In a recent work on the battle of Musa Qala Wadi in southern Afghanistan, the author told of American soldiers driven by the “preaching of evangelical padres who viewed Afghanistan as a kind of American jihad against Godless heathen.” Such a tone from the ministers of the Church sounds eerily reminiscent of the fervor surrounding the evangelical support of the first World War. It was a fervor so intense and widespread that even men like Billy Sunday and Harry Emerson Fosdick found common cause in calling the Church to support the war. Yet in the end, Fosdick and many others came to question their initial support.

As today’s armed forces become more religiously diverse, and as the moral underpinnings of traditional strategies are questioned, the Church will find its traditional message of “Dues vuelt” no longer fully accepted. Perhaps these events and the questions naturally arising from reflections on ten years of war will prompt the Church to rethink its relationship to society and war. A healthy skepticism of political power and a return to rigorous ethical decision making instead of patriotic jingoism will greatly aid the Church in reevaluating its past and preparing a clearer message for the conflicts of the future. Perhaps only then will the Church be able to focus itself on the message that “He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Filed under: Essays ]]> http://religioninamerica.org/2011/12/11/a-season-of-remembrance/feed/ 2 requiredtestblog Wreath at Arlington http://religioninamerica.org/2011/06/23/cornbread-and-caviar-bob-jones-jr/ http://religioninamerica.org/2011/06/23/cornbread-and-caviar-bob-jones-jr/#comments Thu, 23 Jun 2011 23:52:04 +0000 Paul Matzko http://religioninamerica.org/?p=1196 ]]> 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. Jones questioned whether slaveowners were prone to violence toward their slaves. His own great-grandmother, Rachel Napier, owned several plantations and over 300 slaves and is protrayed as a gentle, caring paternalist who only sold slaves in family groups, taught them Scripture, and restrained her overseers. Jones then repeated a line often used in defense of slavery: “One thing is certainly true. The average black slave was in every respect a thousand times better off than he had been in Africa.” (23) And, of course, Jones asserted that the Civil War “had not been fought primarily over the issue of slavery but, rather, over states’ rights.” (24) He finished the section with a fond recollection of eating his lunch as a schoolchild while sitting on the spot where Jeff Davis took the oath of office as President of the Confederacy.

Keep in mind that Bob Jones Jr. published these thoughts in 1985, just two years after Bob Jones University v. United States and only fourteen since the school dropped its whites-only admission policy. The school had begun to change to face the realities of the times, but Jones himself remained unreconstructed. Jones’s defense of the old southern racial order is a sharp contrast to the current administration’s apology for the school’s history of racial discrimination.

I was struck by Jones’s distrust of Zionism. He staked out a moderate position by condemning acts of terrorism by both Israelis and Arabs. He praised the Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, as effusively as he complimented King Hussein’s hospitality (and Jones included signed pictures from both). Jones was greatly annoyed by a group of fundamentalists who had declared their support for Menachem Begin, then the Prime Minister of Israel; instead, Jones condemned Begin’s persecuation of Christian Arabs and the massacre of Arab civilians he ordered at Deir Yassin. “I have a great love for both Jews and Arabs, but I hate tyranny, terrorism, and violence just as much on the part of a Jewish government as I do on the part of an Arab government.” (141) Jones’s moderate views towards Israel and the Arab nations were a marked contrast to the growing support for Zionism among American evangelicals at the time.

Cornbread and Caviar also evinced, what I’ll call for lack of a better term, fundamentalist enlargement. When A. C. Dixon published The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth in the 1910s, fundamentalism was a minimalist movement. The fundamentals were meant to be the basic doctrines of Christianity. They were a call to orthodox ecumenicism, cooperation across denominational boundaries and despite secondary doctrinal differences. A postmillenial, reformed Presbyterian like J. Gresham Machen and a premillenial, dispensationalist Baptist like William Bell Riley could both be considered fundamentalists. Separation was theoretically reserved for those who transgressed a discrete set of fundamental doctrines.

Since the 1910s, the fundamentals have been enlarged. The fundamentals evolved from a set of essential doctrines — e.g., the deity of Christ and the inspiration of Scripture — into a far more detailed list of secondary doctrines and proscribed behaviors. That transformation surfaces briefly in Jones’s discussion of eschatology. “I have never had any agreement with the postmillenial position…it goes contrary to the whole teaching of Scripture and, like Christian Science, is an affront to intellectuality and hard common sense as well. … Postmillenialism is a menace to the spiritual life of fundamental, Bible-believing churches today.” (110) Premillenialism had become a de facto fundamental. Interestingly, Jones did not add cessationism to the list of fundamentals, although most fundamentalists today do. Jones greatly admired O. Talmadge Spence, a Pentecostal preacher and a board member at Bob Jones. He acknowledged their disagreement over the cessation of the apostolic gifts, but he called Spence “as much of a Fundamentalist as I am.” (181)

There are a whole host of adjectives used to describe fundamentalist religion: backwards, anti-modern, reactionary, unscientific, ante-Diluvian.* The idea behind all of those descriptions is that fundamentalist religions have fallen off the train of progress. It’s a whiggish notion that religion, like society and politics, is advancing to greater freedom, rationality, and liberality thanks to science; consequently, fundamentalist religions that don’t share those goals are backwards, and will fade away in time.

It’s also a notion that is wrong.

As George Marsden points out in his influential book Fundamentalism and American Culture (reviewed here), the prediction that fundamentalist Christianity will die out in America is as old as fundamentalism itself, which has managed to outlive its predicted demise. So far from being anti-modern, fundamentalism is a modern form of religion.

Marsden argues for fundamentalism’s debt to modern, scientific ways of thinking in several ways, but the argument most relevant to recent events concerns hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the set of principles by which one interprets Scripture. In the recent furor over Harold Camping and his predictions of a date for the rapture, the question that has not been much asked is how he went about pulling a precise date out of obscure scriptures.

My point, borrowing from Marsden, is that the hermeneutics of Camping and his ilk are compatible with, even indebted to, modern ways of thinking. To be sure, calculating a date for the end of the world is a practice old enough to be condemned in the Talmud. But the methods of Camping et al. are a peculiarly modern take on an ancient tradition.

Witness the Rapture Index, a website that tracks the signs of the times indicating the end of the world. The website lists a series of categories, such as inflation and ecumenism, then tracks whether they are getting better or worse. The aggregate of those numbers serves as index, like the Dow Jones or S&P500, indicating whether the end is drawing nigh. You’ll notice that the Rapture Index, unlike the stock market, is just off the all-time high.

The categories for the Rapture Index have been derived from the inductive, scientific study of the Bible (cf Marsden, p. 60). The index’s creator has read the Bible as a set of proof texts that speak about the end of the world. Then, its creator has examined and quantified the natural world, like a scientist or technocrat. The findings are being distributed on the Internet. And the findings bear the form and authority of a stock market index, a quasi-scientific way of conceiving of the economy. In an age of stock market collapses and government bailouts, what could be more modern?

* Well, maybe not “ante-Diluvian” and certainly not “anti-Diluvian.”

Before The Next Christendom was published in 2002, Jenkins had already made a name for himself as a criminologist and political historian with acclaimed works like Moral Panic, Pedophiles and Priests, and The Cold War at Home. The Next Christendom is one of a series of books  (see Mystics and Messiahs, The New Anti-Catholicism, and Dream Catchers)  that have cemented his reputation as a scholar of religion and given him a wide popular, as well as academic, audience.

The Next Christendom popularized the idea that the future of Christianity lay in the global South. By the new millennium, a majority of the world’s Christians lived in South America, Africa, and Asia. “If we want to visualize a ‘typical’ contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or in a Brazilian favela.” Jenkins digs into population and religion statistics to show that the shift of Christian predominance from North to South is accelerating, so much so that by 2050 “only about one-fifth of the world’s 3 billion Christians will be non-Hispanic Whites.” (2-3)

Contrary to the popular perception of Christianity as an intrinsically Western religion, Jenkins notes that the spread of Christianity in the global South is in many ways a return to the faith’s roots rather than an exceptional circumstance. During the early church, there were far more Christians in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East than in the West and until late in the middle ages large Christian minorities continued to flourish outside the West.  After the decline of non-Western Christianity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, missions efforts struggled because of the perception of Christianity as a foreign faith tied to “foreign imperial domination.” (30) However, Christianity spread rapidly in former European colonies as it went indigenous in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jenkins further fleshes out this argument in his best-selling The Lost History of Christianity (2008).

These new Southern Christians are an eclectic mix of Pentecostals, Catholics, and independent churches that often blend Christianity with traditional African religions. At the same time, Southern Christians do tend to be far more theologically and culturally conservative than their Western counterparts. They have raised Western eyebrows by sending missionaries to the homelands of their former colonial masters and by welcoming dissident Western conservatives to their denominations. Likewise, Liberal Catholics have been alarmed by the conservative shift at the Vatican, but, as Jenkins notes, “Of course the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church are so very conservative: they can count.” (198)

The rise of Christianity in the global South is accompanied by new tensions with a similarly resurgent Islam. Jenkins does not believe that Islam is necessarily any more violent than Christianity, but the growing populations of both faiths living in close proximity could become a fault line for future conflicts.

Although The Next Christendom is primarily a book about global Christianity, the spread of Christianity in the global South will have major ramifications in the United States as well. Jenkins adopts Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis and argues that the divide between Christians and Muslims (and, in India, Hindus) could erupt into global conflict as Western powers intervene on the behalf of fellow believers. US foreign policy will need to be conscious of religion in a way that was forgotten during the ideologically-driven Cold War. There also exists the potential for alienation between a Christianized global South and secularized North. Already, Jenkins notes, the Western media tends to portray Southern religion as primitive, barbaric, and fundamentalist in its attitudes toward church and state, gender, and homosexuality.

The rise of Christianity in the global South will change the face of American Christianity as well. Missions to the West have already been briefly mentioned and such efforts are likely to increase in the US and elsewhere. Immigrants to the United States are predominantly Christian, including large numbers of Catholics and Pentecostals from Latin America, Christian Arabs from the Middle East, and Presbyterian Koreans. Indeed, Jenkins predicts that America will become an increasingly Christian nation as the rest of the West continues to dechristianize. American Christianity, like the population in general, is headed towards becoming a minority-majority faith. If Jenkins’ predictions are even partially accurate, then historians of religion in America need to widen their understanding of non-white and non-Western Christianity; the next generation of American religious historians will need to read in multiple languages and have a solid understanding of global Christianity.

The chaplaincy is also being stretched further as minority groups compete for equal recognition alongside the traditional triumvirate of Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism.  The recent addition of the first Buddhist chaplain and the push for atheistic chaplains also challenges the narrative of US civil religion as conceptualized in the Judeo-Christian framework. While the military chaplaincy has survived several legal actions calling for its disbandment, these changes in social structures and the growth of numerous religious identities across the forces provide the institution with its greatest challenge yet.  As seen in the changes in the chaplain crest, the corps is searching for a more nondescript way of visualizing itself and an identity that embraces the growing religious diversity of the United States. The corps’ responses to these challenges over the next few  years should be closely watched by all observers of the nation’s rapidly shifting religious landscape.

It bears pointing out that homosexuality and gay marriage are two distinct, though commonly conflated, issues. First, evangelicals must determine whether homosexuality is a sin and, second, whether that means that the state should ban homosexual marriages. The second  position does not necessarily follow from the first. Few evangelicals, Christian Reconstructionists excepted, believe that the state should enforce all biblical standards of behavior. It is possible to believe that a behavior is wrong but not support its criminalization. It’s hard to imagine modern laws criminalizing blasphemy, adultery, or poor attendance at church (all of which were penalized in Puritan New England), but other state-enforced, evangelical-supported moral norms remain, like strict bans on prostitution, drugs, and, until 2003′s Lawrence v. Texas, homosexuality. Among evangelicals, there are two categories of immoral behaviors: those which are considered wrong and should be banned by the state and those which are wrong but not deserving of state condemnation.

Interestingly, homosexuality appears to be shifting from the first category to the second, but gay marriage is not. For example, John Piper, a popular conservative evangelical author and the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, recently wrote a post which criticized the idea of gay marriage. Piper offers a traditional theological critique of homosexuality, citing Romans 1:25-27 and I Corinthians 6:9. Yet, he’s not a theonomist; he acknowledges that not all sins should be legally prevented, including pornography and even homosexuality itself, but he argues that the legal significance of marriage (tied to inheritance, taxes, and the like) requires a clear statutory definition. If gay marriage is codified, society will have institutionalized and sanctioned homosexuality. He writes, “The issue is not whether we block a sinful behavior, but whether we imbed [sic] it in our laws.” Piper would have the state permit homosexuality but ban gay marriage. His views represent the majority opinion among American evangelicals.

However, that kind of compromise does not satisfy other evangelicals. If you remember the statistics I mentioned earlier, a significant minority of evangelicals believe homosexuality to be wrong and oppose gay marriage but support civil unions as an alternative. Some left-leaning evangelicals, like Sojourners and its prominent founder Jim Wallis, have supported homosexual civil unions for some time. This does not make Sojourners or Wallis unqualified supporters of homosexuality. Recently the organization has been criticized by LGBT activists for not accepting homosexuality in full and, like Piper, they believe that marriage is foundational to American society and thus oppose homosexual marriage. Yet they believe that excluding homosexual citizens from the various civil, legal, and financial benefits which are only given to married people is a violation of homosexuals’ equality under the law with heterosexuals. Their solution is civil unions, which offer the benefits attached to marriage without the name itself. Speaking broadly, left-leaning evangelicals have lined up behind Wallis while right-leaning evangelicals, like Piper, oppose both civil unions and gay marriage. Until recently, support for civil unions appeared to be just another political litmus test between the two factions, an intractable issue with clear lines of division.

Nevertheless, a new option for evangelicals has emerged. Just this month, Thomas Kidd, a religious historian at Baylor University and a Southern Baptist, wrote a post for Patheos entitled, “Why Churches Should Stop Performing Marriages.” Kidd argues that Americans should extend the separation of church and state to marriage. He writes:

State-defined but church-performed marriage is a relic of medieval Christendom, or the idea that the functions of the church and of the state closely overlap. Some Protestant reformers, including the early Puritan founders of New England, rejected this intermingling of church and state. They saw marriage as an exclusively civil rite, and they refused to perform church weddings at all.

Yet today, most evangelical ministers happily serve as civil functionaries when they recite the words, “By the power invested in me by the state of…”. Kidd believes that this intermingling encourages a “harmful confusion” and leads “many people who otherwise make no serious pretentions to faith [to] still think that their marriage should be consecrated in a church with pews and stained glass.” This incentivizes church marriages for nominally religious couples who want the legal and financial benefits of marriage without having to seriously commit to a church. Kidd believes that evangelicals should stop “fighting to make the government defend a biblical view of marriage.” It’s “a losing battle precisely because the government can’t play the role of the church.” Evangelical ministers should perform matrimonies and leave marriage to the civil authorities. Marriage has become a cheap imitation of the real thing, a mishmash of tax writeoffs and shallow religiosity.

It’s plausible that Kidd’s opinion is informed by his expertise in the history of evangelicals during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Revolutionary America and during the Early Republic, many evangelicals, like Baptist minister John Leland, supported constitutional disestablishment at both the federal and state levels. Leland was not fond of the pre-Revolutionary system of established churches  in which a denomination (predominately the Congregationalists and Episcopalians) received a religious monopoly from the state while dissenting denominations (mostly evangelical groups like the Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) were discouraged or even actively persecuted. Evangelicals allied themselves with humanist intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson and banned religious tests in the federal constitution and then defeated establishment state by state (Massachusetts was the last to topple in 1833).

Marriage, however, was not disestablished and, during the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries, the state attached a host of legal and financial privileges to the institution. Oddly enough, the collapse of the institution of marriage in the US came at the same time that marriage enjoyed its greatest level of formal government support. The state had instituted tax policies to try and encourage strong marriages but these incentives had little or even an adverse effect. State support may have vitiated rather than invigorated marriage.

Does that mean that removing state support for marriage might actually strengthen the institution of marriage? Although it may seem counterintuitive to modern day evangelicals,  removing state support for marriage might do just that. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, both prominent sociologists of religion, have argued extensively (see their brilliant book The Churching of America) that a religious free marketplace encourages vitality, innovation, and growth while state-protected religious monopolies cause stagnation, apathy, and decline. Indeed, contrary to the claims of Christian nationalists like David Barton, America has become steadily more rather than less religious over the past three hundred years. Finke and Stark argue that America’s exceptional religiosity among developed nations is a direct consequence of disestablishing religion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

By disestablishing marriage–severing the connection between state and church–might it also become a more meaningful and vital institution? Perhaps it’s still beyond the Pale of the evangelical imagination, but Kidd is just the latest in a long line of evangelicals to suggest an extension of the separation of church and state. The state can no more create healthy, biblical marriages than it can sustain healthy, biblical churches. Furthermore, if Finke and Stark’s “religious economies model” is any indication, disestablishing marriage may have a beneficial effect on the institution itself. People would no longer seek nominal marriages in order to gain legal and financial benefits. Matrimony would become a more exclusively religious institution and marriage a civil one.

Even more pragmatically, embracing the disestablishment of church and state in marriage could prevent a harmful anti-evangelical backlash in the future. If polling data is any indication, support for gay marriage has been steadily increasing and skews young and educated. If evangelicals continue to be the strongest opponents of gay marriage, they could one day find themselves in the shoes of their counterparts in Canada, where preachers are barred from speaking critically of homosexuality or gay marriage because ministers are representatives of both state and church.

John Leland’s 1776 warning of the consequences of a state-supported clergy remains timely:

“No man or set of Men are entitled to exclusive or separate Emoluments or Privileges from the Community but in consideration of Public Services.  If, therefore, the State provides a Support for Preachers of the Gospel, and they receive it in Consideration of their Services, they must certainly when they preach, act as Officers of the State and ought to be accountable thereto for their Conduct. . . . the Consequence of this is, that those whom the state employs in its Service, it has a right to regulate and dictate to; it may judge and determine who shall preach; when and where they shall preach.  The mutual obligations between Preachers and Societies they belong to . . . must evidently be weakened — Yea, farewell to the last Article of the Bill of Rights! [The fourth article of the Virginia Declaration of Rights adopted in 1776].  Farewel (sic) to “the free exercise of Religion!”

One of those questions is what is happening with the demography of world religions. The question how many people practice which religions and where, and how that’s changing, is probably the most important question for students of contemporary religion—and for practitioners of religion too. For world Christianity, a large and fascinating literature has been published in the past decade or so, books such as Lamin O. Sanneh’s Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity and Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West, Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity and The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South, Mark Noll’s The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects a Global Faith, Lian Xi’s Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China, the collection edited by Lamin Sanneh and Joel Carpenter titled The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World, and the 2001 edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia. Besides books, there is a new set of scholarly institutions for the study of world Christianity, such as Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity, book series at Oxford University Press and Baylor University Press, and initiatives within the Conference on Faith and History to connect scholars of Christianity within the United States and Latin America.

What’s the big deal? Here are some numbers: In 1950, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe or North America, but in 2005 a majority lived in the southern hemisphere. In 1900 Africa was home to 10 million Christians, but in 2000 it was home to 360 million Christians, who are now the continent’s religious majority. In 1900 there were 80 thousand Protestants in China; today there are 50 million Chinese Protestants and 17 million Chinese Catholics. Those changes are, for rapidity and magnitude, the most significant changes ever in the demography of any religion. In the estimation of Philip Jenkins, a leading scholar of this shift, “The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning.”

Over the next few weeks or months I plan to write a series of posts about digging into the demographic data on world religions. At Religion in America we’ve looked at quantitative studies of religion before, most notably in posts on declines in religion, the United States as a religious outlier, and on American denominations and income. What will make this series different is that I want to start from the beginning with raw data on religion from the Association of Religion Data Archives. (Not the very beginning, though, since others will have gathered and curated the data.) And I want to be explicit about what I’m learning both about quantitative methods such as demography and statistics and about digital humanities tools like R, SPSS, and maybe GIS. Finally, I want to produce original charts and graphs from ARDA data about religion in America and around the world. Each post will have a heavy methodological component (skip it if you want), but it will also have a historical point as well.

The next post will be about gathering the datasets and learning the analytical tools, with some data about worldwide religious adherence to whet your appetite for what’s to come.

— — — — — — —

* For the figures cited, see Lamin O. Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xx; Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4; Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Estimates of the number of Christians in Africa and China vary widely, but the numbers cited are sober, middle-range estimates; even lower-bound estimates are within the same order of magnitude. See also David B. Barrett, George Thomas Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). The quotation is from Jenkins, Next Christendom, 3.

Hindus are a logical outlier given the influx of Indians to US universities, especially with their disproportionate representation in the hard sciences. Christians and Jews follow the expected pattern, theologically liberal groups outperforming theologically conservative ones. The trend would have been starker if the author had included datapoints by theological self-identification (“evangelical,” “fundamentalist,” “conservative,” “orthodox,” “liberal,” etc…).

It’s after 6:00 p.m. in my time zone, and the rapture hasn’t come. So there is still time to read Stephen Prothero’s take Harold Camping’s recent prediction of the rapture.

Regarding signs of the times, the Public Religion Research Institute reports some difference in opinion between religious groups on whether natural disaster are a sign of the end times. A majority of Americans believe that “God is in control of everything that happens in the world.” But only 38% of all Americans believe that natural disasters are a sign from God, while 67% of white evangelicals believe that recent natural disasters are signs of the end times.

In other news:

The New York Times reports that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned a study of the clergy sex-abuse scandal. The report, prepared by criminologists at John Jay College, attributes the abuse not to celibacy requirements or to homosexual priests, but to the sexual confusion of the 1960s. The study has received widespread criticism. Stephen Colbert, a comedian but a serious Catholic, offers simple guidelines that should remove any clerical confusion.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Pitzer College in California is creating a department of secular studies, with an undergraduate major, headed by sociologist Phil Zuckerman.

Self-appointed historical expert David Barton made the news again by appearing on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. Yoni Appelbaum explains Barton’s hermenutics and idea of a “professoriate of all believers.” Paul Harvey explains Barton’s “ideological entrepreneurialism.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user futureatlas.com.

In this affordable paperback, published by Penguin Classics, Maffly-Kipp collects sacred texts written and published in the United States. These texts capture some of the religious diversity and creativity of American religion. The book contains a bewildering array of religious traditions: rational religion, the Latter-Day Saints, Shakers, Spiritualists, black Methodists, Christian Scientists, Seventh-day Adventists, Theosophists, feminists, traditions influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. Some of the books were unpublished or virtually unknown in their own day; others were massive bestsellers. The collection contains some well-known texts, helpfully extracted, such as Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon, Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible. It also contains texts very difficult to find elsewhere.

But for all the diversity, there are several important similarities across the text. All but one text is from the nineteenth century, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (1819–20) and ending with Levi H. Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1907)—a century or so of religious creativity expressed in sacred texts. But more important, almost all of these texts are an interpretation of Jesus of Nazareth. This collection of texts would work well paired with Richard Wightman Fox’s Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession or Stephen R. Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, to allow students to compare the cultural history of Jesus across religious traditions and over time.

The one limitation of the text is that it is a collection of scriptures written in America, not scriptures used in America. So the most religiously and culturally significant scriptures in America, such as the King James Bible, the Tanakh and Talmud, the Qu’ran, and the Vedas and Upanishads, are unrepresented. This is hardly a fault, since those texts are readily available elsewhere, but in designing a course one would have to take it into account. Then too, the collection can give little sense of the material culture of these texts. There are some intriguing hints: Thomas Jefferson cutting and pasting his revision of the Gospels; John Ballou Newbrough writting OAHSPE on “a novel device called a typewriter” as the angels guided his hands. Again, it would be unreasonable to expect this volume to tackle the material aspect of the texts. But an enterprising scholar, taking a cue from this collection and from Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, could do intriguing work on the material culture of sacred texts in the United States.

Full disclosure: At the AHA, Penguin gave me a free book-bag for buying more books than were in my budget, but no compensation for this blog post.