Enchanted Americana

Five Books That Have Transformed the Study of American Religions 1

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20168679
AutoresDaryn Henry (0000-0002-5904-840X, University of Virginia Charlottesville VA 22904 USA, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume51
Fascículo2
Páginas249-256
Data de publicação2025-06-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoReligious Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0319-485X • E-ISSN: 1748-0922
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/rsr.17876
OpenAlexW4413989264
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas24

SLAVE RELIGION: THE ‘INVISIBLE INSTITUTION’ IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH. By Albert J. Raboteau. Updated ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1978]. FUNDAMENTALISM AND AMERICAN CULTURE. By George M. Marsden. 3rd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2022 [1980, 2006]. THE MADONNA OF 115TH STREET: FAITH AND COMMUNITY IN ITALIAN HARLEM, 1880–1950. By Robert Orsi. 3rd ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010 [1985, 2002]. OPRAH: THE GOSPEL OF AN ICON. By Kathryn Lofton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. THE GODS OF INDIAN COUNTRY: RELIGION AND THE STRUGGLE FOR THE AMERICAN WEST. By Jennifer Graber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. The study of American Religions—even in the narrow sense2—has become a vast, sprawling, rugged scholarly terrain in terms of traditions and worldviews engaged, variety of sites of interpretation, richness of primary sources, differentiation of methodological approach, theoretical sophistication, epistemological self-reflection, and other academic disciplines consulted. This range emerges from the staggering multiplicity of American faiths themselves, a panoply of religious traditions that interact in dazzling ways with societal and cultural trends. Historically, America has also been a distinctive laboratory for religious experimentation, creation, assemblage, and adaptation. All the while, religion here illuminatingly interplays with the four cardinal American values—themselves ever in tension and, at best, only ever partially realized—of freedom, exemplarity, democracy, and capitalism. Pluralistic from the start, even when there was a widespread yet disputed Protestant background culture, American religious pluralization accelerated during the epochal immigration of the Gilded Age and especially following the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act in 1965, into our own time. This essay has selected five books published during this esteemed journal's history that have had enormous influence on the development of American Religions and that represent the continued enlargement, contestation, complexification, refinement, and celebration of the field. These five books by themselves, of course, do not even come close to encompassing the farraginous complexity of American Religions, but they can give some sense of the twists and turns of the field over the past fifty years and a modicum of the lessons learned. Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South (1978, 25th anniversary ed., 2004) This book represented a watershed in the study of Black religion and of American culture. Riding the 1970s wave of the new social history, Raboteau's book was able to depict the story of Black religion as it bubbled up and burst forth from the experience of regular Black people themselves, instead of something foisted on them from the outside or by elites. The book moved beyond hackneyed stereotypes of the Black Church and succeeded in presenting a vibrant story of Black religion as a complex, multifaceted process of transmission, reception, adaptation, blending, survival, resilience, comfort, inspiration, and resistance. The book did build on the classic studies of WEB Du Bois (2016); Souls of Black Folk [1903]; Carter Woodson's History of the Negro Church (1921); and E. Franklin Frazier's Negro Church in America (1964), but Raboteau surpassed the somewhat reductionist sociological frame of Du Bois and the somewhat astringent institutional frame of the latter two. After Raboteau, it became impossible for any serious scholar of America to avoid the basic twin realities that religious experience had been central to the Black experience and that the Black experience had been central to the American experience. In this work, Raboteau fused the approaches of his two Yale mentors, John Blassingame and Sydney Ahlstrom. From Blassingame, he inherited the fundamental project of telling the story of enslaved people from the Black perspective, not as told by White onlookers, paternalistic or otherwise. Pioneering an intricate methodology for how seemingly submerged voices could be reclaimed even from a skewed archival record, Raboteau showed how to honor the agency of those who did not construct what would become the documentary remnants and crystallizations of a historical experience—voices, Raboteau later wrote, who seemed to “speak directly” to him... “with the wisdom that comes from those who have endured suffering and triumphed over it.” In this regard, Slave Religion not only represented a compelling synthesis of secondary scholarship at its time, but also an attentive and creative reading of the documentary record that combined traditional primary sources with untapped folkloric accounts. Doing so, Raboteau was also able to reset previous historiographical debates (especially Herksovits-Frazier) about the continuity and discontinuity of African survivals in Black American religion, though Raboteau's own resolution of this relative proportionality has been one enduring area of critique. From Ahlstrom, Raboteau took the centrality of religion to the American story. Moving beyond the older denominational histories, Raboteau was able to reclaim a space for distinctively religious history from secularist metanarratives that could marginalize religion to mere epiphenomenon of omni-determinative materialist forces. Slave Religion demonstrated the interplay between deep questions of meaning, theology, and spirituality with public action and social ramifications. Raboteau's book was infused with something of its pathos and profundity by Raboteau's own life. While still in the womb, infamously, his own father was shot and killed by a White man. With no witnesses in Jim Crow Mississippi, the man never faced justice. His mother eventually traversed the Great Migration to Michigan and California. Reared in a family of legacy Black Catholics, his mother eventually remarried a lapsed Catholic priest who had left the priesthood at least partially due to entrenched racism. The stepfather began a rigorous education early in the long tradition of post-Reconstruction Black uplift. Raboteau studied at Catholic parochial schools throughout his early life and landed his first teaching job in theology, a disillusionment that eventually led him to historical study. Later in life, Raboteau discovered a renewal of his faith by entering communion with Eastern Orthodoxy. He felt the Orthodox shared with the Black Church the fundamental ethos in life with which he titled his memoir: a “sorrowful joy.” In later words, he talked about the haunting beauty of life lived in a “minor key,” as described in his poignant retrospective (2002). A cascade of books on Black religion overflowed from Raboteau's, forging multiple streams leading in new directions: among just a few important titles, Evelyn Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent (1993); William Montgomery's Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree (1993); Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood's Come Shouting to Zion (1998); Yvonne Chireau's Black Magic (2003); to the highly original reconfiguration of the survey, Sylvester Johnson's African-American Religions, 1500–2000 (2015), to a renewed denominational/institutional history, like Dennis Dickerson's The African Methodist Episcopal Church (2020); to the popularization of all this work in Henry Louis Gates' four-hour PBS special, The Black Church (2021). Much of this work attends to the intricacies and complexities of Black American religion beyond a singular institutional frame, enlarges its scope beyond Christianity, and challenges the racialist romanticization of Black spirituality, while Jeroen Dewulf's very recent and important Afro-Atlantic Catholics (2022) postulates a Catholicism enculturated to African Traditional Religions as underlying it all. Nevertheless, the continued study of the vibrancy of Black American religion continues to be inspired by Raboteau, even when challenged. George Marsden's, Fundamentalism & American Culture (3 eds. 1980, 2006, 2022) Few academic books have been more fortuitously timed relative to the obsolescing vicissitudes of American society than Marsden's Fundamentalism & American Culture. It first appeared in print right at the threshold of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential victory, when large swaths of journalists, political observers, and Americans were bamboozled about the resurgent phenomenon of the “Religious Right.” In that context, Marsden offered the American public the first sketches of an interpretation of Fundamentalist/Evangelical sensibilities and impulses against the presumed background culture of a mid-twentieth-century, Rawlsian centrist consensus. Here was a sophisticated and nuanced history of America's Evangelical Right that attempted to account, insofar as possible, for its internal allure and durability through a complex understanding of historical background and ideological culture. Since then, two subsequent editions have continued to trace the ebbs and flows of American conservative politico-culture, the second edition appearing after George W. Bush's 2004 re-election (2006), and a third following the cultural ravages of the First Trump era and the swirling epistemological vortex of the 2020 crises (2022). Perhaps a fourth edition might be in the workshop today?! The book traces the antecedents, emergences, assemblages, and contestations of a “militantly anti-modernist Protestantism” (2022, 2) from the theological and civilizational crisis of the Civil War up through the threshold of the Second World War (c. 1870–1940). Marsden did build on a few major previous studies, especially Ernest Sandeen's, The Roots of Fundamentalism (1970), and also the meticulous work of Timothy Smith (1980) and William McLoughlin (1978). But he also truly pioneered a depth of engagement with this sphere of the Evangelical tradition that, at the time, was unmatched at the scholarly level. A plethora of elements and their interplay, that contributed to the Fundamentalist ethos received detailed and textured engagement, including the cultural productions of the Holiness Movement; the Divine Healing Movement; the enduring epistemological structure of Common-Sense Realism; in addition to the role of premillennialism and the D. L. Moody network's brand of revivalism, which prior to Marsden had received the bulk of the attention. Marsden sought to unfold an “analysis of cultural influences on religious belief ...” (2022, 339) and how the response of an array and internally differentiated groups of conservative Protestants to what could be called the initial crises of “the modern” in American life led them to sacralize, then bemoan, repudiate, retreat from, and, finally, attempt to reclaim and commandeer mainstream American culture. This was a time during which America was transformed by a dramatic reconfiguration of space and time by technologies of scale and of the culture by gargantuan businesses, Black lynchings, First Nations warfare, immigration, urbanization, environmental degradation, political intractability, income disparity, escalating class conflict, and dramatically increasing social, cultural, and religious diversity, while the beckoning lure of consumer goods and their advertising enticements scaffolded it all, as America learned to cultivate the power of desire itself. Particularly disconcerting for the Evangelicals who fundamentalized were the ideological trends of historicism, pluralism, pragmatism, and new views of evolutionary science, all of which put pressure on traditional—or newly construed perceptions of traditional—Christian belief that Fundamentalists coalesced around in scorched earth cultural warfare that has not since ever entirely abated. Marsden was part of a cadre of scholars who redirected the impulses of social history toward a reclamation of religious experience at the grassroots level in contrast to the epistemological assumptions of a secularist normativity (inter al., Nathan Hatch, Democractization of American Christianity (1989); Mark Noll, America's God (2002)). Although, on one level, most of Marsden's textual/print sources tend to privilege elite, almost exclusively male, leaders within the context of the emerging Fundamentalist coalition, and Marsden himself acknowledged in subsequent editions that the dynamics of gender and race were impoverished in his analysis, could have been given “better balance” (2022, 299), and needed to be complemented, augmented, and challenged by further scholarship on Black Fundamentalism (Mathewes, Doctrine and Race, 2017), for example, or Fundamentalism and gender (Bendroth 1993). At the same time, most of his sources also operated in a populist register and were ones largely dismissed cavalierly by the scholars of Marsden's era. As such, the book foregrounded historical experience and sources that had receded to the background—and there might be methodological lessons in there for today. Marsden's work taught American Religions that even movements that seemed retrograde and uninformed by scholarly standards might have serious populist energy and internally cogent counter-narratives—true or false. And Marsden also showed how a study of American Religions could also lead the way relative to other historical methodologies in needed interpretive corrections, anticipating by a decade and a half Alan Brinkley's famous “The Problem of American essay that the of the American more From Marsden's as a one can a of the Protestant tradition American history from his to Fundamentalism to and the New to the of the American to the and in Religion & American Culture the of American Religions on and continues to enlargement, this something and a that, for most of its history as America's be left of any of the American religious & Robert The of and in (3 eds. Marsden's book continues to represent the enduring of in work the that not all American religion can be to Protestant This book about the about of about historical methodology in and cultural about historical about the past in to its in the about the of of religious experience in and in contrast to movements among and grassroots and the most of to the study of American Religions was on the that he had been in This was not to that previous scholarship had not other religious groups in American life, in intricate but even so, had to them with that with about the of that were by background assumptions to culture. of that religion the or that faith has to do with and with that there a of about and and that religion toward the or of that to an understanding that faiths in American life have ways of to which could the of and for American Religions more and By the of of and the celebration of the as the for his study of culture, and the of religion in the This was part of a more widespread toward with ed., Religion Religion and of of (1989); among This seemingly and there some religion even of to the assemblages, and that all into what a religious or experience and how In words, this religion as lived no than a for a spirituality as as of religious as the of a ...” all part of the of that and in which they the to edition of the book can be as a of field on the methodological and epistemological of American with and History and not only on the American but also for with and about the how and the of religion and religious All that not even the of this book itself. the was able to a multifaceted of life in from its to its elements of life and culture, and especially the all with a Catholic religious tradition to a religious in the to an and an for how of cultural, and life can interact with what “the was an for a of subsequent even ones that very in from Orsi. 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