Thinking about religious books as commodities

Matt Hedstrom, American Studies professor at the University of Virginia and author of the recently released The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century, talking about his book on Virginia public radio.

Hedstrom starts with a brief, of sorts, for the book markets and book cultures, and why that study is important in the study of religion:

"Religions also always take on the characteristics of their moment, of their surrounding culture. When you think about the United States in the 20th century, and still in the 21st century, I think the most powerful cultural forces we've got are media and the consumer marketplace. We shape our identities so much through what we consume and how we choose to consume all kinds of commodities, and how we consume media in particular. And, for a lot of Americans, over the course of the the 20th century, the most culturally significant commodity that they bought were books."

Thinking about books as commodities and about how faith as currently, culturally understood, is constructed in the context of such market interactions between consumers and commodities has been one of the major developments of my thinking in my dissertation work. Hearing Hedstrom talk at the Religion and the Marketplace conference in Heidelberg, in Oct. 2011, spurred me on in this.

His book, I think, will be a good addition to the growing body of work on religious book cultures.

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Rob Bell's internal contradiction

Rob Bell's been gone from the Michigan megachurch he founded for more than a year now. When he remembers the church, he often in a sense misremembers it, according to Kelefa Sunnah's piece in the New Yorker.

Not misremembers, exactly, but rather remembers the beginning and not the end, what was overcome instead of what was created. He talks about the energy of the potential, not the extent to which an institution is an institution is an institution. The difference between what's emphasized and what's not is the contradiction inherently internal to the megachurch project, and also to Bell himself.

Sennah writes:

"Because [Bell] vividly remembers the early days, he still sometimes talks about Mars Hill as a gritty, scrappy place: a church with no sign, no steeple, no cross, and hardly any decoration. This is all true, but Mars Hill is also a comfortable, well-run facility, with plenty of parking and age-specific child care. It was just after eight o’clock on a seasonably cold morning, and worshippers were trickling in and stamping the snow off their boots."

Both of these aspects were critical to Mars Hill's success, and also to the problems that eventually became serious. Sennah locates the tension in the two very different things a church like Mars Hill needs: a sense of creativity and ongoing discovery, but also structure, order and stability.

Another way to say this would be: the things that Bell did tended to have two opposite and yet simultaneous results. His sermon style, to take one example, brought people together who wouldn't have otherwise been brought together, and it also created new polarities, and pushed people apart.

The same is also probably true for other major evangelical leaders and their megachurches.

The question is always, it seems, of how the internal opposite forces are balanced.

Bell, on the one hand, couldn't not push. But also -- and this is missed by most of his critics and more than a few of his fans -- he couldn't allow himself or be happy with himself as a bomb-thrower and controversialist.

The contradiction, at some point, became unsustainable for Mars Hills. Or, arguably, not for Mars Hill but for Bell, who himself was internally conflicted in exactly this same way the church he created was conflicted, on the one hand wanting to be a radical and on the other unwilling to take strong stands, wanting to be a mediator and someone who builds consensus.

In Sennah's telling, the inherent contradiction within Rob Bell was expressed as a kind of crafted ambiguity ("a careful ambiguity, allowing worshipers to think that he was however evangelical" -- or however liberal -- "they wanted him to be. He wanted to make a wide range of worshipers feel comfortable.") that ultimately broke down. Either Bell himself couldn't bear the cost of keeping it up, or the balancing act of that ambiguity just became impossible, and any move would have meant a tumble.

In this postmortem, at least, the controversy over hell that marked the end, at least for now, of Bell's pastoral ministry was rather incidental to there being an end. It if wasn't that, it would have been something else. What he had, what Bell was, was unsustainable.

The internal contradiction that couldn't be kept up indefinitely.

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The religion in the politics of George McGovern

September 1, 1970 saw a moment critical to the history of religion in American politics. A moment that doesn't fit the standard narrative of what religion-in-politics in American means, yet was, nevertheless, an example of one of the important ways faith has spoken in the public square, but is dismissed as being somehow not real, not counting as really religious.

On that day in the US Senate an amendment came up for a vote that would have ended the Vietnam war. It was drafted by two Christian men, two men whose liberal politics were informed by their Christianity: Mark Hatfield and George McGovern.

The Hatifled-McGovern amendment was known as the "amendment to end the war." It linked military funding to a deadline for troop withdraw from Vietnam. It was the strongest opposition to the Nixon administration and the never-ending military conflict at the time, and McGovern made it stronger by giving a speech that could rightly seen as in the tradition of Old Testament prophets. Right before voting started, McGovern said:

"Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage at Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval and all across our land -- young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces or hopes ... if we do not end this damnable war those young men will some day curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us. So before we vote, let us ponder the admonition of Edmund Burke, the great parliamentarian of an earlier day: 'A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.'"

Hatfield's religious commitments have been noted. The late Oregon Senator was called "Saint Mark," and is something of a symbol of the possibility of a religious left. A committed evangelical, Hatfield believed that the pressing moral issues of his day were war, racism, and the unjust distribution of wealth. He believed that evangelicals should rise up to oppose the "Biblical Nationalism" that was being propagated in their name.

McGovern's religious commitments are not particularly a part of the public character, "McGovern."

He, after all, was famously tarred as the candidate for draft-dodger's amnesty, abortions, and acid.

His name, after all, has become a synonym for loony liberalism, and everyone knows that that's the Godless wing of American politics.

A closer look, though, shows that the life and politics of George McGovern, who died yesterday at the age of 90, was deeply informed and rooted in his Christianity.

McGovern, prairie populist and lifelong Methodist

McGovern, as every obit has now noted, was the son of a Wesleyan Methodist minister.

In the last book he wrote before his death, he recalls Summer tent meetings on the banks of South Dakota's "Jim River," where he would watch altar calls and conversions from the back of the tabernacle. He himself didn't go forward, as he represents it in the book, but was impressed by their earnestness and their commitment, an earnestness and commitment he attempted to imitate in his own love for God.

As he told a Methodist audience late in life: 

"The church gave me certain things that stayed with me .... 'whosoever would save his life shall lose it; whosoever would lose his life for my sake shall find it.' I think that the life well lived is the life spent in service to others. That verse I’ve just quoted suggests it also has to be in service to God. But there’s another verse that says, “if you don’t love your fellow man who you have seen, how can you love God whom you’ve not seen?” So I put the emphasis on public service to others, maybe being a teacher, being a clergyman, being a doctor, being a journalist, being an honest day laborer. Service to others is the key in my opinion to the good life, and that verse says it all."

In another context, McGovern notes that it was not for nothing that scripture quotations were sprinkled throughout his political speeches. His "populist and sometimes radical political views" were informed by, inspired by, and based on "the Christian Social Gospel."

McGovern's early successes in politics came, as South Dakota State University political scientist Gary Aguiar has argued, from "conceptualizing his constituents as peaceful Christian agriculturalists," and staking out positions that reflected that ideology. His later successes came from advocating policies that reflected the "gospel imperative" to care for the poor. 

This is perhaps most directly seen in McGovern's work as director of the Food of Peace program and the World Food Programme, to feed the poor around the world, and his work as a Senator to establish school lunch programs, food stamps, and The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).

As Methodist minister Donald E. Messner writes, McGovern believed that feeding the hungry was an essential expression of the Christian faith. It was "a Gospel imperative as well as integral to a civilized society." Messner says, "McGovern’s deepest personal and political passions were to end war and eliminate hunger. He often acknowledged that he did not see much hope in eliminating humanity’s sinful proclivity for using violence but that he did believe that hunger could be ended in his lifetime."

McGovern wasn't alone in this understanding of the gospel. When he met Pope John XXIII, the pontiff reportedly grasped his hand and told him, "Mr. McGovern, when you go to meet your maker and he asks, 'Did you feed the hungry?'  You can say, 'I did.'"

Nor was it the case that McGovern's faith was entirely political. He was a member of a United Methodist church in South Dakota as an adult and had a deep affection for the "old hymns," which he reportedly sang "with gusto."

None of that has mattered to the public image, though. Another narrative worked better, and was embraced. His concern for peace was re-cast as anti-Americanism, reckless radicalism, and cowardice.

Richard Nixon ordered campaign hacks to say McGovern's plan was going to "cost a billion dollars just to buy enough white flags for America." Robert Novak, a conservative columnist who specialized in smears, popularized the accusation that McGovern and liberals more generally didn't stand for America, but for "amnesty, abortion and acid." Pro-war labor leader George Meany attacked McGovern as "an apologist for the Communist world," the political leader of a rabble representing not good middle class Christians, but "people who looked like Jacks, acted like Jills and had the odors of Johns."

Such were the identity politics of the 1970s. Such was the culture war, though it wasn't called that then. Opposing a war, having a nuanced position on abortion, thinking homosexuals could be decent citizens, that the democratic process should be open to those who hadn't consolidated power and that government should benefit especially those who needed help -- these were successfully reframed as positions no sober citizen and no real Christian could hold.

Ideas that McGovern got from listening Methodists preach the gospel were understood by the electorate as crazy.

As Michael Leheay of the Washington Post reflected, The Nixon "campaign pounced on McGovern's liberalism, turning the word into an albatross for decades to come .... Nixon's campaign portrayed McGovern as a patsy whose stances would open the door to economic decline, national dishonor and communist expansion"

Such, too, is the culture war in our day that McGovern is not remembered as a critical figure in the history of how Christianity has been expressed in American politics. His faith has more or less been erased from the record, and is remembered, if at all, only as a private detail.

There's a sense that his religion, if he was religious at all, wasn't of any import to his public life. There's a sense that he wasn't really religious. Or that if he was religious, his religion, because it advocated a positive role for the state in caring for the poor and critiqued American nationalism, doesn't count as religion. The sense seems to be that when we talk about religion in politics, we're not talking about religion that's religious like that.

It's a strange bias, that gets us here. It has nothing to do with the facts of McGovern's life, and everything to do with the ongoing struggle in American culture over the normative definition of "Christian."

Maybe it is the case that McGovern was the "wrong sort of Christian," or not "really" a Christian, or wrong about what sort of social action the teachings of Jesus entailed. There are serious theological arguments to that effect. It would be a mistake, though, to take those normativized claims of what Christianity is at face value and so dismiss or just miss the way that McGovern and those like him acted as they did because of their commitments to Christianity.

It's not an accident that the two men who started a global school lunch program were both Methodists.

It's not incidental that the two men who took a strong stand against the Vietnam war in September 1970 both belonged to churches that came out of the tradition of the Second Great Awakening.

It's not irrelevant that McGovern sand "the old hymns," and wrote when faced with his daughter's death, he found comfort in the "lovely old song of the faith," "I Need Thee Every Hour."

Religion in contemporary American politics is not just Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan fetishism. It's also this liberal Senator recalling the lines of a nineteenth century Baptist hymn, "I need Thee every hour, most gracious Lord / No tender voice like Thine can peace afford." It's also programs that make sure poor infants don't die of malnutrition in a developed nation like America, and excess American produce doesn't rot while poor people don't starve in undeveloped nations around the globe. Whatever else religion-in-politics is in America, it's also this liberal telling the senate "This chamber reeks of blood," and, when chided for that and told his speech offended his colleagues, responding "it was supposed to."

McGovern's politics were informed by his faith. That's also part of this story.

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Why do people still not know if Obama is a Christian?

Recent Pew poll results on perceptions of Romney's religion say pretty much exactly what one would expect. More people know he's Mormon than used to, but they're either OK with that or don't care. The poll found "unease with Romney’s religion has little impact on voting preferences."

The more interesting information, here, is that 51 percent of registered voters don't "Identify Obama as Christian."

This isn't because they think he's a Muslim, though. There are some who think he's Muslim, but the number that identify Obama with Islam has been pretty consistent and relatively small, upticking only slightly from 12 percent right before the 2008 election to 17 percent today. 

The big block of registered voters who don't say Obama is a Christian are not saying for sure what his faith is. They're saying they "don't know." Nearly a third say that they don't know, now, a number went as high was 41 percent in 2010. From the looks of the numbers, about 10 percent of voters have, over the course of Obama's first term, gone from thinking he's a Christian to not knowing if he's a Christian to thinking he's a Christian again -- all without ever saying he's Muslim.

It's possible to read this "don't know" as simply the safe version of saying he's Muslim. Some Republican officials have taken this stance of allowing doubt and encouraging distrust without actually saying anything directly. Like, "he says he's a Christian ... (but I don't know)," etc.

There's another way to read this question about Obama's Christianity, though, which has nothing to do with rumors he's a secret Muslim.

It's possible 31 percent of registered voters don't know if Obama's a Christian because they don't know if liberal Christianity is really Christianity.


Consider: a year ago there was an intra-evangelical fight about the doctrine of eternal damnation, after megachurch minister Rob Bell wrote a book questioning some aspects of that idea. The terms of the fight were, to a large extent, could one still be considered a Christian if one did not believe in hell? This is not an exaggeration. Though it was portrayed as a conflict over this doctrine, it was actually about who gets to count as Christian. So John MacArthur wrote, e.g., "Is Rob Bell truly a Christian, or is he one of those dangerous deceivers Scripture warns us about repeatedly (Acts 20:29; 2 Corinthians 11:13-15; Colossians 2:8; 2 Peter 2:1; etc.)? It's a fair—and necessary—question." Kevin DeYoung, who started the extensive attack on Bell, wrote that "At the very heart of this controversy ... is that we really do have two different Gods" and "Bell’s vision of heaven and hell doesn’t work because his vision of God is false."

For people who take this position that Christianity is only Christianity if it includes a strong vision of eternal damnation, Obama's not going to count as Christian.

In one of his more extensive statements on his faith, for example, the then-Illinois state senator said,

"I find it hard to believe that my God would consign four-fifths of the world to hell. 
I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity.
 That’s just not part of my religious makeup."

DeYoung, and those like him, would not likely conclude from the above that the president is a Muslim, but they wouldn't say he's a Christian, either. Not a "real" Christian, anyway.

Thus: "don't know."

It's a kind of yes and no answer, as in yes he's a Christian in the sense he identifies as such, but no, he's not really a Christian, because he embraces a "phony theology ... not a theology based on Bible." The "yes" is about a descriptivist account of Christianity, which allows that people are as they say they are, and the "no" is a prescriptivist account, which holds there's an essential definition of Christianity, and someone can say they're Christian without meeting the objective theological standards of being Christian.

It's possible that nearly a third of the country's registered voters are just confused and have been tricked by conservative commentators into suspecting the president of the United States is other than what he claims to be. A more reasonable explain, though, it seems to me, is that this 31 percent recognizes Obama is, as he says he is, a liberal Christian, but they don't know that that Christianity is really Christianity.

For them, liberal Christianity is in a confusing neither/nor space that's kind of hard to name, especially when going back and forth between descriptivist and prescriptivist definitions of "Christian," and that's exactly the gray area where Obama and his faith fall.

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The fictitious history of the Episcopal Church

Conservative critiques of the Episcopal Church seem to have come up with a fictitious history of the church. It makes sense -- or enough sense -- on the level of critique, except that it's also always historical, and it's about how Episcopalians used to be but now have changed. And on that level it's very strange nonsense.

Ross Douthat, doing this:

Today, by contrast, the leaders of the Episcopal Church and similar bodies often don’t seem to be offering anything you can’t already get from a purely secular liberalism.

Russel Mead says the church's extreme irrelevance comes from the fact that it followed "the theological path of least resistance as it makes the transition from a church that once spoke to a nation to a sect in communion only with itself."

Philip Jenkins makes the same argument, essentially correlating the decline in church attendance to a change in the Episcopal Church's relationship to American culture. The church began, the implication goes, to just accommodate culture at some point, and then there wasn't any real difference between being in church or not, so what was the point? Thus the decline. Jenkins says what especially worries him, as an Episcopalian, is that the church leaders won't reverse this trend, but instead will be more accommodationist, adapting even more to "secular" "liberal" culture, instead of staking out an oppositional position that would legitimize the church's continued existence.

Except the Episcopal Church's "golden age" was actually more like the "gilded age."

The church's high-water mark came when it was most staunchly on the side of the status quo. Not when it was prophetically standing against the culture, but when it was, in large part, a club for powerful people and an endorser of proper opinion

The Episcopal Church was at it's height in 1966. According to the Historical Statistics of the United States, which is put out by the US Chamber of Commerce, in 1966 the Episcopal Church had 3.6 million members in the US. More than ever before; more than ever since.

The church's reputation at that moment was as the church of the J.P. Morgans and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and Astors, who dominated America and the Episcopal Church from the 1900s to the 1920s, and made the Episcopal Church into a quasi-national church. In the '50s, according to one report, about three-quarters of New York Times wedding announcements were for weddings in Episcopal churches. It was the church of Wall Street. Church as country club. The "Republican Party at Prayer." One prominent member in the late '60s was Gerald Ford, then the House minority leader. Another was George H.W. Bush, then a congressman from Texas. John Lindsay, the leading liberal Republican from New York, was Episcopalian. As was William Randolph Hearst, as was William Davis Taylor, then the publisher of the Boston Globe, and as were one third of the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall, Potter Stewart and Byron White. When Dwight D. Eisenhower died in '69, he laid it repose at the Washington National Cathedral.

This was not a counter cultural church. This was not a church offering an alternative to the dominant status quo.

And yet it was really, really popular. So if something changed between the height of the 1960s and the bottom dropping out of attendance today, it wasn't that Episcopalians suddenly started "accommodating" to popular opinion and polite society.

In fact, the decline that conservative critiques are pointing to began about a decade before the changes they'll specifically point to as causes. The Episcopal Church began to make the changes that upset conservatives in the mid 1970s: changing the prayer book in '76, declaring homosexuals to be "children of God" deserving of equal rights in '76, ordaining women in '77, ordaining an open homosexual in '77, and so on.

By that time, though, the church was already in decline, having lost about 800,000 members between '66 and '75.

It's perfectly legitimate to critique the changes in theology in the Episcopal Church over the last four decades. It's legitimate, too, to point out how the power, prestige and numbers of the church have more or less evaporated in recent years. Successfully correlating the two things, though, and claiming, even, that there's a causal relationship between the two things, is going to take more work.

But imagining a fictitious history where the Episcopal Church stood against the trends of its day, taking stands for orthodoxy and the Bible against the elite of the era is just nonsense. The Episcopal Church never occupied the culture space of, say, today's Jehovah's Witnesses. There are definitely some things that have changed with this church and with American culture since the 1960s, but this story about this sudden cultural accommodation to fashionable liberalism is fantasy.

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