The large scale contours of American religion

In the midst of this first run at offering Religion 260, American Religion (non-seminar) I found my notes from the last time I offered something similar, spring 1984 at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. (That was just months after I'd passed my comprehensive doctoral exams.)  Immediately I noticed that in that earlier version of the course I was much more concerned, perhaps preoccupied, with insuring that my students absorbed many, many discreet pieces of information about American religious groups and their development. This time I'm much more interested in the patterns.  Or, one might say I'm more interested in plotting the contours of the landscape rather than focused on the individual data points.

Of course one can not plot the contours without the data points.  Perhaps this is a bit like the old discussion about trees and forests.  I'm now more interested in my students having a sense of the forest and being able to find their way among the trees.

Why?  I have a hunch that teaching religion 121, our introductory course in reading the Bible, and American Conservations has a great deal to do with my shift from pieces to patterns.   I'm relying less on students finding the material intrinsically interesting and am more concerned with how understanding what has been might help us understand what is.

And, I suspect that our current concern with religious pluralism raises questions about the past that push us toward the forest rather than the trees.   As we move through the 'text book' and more focused scholarship I find myself noticing connections and comparisons that had never occurred to me before and considering lines of questions that are novel to me.  For example, how do various groups and individuals expect to gain access to the sacred?  Can we trace developments and chart various options?  There is the classic Protestant expectation that this comes through reading the Bible, but also Deist reliance on reason not harnessed to scripture.  And how to compare the  state of revivalist ecstasy to the ritually indued trance of Mother Ann's work or the Ghost Dance?

Nothing better than new ideas! 

California Missions

In anticipation of a possible visit to several of the northern California missions I'm reading up.  On my shelf I had some old stuff, purchased years ago when I went to San Juan Capistrano; this was intended for the tourist trade and presented a rather rosy picture along with the some old photographs.  There is however more recent scholarship, such as Steven W. Hackel's Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis, that I'm finding informative and fascinating.

Converting California by James Sandos offers this useful characterization of earlier portrayals as either Christocentric Triumphalism or Christophobic Nihilism.  He attempts to steer a third course that gives credibility to both the Franciscans and the people they encountered.  This approach parallels recent developments in mission history more globally and will be useful to my teaching about missions and Christianity in the India those explorers were looking for.   Of particular interest for my courses on Christianity is his highlighting the differing meanings members of these two groups attributed to baptism and the distortions that arise from assumptions that baptism was a sign of total conversion. (I also learned quite a lot about venereal disease and the development of musical notation.)

I'm also interested in the function of the missions in the mythos of California.  Sandos points out that once California became part of the United States the history of the missions provided a past for the region, a past that was neither British nor Protestant but that nonetheless could be told as a romantic encounter between Europeans and Native People.  Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, Ramona, did this work.  So too efforts to restore the ruins of the missions in the early 20th century, sometimes from practically nothing, provided Californians and other Americans with cultural destinations akin to other historical sites.   Hence that Sunset Magazine book I bought at San Juan Capistrano and what I suppose that I would have learned about the missions if I'd been an elementary school student in California in the early 1960s. 

Are these also sacred sites either in some universal sense or for American public/civil religion?  Along with the effort to canonize Juniperro Serra, the founder of the first nine missions, that is a provocative issue but one I'm fascinated by as I ruminate on what would constitute a sacred site in the USA.  Certainly these are locations were Franciscans intended to do holy work and there are spaces there designated for religious ritual.  The question, however, is a larger one about how these places are regarded a century-and-a-half after their secularization.  Are they analogous to battlefields?  Certainly some sort of battle was done.  Are they places that enshrine our national values?  Which ones?  Are they places where we are still brought face-to-face with the transcendent or with the realities of our own humanity which is both noble and limited?  Even harder to answer but well worth contemplating if we are to have a way of thinking of our past (and our future) that is neither triumphalist nor nihilistic.  

It is who I am...Catholic and gay

Christine Quinn, NYC council woman and likely mayoral candidate on Weekend Edition.

Insightful reflections on the value of government officials working together instead of as opponents, but to me more interesting for Quinn's comments about the nature of faith.  Asked if she considers leaving the Catholic church since it does not approve of her sexual identity, she replies with something like this: You can't leave your faith, it is who you are.  Moreover she states simply that when she wakes up in the morning she is Catholic and gay.  Her tone suggests that this is the fact, not a problem, and that others who might regard it as a problem should just get over their problem.  Perhaps there is a bit of lurking essentialism in her comments and yet there is also something very appealing about her recognition that faith is something deep and shaping, not merely a choice one makes as if buying a car or ordering dinner.

Religion in the USA

I'm working on my syllabus for Religion 260: American Religion.  To that end I've been reading, along with other things, the Columbia Guide to Religion in American History.  I concur with one reviewer's judgment that while one generally does not expect a reference work to be summer reading, several of the chapters in this volume are compelling and fascinating enough to qualify.  The chapter by Andrew M. Manis on "Civil Religion and National Identity" is among those. I learned lots and will learn more from the book and from works included in each chapter's bibliography.

Coming to the book immediately after three days in a workshop on teaching writing, I admired the writing in several of the chapters and will use examples to illustrate a clear, informative, engaging introduction and generally admirable writing.  For example, Mark Noll begins his chapter on theology this way.

"Americans have changed the world much more by action than by thought.  In the religious realm, it is the same."

Freedom {preposition} religion

This from Bill Moyers on the recent episode regarding contraception, insurance, and Roman Catholic teaching and practice is a fine analysis that hangs on which preposition is inserted between the words freedom and religion.  The liveliness of American religion is stimulated in large degree by the tense circumstances generated by inserting both of and from.  The first amendment promise of freedom of religion (free exercise) is linked with the promise of freedom from (non-establishment).  While the initial scope of this was limited, over the decades we've expanded from the specific legal guarantees to more general cultural expectations that require frequent negotiation.  The freedom to exercise (to believe and practice) one's own religion, does depend on freedom from coercion that forces one to subscribe to the beliefs and practices of another religion.  While this may seem, to many citizens, obvious in the realm of governmental authority, the rub comes in other arenas, most specifically in "faith-based" institutions such as Roman Catholic hospitals.  What Moyers points out about Obama's recent efforts is that the president is offering a plan that preserves the rights of the individual while not forcing the institution to compromise its policies.  Would that all similar conflicts about for/from could be so neatly addressed.

Freedom of WHAT religion?

A news story LINK about the interplay of various freedoms and rights in a North Carolina school.  This time the issue is not textbooks, but rather a dress code.  That code has been interpreted to prohibit a student from wearing her nose ring (really a stud, not a ring) to school, but the student and her mother contend that the nose ring should be allowed as an instance of freedom of religion.  Those who heard Prof. Schillinger on minority and majority views of freedom of religion, at the Constitution Day panel, will now hear echoes of his remarks.  Is this practice, body piercing, a form of religious expression?  Who has authority to decide? At the center of the case is a question about the equal treatment of all religions.

In view of our discussion today in Section A, those students may be interested in the notion of hybrid rights described in this news article.  While noting that freedom of expression may be limited in certain settings, the student and her mom argue, with the ACLU, that freedom of religion trumps those limits.  The legitimate limits may be analogous to the locational barrier we discussed in class.

From Yahoo News.

Fighting Freedoms

Today's discussion of Amy Tan's essay, "To Complain is American," and the American Radio Works documentary, "Great Textbook War,"  pushed me to think more about competing freedoms.  This is not quite the same thing as Foner's notion that freedom is a contested concept.  Rather, I have in mind situations in which two people's, or groups of people's, freedoms seem to compete or even when one person experiences one freedom limiting another.

In the West Virginia textbook "war" some parents wanted a sort of moral and personal freedom to follow their own beliefs and to decide what their children would learn without an coercion from the school board.  At the same time, public education in the USA is intended to prepare students for their responsibilities as citizens who have political freedom.  Thus the civic community has a stake in those students' learning.

Matt's introduction of the federally mandated observance of "Constitution Day," elicited some of this same dynamic.  Who said, "If the government pays, the government can make regulations?"  In order to have access to resources (economic freedom?), the institution, its employees and students submit to a bit of coercion about our programs.

This raises the related, crucial question: What is freedom for?  How is it to be used?  Tan's essay highlights these questions as she wrestles with the American right to speech, even to complain, the writer's responsibility to speak, and the likely consequences of doing so.  She hints at the distinction we have heard in the news about the proposed mosque/community center in Manhattan.  While the community has a right to build there, that right does not necessarily make doing so a good idea.