This evening at my church a missionary preparing to go to Cambodia noted the distinction between Cambodia’s official religion, Buddhism, and the daily faith of Cambodians, animism. Animists believe in multitudinous spirits and demons which have the power to bless those who respect them and curse those who do not. Animists make sacrifices to appease the spirits’ wrath and request their protection. Buddhism may shape the religious rhetoric used by Cambodian animists, but by and large it is a veneer covering a deep rooted folk tradition.
It is easy to think of syncretic relationships between folk religion and established religions in the developing world (e.g. Santa Muerte (“Saint Death“) in Mexico and Vodou in Haiti). But can we locate folk religion in American religious history? The question is complicated by the nature of animism, which appears to be defined in contrast with an established religion (à la Cambodian Buddhism and Mexican Catholicism). Can syncretistic folk religion exist in a country without a legal religious establishment?
Historians have found plenty of evidence of animistic practices from a time and place when America did have an established church: Puritan New England. Richard Godbeer’s The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England examines the practice of folk magic in New England and the role it may have played in the Salem witchcraft trials. (Keith Thomas did the same for Old England in Religion and the Decline of Magic.)
It seems clear that religious historians studying colonial America need to develop an understanding of folk religion, magic, and animism. But should folk religion change the way that scholars of religion in the United States perceive lived religion? Can we find evidence of folk religion and animism in nineteenth and twentieth century American Protestantism and Catholicism?
By Paul Matzko
– 16 May 2010
Moreton, Bethany. To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
In To Serve God and Wal-Mart, Bethany Moreton looks at a series of big questions using the world’s biggest corporation as a lens. Her book is a cultural, not a business, history of Wal-Mart. Rather than chart Wal-Mart’s rise through its innovations in technology, logistics, and business practices, Moreton explains how Wal-Mart adopted and modified the culture in which it was founded. This approach permits analysis of a range of subjects, including gender in the workplace, the rise of a service economy, Christianity and free enterprise, business training in colleges and universities, and business promotion of free enterprise in the United States and abroad. This broad inquiry is motivated by two central questions: How did a discount retailer from the Ozarks become the world’s largest corporation, and what motivates the workers employed by Wal-Mart?
Continued…
By Lincoln Mullen
– 5 May 2010
When I got on the bus to Cambridge today, I was reading David Harrington Watt’s A Transforming Faith: Explorations of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism. Watt begins his book with an essay that is a close reading of a pamphlet titled “Have You Heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” Written in 1965 by Bill Bright, the founder of Campus Crusade, the pamphlet explains how to be converted. Bright’s four spiritual laws are these:
- “God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life.”
- “Man is sinful and separated from God.”
- “Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for man’s sin.”
- “We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.”
When I got off the bus coming back to Waltham, I accepted a pamphlet from a woman at the bus stop. The pamphlet was titled “How Do I Begin a Relationship with God?” Other than the name of the church—Waltham Haitian Church of the Nazarene—there was no author’s name. But sure enough, the main headings were the same as Bright’s four spiritual laws. While the rest of the text had been changed (but not improved), there was only one change in the laws themselves: number 2 had been reworded to be gender neutral.
By Lincoln Mullen
– 19 April 2010
Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was a New England minister and scholar who holds the record for the most imprints of an early American writer: he published something more than four hundred editions of his books and pamphlets. One book that Mather never got published, though, was his massive commentary on the Bible. Mather’s Biblia Americana exists in six folio manuscript volumes at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Now an editorial team led by Reiner Smolinski will be publishing the Biblia Americana in ten volumes. The first volume, covering Mather’s commentary on Genesis, will be published in August 2010 by Baker Academic. That one volume will be 1,400 pages, which gives you some idea of the project’s scope. The best source for more information is the project’s website.
Mather’s Biblia will be a tremendous scholarly resource for historians, theologians, and literary scholars when it’s published. Even better, there are plans for an online edition once the print volumes are out.
It’s worth noting too that Jonathan Edwards’s Blank Bible, which was a similar biblical commentary, is available online with introductory essays from the amazing Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, published by the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University.
Thanks to a Religion in America reader who sent me notes from a recent talk at Yale’s Beinecke Library about Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana.
By Lincoln Mullen
– 29 March 2010
Religion in America’s very own Paul Matzko has been accepted as a PhD student at Penn State, where he will continue his study of the history of religion. He will also be serving as a research assistant for Philip Jenkins and Thomas Kidd. Congratulations, Paul!
By Lincoln Mullen
– 11 March 2010
I recently wrote a blog post about Charles M. Sheldon’s 1897 bestseller, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? The focus of the post is on copyright law, not religious history, so I didn’t post it here. Readers of Religion in America may still be interested.
“What Would Jesus Do?”: A Parable About Copyright
By Lincoln Mullen
– 11 March 2010
Alfred O. Hero, American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank-and-File Opinion, 1937-1969 Durham, NC: Duke University, 1973. 552 pages. ISBN: 0822302535 Continued…
By Paul Matzko
– 6 March 2010
Religion and the Historical Profession
“Several scholars respond to the news that the proportion of historians who specialize in religion continues to climb, and to reflect on both the causes and the significance of of this distinct, and now confirmed, trend in historical studies.” The respondents are Jon Butler, David A. Hollinger, John Schmalzbauer, Jonathan Sheehan, and Grant Wacker.
By Religion in America
– 21 January 2010
Brodie, Fawn. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet. 2nd ed. New York: Knopf, 1971. 499 pages. ISBN: 0394469674.
Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. New York: Knopf, 2005. 740 pages. ISBN: 1400042704.
As part of a reading list to teach me about how biographies are written, I recently read two noted biographies about Joseph Smith. The two biographies were Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1945) and Richard Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005). Joseph Smith was, of course, a nineteenth century visionary, author or translator of the Book of Mormon, and the founder of the Latter Day Saints. Any historian who handles Smith must deal with the supernatural occurrences and claims that pervaded his life. The question I put to myself as I was reading was this: How should a historian treat supernatural? How should a historian write about alleged visions and miracles and prophecies?
Continued…
By Lincoln Mullen
– 12 January 2010
James Kurth, a retired political scientist from Swarthmore College, is perhaps best known for his variation on Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. In the early ’90s Huntington proposed that the end of the Cold War was the beginning of a global contest between people groups and nations that would be predicated upon cultural and religious cleavages. Huntington’s idea became de rigueur with the rise of global Islamic terrorism. But whereas Huntington’s clash was a matter for foreign policy, Kurth believed that the greatest crisis would surface in domestic affairs as a battle between liberal multiculturalism and the Judeo-Christian inflected Western tradition.
Continued…
By Paul Matzko
– 10 January 2010
