conditions of poverty in the rise of the movement, but for her, the 1930s was a moment of impossibilist prayers for scarce material blessings. For Pehl, however, the 1930s was a moment of profound gains for labor due to the very "working class religion" that the 1930s produced.  Of course, part of the discrepancy is the fact that the two historians focus upon different regions of the country. Poor Americans in the rural South, of course, experienced the Depression differently from the employed working classes in Detroit. However, the two books trace the origins and effects of the Word of Faith movement pretty differently. 

For Bowler, the Word of Faith movement is not really a class phenomenon; it is an American phenomenon. It is little more a response to poverty than a response to an American culture which fetishizes health and wealth, and an American Christianity which has historically accomodated those cultural values. For Pehl, however, that desire for material prosperity which led to the Word-of-Faith movement in the 1930s needs to be read primarily as function of Detroit's social history. The Word of Faith movement in Detroit, Pehl suggests, arose only because of the way it brought together the collective histories of Detroit's working class Protestants. Pehl challenges us to trace all religious beliefs as a outgrowth of specific, class and material conditions.

Overall, I'm very excited about the flowering of new scholarship on religion in the Great Depression. Alison Greene's No Depression in Heaven speaks to these subjects as well, but for that we'll have to wait until next month. 

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