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

Andrea L. Turpin

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AT: Thanks, Max!

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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.

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Crossing Parish Boundaries: An Interview with Tim Neary

Karen Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"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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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).

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