I first read Cornbread and Caviar when I was in high school. Bob Jones Jr.’s love for fighting fire with fire and his willingness to say embarassing things about the yet living made it entertaining fare. Stories about Ma Sunday filching fried chicken? Check. Broadsides against Billy Graham? Check. As a teenager, a line like this was just fun: “What a tragedy to see him [Billy Graham] building the church of Antichrist, masking the wickedness of popery, and providing a sheep’s cloak of Christian recognition for the wolves of apostasy.” After receiving a new copy of the book from my uncle last week, I decided to reread it and see what caught my attention now that I’m a graduate student with an interest in twentieth century fundamentalism.
The first thing that stood out was Jones’s apologia for the racial order of the Old South. Read the rest of this entry »
The early modern Atlantic world, in Iberia as well as in Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World, was home to an enormous religious diversity. A simple catalog of the religions that Stuart Schwartz mentions in his book All Can Be Saved gives some idea of how diverse the Atlantic world was: Catholic Christianity, in both its pre- and post-Tridentine formulations; Judaism; Islam; Protestant Christianity, especially Dutch Reformed, French Huguenot, and German Lutheran Protestants; African animist religions; Native American animist religions; European traditions of magic and the occult; and skepticism and unbelief. Of course religious belief as actually held seldom fell into such systematic categories, and Schwartz discusses many kinds of forced and voluntary religious intermingling, among which were Jews and Muslims who converted to Christianity, Old Christians who layered Catholicism on top of folk religions or skepticism, Native Americans and Africans who mixed Christianity with their traditional religions, and Christians who were influenced by Native American and African religions or converted to Islam or Judaism. The question that motivates Schwartz’s study is this: Out of that religious milieu, how did many Iberian Christians come to hold the proposition that “each person can be saved in his or her own religion” (epigraph)? Put another way, how did toleration develop out of religious conflict?
Balmer, Randall. The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2010. 89 pages. ISBN 1602582432
