Anti-Christians – A Conversation with Obery M. Hendricks

Posted on May 22, 2022 by Eric

Obery M. Hendricks, Jr. is Visiting Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary and Adjunct Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Columbia University. His new book, Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals Are Destroying Our Nation and Our Faith, charges conservative evangelicals with undermining the Christian tradition.

ECM: Members of the Christian Right seem to believe they are defending a tradition that liberal Christians have betrayed. But you argue that, on issue after issue, the Christian Right has taken positions antithetical to those of Christ. So in what sense can this modern movement claim to be true to that ancient tradition?

OMH: I think part of the answer lies in this moment, but the modern innovations are founded on a legacy that goes way back, at least to the fourth century. When the Roman Emperor Constantine declared himself the thirteenth apostle appointed by God, he transformed the faith that Jesus preached to the oppressed and institutionalized it as the official religion of the powerful empire that had executed Jesus. From that time, throughout history mainstream Christianity has had a virtually uninterrupted alignment with the powers that be, with few exceptions. That continues to be the case with American Christianity in the 21st century. However, the right-wing evangelical movement has gone further, being openly and shamelessly animated by a will to dominate, control, and exclude. In that sense it is true to the tradition of mainstream Christianity, but neither are true to the liberating Gospel of Jesus the Messiah, in that they are committed instead to accumulating and maintaining power, privilege, and the status quo.

ECM: American Evangelicals like to trace their lineage back through the 19th century abolitionists, but today they are leading the charge against critical race theory. What do you make of this?

OMH: It is true that many, perhaps most of the major abolitionists were evangelicals, and in a number of respects the greater evangelical movement had a prominent egalitarian strain, with evangelical figures also supporting women’s rights, universal education, workers’ rights, and in the early 20th century opposing racial segregation and urban poverty of both domestic and immigrant populations. But I think that changed in an important way around the time of the New Deal. When FDR altered the philosophy of government in America, turning the force of government away from the interests of big business and wealthy elites and toward the interests of the struggling masses—away from a laissez-faire toward a welfare state, if you will—certain members of the capitalist elite enlisted the help of evangelical preachers to push back on New Deal provisions that threatened their power and bottom lines. During these years, up to and including the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942, evangelical elites and capitalist elites found areas of common cause that would solidify and expand during the decades to come. Their efforts to defend and reclaim the old status quo necessarily reinforced the racial status quo, which was racist by any measure.

This movement coalesced in the late 1970s, when the Carter Administration sought to crack down on educational institutions that practiced racism as policy. Many of these were avowedly Christian institutions, and one of them, Bob Jones University, had the enthusiastic support of evangelical conservatives including Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and Timothy LaHaye. The fight over integration and tax exemption at Bob Jones motivated the founding of Christian Right institutions like the Moral Majority. By now it is well-established that the Christian Right can trace its history to the rotten roots of racism, and not to abortion politics, as many continue to claim. So while it is true that white evangelicals have ancestry in abolitionism, their perspective is so drastically different that we should not be surprised that they are so stirred and angry at the prospect of a history curriculum that takes seriously the Black perspective. Things have changed.

ECM: Let’s focus in on that relationship between evangelical Christianity and American capitalism for a moment. Though Jesus had a lot to say about money and the dangers associated with greed, right-wing Christians have not lifted a prophetic voice where wealth and inequality are concerned. Why not?

OMH: The simplest way to answer all such questions may be to observe that right-wing Christianity is a form of what I call ideological religion, which is to say that its proponents always sacralize their own interests above the demands of the Gospel witness. So if certain kinds of political power serve their interests, then for them that expression of political power is Christian. If white supremacist policies or practices serve their interests, then for them white supremacy is Christian. If they are interested in wealth, then Christianity and wealth get conflated. And so on. When it comes to wealth, they have either ignored Jesus’ teaching on greed, or they have misinterpreted them in ways that justify exploitation and unjust accumulation.

Reading the whole thing in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Church / State – A Conversation with Steven K. Green

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Eric

Steven K. Green is the Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of History and Religious Studies at Willamette University, a position he accepted after serving for ten years as legal director and special counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. In his new book, Separating Church and State: A History, Green charts the long legacy of an important American idea.

ECM: You write that the concept of church-state separation appears to be “on the ropes” under the Roberts Court. How so?

SKG: As a historian and a lawyer, one thing that I have found very curious is just how often the conservative members of the Supreme Court now criticize the idea of church-state separation, an idea that the Court did not create but has adopted and embraced ever since a unanimous decision back in 1947. The hostility that we are seeing from these justices seems to reflect a perspective that separation has somehow been forced upon the Court. Justice Thomas has been very critical and, as recently as January, Justice Gorsuch has referred in passing to the “so-called” separation of church and state. It’s very strange, because this is a principle that the Court has roundly endorsed over the years, but now they act like it’s some kind of an alien concept. The purpose of this book is not necessarily to get into a debate about the merits of separation, but rather to explore the bona fides of the principle as well as why it has become controversial.

ECM: What’s the origin story of church-state separation? Is it traceable directly to the Constitutional Convention, or only as far back as the Warren Court?

SKG: In this book I am very interested in the historical pedigree of the concept, and how it has evolved over time. I therefore open with some attention to the western Christian origins, dating back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church was trying to free itself from the control of the Holy Roman Empire and so drew a line in the sand. St. Augustine wrote about the two cities separated by a wall, the one temporal and the other sacred. So the concept goes back to the Church doctrine of separate spheres of influence. Later it acquired an Enlightenment strain. In each case it predates the colonies, and it certainly predates the Constitution. Now, there was nothing in the Constitution initially that dealt with religious issues except for the “no religious test clause” that was put into Article 6. Separation of church and state wasn’t really debated during the Constitutional Convention, though it would come up two years later with the drafting of the First Amendment. Even then, the phrase was not explicitly used.

ECM: What is the distinction between “separation” and “disestablishment,” and why does it matter?

SKG: Disestablishment is the disentanglement of the public and private religious spheres, in terms of both regulation and support of religion. That does not necessarily imply entirely separate spheres of activity with no crossover, as separationism does. We need to keep in mind that these are not synonymous. The book does not make the claim that the majority of the Founders, who voted for disestablishment, necessarily supported complete separation of church and state. Separationism remains a very fluid concept that can have multiple meanings. It wasn’t a concept that was alien to the Founders, but I don’t claim that there was any consensus around it. There was far greater consensus around disestablishment. Even the three states that retained their colonial religious establishments—New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts—all claimed that they did not have establishments. This was a bad word even then. So the movement toward disestablishment was well underway even before the Constitution. There was no turning back on that. But it’s different and more difficult to determine the extent to which certain of the Founders may have believed in one version of separation over another.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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Hijacking History – A Conversation with Kathleen Wellman

Posted on February 15, 2022 by Eric

ECM: Your book is interested in the Christian Right’s “polemical” use of history. What is the Christian Right and why is its approach to history polemical?

KW: The Christian Right is a coalition of religious-political activists for whom religion and politics are inextricably linked. The argument advanced by the Christian Right is that you truly cannot be a Christian without espousing the political positions of the Right. In many cases, the key spokesmen for this movement have sought to ground their work in history, and so their approach to history has been necessarily polemical. Examples of this date back to the turn of the twentieth century with attacks on Darwinism and European social welfare measures. It became especially pronounced in more recent decades, when the Republican Party decided to use Christianity as a centerpiece of its political strategy, maintaining that capitalism and patriarchy are Christian values and that feminism and social welfare programs are antithetical to them. These positions have found a receptive audience among evangelicals. The religious message of Christianity, then, has become increasingly distorted by contemporary political issues.

ECM: Your project focuses on a trio of publishers in particular. Who are they, and why have they drawn your attention?

KW: The publishers are Bob Jones University Press, Abeka Books, and Accelerated Christian Education. I was led to these three publishers when I got involved in the discussion around Texas state standards that our conservative Board of Education mandated for 2014 textbooks. I’m an historian of early modern Europe, and I was appalled to see that, suddenly, John Calvin was being inserted into state standards as one of the key figures of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Thomas Aquinas, too, very peculiarly received pride of place. When I looked into some of the textbooks under review for the Texas market, I learned that Moses was an essential figure to all of the founding documents of the United States. I realized then that, clearly, these standards were being constructed to advance a very particular understanding of history, but I had no idea where these views could have come from. When I found the three curricula, I was able to connect some of the dots. As my book documents, the materials produced by these three publishers provide a fascinating window into how history is being refashioned and deployed in the service of conservative politics.

ECM: What are some other examples of claims made in these texts that struck you as ahistorical or as motivated by a partisan agenda?

KW: Though they are published by conservative fundamentalists, these materials present themselves as generically Christian sources, presenting the Christian understanding of history. Much of their narrative is ahistorical because it intends to tell a clear and consistent story of the emergence of “biblical truth” during the Protestant Reformation. Thus all prior civilizations are found wanting; they are heretical and destined to fail. When “biblical truth” triumphed over earlier civilizations and other religions, God’s favor fell first on England, and then on the United States as manifest in its economic success and international hegemony. In their treatment of recent history, these curricula serve an explicitly partisan agenda as they make clear that these positive developments, as well as God’s continued favor, are due to the alliance of “biblical Christianity” and the Republican Party.

ECM: Do we have a sense of how many students have been taught this material?

KW: These curricula have been in circulation since the early 1970s when all three of the publishers entered, first, into the secondary school market, and then expanded into K-12. Initially developed during opposition to desegregation, they flourished in the segregation academies that were opening, sometimes several per week, around that time. They persist today because they are popular both in Christian schools and within the homeschooling movement. We don’t have any idea how extensive that movement is because many states do not require reporting from homeschoolers about which curricula they use.Several reporters have tried to gain that information. Rebecca Klein of HuffPost has tried to survey schools in Florida where vouchers are used to support private education with public funds and has found that these are the curricula predominantly used in those schools. The same is true for North Carolina. We don’t have hard numbers because publishers won’t share them, the nation doesn’t compile them, and the largest states, like Texas, Pennsylvania, and New York, don’t require any reporting at all. There are a number of legal entities devoted to the “parental rights” movement, which is explicitly committed to preventing states from acquiring this information. Another feature that makes these curricula significant is that they are multigenerational at this point. Some kids who went to school in the 70s first learned this material, their kids probably learned it a couple of decades later, and their kids may now be learning it as well. There is substantial depth of penetration at this stage.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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Hidden Mercy – A Conversation with Michael J. O’Loughlin

Posted on January 18, 2022 by Eric

Michael J. O’Loughlin is the award-winning national correspondent for America Media and the host of the podcast Plague: Untold Stories of AIDS and the Catholic Church. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, National Catholic Reporter, and The Advocate. In his new book, Hidden Mercy: AIDS, Catholics, and the Untold Stories of Compassion in the Face of Fear, O’Loughlin documents where these stories intersect with the Catholic Church.

ECM: The book documents “untold”stories of Catholics during the AIDS crisis. Why have these stories gone untold until now?

MJO: I think a lot of the stories have gone untold because there is still a taboo within Catholicism about sexuality, especially during the height of HIV and AIDS, and there’s no natural way of sharing these stories within the Church. In the book, I talk about how it’s difficult to relay LGBT history in general because it’s rarely talked about in families or schools, and almost never in church or religious education. There was a very real risk that these stories would be lost to time, and my goal was to capture them and share them with an audience that might benefit from knowing this history. 

ECM: Throughout these stories, there seems to be a tension between Catholic clergy and gay parishioners who were at once repelled by and drawn to one another. Can you speak to that?

MJO: What I found interesting about these stories is that they reveal the standard narrative to be far too simplistic. You have the Catholic Church on one side, the gay community on the other. That understanding was formed, in part, by the ACT UP campaign in New York City, where you had an activist group targeting the Church because of its opposition to same-sex relationships, and that confrontation created some clearly defined rivals. Even in that story, though, I was surprised to learn that about a third of ACT UP members in New York were Catholics. This clued me in that something interesting was happening in the overlap. As I started doing more research, I realized that there was actually a pretty large contingent of LGBT Catholics at that time who felt really torn over which side they belonged on. Sometimes they got in trouble with the gay community because they were Catholic, and of course they got in trouble with the Catholic community because they were gay. They inhabited this middle world. I wanted to hear from them what that experience was like, how they navigated that space. I think that, for a lot of LGBT people today, even though the stakes might not be quite as high, that tension is still there. They often don’t know quite where they belong.

ECM: The tension was internalized by gay priests, some of whom were closeted and some out. How did they cope?

MJO: I think it was very difficult. There were relatively few openly gay priests back then. I profile one of them, Father Bill McNichols, who decided pretty early on in his priesthood that he had to be honest about his own sexuality in order to minister effectively, at the time, mostly to gay men with AIDS. This openness came at great risk to his vocation. He took a fair amount of abuse from fellow Catholics, he experienced some professional setbacks, and in these ways he sort of validated the fear felt by other gay priests who had chosen not to come out. Interestingly, though, it was around this time that HIV and AIDS started to affect priests as well, so there was a sort of forced reckoning among gay members of the priesthood who now had to risk going public about their HIV status, perhaps revealing that they had not lived up to their vows or to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. The result was this firestorm of identity and publicity. In the book, I talk about some priests who went public with their HIV status because they wanted to use their own lives to help others feel less shame, stigma, and isolation. But it was never easy, and I don’t think we ever got a full reckoning of what it meant to be a gay priest during the crisis. 

ECM: What role did nuns play in the Catholic response to AIDS? Was their experience different from that of priests?

MJO: Nuns always seem to be the unsung heroes of the Church’s story, and during HIV and AIDS this was no different. They were staffing wards at Catholic hospitals throughout the country. They were leading outreach efforts. I write about one nun who really wanted to serve HIV and AIDS patients in her small city in Illinois, but lacked the education. So she moved to New York to immerse herself in the gay community, volunteer at the hospitals, answer calls at AIDS hotlines, and eventually returned to Illinois to serve as a strong advocate and ally for the gay community there.

As to whether their experience was different, I do think that nuns historically have had a little more freedom to engage in innovative forms of ministry. Sometimes their superiors grant them greater flexibility or less oversight. They’ve had a little more leeway to go out and serve in what Pope Francis has called the “field hospital of the church,” and I think we see that play out in the 80s and 90s.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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Colorblind Christianity – A Conversation with Jesse Curtis

Posted on December 20, 2021 by Eric

Jesse Curtis is Assistant Professor of History at Valparaiso University. His book, The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era parses the theories and practices animating white evangelical thinking on race since 1960. He shows that, over three decades, “Colorblind Christianity” went from a Civil Rights call-to-arms to a rearguard action in defense of whiteness.

ECM: What is Colorblind Christianity? Or, rather, what has it been?

JC: Around the middle of the twentieth century, black evangelicals really challenged white evangelicals over segregation and racism. They argued that God is colorblind, so Christians should not divide themselves according to race. Because we are one in Christ, they said, you must include us. It is a theological scandal that we are being discriminated against. This was clearly a mode of colorblind theology, deployed in the interest of unity and equality. By the end of the century, however, white evangelicals had completely turned the tables. They argued that God is colorblind, and so Christians should not concern themselves with racial consciousness, racial injustice, etc. If we are one in Christ, they said, why are you talking about race? If you were a mature Christian, you would recognize that race doesn’t matter. This, too, was clearly a mode of colorblind theology. The book is about the transition from the one to the other.

I frame the final product as a new theology of race. Put simply, over the course of several decades, white evangelicals went from thinking that God is a segregationist to thinking that God is colorblind. It’s not the case that white evangelicals were borrowing something from secular racial ideology or assuming the colorblindness of conservative politics. Their version came up indigenously within evangelicalism, rooted in evangelical ways of thinking, reading scripture, the words of the Apostle Paul—you know, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, we are one in the Body of Christ.” These kinds of ideas and idioms really shaped the evangelical racial imagination in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement. This new theology offered a way for white evangelicals to sacralize their own uses of race. It was racial consciousness for me but not for thee. When we use race, we’re using it to promote the gospel and advance the kingdom. When black evangelicals use race, they’re distracting from the gospel and threatening the unity of the Body of Christ.

ECM: We’ll put a pin in that white evangelical “use” of race and return to it in a moment. But first, you write that, initially, white evangelicals tried to integrate the faith via their college campuses. How did they do that, and how did it turn out?

JC: In the late 60s, there was a sincere effort to make changes on evangelical campuses. College presidents, administrators, and thought leaders conceded that they had dropped the ball here. They recognized that, in their concern for maintaining academic standards and providing a full evangelical experience for students, they had not been concerned with opening these opportunities to black students. So there was a new wave of recruitment efforts in the late 60s that marked a dramatic shift, from campuses that were theoretically willing to accept black students but also likely to subject them to demeaning and discriminatory policies, to campuses that were actively pursuing black students and working to incorporate them into campus life. Messiah, Wheaton, Calvin, and other major evangelical institutions all got on board for this effort, and they began to enroll larger cohorts of black students than ever before. This is all richly ironic, of course, because it’s race conscious to go out and deliberately recruit black students. But it’s race consciousness in the service of building a colorblind Christian campus. In the new world that the Civil Rights movement had wrought, an all-white campus was an indictment of Christian credibility, so black students were needed, even though whiteness and blackness were supposed not to matter. I don’t mean to be overly cynical. There were good intentions at work here.

On a lot of these campuses, though, things kind of blew up in their faces. There was a lack of understanding about the kind of institutional and systemic changes that would have been necessary to make it work. At some colleges, you had this wave of recruitment between ’68 and ’71, and then, by the mid-70s, there were with fewer black students enrolled than ever before, because of the severity of the conflicts, controversies, and backlash from white students, parents, and donors. White administrators, in many cases, simply threw up their hands and admitted that they didn’t know how to integrate a campus properly. It became a generations-long project that, in many ways, continues right up to the present.

ECM: Segregated churches and campuses—whether de facto or de jure—received some support in these years from the Church Growth Movement. What was this movement, and why was it so influential on evangelical thinking with regard to race?

JC: The Church Growth Movement (CGM) came out of India in the 1930s. Donald McGavran was a missionary to India at that time, and he was very interested in finding approaches to spur mass movements to Christ. McGavran was looking at the mission field and concluding that the churches were foundering. Missionaries were doing good work, in his view, but the people of India were not converting in any numbers. So he was drawn to this theory that, instead of converting individuals, missionaries could move entire people groups to Christ at the level of caste. Groups could convert as groups, without crossing caste lines, without being pressured to change their culture or to become “Western.” The people of India would be permitted to live their lives as before, without undue demands on their lifestyle. They would simply come to Christ. By the 1950s, this theory—later articulated as the “Homogenous Unit Principle” (HUP)—had become very popular in evangelical missionary circles, and even among those in the more ecumenical World Council of Churches. In the 1960s, it came home to the United States.

Prior to the Civil Rights movement, Black Power, and this widespread ethnic revival, McGavran hadn’t considered applying this sort of approach to the US because he thought of it as being, essentially, homogenous. Racial distinctions notwithstanding, the US wasn’t like the rest of the world with their castes and clans and tribes, at least in his view. But as the 60s wore on and different identity groups became more clearly defined and pronounced, the US started to look a lot like the rest of the world. So McGavran, working with a number of other evangelical missionaries, began to argue that, even in the United States, homogenous churches grow faster. This was not just an observation—it was a prescription. Church leaders and planters in the United States, according to this reasoning, should actively pursue homogenous congregations. These didn’t need to be racial, necessarily, but they certainly could be. Class would work, occupation, or some other unifying quality—the point was that, according to McGavran, people like worshipping with people like themselves, and churches should give them that.

Of course, the ethical implications of this idea, introduced into a racist society, are enormous. Critics pointed this out immediately. Far from colorblindness, this was explicit race consciousness, deployed toward greater division and separation. But McGavran pitched it as a sort of cultural sensitivity. Back in the 50s, writing about his experience in India, he had argued, basically, that it does no good to say that tribal peoples shouldn’t have racial prejudice. They do have it, he argued, and we ought to use it to spread the gospel. This allowed him, in the 60s and 70s, to argue the same thing about Americans—they have racial identities and allegiances, and we should use these for Christ.

At the grassroots level, this thinking ends up facilitating worship spaces in which race doesn’t seem to be in play at all. When congregations are all white, congregants don’t have to think about whiteness. White evangelical Christians think of white evangelical Christianity as nothing more or less than the norm.

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The New Midwest – A Conversation with Kristy Nabhan-Warren

Posted on November 16, 2021 by Eric

Kristy Nabhan-Warren is the V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair of Catholic Studies and Professor in the Departments of Religious Studies and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. In her new book, Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work, and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland, she examines the how meatpacking plants are changing the face of the Midwest.

ECM: How important is the meatpacking industry to the economies of heartland states like Iowa?

KNW: Incredibly important. In the 1960s and 70s, the meatpacking industry moved from urban bases like Chicago out to small towns and rural settings in states like Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. They did this for a number of reasons, from cutting costs to preventing unionization among their workers. In Columbus Junction, Iowa, where I did a lot of my fieldwork, the meatpacking plant is the economic lifeblood of the community—for better and for worse. The plants have revitalized towns that once were struggling, but they have done so by polluting the air, the water, the land, and the bodies of the people who live there, all while killing tens of thousands of animals every day. It’s a complicated story. I didn’t intend to demonize the industry, but I didn’t want to let it off the hook, either.

ECM: What goes on in these plants, and who does the work?

KNW: When I started this project, the working title was Cornbelt Catholicism. I was really focused on parishes in rural Iowa and how these places are changing with the arrival of migrants from Africa, Asia, and Central America. When folks think about Iowa, they probably imagine a population of white farmers. But what’s really fascinating—and what ultimately changed the course of my project—is that meatpacking plants, specifically, have become an engine of diversification in the Midwest and on the plains. When you walk into one of them, you hear a variety of languages being spoken. The first time I walked into the Tyson plant in Columbus Junction, the first thing I saw was an enormous sign stating “welcome” in fifteen languages. It is obvious, right away, that white folks are a minority in that building. The majority are brown and black folks from Central America and Africa.

Refugees—and in the book I refer to all of the immigrants as refugees, regardless of their legal status, because they have all fled a certain kind of violence—perform all sorts of job within the plant. On the slaughter side, also called the “hot side,” they cut, slice, and trim fat before the carcass goes to the chiller. Some jobs are gendered as trimmers who use whizzer electric knives tend to be women. The sawing of carcasses tends to be done by men. They are “hide rippers,” “kidney poppers,” “de-jowlers,” and they burn the hair from the sows to give them the clean pink piggy look. In short, they do difficult, dirty, dangerous jobs and at a very fast pace. Refugees who work on the fabrication or “cold” side dissect the dehided carcass into the various cuts of meat that we find in supermarkets. Others work in the distribution centers, or as translators. Refugees literally run the plants, and without their labor meat would not be served on tables across the United States and around the globe.

I learned in the course of my research that the rural Midwest is much more complicated than most people assume. When we put in the time and do the work—and I should note that I did my fieldwork over more than six years—we can see that these are dynamic places where refugees, migrants, and asylees from all over the world are coming together to find work and provide for their families. Their presence is changing the face of the heartland.

ECM: How are religious traditions tied up in this work?

KNW: One of my goals with this book was to demonstrate how workers in meatpacking plants bring their faith to work with them—often in the form of material objects like rosaries and scapulars, or inscribed in their bodies through tattoos, and many of them incorporate prayer into their work routines because their jobs are very dangerous. At Iowa Premium Beef, another site where I did fieldwork, there is a group of Sudanese Muslim women who have cleaned a small area in the locker room where they go a couple times during a shift to pray. They perform ablutions in the sink, they cleanse themselves, they unroll their prayer rugs, and they say their prayers. In these ways, individuals are able to craft meaning in a really violent, bloody, profane place. Another thing that fascinated but also troubled me was that Tyson has the largest chaplaincy program of any company in the United States. Every one of their plants has a chaplain, whose responsibilities include counseling workers, taking them to the doctor when they get hurt, and serving as a sort of spiritual guru. That program is part of a larger effort at companies like Tyson—Bethany Moreton documents this really well in her book about Wal-Mart—to implement a corporate religious lexicon from the top down. I try to show how religion permeates the plant from the grassroots, originating with a diverse group of workers, as well as from the CEOs, CFOs, and the managerial class, who promote a business-oriented version of evangelical Christianity.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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Active Passive – A Conversation with Stephanie A. Martin

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Eric

Stephanie A. Martin is Associate Professor of Corporate Communication and Public Affairs at Southern Methodist University. In her new book, Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump, she analyzes scores of sermons delivered at evangelical megachurches to document how evangelical pastors framed the 2016 electoral contest.

ECM: Between 2010 and 2018, you listened to, transcribed, and examined hundreds sermons delivered at evangelical megachurches across three dozen states. Why?

SAM: I did it for a couple of reasons. My animating interest, when I first began, was the reaction to the Great Recession and the popularity of the Tea Party among evangelicals. There had been, since the time of Reagan, a merger between the “free market” economic rhetoric and the social values rhetoric coming out of evangelical communities, but the cataclysmic impact of the Great Recession made me wonder if evangelicals—and really, the nation writ large—might reconsider its commitment to “trickle down” economics.

But then Obama came into office and the Tea Party arose and evangelicals started joining up. The great reckoning that I thought might on its way turned out not to be. So my central research question ended up being something like, how can I understand the grassroots movement bent on maintaining evangelical allegiance to free market economics?

I was pretty familiar with the popular media framing of evangelicals, and had recently watched the documentary Jesus Camp, which offers this very polemical presentation of evangelical life, and neither bore much resemblance to the evangelical people that I knew personally. So I started to wonder how I might get inside the movement to observe and understand their thinking firsthand. It made sense to attend their churches and listen to the sermons. This was pretty easy to do with megachurches, in particular, because so many of them stream and archive their sermons online. They’re “digital” churches.

ECM: Do the sermons given in very large churches (and streamed online) accurately reflect grassroots evangelical thought and opinion?

SAM: I think so, for a couple of reasons. The first is that they demonstrate a high degree of rhetorical resonance—or what I call esprit de finesse—which refers to the idea that rhetoric always reaches out to and connects with other, related conversations, and these become mutually reinforcing.The sermons that I heard drawing upon conservative social positions, conservative economics, personal responsibility, etc. were grounded within the same ideas and values that routinely feature on Fox News, that Republican politicians tout in their campaign speeches and rallies, and that get shared as common sense every day at diner counters and barrooms. Because there is such pervasive esprit de finesse within the conservative political movement in the United States, it’s easy to see how that rhetoric also pervades the discourse within the churches that conservative people attend.

But also, I learned in the course of this project that pastors share and edit sermon content kind of like how Internet readers use Wikipedia. The preachers that I studied are among the most charismatic, most famous religious figures in the United States, even if they may not be as well known outside of evangelicalism. And they upload their sermons to places like Sermon Central, or simply onto their church websites, which allows pastors of smaller churches to search for and browse those sermons, like I did, and borrow from or mimic them in their own pulpits. So evangelical sermons are not always created out of whole cloth. Very often they get replicated and reused again and again. Sometimes I would hear a sermon that sounded very familiar to me, and when I compared the transcripts I could see that it was almost word-for-word, indicating that there was some copying going on here. That validated my hunch that this mutual reinforcement was at work.

ECM: Having set out to draw some conclusions about economics, you end up making an important observation about politics. You observe that, during the 2016 campaign, these megachurch pastors did not openly advocate for Donald Trump, as many might suspect. Instead, how did they frame the race?

SAM: I don’t think I ever heard a pastor tell a congregation who to vote for. Instead, practically all of them embraced a rhetoric of what I call active passivism, which has several elements.

First of all, you have to understand that white evangelicals are one of the most politically active subcultures in the United States, and pastors encourage this. The pastors that I studied would routinely remind their congregations that America is an exceptional nation, chosen and blessed by God, a city on a hill, and therefore Christian citizens have an almost divinely mandated responsibility to vote. It would be disrespectful to the nation, its founders, its troops, and others if they didn’t.

But then, second, the evangelical pastors making this appeal in 2016 were confronted with a pair of presidential nominees who carried historically low approval ratings. So in pressing their audiences on the vital importance of voting, the pastors would also acknowledge that the options were very bad. If you think these candidates are abysmal, they would say, we agree. If you feel depressed about it, we do too. Nobody is happy with this situation. This created a sort of cognitive dissonance in the message. Congregants were told that it was important for them to vote, but also that they had no good candidate for whom to vote.

And this set up the third part of the appeal, the piece that relieves the tension produced by the first two. To listeners who felt at once obligated to vote and dismayed or anxious about the difficult political choice before them, the pastors said, almost across the board, don’t worry, because God is in control. Vote the issues, vote your values, and trust that He will take care of the rest. If the strong entreaty to vote was the active part of the appeal, this was the passive. It essentially drained the election of all significance, because it assured these voters that their votes didn’t really matter in the end. It made them feel that, while they were obligated to vote, they were not responsible for whatever real world effects their votes might have on vulnerable people. God would handle all of that for them.

Because most white evangelicals consistently vote Republican, and because this particular Republican candidate had a unique set of moral failings that might have given them pause, this active passive appeal had the practical effect of soothing their troubled consciences, directing their attention past the candidate and onto the issues, and ultimately excusing them from accountability in any case. This is the mindset that millions of evangelicals likely carried with them into the voting booth, and as we know, 81 percent of them voted for Donald Trump.

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Public Confessions – A Conversation with Rebecca L. Davis

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Eric

Rebecca L. Davis is the Miller Family Early Career Professor of History at the University of Delaware. In her new book, Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics, she documents famous changes-of-heart from across the twentieth century, noting how the public reception of each was influenced by important political and cultural trends.

ECM: Over the course of the twentieth century, the religious conversions of famous people generated an immense amount of public interest. Why did average Americans feel so invested in personal decisions made by celebrities?

RLD: These conversions generated a lot of public interest because they spoke to broader cultural anxieties at work across the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. These included questions of personal authenticity and fears about brainwashing, among others. In the context of the anti-communism that preceded and followed World War II, there was a lot of concern about communists in our midst—people pretending to be patriotic Americans who were actually subversive agents of the Soviet Union. The first religious conversions that became cultural events of the sort that I discuss in the book were among Americans who were explicitly describing their religious conversions as an ideological defense against communism. That’s not to say that they weren’t sincere in their belief—I think they were. But at the same time, they argued explicitly that being converted—to Protestantism, to Roman Catholicism—offered a way to protect the American mind and soul from the danger of infiltration by communist ideas.

ECM: The first example you consider is that of Clare Booth Luce, who converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in 1946, and in 1947 published a series of magazine articles explaining “the ‘real’ reason” why. How is her situation representative of the tendency that you describe?

RLD: Discovering the sensation that Clare Booth Luce’s conversion made was one of the first surprises in my research for this project, and something that really sent me down the trail of archival research to learn more. I was stunned that more historians hadn’t talked about how culturally significant her conversion was. Luce was a member of Congress serving her second term from a district in Connecticut, she was a renowned playwright, her husband was Henry Luce, the incredibly influential magazine publisher. So her decision to become a Roman Catholic made waves. A lot of people wrote her supportive letters, a lot of people wrote very critical ones, and of course she decided to defend her decision in a series of articles for McCall’s. The more I learned about her conversion and the public response to it, the clearer it became to me that she had created the model for the politically significant religious conversion. It’s a model that others would follow later on without giving her much credit, and I don’t think that historians have given her enough credit for how politically and culturally important her conversion turned out to be.

ECM: Whitaker Chambers left the Communist Party and became a Christian to great celebration, and his sincerity was never really questioned in the way that a conversion from Christianity to communism might have been. Does this suggest that, in the public mind, sincerity depends a lot on what the figure is converting to and from?

RLD: Absolutely. I think that Chambers is a good example of how these religious conversions packaged together several ideas that were important at the time. His conversion was emblematic of the intense anti-communism of conservative politics in that moment. It was an early example of the melding of Christian fervor with anti-communist conservatism. But it was also important because of the way that it featured a kind of heterosexual family morality as part of what the conversion had accomplished. In his memoir, Chambers wrote that he had heard the voice of God as he gazed at his young daughter, he was converted at that moment, and he knew immediately that he had to leave communism. In a statement he delivered to the FBI, Chambers revealed that he had had sex with men while he was a Communist, but claimed that he had rejected same-sex desire when he converted to Christianity.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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Saving Us – A Conversation with Katharine Hayhoe

Posted on September 21, 2021 by Eric

Katharine Hayhoe is Professor of Political Science and past co-director of the Climate Center at Texas Tech University. She is chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy, an Oxfam “Sister of the Plant,” and a UN “Champion of the Earth.” Her new book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, proposes to fight climate change through better communication.

ECM: You like to say that the most important thing individuals can do to fight climate change is to talk about it. What do you mean, exactly?

KH: Well, I don’t mean talk more about the science—about melting glaciers or rising seas. We need to talk about why these things matter to us and what we can do to fix them. Though we have been very focused on the divide between the people who think that climate change is real and those who do not, we should be more concerned with the divide between those who think it’s real and those who think it matters to them. You can concede that climate change is real and important and even serious, but if you don’t think it matters to you, then you’re unlikely to do anything to fix it.

I should add, too, that polling data shows we are not talking about it. We are not having conversations about climate, and the media is not covering it. I saw a pretty shocking statistic recently, that Jeff Bezo’s space launch had received as much media attention in a single day as climate change had received in the previous year. So we aren’t talking about it, and talking is a window into our minds. It’s our means for showing others what we think about, what we care about. We can’t read each other’s minds. So if we, as individuals and as a nation, are not talking about climate change, then it will never receive the priority that it requires.

ECM: Climate change is factual, so persuading people to care about it should be as simple as sharing the facts. But it’s not?

KH: On issues that are not politically polarized, that do not carry weighty moral or ethical implications, that do not require a significant and potentially costly response, facts are usually enough to change people’s minds. If a new understanding of dark matter were suddenly to arise, most people would simply consider it interesting. They might not understand it, but they wouldn’t accuse scientists of being shills in the pay of Big Green or Big Telescope. The reasons that people object to climate science have nothing to do with the actual facts of the matter. If they truly doubted the science of thermodynamics, they would never get on an airplane. They would refuse to use a refrigerator or a stove. But of course they do those things all the time.

The real political problem of climate change is that we don’t want to fix it. Often, we don’t even believe we can fix it. So when faced with an enormous problem that we doubt our willingness or ability to solve, our natural defense mechanism is to deny. We all want to be good people, to live according to values. Nobody wants to say, “Yes, climate change is real and present and devastating to plants and animals and low-income countries and all future generations, but I don’t want to fix it.” That would make us bad people. Instead, we come up with reasons not to act. We may claim that climate change is not real, or it is real but we aren’t causing it, or it’s not serious, or it’s actually all of those things but there’s nothing we can do about it. Psychologically, this gets us off the hook. But it does nothing to mitigate climate change, unfortunately. So while facts are important, we need to develop arguments that go beyond the merely factual to tap into people’s beliefs and values. 

ECM: So is political will essentially a communication problem? A matter of matching an appeal to an audience?

KH: Yes and no. I note in the book that, when the Green New Deal was first introduced, it was quite popular even with conservative Republicans. I believe the figure is that 57 percent of conservative Republicans supported the Green New Deal initially. But that support dropped off quickly, and not because the Green New Deal changed—it didn’t. What changed was the coverage it received, especially in conservative media. So clearly, how we talk about things does matter. At the same time, our lived experience also matters. When people can connect the impacts of climate change to a place that they love or live in, or experiences that they’ve had, the problem suddenly becomes deeply personal in a way that surpasses whatever the world’s talking heads have to say.

I’m convinced that we will act on climate. The question is when. Because in the meanwhile, the impacts are getting worse and worse and worse to the point that, wherever you live today, you can point to the effects in your own region, and these will continue to accumulate and intensify until the populace rises up and demands action. The question, from a scientific perspective, is whether this will happen in time to avoid the most dangerous impacts. The best time to quit smoking is not after you develop lung cancer—it’s before. The best time to develop healthy lifestyle habits is not after you suffer a heart attack—it’s before. And so our concern as scientists, the reason we’ve been sounding the alarm so loudly and so consistently for decades, is that we are sort of like the physicians of the planet. Our task is similar to that of the doctor who has the tools to scan your arteries and prescribe diet, exercise, and medication. Or to scan your lungs and identify the troubling spots, and to tell you that now is the time to stop smoking. We see the warning signs, we know what’s coming, and we’re telling people that it’s past time for us to change our ways. It’s a very prophetic ethos.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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The Eyes of the World Upon Us, Again

Posted on June 12, 2021 by Eric

Abram Van Engen is Associate Professor of English at Washington University of St. Louis. Daniel T. Rodgers is Emeritus Professor of History at Princeton University. Richard M. Gamble is the Anna Margaret Ross Alexander Chair of History and Politics at Hillsdale College. Each has a recent book on the image of the “city on a hill” in American history.

About two thousand years ago, in Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth delivered his famous “Sermon on the Mount.” As part of that discourse, he encouraged the audience to set a godly example in public, styling his followers “the light of the world,” their virtue radiating as though from “a city that is set on a hill.”

Sixteen centuries later, the Puritan John Winthrop employed this image in his A Model of Christian Charity, drafted aboard the flagship Arbella as it approached Massachusetts Bay. “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop wrote of the colonists, “the eyes of all people are upon us.” His words went unpublished for 200 years after that, then languished in obscurity for 100 years more, before achieving 20th century prominence first in the work of select New England historians and later in the campaign speeches of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Suddenly ubiquitous, Winthrop was retroactively lauded as author of the American mission statement, his address canonized as an essential founding document with standing somewhere between the Mayflower Compact and the Declaration of Independence. It was cited routinely in schools, revered in churches, and for a time awarded primacy of place in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Winthrop, it now seemed, had been progenitor of it all; the intellectual grandfather of the American experiment.

But he wasn’t really, and so finally, in the second decade of the 21st century, three serious scholars wrote three excellent books recounting the singular story of his remarkable comeback. Each is a compelling piece of American historiography; all demonstrate the rhetorical value of past discourses to present purposes—even when the connections are tenuous between.

Read the whole thing in the Journal of Communication and Religion.

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On Biblical Womanhood – A Conversation with Beth Allison Barr

Posted on May 18, 2021 by Eric

Beth Allison Barr is Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean for Professional Development at Baylor University. Her new book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, blends personal memoir with history to examine how submission became a central requirement for women in conservative Christian denominations.

ECM: What is biblical womanhood, and how is it made?

BAB: Contrary to much popular belief, biblical womanhood is a very modern construct. It’s the idea that God created women and men with separate roles in life, and that women are destined for home and hearth, children and family, while men are destined for work outside of the home. It suggests that women and men are uniquely made in these ways, so while they may sometimes have to overlap their roles—as when, in time of financial hardship, a woman may have to get a job to help pay the bills—the ideal is that women manage the household and men participate in public life. It suggests, further, that when women and men adhere to these standards, God will bless them and their families.

This is biblical womanhood in a nutshell. There are two versions of it—one that originated in the nineteenth century and that we call the “cult of domesticity,” and another that emerged in the twentieth century, in response to the surge of women in the workplace brought on by World War II. When the men came home from Europe and Asia, there was a concentrated push to move women back into the household and restore those jobs to the men who had left them. Christians joined that effort and, by the 1970s, had tailored their “complementarian” arguments to counter those of the Second Wave feminists, who they believed to be antithetical to Christianity. 

ECM: Though proponents of complementarianism position themselves as standing boldly against the secular culture, you argue that they are actually products of it. How so?

BAB: The one aspect of biblical womanhood that has historical continuity is patriarchy. Christians often don’t like to use that word because we associate it with feminism, but it’s really just a simple historical construct. It suggests that, wherever you are in time, women’s ability to make choices about their lives is always limited by the men around them, and that they always have fewer options than men do. Legally, politically, socially, religiously—in all of these realms—women are to a significant extent under the control of men.

Complementarianism—the idea that women and men have different and complementary gender roles to perform—is simply another manifestation of the patriarchy that has been at work since the beginning of civilization. So while complementarians are correct that their belief has historical continuity, they are incorrect that it is a Christianphenomenon. Essentially, the thesis of my book is that biblical womanhood is a product of historical circumstances. It has been refashioned throughout history—by Christians and non-Christians alike—but it always insists that women are less than men, that there is something innately wrong with them, and that they cannot exercise authority in the same way that men can.

ECM: The discussion around women in Christian ministry and in leadership always arrives eventually at the Apostle Paul. Has he been misread on the matter?

BAB: He has! I’m a medieval scholar—not a biblical scholar—so when I started writing the book, I decided that I was not going to tackle Paul. My husband is a pastor and when I told him my plan, he challenged me on it. He said the reason that Christians think biblical womanhood is biblical is because they are so accustomed to reading Paul that way and that if I didn’t address it, I was going to lose them. I listened to him, and I’m really glad I did.

I went back to the drawing board and wrote a chapter on Paul, drawing largely from scholarly sources that I’ve been using in my lectures at Baylor since 2008. I try to show that, to paraphrase Beverly Roberts Gaventa, we’ve missed Paul’s point. Because patriarchy is so central to everything we do, and because we look for the points in Paul that seem to support the world around us, we inevitably see Paul supporting a patriarchal world. But if we read Paul in his context, rather than ours, we see that he was calling Christians to be unified and to use their skills in God’s service. We see him celebrating women in positions of leadership. This includes Phoebe, to whom he entrusted his letter to the Romans. She was the carrier of that letter in the same way that Timothy had been previously, meaning that she would have taken it around and read it to audiences. In other words, the book of Romans was first preached by a woman, with Paul’s blessing. We miss those details when we read Paul in this post-1970s understanding. I want readers to know that you can be a faithful Christian and read Paul differently.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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White Evangelical Racism – A Conversation with Anthea Butler

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Eric

Anthea Butler is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In her latest book, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, Butler provides a sweeping survey of American history since slavery, documenting the various ways that white evangelicals have contributed, through active collaboration and passive complicity, to the racist status quo in America.

ECM: The book is White Evangelical Racism—three words with which we’re all familiar, but that have been variously defined. Either separately or together, what do they mean to you?

AB: I chose this title because I wanted to set certain parameters for the book. I specified white evangelicals to show that I’m using the term in the way that it is used colloquially by the media and the political pundits, rather than in some academic sense. That popular understanding of evangelical can be traced to self-identification, to the demographic of white, Christian conservatives who consider themselves evangelical. And I included racism because it is a very particular type of racism that I am discussing. That is, the racism that hides behind “moral” issues.

I address these questions at some length in the book, exploring how the meaning of evangelicalism has changed over time, and recognizing that there are a lot of people out there who don’t realize they’re in this thing because their self-concept leans heavily on theological considerations, allowing them to pretend that they’re not political. But nobody cares about your commitment to the Bebbington Quadrilateral when you’re arguing about the Supreme Court or judges or abortion. They care about how your belief informs your politics, which candidates you vote for, and what they stand for. So I wanted to pull evangelicals out of this safe little realm in which they’ve placed themselves and press them to confront how other people see them.

ECM: That theological/political distinction seems important here, because evangelical scholars have characterized the tradition primarily in theological terms. Has that emphasis left us misunderstanding who evangelicals are?

AB: Absolutely. Here’s the thing—and I can say this, having once been a part of this movement and studied it now for many years—evangelicals care about theology insofar as it remains an internal argument. It is not the external argument. But the theological emphasis allows them to insist on a high-minded conversation that doesn’t have to grapple with racism or gender issues or sexuality or anything else. The problem is, the theological positions they’ve taken end up shaping their political positions on moral issues. Complementarianism, for example, is one way that theological beliefs drive the political discussions.

ECM: Can you say more about that example? How does a theological belief in complementarianism drive political discussions?

AB: In 2008, when John McCain selected Sarah Palin as his running mate, I recall Tony Perkins made the comment that, while she could be the vice president, she could not be the head of her home—something like that. It made me start to think about the bounds of what is appropriate for women where evangelicalism is concerned. A lot of evangelicals derive their views about gender, family, and politics from the belief that God created women to perform certain roles and men to perform others and that they complement each other in various ways. So when we talk about gender equity in public life or wages or some of these things, there’s an assumption that men should hold a privileged position because it’s part of God’s design. That theological belief is brought to bear on the political discourse, with consequences for the public.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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Craft Practice – A Conversation with Jodi Eichler-Levine

Posted on March 9, 2021 by Eric

Jodi Eichler-Levine is the Berman Professor of Jewish Civilization at Lehigh University. To complete her new book, Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis: How Jews Craft Resilience and Create Community, Eichler-Levine took up needle and thread with Jewish crafters from across the United States to document how small acts of tactile creation have helped preserve an ancient culture in a modern world.

ECM: What prompted your interest in Jewish crafting, and what inspired you to begin work on this project?

JEL: Well, for starters, I am a Jewish crafter. When I was in graduate school, I took up knitting because it provided me with something to create immediately, unlike my dissertation, which seemed very amorphous by comparison. Soon I began to notice that there were books with titles like Zen and the Art of Knitting or Mindful Knitting or The Quilting Path: A Journey Into Quilting and Kabbalah. So even though I was writing a dissertation about children’s books—which also featured textiles—I was intrigued by the idea that creating something with your hands could be understood as a religious practice and have an intimate connection to religious identity. Once I had finished my first book and moved to Lehigh University, where I now teach, I was able to focus on these themes and begin work on the project.

ECM: Early on, you grapple with a pair of interesting definitional questions—which works count as Jewish, and what distinguishes art from craft?

JEL: I define Jewishness very expansively. I like to think of Jewishness as a horizon rather than a container. I’m not interested in normative or legal definitions of Judaism, and I’m not after a one-size-fits-all understanding of who counts as Jewish. Many of the people in the book were born Jewish, many others converted, some had Jewish mothers, others had Jewish fathers, and overall they demonstrate that there are lots of ways to be Jewish. Similarly, Jewishness is not something that takes place only in a synagogue, and it’s not simply about religious belief. I was looking for a fluid way to approach both Jewishness and crafting, and in that sense the very action of crafting informed how I understood Jewishness. Crafting is a process. The people that I spoke with never talked about their work only as finished projects. They talked about going to the store, picking out the fabric, the meditative quality of stitching by hand, etc. That’s true for Jewishness, too. Jewish life isn’t a nice, neat pattern that you cut out and apply perfectly. Rather, it’s a lot of little actions, all the time, every day, that make up Jewish life. For many people, especially in 21st century America, informal Jewish activity and Jewish education have become much more important than whether you follow every single Jewish law. But that’s been true throughout history—there’s always been wide variability in Jewish practice.

To your second question, there’s a really gendered power dynamic at work in how we talk about art and craft. I started out primarily interested in craft, which has been distinguished from art especially since the modern period when the notion of “fine art” emerged and we began to see areas dominated by men, like the Royal Academy of Art, in which oil painting was recognized as a “high” or “fine” art, while forms generally associated with women, such as knitting or spinning, were increasingly consigned to “craft.” It’s important to keep this in mind, and feminist artists have been pointing it out. I wanted to capture both, and to think of art and craft as a continuum rather than a binary. Anyone can make art; anyone can make crafts. Some of the women in the book have studied art and hosted shows, while others make blankets for charity and never show a thing. There’s a whole range in between. There’s something very political in deciding whose work matters, whose creation gets recognized.

ECM: Most of your interview subjects were women, and your analysis is informed by gender questions throughout the book. Why did you choose this approach?

JEL: I started out very interested in women in an unapologetic, second-wave feminist kind of way. There are certainly important things to be said about gender queer participants and about men, and a few do feature in the surveys. But I opted to focus primarily on older Jewish women, because Jewish Studies as a guild has tended to privilege younger people, and it’s a field that has often focused narrowly on official texts and synagogues and institutions.

Looking at gender and crafting allows me to get at the texture of everyday life for these women, and to disclose a Judaism of feeling—literal feeling, in terms of the tactility of the objects, but also of the emotions that go into the work. This allows me to re-read Jewish practices in new ways. Historically, for example, when Jewish women have made wimpels—swaddling clothes associated with circumcision—and these are then wrapped around a Torah scroll, women crafters have been able to insert themselves into a part of the synagogue from which they are otherwise excluded. There’s actually something quite subversive about the history of Jewish women and crafts, and I was interested in getting at that. We have enough books about famous rabbis. I wanted this book to be about everyday people and to center women’s experiences.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife – A Conversation with Ariel Sabar

Posted on January 26, 2021 by Eric

Ariel Sabar is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and other publications. His new book, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, recounts a modern-day detective story of biblical proportions.

ECM: What was your initial reaction when you learned that you would be doing a story about the possibility that Jesus was married?

AS: Well, I wasn’t really investigating the possibility that Jesus was married. I was investigating the possibility that a recently discovered ancient text claimed he was married. I was doing some freelance work for Smithsonian magazine back in 2012 when an editor there reached out to me about a discovery that a Harvard scholar had made—a fragment of papyrus on which Jesus is said to utter the worlds, “My wife.” It was clear from the very beginning that this was never considered to be evidence of a married Jesus. It wasn’t a marriage certificate or a biography. At best, it meant that there had been a group of early Christians—perhaps as early as the second century—who believed that Jesus was married and that his marriage was theologically significant. It would still be a very big deal, though, because there was nothing else like that in antiquity.

I thought it was wild. I didn’t know a whole lot about the subject. I’m Jewish, and I didn’t study the New Testament closely growing up—certainly not the non-canonical or gnostic gospels. For about three mostly sleepless weeks I did a ton of research, conducted a bunch of interviews, and produced a 6,000-word story on deadline. It was published around the time that Dr. King made her presentation in Rome. As a journalist who covers scholars and is fascinated by their work, I recognized that this could be a pretty exciting find. But I didn’t have any idea in 2012 where it would ultimately lead.

ECM: When the papyrus was discovered, it sparked a scholarly debate over authenticity. Dr. King thought it might be legitimate; her critics said it was fake. As you reported that debate, were you persuaded that the piece was real?

AS: Well, I’m a journalist, not a scholar, so I don’t have the qualifications to judge whether a text that a Harvard professor dates to the fourth century is authentic. But I entered the story with an open mind. I really didn’t know one way or the other and I didn’t think it was my place to say. My job was to interview the people who were involved and try to understand their various arguments. But journalists always have to be skeptical, so I was careful to ask the sorts of questions that would encourage these scholars to identify the relevant gaps, silences, and problems. I wanted to know their levels of confidence in its credibility. If there were reasons to doubt it, then I wanted to know what they were.

ECM: If the papyrus wasn’t authentic, then it would most likely be a finely crafted forgery. Are these common? Is there a market for forgeries of ancient texts?

AS: From the dawn of archeology—and even the dawn of treasure hunting—there have been people searching the world for important artifacts, and that has created an incentive for other people to fabricate them. Whether it’s a piece of the cross that Jesus was crucified on, a part from a famous sunken ship, or an artwork that went missing hundreds of years ago—as long as there are people who are willing to pay for these items, there will be others who are willing to produce and sell them. If you’re good at forgery, you can make a lot of money. And in some cases, forgers are after something else—a chance to rewrite history, a chance to embarrass the experts, or even just a chance to have a chuckle at having fooled someone. This sort of thing has been around forever.

One thing that is relatively new, however, is the practice of using papyrus as a medium for forgery. In this particular case, the experts found the piece compelling in part because there hadn’t really been a history of papyrus forgery. Papyrus was the throwaway paper of the ancient world. It was seen as so ephemeral, and the languages it contained were often so obscure, that such a forgery would be really difficult to do. It was hard to imagine that anyone would have the classical education, the artistic skill, the motivation, and the nerve to produce something like that. But in recent years the market for ancient papyri has grown considerably, largely thanks to some wealthy evangelical Christians—especially the Green family of the Hobby Lobby craft store chain. They’ve spent millions of dollars acquiring biblical artifacts for their Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, and among these have been a bunch of fake Dead Sea Scrolls and thousands of looted antiquities from Egypt and Iraq, which they are now being forced to return. When they entered the marketplace in about 2009, there was suddenly a brand new demand for ancient manuscripts.

Read the whole thing at Religion & Politics.

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Republican Jesus – A Conversation with Tony Keddie

Posted on October 29, 2020 by Eric

keddieTony Keddie is Assistant Professor of Early Christian History and Literature at the University of British Columbia. In his new book, Republican Jesus: How the Right has Rewritten the Gospels, Keddie situates popular Republican perceptions of Christ within a historical context both ancient and modern. He explains in detail how right-wing actors have revised Christian values to suit purposes very different from—and often at odds with—the historical Christ.

ECM: Who is Republican Jesus, and what inspired you to write about him?

TK: The short answer is that Republican Jesus is a version of Jesus invented by the Christian Right over the past century to place conservative talking points into the mouth of Christ and to give them the authority of the divine Word. The book is devoted to fleshing out that process.

I was inspired to write it at this moment because, though there have been a lot of great books coming out about contemporary evangelicalism and contemporary religious politics in America, most are not talking about the biblical texts or the politics of biblical interpretation in any depth. As a Bible scholar, I wanted to write about these things with special attention to the Christian Right and its agenda.

My students at the University of British Columbia played a role, too. In Canada, you know, everyone is always sort of keeping an eye on America, and they tend to ask different questions than the ones you get in the US. These students have often been self-identified evangelicals or conservatives, but they didn’t understand the economic conservatism or the xenophobia of Christian Right interpretation. So their curiosity prompted me to try to explain how so many Americans have come to understand Jesus as a prophet of small government and secure borders.

ECM: Those who worship Republican Jesus today don’t think of him as Republican Jesus—he’s just Jesus. They think of themselves as supporting the Republican Party because that’s what Jesus would do, not as worshipping a Jesus that the Republican Party has created. How did this happen?

TK: Well, this understanding of Jesus has been in development now for a few generations. Much of it is traceable to the conservative reaction to the New Deal, when corporate leaders and conservative clergymen partnered to promote a fiercely individualistic Jesus who scorned government intervention in the private sector. They did this consistently, all while concealing the entire interpretative enterprise. So instead of understanding this Jesus as the product of specific interpretative choices made by human beings with certain worldly commitments, their audiences were encouraged to see him simply as the way it is. Over time, that opportunistic rendering gained traction.

It’s also the case that there have been concerted efforts by Christian Right influencers all along to hide their politics—to suggest that what they’re doing in the political realm is actually apolitical. Billy Graham, for example, was this great evangelist who was constantly and performatively spurning the Civil Rights movement because it was “political,” but then also appeared on stage or in conference with Republican presidents and supported their aggressive foreign policy decisions as part of his generic anti-communism. When religious leaders choose to act or not to act in public, the choice is always political, and their religious views must be understood alongside their politics.

We’re seeing this same thing now with Graham’s son, Franklin. About a month ago, he organized a “Prayer March” and promoted it with the persistent refrain that “this is not political.” And yet everyone knows where Graham stands politically. Mike Huckabee was one of the anchors, and the event was clearly intended to mobilize conservative evangelical Christians—an important Republican voting bloc—shortly before a national election. So here again we have a disingenuous disavowal of politics by obviously political actors. It’s a dangerous conceit because it creates a sense of unity around faith and prayer, but the entire event is dominated by perspectives that are particular to American economic conservatism. They’re pro-privatization, anti-regulation, and anti-taxes, with gestures toward authoritarianism—emphasizing prayers for the police following a summer of mostly peaceful Black Lives Matter protests, for example. All of this allows participants to think of their faith as purely biblical, when in reality it has been carefully molded by a particular set of political influencers.

ECM: At this point, Republican “family values” advocacy is based primarily on opposition to abortion and to same-sex marriage. You suggest that Jesus probably wouldn’t actually take these positions. Why?

TK: Throughout the book, I try to answer questions like this in reference to two historical contexts: the context in which the biblical texts were written, and the context in which the interpretations were first devised. Where family values are concerned, I note that there is an entire right-wing discourse that was developed in the 1960s and 70s to sacralize the white patriarchal family in reaction to Civil Rights, second-wave feminism, gay rights, and other progressive movements. That discourse was then pushed upon the gospels by way of cherry-picking certain useful verses and ignoring others that were inconvenient.

Matthew 19, for example, includes the phrase “God made them male and female,” which has been cited frequently in defense of the simple gender binary that conservatives value. But then, just a few lines later, in an integral section of the text, Jesus goes on to talk about eunuchs—those who were born as eunuchs, those who have been made eunuchs by others, and those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. So, three different types of sexual minority. Eunuchs in the ancient world were perceived—pejoratively—as a sort of third class of half-males; as neither entirely male nor female. To make claims about “biblical manhood and womanhood” in a chapter like this involves a really sloppy use of sources while entirely missing the historical context around Jesus, who is also not very family oriented. He shuns his family in some of the gospel accounts, and otherwise thinks of his disciples as his family. So the imposition of a “nuclear family” model on Jesus and his teaching is a distinctly modern imposition.

As for abortion, the Bible doesn’t mention it anywhere, at least not explicitly. This is why conservative Christians were debating over whether they thought abortion was a blessing or a curse all the way up to the years just before Roe v. Wade. That divisive case played a major role in generating the right-wing biblical cases against abortion that are so common today, but conservatives rarely approached the biblical evidence with such certainty before this historical moment.

Jesus and his earliest followers probably understood when human life begins in one of two ways—either as beginning with the first breath, the “breath of life,” which seems to be the view of the Hebrew Bible and was taken up in this way by the ancient rabbis; or as beginning at some uncertain point during gestation, following the popular gradualist theory best known from some Greek philosophers (the fetus begins as a seed and endures a plant-like stage before gradually becoming more like an animal and then more like a human). We don’t really know what Jesus would have thought about when human life begins, but I can say with confidence that he would have been totally perplexed by the modern right-wing discourse on “fetal personhood” and “unborn citizens” that need to be saved from the government.

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