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Why Religion Is Hard For Historians (and How It Can Be Easier)

Part of: The Soapbox

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2019

Kathryn Lofton Open the ORCID record for Kathryn Lofton [Opens in a new window]
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Extract

History is a word for a certain kind of reasoning: reasoning about time, about human agency, and about material records that can provide information about humans as marked by time. For many scholars—not to mention many of those outside the academy—such reasoning is antithetical to the word religion. No matter how many books prove incontrovertibly that the authors of the Talmud engaged rigorously with Greek philosophy, or that Islamic philosophers contributed to the formation of modern scientific practice, or that evangelical readers engaged significantly with Biblical criticism, scholars of religion have not (and perhaps finally cannot) upend the common perception that religion is not a site of reasoned thought, but rather a space where reason is suspended. “Religion is too important to be left in the hands of people who believe in it. Finally, historians are coming to grips with this simple truth,” David A. Hollinger opined in response to reports about the flurry of scholarly interest in religion as an effect in the modern United States. It is a good quip, but one that portrays the historian as an axiomatically rationalist hero, swooping into medieval confusion in order to give clarifying accounts of the truth behind puzzling theologies, curious myths, and archaic rituals. Hollinger suggests that religious people or religious historians cannot do this work. Believers by his lights are not to be trusted with the reasoning history demands.

Keywords

ReligionBusiness and CapitalismPolitical CultureTheory and Historiography
Type
The Soapbox
Information
Modern American History , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 69 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am deeply grateful to Brooke Blower for her intelligent and incisive editorial engagement, not to mention offering a soapbox on which I could stand. During the five-year gestation of this piece, I received thoughtful feedback from Steve Andrews, Ed Linenthal, and Matthew Specter. Through the 2014 poll that informed my early thinking on these subjects, I corresponded with many colleagues. I thank the eighty-five respondents to that Google survey for their replies, and I thank Christopher Allison, Chip Callahan, Chris Cantwell, Matthew J. Cressler, Edward E. Curtis IV, Janine Giordano Drake, Kate Carté, Paul Harvey, Matthew Hedstrom, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, John Lardas Modern, Robert Orsi, Sally Promey, Leigh Schmidt, Chad Seales, Skip Stout, Daniel Vaca, and Tisa Wenger for their additional exchanges. Nancy Levene and Caleb Smith offered sentence-level readings that rescued me from much more than errors of grammar.

References

1 Hayes, Christine, What's Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives (Princeton, NJ, 2015)Google Scholar; Griffel, Frank, Al-Ghazali's Philosophical Theology (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Worthen, Molly, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (New York, 2013)Google Scholar.

2 The Editors, “Religion and the Historical Profession,” The Immanent Frame, Dec. 30, 2009, https://tif.ssrc.org/2009/12/30/religion-and-the-historical-profession/ (accessed Mar. 9, 2019). Hollinger has written searchingly on the subject of authorial religious identity. See Hollinger, David A., “The Wrong Question! Please Change The Subject!” Fides et Historia 43, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2011): 34–7Google Scholar; Hollinger, David A., After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton, NJ, 2013), 138–69, 190–8Google Scholar.

3 On the emergence of historical thinking alongside and within Enlightenment thought, including eighteenth-century critiques of religion, see Brewer, Daniel, The Enlightenment Past: Reconstructing Eighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge, UK, 2008)Google Scholar; Frei, Hans W., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT, 1980)Google Scholar; Sheehan, Jonathan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ, 2007)Google Scholar; and von Mücke, Dorothea E., The Practices of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public (New York, 2015)Google Scholar. These scholars demonstrate that the Enlightenment did not nullify religion; rather, they describe in different ways how religious texts and ideas survived and thrived in the context of emergent scholarly techniques of interpretation. Early modern European scholars—historians, theologians, Biblical critics, philosophers—did not abandon religion in favor of history; they used history as a tool, and as they did, those scholars intensified relations to religion.

4 The number of books published per year in U.S. history with religion as one of their main subjects has increased significantly over the last thirty years. To make a simple comparison: the number of books published in U.S. history on religion with a copyright of 2015 is four times the number published in 1995. Rather than provide the entirety of the available bibliography of 2015 publications, I refer readers to Paul Putz, “New Books Alert: 2015 Year in Preview, Part One (January–April),” Religion in American History, (Dec. 19, 2014), http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2014/12/new-books-alert-2015-year-in-preview.html (accessed Mar. 9, 2019); and Paul Putz, “New Books Alert: 2015 Year in Preview, Part Two (May–August),” Religion in American History (Apr. 20, 2015), http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2015/04/new-books-alert-2015-year-in-preview.html (accessed Mar. 9, 2019). On the recent popularity of religion as a theme of historical study, for instance, see Butler, Jon, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History,” Journal of American History 90, no. 4 (Mar. 2004): 1357–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jon Butler, “Religion and the Historical Profession,” The Immanent Frame (Dec. 30, 2009), http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2009/12/30/religion-and-the-historical-profession/ (accessed Mar. 9, 2019).

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12 For examples of historical scholarship specifically focused on the history of religious bigotry, see Davis, David Brion, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47, no. 2 (Sept. 1960): 205–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dinnerstein, Leonard, Antisemitism in America (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Fluhman, J. Spencer, “A Peculiar People”: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2013)Google Scholar; Franchot, Jenny, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley, CA, 1994)Google Scholar; and Mason, Patrick, The Mormon Menace: Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South (New York, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 To think through this particular problem, I work in conversation with many theorists of religion who have proved the consequential role of scholarly classification in everyday political governance and social life. The development of categories, and the pursuit of their effects on how we think, defines some of the programmatic work done under the auspices of the academic field called Religious studies. See Smith, Jonathan Z., Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar. For an assessment of some of the tensions in Smith's work, see Levene, Nancy K., “Courses and Canons in the Study of Religion (With Continual Reference to Jonathan Z. Smith),” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80, no. 4 (2012): 998–1024CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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15 Schultz and Harvey, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” 135.

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17 McGreevy, John T., “Religious History,” in American History Now, eds. Foner, Eric and McGirr, Lisa (Philadelphia, 2011), 242–260Google Scholar. McGreevy's point is valuable as a prod toward transnational scholarship (which is his intention) but also as it offers a moment to reflect on the nationalist tenor of the ascription American religion. Throughout the historiography of religion in the U.S., there has been an easy slippage between the mutually reinforcing processes of “evangelization” and “Americanization.” This suggests that the primary process by which an immigrant or outsider might become acculturated to the United States is through a process tinged with Christian theological and moral imperatives. Or, as R. Laurence Moore would argue, the process of becoming American is one in which potential converts distinguish themselves from the religious mainstream. See Moore, R. Laurence, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York, 1986)Google Scholar. Whichever the case may be, the consistency is the nation-state summarized by the category “American.” Although scholarship across the social sciences and humanities has identified the hermeneutic and political limits of the nation-state, this does not seem to have diminished its repeated usage by scholars to summarize a subject area (American religious history or American religion). Efforts to correct for this nationalism include field titles such as “religion in the Americas” and “U.S. religions.” On the problem of cultural nationalism, see Gans, Chaim, The Limits of Nationalism (Cambridge, UK, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the political economy of contemporary religious nationalisms, see Juergensmeyer, Mark, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley, CA, 1994)Google Scholar. On the status of the nation-state in contemporary social science, see Aydinli, Ersel, Globalization, Security, and the Nation State: Paradigms in Transition (Albany, NY, 2005)Google Scholar. On the importance of expanding our geographic boundaries in the study of religion, see Tweed, Thomas, “Expanding the Study of U.S. Religion: Reflections on the State of a Subfield,” Religion 40, no. 4 (2010): 250–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Tweed, Thomas, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, MA, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 McGreevy, “Religious History,” 243.

19 Butler, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith,” 1360.

20 On the problematic distinction between American Indians and non-natives, see Dees, Sarah, “An Equation of Language and Spirit: Comparative Philology and the Study of American Indian Religions,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 27, no. 3 (2015): 195–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 For a sample of their scholarly excellence, see Butler, Jon, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar; and McGreevy, John T., Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 For an instance of scholarship derived from such surveys, see Froese, Paul and Bader, Christopher, America's Four Gods: What We Say About God— & What That Says About Us (New York, 2010)Google Scholar. On the problem of the judicial standard of “sincerely held” belief established in U.S. v. Ballard (1944), see Charlie McCrary, Sincerely Held: American Religion, Secularism, and Belief (Chicago, forthcoming).

23 Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993), 27–54Google Scholar; Orsi, Robert A., “Belief,” Material Religion 7, no. 1 (Mar. 2011), 10–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Frankenberry, Nancy and Penner, Hans H., eds., Language, Truth, and Religious Belief: Studies in Twentieth-Century Theory and Method in Religion (New York, 1999)Google Scholar. This summary of the critical debates surrounding belief derives in part from a roundtable discussion held at Yale University in 2011 with Jason C. Bivins, Mayanthi Fernando, Russell McCutcheon, and Mary-Jane Rubenstein. See Lofton, Kathryn, “Introduction to the Yale Roundtable on Belief,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 24, no. 1 (2012): 51–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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27 Lopez, “Belief,” 33.

28 Csordas, Thomas, Language, Charisma, and Creativity: The Ritual Life of a Religious Movement (Berkeley, CA, 1997)Google Scholar; Hamdy, Sherine, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (Berkeley, CA, 2012)Google Scholar; Heo, Angie, The Political Lives of Saints: Christian-Muslim Mediation in Egypt (Berkeley, CA, 2018)Google Scholar: Mahmood, Saba, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roberts, Nathaniel, To Be Cared For: The Power of Conversion and Foreignness of Belonging in an Indian Slum (Berkeley, CA, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Petro's, AnthonyAfter the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see especially 18–52.

30 Weisenfeld, Judith, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York, 2017), 5Google Scholar.

31 For a critical appraisal of this uptick in history, see Enstad, Nan, “The ‘Sonorous Summons’ of the New History of Capitalism, Or, What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Economy?” Modern American History 2, no. 1 (Mar. 2019): 83–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an observant critique with special attention to the history of religion, see Engel, Katherine Carté, “Religion and the Economy: New Methods for an Old Problem,” Early American Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 482–514CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 On insurance companies and the emergence of a risk society, see Baker, Tom and Simon, Jonathan, eds., Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (Chicago, 2002)Google Scholar; Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (New York, 1992)Google Scholar; Bouk, Dan, How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (Chicago, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Zelizer, Viviana A. Rotman, Morals and Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (New York, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Levy, Jonathan, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Ibid., 73.

35 Ibid., 46.

36 Risk also would become something in which all economic actors would eventually—willingly or unwillingly—become complicit. Hacker, Jacob S., The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (New York, 2008)Google Scholar; Schiller, Robert J., The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton, NJ, 2004)Google Scholar.

37 On democratization and revivalism, see Hatch, Nathan O., Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT, 1989)Google Scholar; and Thomas, George M., Revivalism and Cultural Change: Christianity, Nation Building, and the Market in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar. For a more critical view of the role of authority in revival activity, see Mathews, Donald G., “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830: An Hypothesis,” American Quarterly 21, no. 1 (Spring 1969): 23–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Levy, Freaks of Fortune, 74.

39 Ibid., 17.

40 Ibid, 18.

41 Ibid.

42 On the mistake of understanding existential sovereignty as devoid of religion, see Khawaja, Noreen, The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre (Chicago, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Levy, Freaks of Fortune, 72.

44 Ibid., 80.

45 On the history of freemasons, see Brooks, Joanna, “Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy,” African American Review 34, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 197–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carnes, Mark C., Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, CT, 1991)Google Scholar; Clawson, Mary Ann, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, NJ, 2014)Google Scholar; Hackett, David G., That Religion in Which All Men Agree: Freemasonry in American Culture (Berkeley, CA, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Loretta J., Black Freemasonry and Middle-Class Realities (Columbia, MO, 1980)Google Scholar; and Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 16–64Google Scholar.

46 Hackett, That Religion in Which All Men Agree.

47 Levy, Freaks of Fortune, 203–4. Levy relies on Weber, Max's essay, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1904), in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1979), 302–322Google Scholar.

48 Durkheim, Émile, “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” in Bellah, Robert, ed., On Morality and Society (Chicago, 1973), 43–57Google Scholar, here 51; Durkheim, Émile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology (London, 1915), 419Google Scholar.

49 The most popular undergraduate text offering an account of such theories is Pals, Daniel, Nine Theories of Religion (New York, 2014)Google Scholar. A more inclusive introductory work on theories of religion is Meredith Minister and Bloesch, Sarah J., eds. Bloomsbury Reader in Cultural Approaches to the Study of Religion (London, 2018)Google Scholar.

50 Connolly, Peter, ed., Approaches to the Study of Religion (London, 2002)Google Scholar; Martin, Craig, A Critical Introduction to the Study of Religion (New York, 2014)Google Scholar; McCutcheon, Russell T., Studying Religion: An Introduction (New York, 2007)Google Scholar; Orsi, Robert A., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies (Cambridge UK, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rodrigues, Hillary and Harding, John S., Introduction to the Study of Religion (Abingdon, UK, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stausberg, Michael and Engler, Steven, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion (Abingdon, UK, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Mark, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 For a paradigmatic expression of this perspective, see Butler, Jon, “Theory and God in Gotham,” History and Theory 45, no. 4 (Dec. 2006): 47–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Kruse, Kevin M., One Nation under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York, 2015), 294Google Scholar.

53 This point is aptly illustrated by his Twitter personae, as described in Emma Pettit, “How Kevin Kruse Became History's Attack Dog,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (Dec. 16, 2018), https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Kevin-Kruse-Became/245321 (accessed Mar. 9, 2019).

54 Work that engages this approach has a strong (if unstated) debt to Michel Foucault's conceptualization of power. For a starting point, see Foucault, Michael, “The Subject and Power,” in Dreyfus, Hubert and Rabinow, Paul, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1983), 208–26Google Scholar.

55 Goetz, Rebecca Anne, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore, 2012), 120Google Scholar.

56 Irons, Charles F., The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), 102Google Scholar.

57 Besides the four volumes that received the most votes overall in that 2014 survey, these books received more than two votes as the most significant work from the last ten years: Albanese, Catherine L., A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT, 2007)Google Scholar; Bivins, Jason C., Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Curtis J., The Burden of Black Religion (New York, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fessenden, Culture and Redemption; Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America; and Wenger, We Have a Religion.

58 Orsi, Robert, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 12Google Scholar.

59 Sullivan, Winnifred Fallers, The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 8Google Scholar.

60 In recent years, another work, Johnson's, Sylvester A.African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge, UK, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has joined Orsi's and Sullivan's work as a major contribution to this field referred to as the cultural history of the study of religion.

61 Monroe's personal library, catalogued at the time of her death, suggests the latter, although the possession of books does not automatically convey the way in which they were read and possessed. To view the listing of the volumes in Monroe's estate, consult http://www.librarything.com/catalog/marilynmonroelibrary (accessed Mar. 9, 2019).

62 For an indicative act of scholarship, see Klein, Diane J., “Latino Masculinities Under the Microscope: Stereotyping and Counterstereotyping on Five Seasons of CSI: Miami,” FIU Law Review 3, no. 2 (2008): 395–421CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Havens, Timothy, “‘The Biggest Show in the World’: Race and the Global Popularity of The Cosby Show,” Media, Culture & Society 22, no. 4 (July 2000): 371–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matabane, Paula Whatley and Merritt, Bishetta D., “Media Use, Gender, and African American College Attendance: The Cosby Effect,” Howard Journal of Communications 25, no. 4 (2014): 452–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.