{"title":"RAC volume 31 issue 2 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086506","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RAC volume 31 issue 3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.19","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT What kind of world did early American men and women believe they were living in? Did God choose lottery winners or did intellectual, economic, and scientific insights engender more reasonable, skeptical, or secular formulations? Lotteries were a common and uncontroversial presence in early American economic and civic life, funding the construction of everything from bridges to churches. George Washington liked giving lottery tickets as gifts. Denmark Vesey purchased his freedom by winning a lottery. Although scholars have used the lottery and other forms of gambling to make important claims about class and culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lotteries hold rich, untapped insights for American religious history. By offering a specific causal experience to explain, lotteries prompted answers from their participants, known as “adventurers,” about why things happened. Relying on firsthand accounts of lottery winners, correspondence among the managers who oversaw lotteries, promotional schemes designed to entice participation, and newspaper coverage, this article demonstrates providence's ongoing centrality to causality in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America. Far from jettisoning an animated, meaningful universe with the aid of reason or in the face of debilitating doubt, lottery adventurers employed both longstanding and novel versions of providence to explain how the world worked and how God worked in the world.
{"title":"Lotteries and Overlapping Providences in Early America","authors":"T. Tomlin","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.10","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT What kind of world did early American men and women believe they were living in? Did God choose lottery winners or did intellectual, economic, and scientific insights engender more reasonable, skeptical, or secular formulations? Lotteries were a common and uncontroversial presence in early American economic and civic life, funding the construction of everything from bridges to churches. George Washington liked giving lottery tickets as gifts. Denmark Vesey purchased his freedom by winning a lottery. Although scholars have used the lottery and other forms of gambling to make important claims about class and culture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, lotteries hold rich, untapped insights for American religious history. By offering a specific causal experience to explain, lotteries prompted answers from their participants, known as “adventurers,” about why things happened. Relying on firsthand accounts of lottery winners, correspondence among the managers who oversaw lotteries, promotional schemes designed to entice participation, and newspaper coverage, this article demonstrates providence's ongoing centrality to causality in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America. Far from jettisoning an animated, meaningful universe with the aid of reason or in the face of debilitating doubt, lottery adventurers employed both longstanding and novel versions of providence to explain how the world worked and how God worked in the world.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT This article examines the first Mormon mission to Jamaica in January 1853. The missionaries, facing opposition from both black and white Jamaicans, returned to the United States after only a month on the island, having made only four converts. Latter-day Saints did not return to Jamaica for another 125 years. Drawing on the missionaries’ personal papers, church archives, local newspaper reports, and governmental records, I argue that the 1853 mission played a crucial role in shaping nineteenth-century Mormonism's racial theology, including the “temple and priesthood ban” that restricted priesthood ordination and temple worship for black men and women. While historians have rightly noted the role twentieth-century missions to regions of the African Diaspora played in ending the ban, studies of the racial restriction's early scope have been discussed in almost exclusively American contexts. The mission to Jamaica, precisely because of its failure, helped shape the ban's implementation and theological justifications. Failing to make any inroads, the elders concluded that both Jamaica and its inhabitants were cursed and not worthy of the missionaries’ time, which anticipated later decisions to prioritize preaching to whites and to scale back and ultimately abandon efforts to proselytize people of African descent.
{"title":"“A verry poor place for our doctrine”: Religion and Race in the 1853 Mormon Mission to Jamaica","authors":"C. Jones","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.9","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article examines the first Mormon mission to Jamaica in January 1853. The missionaries, facing opposition from both black and white Jamaicans, returned to the United States after only a month on the island, having made only four converts. Latter-day Saints did not return to Jamaica for another 125 years. Drawing on the missionaries’ personal papers, church archives, local newspaper reports, and governmental records, I argue that the 1853 mission played a crucial role in shaping nineteenth-century Mormonism's racial theology, including the “temple and priesthood ban” that restricted priesthood ordination and temple worship for black men and women. While historians have rightly noted the role twentieth-century missions to regions of the African Diaspora played in ending the ban, studies of the racial restriction's early scope have been discussed in almost exclusively American contexts. The mission to Jamaica, precisely because of its failure, helped shape the ban's implementation and theological justifications. Failing to make any inroads, the elders concluded that both Jamaica and its inhabitants were cursed and not worthy of the missionaries’ time, which anticipated later decisions to prioritize preaching to whites and to scale back and ultimately abandon efforts to proselytize people of African descent.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57087295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT This essay explores how some Americans came to view the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and, more broadly, ecumenical mainline Protestantism as a threat to the national security interests of the United States. By focusing on the efforts of various elements in the federal bureaucracy—including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Chemical Warfare Service, and Military Intelligence—and the work of average Americans to investigate the FCC, the essay examines how techniques of surveillance and information management helped shape the way Americans came to understand religion in the twentieth century. The essay develops three interconnected themes: first, the rise of America's national security surveillance establishment in the United States after World War I; second, the development of new methods of information management and visualization in corporate and state bureaucracies; and, third, the rise of voluntary, private surveillance in the wake of World War I. Through these three themes, the essay highlights how a network of federal bureaucrats, business leaders, and average citizens used graphs, indexes, and files to interpret mainline, ecumenical Christianity as a threat to domestic security in the United States. Ultimately, the project suggests that scholarly efforts to assess fissures in U.S. Protestantism have focused too much on controversies over belief and theology—especially those related to evolutionary theory, eschatology, and scriptural inerrancy—and paid far too little attention to the emerging bureaucratic systems of state and corporate surveillance that helped to document, visualize, and disseminate these accusations in the first place.
{"title":"Charts, Indexes, and Files: Surveillance, Information Management, and the Visualization of Subversion in Mainline Protestantism","authors":"M. McVicar","doi":"10.1017/rac.2020.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2020.13","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay explores how some Americans came to view the Federal Council of Churches (FCC) and, more broadly, ecumenical mainline Protestantism as a threat to the national security interests of the United States. By focusing on the efforts of various elements in the federal bureaucracy—including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Chemical Warfare Service, and Military Intelligence—and the work of average Americans to investigate the FCC, the essay examines how techniques of surveillance and information management helped shape the way Americans came to understand religion in the twentieth century. The essay develops three interconnected themes: first, the rise of America's national security surveillance establishment in the United States after World War I; second, the development of new methods of information management and visualization in corporate and state bureaucracies; and, third, the rise of voluntary, private surveillance in the wake of World War I. Through these three themes, the essay highlights how a network of federal bureaucrats, business leaders, and average citizens used graphs, indexes, and files to interpret mainline, ecumenical Christianity as a threat to domestic security in the United States. Ultimately, the project suggests that scholarly efforts to assess fissures in U.S. Protestantism have focused too much on controversies over belief and theology—especially those related to evolutionary theory, eschatology, and scriptural inerrancy—and paid far too little attention to the emerging bureaucratic systems of state and corporate surveillance that helped to document, visualize, and disseminate these accusations in the first place.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2020.13","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49159669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rebecca Barrett-Fox, Brandon L. Bayne, Valerie C. Cooper, G. Espinosa
Higher education has experienced pandemics and economic downturns over its long history. Recent events have invited comparisons to small pox scares, worldwide flu epidemics, and other moments of fear for student, faculty, and staff health. Campus leaders are nervously watching the bottom line while students and parents worry and contemplate different modes of learning, deciding whether they want to buy what colleges and universities can offer. Faculty, meanwhile, forged new sorts of relationships with their students during spring semester 2020 and wonder about how this environment might continue going forward. Among many in higher education, there is a sense that something has forever changed. For over a decade, we have talked about the differences between face-to-face and remote classes, debating their relative pedagogical and financial merits. With recent events blurring all forms of instruction into virtual classrooms and online assignments, Facebook pages and websites sprung up for faculty to share ideas, teaching modules, and assignments. Social distancing has, ironically, added a new appreciation for the larger learning community, reminding us of the value of quality online materials and revealing again that good teaching is as collaborative as good research. Having learned new things about teaching and learning, how will this experience be built into our courses going forward? In other words, how has the pandemic affected how we will teach in the future? What has forever changed?
{"title":"How the Coronavirus Pandemic Will Change Our Future Teaching","authors":"Rebecca Barrett-Fox, Brandon L. Bayne, Valerie C. Cooper, G. Espinosa","doi":"10.1017/rac.2020.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2020.10","url":null,"abstract":"Higher education has experienced pandemics and economic downturns over its long history. Recent events have invited comparisons to small pox scares, worldwide flu epidemics, and other moments of fear for student, faculty, and staff health. Campus leaders are nervously watching the bottom line while students and parents worry and contemplate different modes of learning, deciding whether they want to buy what colleges and universities can offer. Faculty, meanwhile, forged new sorts of relationships with their students during spring semester 2020 and wonder about how this environment might continue going forward. Among many in higher education, there is a sense that something has forever changed. For over a decade, we have talked about the differences between face-to-face and remote classes, debating their relative pedagogical and financial merits. With recent events blurring all forms of instruction into virtual classrooms and online assignments, Facebook pages and websites sprung up for faculty to share ideas, teaching modules, and assignments. Social distancing has, ironically, added a new appreciation for the larger learning community, reminding us of the value of quality online materials and revealing again that good teaching is as collaborative as good research. Having learned new things about teaching and learning, how will this experience be built into our courses going forward? In other words, how has the pandemic affected how we will teach in the future? What has forever changed?","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2020.10","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RAC volume 30 issue 2 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2020.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2020.12","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2020.12","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57085925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT This article begins with a simple question: How did white evangelicals respond to the civil rights movement? Traditional answers are overwhelmingly political. As the story goes, white evangelicals became Republicans. In contrast, this article finds racial meaning in the places white evangelicals, themselves, insisted were most important: their churches. The task of evangelization did not stop for a racial revolution. What white evangelicals did with race as they tried to grow their churches is the subject of this article. Using the archives of the leading evangelical church growth theorists, this article traces the emergence and transformation of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). It shows how evangelistic strategies created in caste-conscious India in the 1930s came to be deployed in American metropolitan areas decades later. After first resisting efforts to bring these missionary approaches to the United States, CGM founder Donald McGavran embraced their use in the wake of the civil rights movement. During the 1970s, the CGM defined white Americans as “a people” akin to castes or tribes in the Global South. Drawing on the revival of white ethnic identities in American culture, church growth leaders imagined whiteness as pluralism rather than hierarchy. Embracing a culture of consumption, they sought to sell an appealing brand of evangelicalism to the white American middle class. The CGM story illuminates the transnational movement of people and ideas in evangelicalism, the often-creative tension between evangelical practices and American culture, and the ways in which racism inflected white evangelicals’ most basic theological commitments.
{"title":"White Evangelicals as a “People”: The Church Growth Movement from India to the United States","authors":"Jesse Curtis","doi":"10.1017/rac.2020.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2020.2","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article begins with a simple question: How did white evangelicals respond to the civil rights movement? Traditional answers are overwhelmingly political. As the story goes, white evangelicals became Republicans. In contrast, this article finds racial meaning in the places white evangelicals, themselves, insisted were most important: their churches. The task of evangelization did not stop for a racial revolution. What white evangelicals did with race as they tried to grow their churches is the subject of this article. Using the archives of the leading evangelical church growth theorists, this article traces the emergence and transformation of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). It shows how evangelistic strategies created in caste-conscious India in the 1930s came to be deployed in American metropolitan areas decades later. After first resisting efforts to bring these missionary approaches to the United States, CGM founder Donald McGavran embraced their use in the wake of the civil rights movement. During the 1970s, the CGM defined white Americans as “a people” akin to castes or tribes in the Global South. Drawing on the revival of white ethnic identities in American culture, church growth leaders imagined whiteness as pluralism rather than hierarchy. Embracing a culture of consumption, they sought to sell an appealing brand of evangelicalism to the white American middle class. The CGM story illuminates the transnational movement of people and ideas in evangelicalism, the often-creative tension between evangelical practices and American culture, and the ways in which racism inflected white evangelicals’ most basic theological commitments.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2020.2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086187","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"RAC volume 30 issue 3 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/rac.2021.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2021.2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT When Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther Party Minister of Information, returned to the United States in November 1975, he claimed to have surrendered his life to Christ and conservatism. Utilizing the Eldridge Cleaver Papers housed at the Bancroft Library, this article recounts the transformation of Eldridge Cleaver from radical Black Panther to born-again Christian and anticommunist crusader. Cleaver's story of transformation demonstrates the pervasive power of the twentieth-century crusade against communism and the manner in which American conservatism created distinct categories of race that were written on the mind, body, religious belief, and practice of Eldridge Cleaver. This article highlights how conservatives enacted a program of racial respectability, remaking Eldridge in the image of conservative, capitalist, Christian whiteness. Cleaver was stripped of his “blackness,” a conservative effort to distance him from the “volatile black figures” of the mid-twentieth century. If Cleaver held on to any vestige of his old life—his leather jacket, “regional euphemisms,” liberationist ideology, and even his Afro hairstyle—his new life would be useless to conservatives. This article illustrates how Cleaver participated in a global crusade that sought to maintain and extend the unifying commitments of twentieth-century religious conservatism. Those commitments included (1) the commercial, economic, and political interests that produced, funded, and policed conservatism; (2) traditional white, middle-class family values; and (3) political, racial, gendered, and religious understandings of the citizen subject. Eldridge Cleaver and his anticommunist crusade are windows into the distinct categories of religion, politics, and race—Christianity, conservatism, and white respectability—constructed and enacted by American conservatives in the twentieth century.
{"title":"Born Again Black Panther: Race, Christian Conservatism, and the Remaking of Eldridge Cleaver","authors":"D. Wells","doi":"10.1017/rac.2020.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2020.15","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT When Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther Party Minister of Information, returned to the United States in November 1975, he claimed to have surrendered his life to Christ and conservatism. Utilizing the Eldridge Cleaver Papers housed at the Bancroft Library, this article recounts the transformation of Eldridge Cleaver from radical Black Panther to born-again Christian and anticommunist crusader. Cleaver's story of transformation demonstrates the pervasive power of the twentieth-century crusade against communism and the manner in which American conservatism created distinct categories of race that were written on the mind, body, religious belief, and practice of Eldridge Cleaver. This article highlights how conservatives enacted a program of racial respectability, remaking Eldridge in the image of conservative, capitalist, Christian whiteness. Cleaver was stripped of his “blackness,” a conservative effort to distance him from the “volatile black figures” of the mid-twentieth century. If Cleaver held on to any vestige of his old life—his leather jacket, “regional euphemisms,” liberationist ideology, and even his Afro hairstyle—his new life would be useless to conservatives. This article illustrates how Cleaver participated in a global crusade that sought to maintain and extend the unifying commitments of twentieth-century religious conservatism. Those commitments included (1) the commercial, economic, and political interests that produced, funded, and policed conservatism; (2) traditional white, middle-class family values; and (3) political, racial, gendered, and religious understandings of the citizen subject. Eldridge Cleaver and his anticommunist crusade are windows into the distinct categories of religion, politics, and race—Christianity, conservatism, and white respectability—constructed and enacted by American conservatives in the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":42977,"journal":{"name":"RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE-A JOURNAL OF INTERPRETATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/rac.2020.15","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"57086107","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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