Religion, Race, and the Right

Here is Mark Noll's interesting review of my book Freedom's Coming, from the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. He provides an excellent overview of the book, says some kind words, and ends with an interesting critique and discussion.

He begins:

Paul Harvey's well-researched book provides a welcome overview of a complex
subject that has been as important for national public life as for American
religious history. Continuity in the volume is maintained by Harvey's focus on

"theological racism," "racial interchange," and "Christian interracialism" in

the South from the time of the Civil War to the early twenty-first century. At
one level, Harvey offers a relatively clear history of causes and effects, with
widespread "theological racism" being undercut by "racial interchange and
leading on to "Christian interracialism." Yet most of the book does not dwell on
this large-scale narrative; rather, it features a great deal of insightful local
history, many telling personal vignettes, careful attention to institutional

Crocodile Tears for Military History, and Religious History

All the whining lately about the state of military history gets an excellent response from Mark Grimsley. It reminds me a bit of occasional whining I still hear -- more from the public than the profession -- about how religious history has somehow not been given its due in the academy, or how scholars of faith are hounded or driven out. Time for the p.c. conservatives to get over themselves. If you apply for 3 or 4 academic jobs in a year and don't get one, for god's sake, join the crowd. By this standard, everyone in every field in American history would feel victimized.

Meanwhile, Catherine Brekus's introductory essay ("Searching for Women in Narratives of American Religious History") to the new anthology The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past is a must read for scholars in American religious history. She names names and takes the historiography to task--women's history for not understanding religion, and religious history for continuing to marginalize women. The essays in the volume are strong.

Really American Religious History A-Z

I'm currently co-editing (along with Ed Blum and bibliographic editor Randall Stephens) the Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, which will feature, among other good things, about twenty-one essays by top scholars in the field on all manner of topics, from "Colonial Encounters" to "Religion and Politics" to "Islam in America."

One of the appendices for the book will have a glossary -- American religious history A-Z. So, what do you think are some really important but often overlooked terms -- people, events, movements, whatever -- that should go in such a glossary. Send me some suggestions, and I'll give you the grand prize -- a tour of Focus on the Family headquarters if/when you visit Colorado Springs.

P.S.: Somebody really needs to do a good, solid, non-polemical academic history of Focus on the Family -- anybody doing any such thing out there?

Oath for Experts Revisited

I was just reminded by Maarja Krustein of a concept I was messing around a while back, of getting people together to draft a new “oath for experts”. I had great ambitions a few years back about this idea, about trying to renovate what an expert ought to act like, to describe a shared professional ethic for experts that would help us explain what our value still might be in a crowdsourced, neoliberal moment. The Hippocratic Oath is at least one of the reasons why many people still trust the professionalism of doctors (and are so pointedly scandalized when it is unambiguously violated).

We live in a moment where increasingly many people either believe they can get “good enough” expertise from crowdsourced knowledge online or where experts are all for sale to the highest bidder or will narrowly conform their expertise to fit the needs of a particular ideology or belief system.

I think in both cases these assumptions are still more untrue than true. Genuine experts, people who have spent a lifetime studying particular issues or questions, still know a great deal of value that cannot be generated by crowdsourced systems–in fact, most crowdsourcing consists of locating and highlighting such expertise rather than spontaneously generating a comparable form of knowledge in response to any query. I still think a great many experts, academic and otherwise, remain committed to providing a fair, judicious accounting of what they know even when that knowledge is discomforting to their own political or economic interests.

Mind, you, crowdsourcing and other forms of networked knowledge are nevertheless immensely valuable, and sometimes a major improvement over the slow, expensive or fragile delivery of authoritative knowledge that experts in the past could provide. Constructing accessible sources of everyday reference in the pre-Internet world was a difficult, laborious process.

It’s also undoubtedly true that there are experts who sell their services in a crass way, without much regard for the craft of research or study, to whomever is willing to pay. But this is why something like an oath is necessary, and why I think everyone who depends upon being viewed as a legitimate expert has a practical reason to join a large-scale professional alliance designed to reinvigorate the legitimacy of expertise. This is why professionalization happened during the 20th Century, as groups of experts who shared a common training and craft tried to delegitimate unscrupulous, predatory or dangerous forms of pseudo-expertise and insist on rigorous forms of licensing. I don’t think you can ever create a licensing system for something as broad as expertise, but I do think you could expect a common ethic.

The last time I tried to put forward one plank of a plausible oath, I made the mistake of picking an example that created more heat than light. I might end up doing that again, perhaps by underestimating just how many meal tickets this proposed oath might cancel. But let’s try a few items that I personally would be glad to pledge, in the simplest and most direct form that I can think of:

1) An expert should continuously disclose all organizations, groups and companies to whom they have provided direct advice or counsel, regardless of whether the provision of this advice was compensated or freely given. All experts should maintain a permanent, public transcript of such disclosures.

2) An expert should publically disclose all income received from providing expert advice to clients other than their main employer. All experts should insist that their main employer (university, think tank, political action committee, research institute) disclose its major sources of funding as well. The public should always know whether an expert is paid significantly by an organization, committee, company or group that directly benefits from that person’s expert knowledge.

3) Any expert providing testimony at a criminal or civil trial should do so for free. No expert should be provided compensation directly or indirectly for providing expert testimony. Any expert who serves as a paid consultant for a plaintiff or a defendant should not provide expert witness at a trial involving that client.

4) All experts should disclose findings, information or knowledge that contradicts or challenge their own previous conclusions or interpretation when that information becomes known to them in the course of their own research or analysis. Much as newspapers are expected to publish corrections, experts should be prepared to do the same.

Do You Know Young Scholars Syllabi ?

There are an awful lot of great American religious history syllabi available at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, from the various "classes" of the Young Scholars in American Religion program. Here, for example, are the syllabi from the 1997-99 class. Great teaching resources. I'm putting a more complete list under the "Teaching Resources and Syllabi" roll on the left side of the blog (scroll down). Please send useful links that you use in teaching.

Oh My God !! Jesus in Red, White, and Black

One of my more fun classes ever -- in spite of it being a night class, 7:15 - 9:50 p.m. -- "Jesus in Red, White, and Black." Partly it was inspired and taking off from Stephen Prothero's American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon" -- which ex-blogger Mode for Caleb gives and extended and thoughtful response to here. Our class covered everything from the Jesuit Relations to Du Bois to Vine DeLoria. We watched The Apostle and discussed R. Marie Griffith's excellent review of the film. The student blogs and journals from this class were terrific.

Also recommended: Mark Noll's lectures at Princeton University last fall, on the subject "Race, Religion, and American Politics: From Nat Turner to George W. Bush" -- podcasts and web downloads are available if you're on a high speed computer.

What Can You Do with Denominational History? By Lincoln Mullen

Lincoln Mullen

I recently read Thomas Kidd and Barry Hankins's Baptists in America: A History (2015). I must have liked it, since my father, for many years a Baptist pastor, says that I've tried to send him copies more than once. This book deserves a proper review, perhaps paired with David Bebbington's Baptists Through the Centuries: A History of a Global People (2010). But for today I want to use the book to think through what a denominational history can accomplish. Here are a few thoughts about the particular set of things the book is able to accomplish because it is a denominational history.

1. A denominational history can cross the color line.

This book is not filled with "Baptists" and "black Baptists," where unmarked Baptists can be assumed to be white. Rather, Kidd and Hankins are careful to write "white Baptists" when they mean white Baptists, and write "black Baptists" when they mean black Baptists. A denominational history is of course far from the only way to discuss race in the context of religious history. Yet we can contrast the effects of the decision to focus on Baptists with the decision to focus on, say, evangelicalism. Recent histories of evangelicalism or fundamentalism tend to take white Christians as their subjects, whether or not there are good reasons to question that demarcation, acknowledge the color line, and leave it at that. If race is the single most-important category in U.S. history (and it is), then our histories of U.S. religion ought to be able to discuss race at least as well as this denominational history.