History of Christianity

It did not have to be. The Falwells, the Dobsons, the Reeds, the LaHayes, all those who may well have given more contours to the term “evangelical” than any theologians – they did not have to be the embodiment of evangelical public activism that goes down in history. There was another option. Maybe there still is. One that protests abortion but also nuclear armament and imperial wars, that answers “what would Jesus do?” with “he would consume less.” One that thrives not only under the halogen lights and artificial plants of suburban churches but also under the scrutiny of Berkeley or Chicago academia. What sounds like a happy hipster fantasy from the fringes of indefinable 21st century evangelicalism is, in fact, a well-substantiated claim of David Swartz’s Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism, just out from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The 1970s were not a “Reagan Revolution-in-waiting,” he argues, but the age of a “fluid”, open-ended evangelicalism that was beginning to explore more than just one kind of electoral politics and political activism. In the end, Swartz’ narrative documents a failure. However grand the intentions of the faithful’s small movement, it was not effective enough, was torn apart by identity politics and theological disputes. During the Reagan years, evangelical political involvement eventually became equated with conservative causes. And even though this book makes one wonder at times if it hasn’t arrived ten or twenty years too early, given the fact that many of its protagonists are still around and influential, it describes a chapter in American political and religious history that is definitely closed. Yet Swartz does not provide a lament, and even hints at at signs of re-birth, despite the groans of Ron Sider, one of his main characters: “we called for social and political action, (and) we got eight years of Ronald Regan.”

Characters, anyways; this book is full of them, and they sparkle here. Swartz’s ability to combine biography and social history carries his narrative through the stories of several more or less prominent individual activists who, taken together, represent a segment of the political landscape that is barely imaginable today: there is Jim Wallis, the Post-American communitarian turned presidential confidante; Mark Hatfield, Evangelical and Republican Senator from Oregon who called the Vietnam war a “sin that scarred our national soul;” Sharon Gallagher, the enigmatic co-founder of Berkeley’s “Christian World Liberation Front” that negotiated the movement’s porous borders with both the Radical Left and fundamentalist religion. We meet Calvinists whose Kuyperian understanding of God’s total claim on all of life translated into progressive action on campus and in politics, and Anabaptists whose attempts to live, cook, and bring in the kingdom were suddenly echoed once simple living became a matter of economic urgency, not just Christian faithfulness. Or Peruvian evangelical Samuel Escobar, representing “other third-world evangelicals” and their scathing diagnosis of how American imperialist assumptions had infected evangelical theology and praxis.

Swartz’s emphasis on the contribution of ethnoreligious fringe communities to evangelical political engagement is intriguing. Why was it that the call to a different kind of public faith was echoed so loudly in Dutch, Latino, African-American or Swiss-German quarters on the vast map of American Protestantism? Was there something peculiar about growing up among a minority which could afford the luxury of emphasizing the desirable, not just the doable, and placed a premium on a healthy and functioning community that made many of Moral Minority’s characters particularly susceptible to the goal of changing an entire national community and to “a dualistic application of moralism?” Or was it, in fact, embarrassment about their own confined ethnic communities and the desire to finally being listened to by the America out there that drove their quest for relevance?

Or was the origin of the Evangelical Left located within transformations in fundamentalism, not necessarily the energy of minority communities? Swartz seems to suggest so. It is Carl F. H. Henry’s clarion call to fundamentalists to overcome their “uneasy conscience” and recover the “world changing potential of the gospel” that kicks off Moral Minority. Given Henry’s reputation as the patron saint of conservative evangelical culture-transformers, the storyline of him inspiring the likes of Jim Wallis and Ron Sider seems unlikely at first. But Swartz succeeds in telling it. He downplays the larger implications of choosing this kind of genesis, but demonstrates a significant point: despite the dividing line between right and left, both sides are best understood as fundamentally united by the desire to change the world through activism and politics. At the end of the day, it is that kind of understanding of what the church ought to be and the assumption that such a thing as “Christian responsibilities of citizenship” existed, as the 1973 Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern put it, that sets it apart as the kind of neo-evangelicalism that blossomed in light of Henry. Swartz provocatively suggests another form of kinship between left and right: the Manichean worldview behind progressives’ combat against what they saw as “satanic” in the United States ultimately “modeled” to the religious right what good activism could look like. “The evangelical left hastened the arrival of the religious right,” he states.

The final third of the book is devoted to a story of decline and decreasing relevance. When workshops were finally splintered up into smaller segments, each representing a particular brand of identity politics or theological preference, a cohesive activist movement became an illusion. And though Swartz points out that many evangelical communes were more long lasting and, by many measures, more successful than their secular counterparts, they also became less and less self-consciously evangelical. Their magazines had to rely on Catholic and mainline Protestant subscribers, still tickled by the peculiarly evangelical brand of energy on their pages, and more than once does Swartz document the looming question: was the evangelical left still evangelical? His suggestion that space played a role in the movement’s decline – stuck in academic bubbles and Northern cities while the country’s political pulse moved more and more to the South and West – is equally intriguing and deserves further consideration in light of the larger historiography of 20th century political geography.

In addition, Swartz points out, the evangelical left was pushed away by secular progressives with whom they shared agreement on various policies. While the evangelical right found powerful coalition partners in rising secular neo-conservatism, the left had to deal with secular cobelligerents for whom abortion rights were non-negotiable and evangelicals an expendable force. Though Swartz doesn’t state it explicitly, one wonders if the religious left was ever taken seriously by their supposed secular allies. Too often, evangelical progressives appear as Johnny-come-latelies, frantically trying to baptize an already existing political agenda and unable to deliver large number of votes for Democratic causes (unlike the evangelical right for Republicans). Eventually, the reader is not surprised to learn that evangelicals who wanted “Jesus’ demands” taken seriously were dragged out of a meeting of the Berkeley Students for a Democratic Society.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Swartz’ narrative of decline is the enduring hold that denominational subcultures had on many progressive evangelicals. Denominational loyalties remained strong. Some activists perceived “evangelical” itself as an imperialist word conquering older, ethnic, local and peculiar subcultures. American religion, Swartz all-too-briefly suggests, cannot be as easily divided along the lines of a conservative-liberal realignment that sociologists invoke. Older boundaries still endured – or were freshly discovered: “High Church traditions … poached surprising numbers of young evangelicals.”

Swartz’ portrait of the Evangelical Left’s breakdown counters not only the thesis that political and sociocultural interests supercede denominational loyalties, but also common wisdom among many conservative evangelicals: peace’n justice speech does not necessarily spill its speakers into a quasi-secular mainstream but may as well throw them on a quest for the distinct and particular. “There is a lack of a sense of body in the evangelical community. It is fragmented.” Carl F. Henry sighed in an interview with Sojourners. After all, once the slogans got old and common enemies couldn’t be identified easily enough anymore to inspire energetic action, whose peace and what kind of justice one talks about became important again. It remains to be seen if para-denominational evangelicalism and its case for modern capitalism are strong enough of a center to prevent a similar fate for the religious right.

David Swartz has written a book of colorfully portrayed characters and credible storyline that strikes an elegant balance between politics, theology, social history and biographical narratives. Wherever he has refused to go down an avenue to explore what was, this book at least opens a new discourse. And wherever he provokes the reader to ponder what might have been, it succeeds, no doubt.

Philipp Gollner, Doctoral Student in History and Presidential Fellow, University of Notre Dame

In the late twentieth century Americans experienced a major cultural shift in their experiences of religion. Cultural commentators have called this a “Culture War” and argue for a return to traditionalism – or at least how they believe religion was traditionally practiced. Theologians largely left behind the idea of constructing systematic theology in favor of diversity and meeting the needs of particular peoples in particular places and times. Americans readily ignored the denominations of their parents and grandparents preferring a stronger sense of voluntarism in their religious affiliations.

These religious, theological, and ecclesial changes ran parallel with and intersected with changes in mobility, cultural identity politics, and worldview alternatives. Historians of religion in the late twentieth century followed suit, challenging traditional religious narratives too heavily focused on Puritan ideals and cultural hegemony. The descent of Protestantism in American intellectual ideology was fostered by an increasing recognition of pluralism, voluntarism, and cross-cultural contact.

Religious changes since 1950 have been massive indeed. The first philosophical problem encountered in the 1960s was the perceived hegemony of Protestant thought. The rise of Catholic and Jewish intellectuals challenged the accepted narrative creating the first step in undermining the cultural consensus. Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew argued for three occasionally overlapping spheres of religious experience in American culture. Their combined efforts against the perception of an anti-religious communism brought the three independent groupings together in a unified American ideal.¹

Robert Bellah saw the consensus ideology as a unique phenomenon informed by these three spheres and called it “American Civil Religion” with its worship of its own saints and martyrs, religious sites and pilgrimages, and its own religious rituals. Civil religion remains a site of scholarly debate today as to exactly what it entails, where it best applies, and how it works. The debates regarding Civil Religion opened up the scholarship to a consciousness of America’s Protestant hegemony.

The second shift in the historiography was the incorporation of sociological, anthropological, and ethnographic methods to the study of American religion. As scholars began to view American history through new lenses, pluralism emerged throughout American history – pluralism noticeably absent from the grand narrative. Americans had always been pluralistic, and the nation was founded in part on the disestablishment of religion. Continual immigration and religious innovation had created widely variegated religious ideas and practice. When combined with economic opportunities and seemingly infinite space, the country inevitably fertilized a massive plurality of religious expression. The Immigration Act of 1965 opened the United States to massive immigration, particularly from East and South Asia and South and Central America, bringing a variety of ancient religious practices and ideas with it.

The countercultural ideas regarding extreme freedom, personal authenticity and something I call “religious realism” inoculated the American experience with openness to alternative religious experiences beyond the dominant traditions. Americans experienced these expanding religious options in a very American ahistorical syncretic manner. Using a variety of new sociological tools scholars uncovered a great deal of variety in American history at the same time as they themselves experienced an expanding pluralism. Scholars at the end of the millennium began to recognize that religion and culture were inseparable and intermingling. New more provisional narratives emerged creating meaning and logic from religious experience.

As a direct result of the cultural upheavals of the 1960s a new force in American politics emerged in the Christian Right. As a synthetic political collaboration between social conservatives, Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Pentecostals, the force came to dominate the Republican Party by the early 1980s, supporting the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush.

The ascendancy of the Religious Right caught the mostly secular and mainline left off guard. Having undergone a movement away from national politics in the late 1920s, Fundamentalists in America had been largely ignored, yet fostered significant growth during that period. Some Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham gained national fame and political influence, but a great deal more occurred away from the spotlight as Evangelicals developed their own countercultural views inculcated through TV, radio and their own publication circles. The move back to political power in the late 1970s came as a surprise to many and demonstrated a shift in Evangelicalism away from isolationism and personal experience to a concerted effort to regain cultural dominance in America. This movement called for the dissolution of denominationalism and the ascension of a particular (but understood as a universal and traditional) Born Again Christianity.²

In total, these three shifts in the last half of the twentieth century drastically altered America in its variety of religious experiences and its recognition of difference. The descent of Protestantism in American culture opened up the view of our past as pluralistic and awakened a recognition of difference as having had direct contributive impact on the American experiment. The rise of pluralism challenged our understandings of the past and the question of who we were as a people – if even there has ever really been a “we” to begin with. The emergence of the Christian Right in one sense represents a very particular type of religious experience, but it too stems from recognition that choice, pluralism, and syncretism have always been a part of the American experience.

Theological shifts since 1950 have also had great effect on American culture. Theology followed the religious shift from the hegemonic to pluralistic with a slight delay. But at times the emergence of new theological options had immediate effects on the culture immediately as well. The first shift in the 1950s were the great ecumenical accomplishments such as the formation of the National Council of Churches and the corresponding World Council of Churches. Ecumenism followed theologically from a concept of the universal church and the idea that disparate traditions should in fact work together to create world peace and justice. Denominationalism was considered sinful. In a few short years ecumenical work also became interreligious work, first between Christians and Jews, then between Christians, Jews and Muslims, and soon extending to the religions of the world. Interreligious experience brought with it both experiences of self pride but also of religious humility in the face of alternative equally viable religious traditions. Theologies of pluralism, soon emerged to help describe this new religious reality.³

In the so-called third world, one such theology developed. The forces of decolonization fostered the growth of theologies of liberation. As immigration expanded in the 1960s theologies of justice and the preferential option for the poor entered the American scene, and undermined the Protestant cultural authorities and created space for alternative views of America as a destructive world power. These largely Roman Catholic theologies inspired the creation of a Black Liberation Theology as an authentic black religious expression.⁴

Other oppressed cultural groups in America fashioned their own culturally informed theologies resulting in a grouping of peopled theologies. The Civil Rights movement, the New Left and the Counterculture inspired white and black American women to begin to think of the theological implications of misogyny, resulting in new theological strains of Feminist and later Womanist theologies. Feminist and Womanist theories drew from traditional theological sources, but also from non-traditional (even non-Christian) sources.⁵ The trend continued through the following decade and extended to a peopled theology of Queer theory – a re-creation of theology for Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transgendered people and their allies. More importantly, Queer Theology is an effort at recognizing difference as a theological value at the core of the religious experience.

Historical narratives from the nineteenth and early twentieth century attempted to draw American life into a single unified stream of history. Puritan values such as hard work, universal education, family centered society, and capitalism have been argued as such organizing principles. Other ideas such as a the idea of Progress, of American exceptionalism, chosen status, and of America as world savior still infiltrate our society today, but without the power of unity and the determinism that made these hegemonic in the 1950s.

Unified meta-narratives simply could not stand against the pressure of America’s past that continually defies amalgamation. This is not to say that there is no longer intrinsic value for narrative in the American experience; that would be far too naïve and limited. But the expansion of narrative to include the diversity and pluralism of the American experience challenges the notion of a single unified theory. Monolithic historical narratives create a kind of purified uniform past that never was. So while useful in organizing some aspects of society into understandable chunks, the hegemony of meta-narratives has rightly gone extinct. The summation of the religious changes in the United States over the past half century has been an extreme expansion of the recognition of pluralism and the value of cultural contact. Unified cultural ideology is continually being eroded by experiences of difference and new forms of historical narratives expressed through it.

 

Notes

 
[1] Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955.

[2] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America”, Dædalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967).

[3] Preston Shires, Hippies of the Religious Right, Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007.

[4] See as an example of pluralistic theology John B. Cobb, Varieties of Protestantism, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.

[5] James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1970.

[6] See as an example of early Feminist Liberation Theology, Rosemary Radford Ruether, The Church against Itself: An Inquiry into the Conditions of Historical Existence for the Eschatological Community, New York : Herder and Herder, 1967.

 
The American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week” (September 30-October 6) underscores a disturbing recurrent theme in American life — and a trait we clearly share with other parts of the world. While perhaps more notorious and frightening in other countries, the dangers from banning and burning books continue in our own, as we have seen when a Florida pastor threatened to burn the Quran on September 11, 2010.

The Congregational Library in Boston, Massachusetts, has one copy — and there are only nine known in the world — of the first book banned and burned on American territory. This significant event occurred in Boston on October 17, 1650. The volume in question is The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption. Its author was William Pynchon (1590-1662), a merchant and magistrate of considerable importance to the puritan venture in New England.

Pynchon was so busy as the colonizing founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, that it is extraordinary that he had time for anything else. But much to everyone’s surprise copies of a theological treatise he wrote arrived in Boston in October 1650. As luck would have it –- or not –- the Massachusetts General Court (the colony’s legislature) was then in session. Even though it is a thin volume, 158 pages of text, the authorities did not need to read it. The Meritorious Price was a book you could tell by its cover: a glance at the title page convinced them that Pynchon’s views were somewhat unorthodox. That, in their judgment, was enough to make it potentially prejudicial to the Bay Colony, especially among those in the British parliament who were already skeptical about the Massachusetts experiment. Pynchon fell victim to the puritan versus puritan struggles which eventually doomed the English republican Commonwealth.

The General Court voted a “protestation” on October 16, 1650, which called for “the said book now brought over be burnt by the executioner… & that in the market place in Boston, on the morrow, immediately after the lecture.” (Mass. Records, III, 215)

As for the aftermath: the book-burning incident had a traumatic impact on Pynchon. Though he tried a conciliatory approach when he conferred about it with three Court-approved clergy, he never attended the Massachusetts legislature again. And while the dramatic public censure of The Meritorious Price reflected badly on Massachusetts, its result at the time was negligible, if not counterproductive. The symbolic execution by burning Pynchon’s book changed nothing. By 1653 Pynchon was back in England, where he wrote several more increasingly wordy volumes, mostly on the same theme. He never changed his mind. He died late in 1662.

Adapted from a posting on Beacon Street Diary

For a more extensive analysis see David M. Powers, “William Pynchon and The Meritorious Price: The Story of the First Book Banned in Boston and the Man Who Wrote It,” Bulletin of the Congregational Library, Spring 2009, pp. 4-13. For more on burning books, see Hans J. Hillerbrand, “On Book Burnings and Book Burners: Reflections on the Power (and Powerlessness) of Ideas,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 74, (2006: 593-614).

The brouhaha over Todd Akin’s comments on “legitimate rape” has been especially virulent in the Saint Louis, Missouri area. It dominated our media for weeks. Akin received a degree from Covenant Theological Seminary in Saint Louis and attends a church associated with that seminary (Presbyterian Church of America). The media frenzy compelled Covenant Theological Seminary to issue an official statement denouncing rape as a violent and heinous crime.

But whether or not Todd’s church promotes an “anti-woman” culture is a question not readily settled by public pronouncements. There is a certain irony in all this, in that Akin’s church is a part of the broader evangelical tradition, a tradition that was largely responsible for the emancipation of women in the early nineteenth century. I have spent a considerable amount of time studying this evangelical conundrum, in an attempt to understand its relationship to culture, then and now.

The Presbyterian Church in America and Covenant Theological Seminary have a well articulated position on the role of women in the church. The PCA believes that men and women have equal value in the eyes of God but different roles or functions within the life of the church. Women, for instance, are barred from being deacons and elders. Church polity concerning women is based largely on I Timothy 2:11–14, a biblical passage that prohibits women from teaching or exercising authority over men. The PCA believes that male spiritual headship/female subordination is grounded in the created order, an order that Christianity redeems but does not alter. The English Standard Version Study Bible (2008) explains what is called the complementarian view on the I Timothy passage.

The commentators support the view that gender roles in the church are rooted in the created order. They also remark that this passage does not have “in view the role of women in leadership outside the church (e.g., business or government).”¹ The PCA/ complementarians claim that they are upholding the historic Protestant interpretation of this passage. This may be an assertion easily made by theologians, but can it be substantiated by historians? New research on early Protestant beliefs concerning natural law and the spiritual and temporal kingdoms brings the complementarian claim into serious question. It also provides new insights into the significant role evangelicalism played in the emancipation of women.

The early Protestant reformers held to a two-kingdom view that was in some ways similar to their medieval forebears. This is especially clear in the writings of both Luther and Calvin. They both defend the moral goodness of the sword-bearing state and the Christian’s participation in that state. They believe Christians are citizens of two kingdoms, both ordained by God. These two kingdoms, however, operate for different ends and under very different rules.

The spiritual kingdom is expressed on earth in the church, which has a redemptive and eschatological purpose. It does not bear the sword and submits to the redemptive ethic of Scripture as revealed in Jesus Christ. The temporal kingdom, on the other hand, can use the sword and is based in natural law. Natural law, for the Reformers, is that law imprinted on the consciences of humankind (Romans 2:14-15) and found in the moral principles underlying the Mosaic law. Natural law also finds its origin in creation ordinances.² Consistent with Protestant convictions, both Luther and Calvin believed that sin has marred human ability to fully discern natural law outside of God’s special revelation and regenerating grace; nevertheless, through the remnants of natural law, God graciously restrains the consequences of sin in this world.

After doing extensive research, I have concluded that most prominent theologians in the English-speaking world, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, held something similar to a natural law/two-kingdom view. For them, natural law/creation ordinances mandated the subordination of women to men in the temporal kingdom. The church, on the other hand, was animated by egalitarian principles, such as the priesthood of all believers. The church might honor “the order preserved by the world” (as Luther expressed it), but the principle of male headship/female subordination was not organic to the church.

This is spelled out clearly in Luther’s exegesis of Galatians 3:28: “In the world, and according to the sinful nature, there is a great inequality of persons, and this must be observed carefully . . . . But in Christ there is no law, nor difference of persons, there is only one body, one spirit, one hope one gospel.”³ Protestant exegetes, up to the nineteenth century, believed social hierarchy, including male headship and female subordination, was a necessary component of temporal social order, established by God at creation. In this respect they were conservative, re-enforcing traditional cultural norms. However, contrary to today’s conservative theologians, they did not make creation ordinances organic to life in the church.

A survey of commentaries written before the mid- nineteenth century, dealing with pivotal passages, such as I Timothy 2:11-14, I Corinthians 11:3 and I Corinthians 14:34-35 confirms a natural law/two kingdom view. For instance, John Calvin believes that, in I Corinthians 11:3, man is placed in an intermediate position between Christ and the woman. Yet, at the same time, in Galatians 3:28, Paul says, “in Christ there is neither male nor female.” Calvin resolves this dilemma as follows: “When he [Paul] says there is no difference between the man and the woman, he is treating of Christ’s spiritual kingdom, in which external qualities are not regarded or made any account of.”

This spiritual kingdom has its present expression in the church, and, in fact, it is this spiritual liberty and equality that underlie the Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. However, in this world, our spiritual liberty and equality in Christ always should respect social order and decorum. Therefore Calvin goes on to qualify his position:

In the meantime, however, he [Paul] does not disturb civil order and honorary distinctions, which cannot be dispensed with in ordinary life. Here [I Corinthians 11:3], on the other hand, he reasons respecting outward propriety and decorum—which is part of ecclesiastical polity.”⁴

Calvin later again affirms this principle that male headship reflects “external arrangement and political decorum.”⁵ He would regard today’s complementarian assignation to men of “spiritual headship” as a strange co-mingling of spiritual and temporal kingdom principles. In accordance with basic Protestant doctrine, Calvin says that the spiritual head of woman is Christ only; however, in the kingdom of this world, she is subject to man. Later theologians follow a similar line of thought.

Puritan Matthew Poole argues that the headship of man over women, referred to in I Corinthians 11:3 is strictly “political or economical.” He also believes that when Paul says that the “head of every man is Christ,” he is referring to all church members, male and female, since Christ is the spiritual head of men and women alike. Baptist theologian John Gill writes that natural law/creation ordinances establish the subordination of women in the civil realm. (Consequently, female subordination is also observed in the church.) Evangelical Anglican exegete, Thomas Scott, says nothing of male spiritual headship and restricts female subordination to “this lower world.”⁶

Consistent with their understanding of the different principles that govern the civil and spiritual kingdoms, most early theologians also recognized the possibility of something contra mundum in the life of the church. Luther writes in his exegesis of I Timothy 2 that “if the Lord were to raise up a woman for us to listen to, we would allow her to rule like Huldah.”⁷ Calvin acknowledged the possibility of women with an extraordinary call, as did Matthew Poole, Matthew Henry, Thomas Scott, John Wesley, and Adam Clarke. In fact, Methodist theologian Adam Clarke even reprimanded women who failed to act/speak under the prompting of the Holy Spirit.⁸ Today’s complementarians either reject or ignore the idea of the extraordinary call.

Theologians who were part of the Magisterial Reformation often gave the temporal kingdom an expansive authority — and sometimes distinctions between the two kingdoms were a bit muddled. However, none made creation ordinances foundational to the spiritual kingdom/church, and most recognized the possibility of women with an extraordinary call. No wonder it was in the church or during religious revivals that the voices of women were first heard in American history.

This was a phenomena that was indeed something new under the sun. The egalitarian theology of the spiritual kingdom does much to explain why there were female preachers, evangelists, and exhorters long before there were female politicians, business leaders, and academicians. In 1827, Harriet Livermore preached before the U.S. Congress (and twice again thereafter), long before that august body would countenance a woman sitting among their ranks.⁹

Lillian O’Connor’s study of the rhetorical styles of women involved in the ante-bellum reform movement found that almost all the early women orators spoke in what was called “pulpit style.” This was because these women had first presented their thoughts publicly inside a church, often from a pulpit.¹⁰ Catherine Brekus’s painstaking research on female preaching in America between 1740 and 1845 does much to re-discover the voices of women who others had long ago attempted to obliterate from the historical record. These women were motivated by spiritual kingdom theology —that in Christ there is neither male nor female. They answered an extraordinary call. The narrow path they blazed through the wilderness has become a broad highway of opportunity for women today. Theological ideas do have consequences, then and now.

Notes

 
[1] English Standard Version Study Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 2328.

[2] For a full treatment of natural law and the two kingdoms see David VanDrunen’s book, Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms : A Study in the Development of Reformed Social Thought (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010).

[3] Martin Luther, “Lectures on Galatians, 1535″ in Luther’s Works, Vol. 26 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1963), 356.

[4] John Calvin, Commentary on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians in Calvin’s Commentaries, Vol. 20 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1981), 354.

[5] Ibid.

[6] For a detailed account of Poole, Gill, Scott, and other exegetes on this issue see J. G. Brown’s book, An Historian Looks at I Timothy 2:11–14, The Authentic Traditional Interpretation and Why It Disappeared (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2012), Chapter One.

[7] Martin Luther, “Lectures on I Timothy” in Luther’s Works, Vol. 28 (Saint Louis: Concordia, 1973), 280.

[8] See An Historian Looks at I Timothy 2:11–14, Chapter One.

[9] Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims, Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1, 12.

[10] Lillian O’Connor, >Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Ante-Bellum Reform Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 115–16.

In April 2012 the good folks over at Wipf and Stock published an annotated edition of John Williamson Nevin’s masterpiece, The Mystical Presence. This was a much anticipated addition to the exponentially growing collection of studies in the Mercersburg Theology (including an effort from yours truly). Indeed it seems that in recent years an increasing number of historians, theologians, and Christian laypersons have been delighted to rediscover this fascinating little niche of American church history.

Here I’d like to offer a brief, fly-by introduction to the history and theology of Mercersburg, including some excerpts from the chief texts of the movement. In closing I’ll suggest a few reasons why this area of study continues to garner interest.

John Willliamson Nevin (1803-1886) chief architect of the Mercersburg theology, was born on Feb. 20, 1803 to a family of Scotch-Irish descent in Franklin County, PA. Here he was raised in a “high-church” Presbyterian environment at Middle Spring Church in Shippensburg. At age 15 Nevin enrolled at Union college in Schenectady, NY (notably, where he encountered Revivalism for the first time).

After a brief break following his collegiate studies, he spent time at Princeton, both as a student and eventually as a professor, filling in at the request of the illustrious Charles Hodge for two years (Hodge would later become one of Nevin’s primary theological interlocutors. See Bonomo’s Incarnation and Sacrament). From there Nevin was called as chair of Biblical Literature at Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburg and then to the German Reformed Church’s struggling seminary in Mercersburg, PA, in 1840. There, Nevin was joined by the renowned historian Philip Schaff, who was born in Sweden and educated quite broadly at Berlin, Tübingen, and Halle.

Over the next two decades, drawing from the well of German Idealism and Romanticism as well as Patristic and Reformation theology, Nevin and Schaff would offer one of the most insightful and penetrating critiques of Protestant theology and American revivalism to date.

Nevin’s engagement with revivalism at Union, as wall as the Old School vs. New School conflict among Presbyterians at Princeton, prompted a prolific career of criticizing revivalist and nominalist tendencies in the American church. In response to these tendencies, Nevin insisted upon a view of Christ and the church that emphasized the Incarnation, unity, the sacraments, and catholicity. In a letter, Nevin states quite clearly (and beautifully!) that the “cardinal principle” of the Mercersburg system is “the fact of the Incarnation.” He continues,

“This viewed not as a doctrine or speculation but as a real transaction of God in the world, is regarded as being necessarily itself the essence of Christianity, the sum and substance of the whole Christian redemption. Christ saves the world, not ultimately by what he teaches or by what he does, but by what he is in the constitution of his own person. His person in its relations to the world carries in it the power of victory over sin, death, and hell, the force thus of a real atonement or reconciliation between God and man, the triumph of a glorious resurrection from the dead, and all the consequences for faith which are attributed to this in the grand old symbol called the Apostles’ Creed.” ¹

But few of Nevin’s writings were so cordial. The bulk of his career is characterized by numerous articles, tracts, and essays that are intellectually rigorous, argumentative, and critically engaged. Notable is Nevin’s The Anxious Bench (1844), a polemical tract which addresses the historical transmission of revivalist Puritanism into its early nineteenth-century manifestations via the Second Great Awakening.

The work is a scathing criticism and outright rejection of Charles Finney’s “New Measures” revivalism, recently employed by a visiting preacher in a local German Reformed congregation in Mercersburg. Finney, one of Nevin’s most frustrating opponents, emphasized the instantaneous conversion of the individual and a doctrine of the individual’s agency in Christian moral action (part and parcel of social reform during what historians have called the age of the “benevolent empire”).

Finney’s “new measures” included the “anxious bench,” which was essentially an intensified version of what is commonly known as an altar call within evangelicalism. Nevin’s hostility towards such trends, which he calls “mechanical and shallow,” ² is displayed no more clearly than in his own words:

“If Finneyism and Winebrennerism, the anxious bench, revival machinery, solemn tricks for effect, decision displays at the bidding of the preacher, genuflections and prostrations in the aisle or around the altar, noise and disorder, extravagance and rant, mechanical conversions…justification by feeling rather than faith, and encouragement ministered to all fanatical impressions ; if these things, and things in the same line indefinitely, have no connection in fact with true serious religion and the cause of revivals, but tend only to bring them into discredit, let the fact be openly proclaimed.” ³

The alternative to this “system of the bench” is what Nevin calls the “system of the catechism,” by which he means the “organic” life of the church that nurtures Christians over the course of a life time. Opposed to one-time conversion experiences, fiery sermons, and ecstatic enthusiasm, Nevin emphasized word and sacrament, catechesis, Christian nurture, and essentially that the whole (Christ’s body, the Church) always remains greater than the sum of its parts (individual Christians). He explains,

“In this view, the Church is truly the mother of all her children.  They do not impart life to her, but she imparts life to them… The Church is in no sense the product of individual Christianity, as though a number of persons should first receive the heavenly fire in separate streams, and then come into such a spiritual connection comprising the whole; but individual Christianity is the product, always and entirely, of the Church as existing previously, and only revealing its life in this way.  Christ lives in the Church, and through the Church in its particular members; just as Adam lives in the humans race generically considered, and through the race in every individual man.” ⁴

As such, among the primary emphases of the Mercersburg movement is a rediscovery and recasting of Reformed ecclesiology. For Nevin and Schaff the Church is the primary means of communicating Christ and, accordingly, the salvation of mankind. The church is objective and unified in Christ; it is the extension of Christ incarnate through history. According to Nevin,

“Christ’s presence in the world is in and by his Mystical Body, the Church. As a real human presence, carrying in itself the power of a new life for the race in general, it is no abstraction or object of thought merely, but a glorious living Reality, continuously at work, in an organic historical way, in the world’s constitution.” ⁵

Thus for Nevin there is no presence of Christ in the world apart from the Church, which is the very form that Christ’s body has taken. Simply put, “No church, no Christ.” ⁶

Though by and large more amiable in tone than Nevin, Schaff likewise expressed grave concern over sectarianism and intemperate autonomy throughout the American Church: “The most dangerous foe with which we are called to contend,” he wrote, “is not the Church of Rome but the sect plague in our own midst; not the single pope of the city of seven hills, but the numberless popes – German, English, and American – who would fain enslave Protestants once more to human authority, not as embodied in the church indeed, but as holding in the form of mere private judgment and private will.” ⁷

Schaff, who fell in love with his adopted country (and dedicating a good bit of writing to this theme), nevertheless shared with Nevin apprehension over the sheer and unchecked democratization of the American church, which in their view resulted in throwing out the unity and wholeness baby with the authoritarian bathwater.

In 1846, Nevin composed his most important and influential work, The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic View of the Holy Eucharist, now considered by many to be a classic in American theological literature. Though not inherently polemical, the Mystical Presence presents an impressively comprehensive view of the Eucharist that deeply challenged many of Nevin’s contemporaries within his own reformed tradition and continues to challenge a wide variety of theologians to this day. Historically and theologically sophisticated, it is easily the most important work of the Mercersburg corpus. In keeping with his “cardinal principle,” Nevin develops his sacramentology on the basis of the Incarnation:

“’The Word became Flesh!’ In this simple, but sublime enunciation, we have the whole gospel comprehended in a word. … The incarnation is the key that unlocks the sense of all God’s revelations” ⁸

“His flesh is meat indeed – his blood drink indeed; aleithos, in reality, not in a shadowy or relative sense merely, but absolutely and truly in the sphere of the Spirit. The participation itself involves everlasting life; not in the form of hope and promise, but in the way of actual present possession; and not simply as a mode of existence of the soul abstractly considered, but as embracing the whole man in the absolute totality of his nature.” ⁹

Two years later, in 1848, Nevin took to his pen rather aggressively in a work titled Antichrist, or the Spirit of Sect and Schism. This work, following in the tradition of The Anxious Bench, focused specifically on the sectarian tendency of nineteenth century revivalism. Nevin goes as far as to suggest that the spirit of sectarianism is akin to the Antichrist of 1 John 4:1-3. His reasoning is as follows: If the Church is indeed Christ’s body, the objective, visible, and historical extension of the Incarnation, then the fragmenting of the church is no less than the dividing of Christ’s body. It is therefore, a rejection of the Incarnation and a promotion of Christological heresy.

Also notable among the Mercersburg corpus is the Mercersburg Review, spanning numerous volumes during the late 1840s and 1850s. Nevin served as editor of the Review, which for its time, aside from the well-known Princeton Review, had few rivals in terms of scope and scholarly acumen. Nevin was not only editor but was also the primary contributor to the Review, writing on a broad range of topics, including everything from philosophy to theology to politics to the Mexican-American war.

In the end, the revivalist impulse, combined with the “commonsense realist” approach of Princeton (and indeed the nation as a whole), proved too powerful for any “high-church” Protestant theological movement (especially one so indebted to a rather foreign German idealistic philosophy), and Mercersburg proved ineffective in terms of any major ecclesial influence. The short-lived tenure of Mercersburg is not to be dismissed, however, as it continues to shed light on the diversity of the Reformed tradition in the antebellum United States and offers insights into the life and practices of the church today.

The eminent historian Sydney Ahlstrom captured well the historical value of Mercersburg when he said that it revealed “with startling clarity that the basically Puritan forms of church life which had become so pervasive in America could be subjected to searching criticism by men who still honored Calvin and treasured the Reformation’s confessional heritage.” ¹⁰

There are several reasons why I think Mercersburg continues to retain interest:

1. In recent years, the postmodern penchant for tradition and shifts away from American revivalism for some, demonstrated for example by the emerging church movement, has resulted in the adoption of eclectic liturgical practices and theological expression, stemming from Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and other “high-church” traditions. Mercersburg has an appeal to this sort of sensibility as a Reformed movement that sought to retain the “high-church” sensibilities of the Reformation. That Mercersburg has such a broad, eclectic, and catholic appeal is demonstrated rather well by Brad Littlejohn’s work, The Mercersburg Theology and the Quest for Reformed Catholicity.

2. Along similar lines, unity and ecumenism have become all the rage, especially in mainline Protestant traditions. While the Mercersburg theologians would have serious reservations about the doctrinal content of many of these traditions, the Mercersburg tradition does serve well as a confessional, traditional expression of Protestantism that nevertheless values unity and decries the insular and sectarian tendencies of fundamentalism.

3. In an age when “philosophy,” “psychology,” and “sociology” have seemingly trumped the classical methods of “theology” proper, Mercersburg remains relevant as a philosophically sophisticated tradition that will simultaneously satisfy those who insist upon traditional methods of biblical theology. Nevin, it should be noted, wrote intelligently in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and the philosophy of history. Shaff, of course, was a historiographical giant.

4. Many American Reformed traditions are currently undergoing a liturgical renewal of sorts. More and more, confessional Presbyterians and reformed are returning to weekly communion, lectionaries, traditional liturgies, and other forms of “smells and bells.” Mercersburg serves as a wonderful precedent and resource on this side of the Atlantic for those who need an example of a thoroughly – but uniquely! – Reformed and American tradition.

5. Finally, many theological debates continue to get bogged down in the excruciating minutia of exegesis and doctrine (stemming, I would argue, from our American commonsense realist tendencies). The Mercersburg traiditon, while valuing exegesis and doctrine, in my view does a good job of majoring on the majors and minoring on the minors, of ensuring that everything points back to Jesus Christ (so much so that some have suggested a kindred spirit in Barth!)

I for one am very thankful to have been introduced several years ago to this intriguing piece of American Church history, and I am thrilled to be a part of larger project to annotate and publish a wide variety of writings form the Mercersburg tradition. Mercersburg has challenged me to always look for the marginalized philosophies, groups, and movements within American history. It turns out that these historical exceptions to the rule often teach us more about the vast movements of our history than we could ever anticipate.

 

Notes

 
[1] Letter from John Nevin to Henry Harbaugh, (between 1860 and 1867).

[2] John W. Nevin, The Anxious Bench (Chambersburg, Pa, 1844), vi.

[3] Anxious Bench, 28.

[4] Ibid., 67-68.

[5] Nevin, “Christ and the Church’ in James Hastings Nichols, ed. The Mercersburg Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 89.

[6] Nevin, The Church, 65-66.

[7] Philip Schaff, The Principle of Protestantism, ed. Bard Thompson and George H. Bricker (1845; Philadelphia, 1964), 154.

[8] Nevin, The Mystical Presence (1846), 199.

[9] Ibid., 226.

[10] Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale, 1973), 620.

Samuel Frey Wolgemuth (1914-2002) was born and raised among the necktie-eschewing, bonnet-wearing, peace-practicing “plain people” of the Brethren in Christ Church, a then-small, sectarian denomination similar to the Mennonite Church. By 1939, Wolgemuth was an ordained minister, shepherding a revival among a once-dwindling congregation in southwestern Pennsylvania. Within a decade, he’d been elected to the bishopric—no small feat for a man not yet 40 years old.

Then, in 1952, Wolgemuth resigned his denominational post to pursue full-time employment with Youth for Christ (YFC), a parachurch ministry aimed at evangelizing young people. He initially served as YFC’s representative to Japan and as organizer of the eighth-annual World Congress on Evangelism in Tokyo. In 1957 he became vice president of YFC’s Overseas Program, and by 1965 had ascended to the presidency of Youth for Christ International, a post he held until his retirement in 1973. All the while, he maintained connections to his natal denomination, serving on many of its boards and continuing to promote its distinctive doctrines, like nonresistance.¹

How do we make sense of someone like Samuel Wolgemuth—someone whose theological identity lies deep within traditions as seemingly divergent as Anabaptism and evangelicalism?

Historian Jared S. Burkholder and theologian David Cramer provide one answer to this question in their recent edited volume, The Activist Impulse: Essays on the Intersection of Evangelicalism and Anabaptism (Wipf and Stock, 2012). As their title indicates, Burkholder and Cramer see evangelicalism and Anabaptism as linked by a shared “activist impulse,” a desire to “engage American society” and to make “vigorous efforts . . . in support of Christian ideals” (p. 2). This shared “impulse,” though understood and operationalized differently in each tradition, has created a space for myriad “intersections,” both historical and theological, between these two movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By focusing on these intersections rather than the obvious departures, argue Burkholder and Cramer, church historians and theologians might gain more nuanced insights into Anabaptist-evangelical relations.

Such an approach directly challenges the dominant historiography of Anabaptist-evangelical relations. As developed by a previous generation of scholars (mostly historians) like Rodney J. Sawatsky and Beulah Stauffer Hostetler, this historiography has emphasized declension, arguing that as evangelical influence increases, Anabaptist distinctives decrease and, ultimately, vanish.² Burkholder and Cramer want to move beyond such dichotomistic thinking. “While such arguments still carry some weight, and some Anabaptists continue to resent the appeal of popular evangelicalism,” they admit, “others see plenty of opportunity for integrating the two traditions” (p. 3).

Burkholder’s and Cramer’s assembled band of collaborators flesh out this integrative approach in a series of fourteen thought-provoking essays. The opener, a brilliant survey of Anabaptist-evangelical intersections across American and Canadian history by Mennonite historian Steven M. Nolt, lays a fine foundation for subsequent entries. Nolt chooses the guiding metaphor of conversation, suggesting that at various points Anabaptists and evangelicals have engaged in spirited debate, at times tentatively and at times vigorously. On occasion, the conversation has been conflicted: Nolt notes that evangelicals have long felt suspicious of evangelicals’ uncritical devotion to the nation-state and to consumer culture, while evangelicals have expressed concern over Anabaptists’ insufficient concern with “stewarding” politics, culture, and the arts. On the other hand, evangelicals and Anabaptists have often had much to agree upon.

Some evangelicals have warmly embraced Anabaptism’s “long-standing witness of discipleship” as a critique of the “cultural status-quo,” while some Anabaptists have used evangelicalism’s emphasis on a personal religious faith to “distinguish theological convictions from ethnic conventions” or to “move past embarrassing particularities” and into the religious mainstream (pp. 37-38). Importantly, he concludes that the future of Anabaptist-evangelical relations will center not on North America but on the global south, where both Anabaptist and evangelical churches are gaining new members at unprecedented rates.

Building on Nolt’s survey are two sections of historical case studies. These studies profile a variety of Anabaptist-related communities—including Mennonites, Mennonite Brethren in Christ, Grace Brethren, and others—and their intersections with American evangelicalism. The first section, “Anabaptism and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy,” examines Anabaptist efforts to navigate the murky theological and cultural waters of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American Protestantism. Two essays stand out. The most convincing, by University of Notre Dame doctoral student Benjamin Wetzel, describes how some Mennonites—including prominent Bishop Daniel Kauffman—endeavored to carve out a “third way” between fundamentalism and modernism: one that confronted the perceived dangers of a rapidly changing society while endeavoring to preserve Mennonite distinctives like nonresistance and nonconformity.

A similar study from Burkholder, examining anti-modernist activism among eastern Pennsylvania Mennonites, argues for a “distinctly Mennonite version” of fundamentalism that “was both an internal response to modernity and . . . that simultaneously opposed the broader, non-Mennonite fundamentalism that was gaining momentum in America during the same period” (p. 187). Burkholder’s theory seeks rightly to counter the dominant “‘infiltration’ theses” in Anabaptist historiography, which situate Mennonites as the agency-less victims of fundamentalist influence. Nevertheless, his invention of a “Mennonite fundamentalism” seems less convincing than Wetzel’s “third way,” especially in light of recent scholarly critiques of “comparative fundamentalisms.” [PDF]

Like “Muslim fundamentalist” or “Hindu fundamentalist” in other contexts, “Mennonite fundamentalist” may fail to capture what Burkholder is trying to describe in his essay, given the historical rootedness of the broader category. Indeed, if “Mennonite fundamentalism” offered a critique of both the liberals and the conservatives, why employ the term “fundamentalism” at all?

In the second section of case studies, “Intersecting Concerns: Anabaptist and Evangelical Public Witness,” a handful of diverse scholars push the conversation on Anabaptist-evangelical intersections in interesting new directions. First, Felipe Hinojosa complicates preceding studies by showing how Hispanic Mennonites in the American Southwest “forged an evangelical and Anabaptist identity that was unique to their communities—one that better reflected their own cultural and ethnic context” (p. 239). His discussion of becoming evangélico—which, as he notes, carries meaning beyond the English-language “evangelical”—is particularly fascinating.

Asbury University professor David Swartz’s essay similarly re-directs the discourse by showing how evangelicals have been influenced by Anabaptists. For thousands of progressive evangelicals, Anabaptist icons like John Howard Yoder, Ronald J. Sider, and Doris Longacre (author of the bestselling More With Less cookbook) provided the ideologies and practical theologies necessary to provoke action on issues like global poverty, pacifism, and simple living. Years before Jerry Falwell’s Religious Right became the de facto public face of evangelical politics, these Anabaptist-inspired evangelicals forged a left-of-center movement that left a significant mark on the 1970s public sphere.

The book also contains a section of theological essays, exploring “intersecting trajectories” as diverse as atonement theory, pacifism, and biblical authority.

One of the collection’s most unique contributions comes from John Fea, a professor of history at the Brethren in Christ-related Messiah College. Departing from the historical narratives and theological treatises that comprise the majority of The Activist Impulse, Fea’s essay offers a historiographical excavation of the ways in which the activist impulses of both Anabaptism and evangelicalism are driven by oversimplified, ideologically charged readings of American history. Among Anabaptists (especially Yoderian neo-Anabaptists), Fea identifies an attempt to use the past to critique America’s moral failings (slavery, war, economic oppression, etc.) and to envision a more just, peaceful future.

By contrast, Fea argues, evangelicals seek “to discern the hand of God in American history” (p. 83) and to emphasize American’s providential status as a “Christian nation.” “Both approaches,” Fea contends, “allow political, religious, and cultural agendas to be their lens for understanding the past, rather than letting the past stand on its own terms” (p. 83). He concludes with an invitation for both Anabaptists and evangelicals to cultivate a less ideological view of the past, one that sees historical actors not in Manichean terms but as fallible humans shaped by their contexts: “An encounter with the past in all its fullness, void as much as possible of present-minded agendas, can cultivate virtue in our lives” (p. 91).

There are, of course, problems with the The Activist Impulse. In the main, it contains too few voices of women. Given that women have long dominated the membership rolls of both evangelical and Anabaptist churches, their stories undoubtedly shed substantial light on the question of these “intersections.” Yet outside of Swartz’s discussion of evangelical feminism and its Anabaptist encouragers, few women are allowed to demonstrate their “activist impulse.” In the same vein, youth—such as might have flocked to the trendy Youth for Christ rallies of the 1950s, participated in the 1-W alternate service programs of the 1960s, or listened to the popular evangelical rock music of the 1970s—are also strangely absent from the collection.

What’s more, the book doesn’t deal adequately enough with the definitional problems associated with the terms “evangelicalism” and “Anabaptism.” Both have a rather contested genealogy–a fact mentioned in only a handful of the contributions. For instance, scholars like Sawatsky and Perry Bush have offered excellent readings of the evolution of “Anabaptism” from the sixteenth-century to the present, showing that it has been repeatedly re-interpreted to address presentist concerns and to meet specific needs. (Fea gets this; others do not.) And while the editors address specifically the definitional quandary associated with “evangelicalism,” they nevertheless allow each contributor define the concept on his or her own terms, with the result of a rather disjointed overall approach to the topic.

As theologian Ted Grimsrud noted in his blog review, the “rather benign,” David Bebbington-inspired definition favored by most contributors ignores the fact that evangelicalism is (at least with regard to the dominant historiography) a “post-fundamentalist” movement. That is, evangelicalism emphasizes not just the “authority of the Bible” but its plenary inspiration and inerrancy; it emphasizes not only “Christ’s atoning death on the cross” but substitutionary atonement. Both of these, Grimsrud rightly concludes, are areas in which some Anabaptists (especially more liberal Mennonites) would take exception to evangelicalism.

Of course, defining evangelicalism as “post-fundamentalist” negates the influence of holiness and Pentecostal traditions, both of which were often more appealing to Mennonites than fundamentalism and both of which existed on the margins of fundamentalist evangelicalism and therefore did not wholly embrace either inerrancy or substitutionary atonement. Thus, the question of adequate definitions remains.

Definitional issues aside, The Activist Impulse unquestionably demonstrates the vital intersections between these movements. From Swartz’s discussion of Anabaptist-inspired evangelical leftists, to Wetzel’s determined excavation of Mennonites’ “third way” between fundamentalism and liberalism, the volume catalogs numerous instances in which Anabaptists and evangelicals have cooperated and commingled—though not without conflict.

Such is undoubtedly the case with Samuel Wolgemuth. Clearly, Wolgemuth saw his primary “activism” as evangelism, a fact he made clear during countless rallies, preaching engagements, and lecture series. And yet, at least among his natal denomination, his revivalist rhetoric rang with a distinctly Anabaptist timbre. Consider a 1978 sermon delivered to the Brethren in Christ General Conference, on the importance of world missions. “Our history as a church calls us, as does the Word of God, to identify with those who set out long ago to turn their world upside down,” delcared Wolgemuth. “Their obedience to the Holy Spirit set them apart from the crowd with an initiative that no one could stop. . . . The church of today is heir to the revolutionary [missionary] forces [that] changed the face of the world.”³

Unlike the majority of his evangelical colleagues, Wolgemuth viewed the preaching of the Gospel as a distinctly counter-cultural act. If that’s not an evangelical-Anabaptist intersection, I don’t know what is.

Notes:
[1] For more on Wolgemuth, consult s.v. “Wolgemuth, Samuel Frey,” in Randall Balmer, Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2003); Joan Giangrasse Kates, Obituary of Samuel Frey Wolgemuth, Chicago Tribune, February 8, 2002.

[2] Monographs advancing such a thesis include Hostetler, American Mennonites and Protestant Movements (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 1987), and Theron Schlabach, Gospel vs. Gospel: Mission and the Mennonite Church, 1863-1944 (Scottdale, Pa. : Herald Press, c1980). Other similar studies include Rodney J. Sawatsky, “Fundamentalism, Liberalism, and Anabaptism: Mennonite Choices in the 1920s and 1930s,” unpublished paper, December 4, 1978, Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, Lancaster, Pa., and Luke L. Keefer, Jr., “The Three Streams in Our Heritage: Separate or Parts of a Whole?” Brethren in Christ History and Life 19, no. 1 (April 1996), pp. 26-63. Burkholder and Cramer are explicitly critical of a 1979 collection of essays, Mission and the Peace Witness: The Gospel and Christian Discipleship (Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press), edited by Robert L. Ramseyer.

[3] Samuel Wolgemuth, “‘An Open Door — No Man Can Shut It’ (Revelation 3:8),” Brethren in Christ History and Life 1, no. 2 (December 1978), p. 71.

Devin C. Manzullo-Thomas (M.A., Temple University) is a public historian and archivist. He is currently working on an article-length biography of Samuel Wolgemuth that seeks to shed further light on twentieth-century intersections of Anabaptism and evangelicalism. Professionally, he serves as assistant editor of Brethren in Christ History and Life, the journal of the Brethren in Christ Historical Society.

 
I study, among other subjects, black Catholics. When I tell people I study black Catholics, I am often met with blank stares. If black Catholics occupy any space in the American religious imagination, they conjure images of Catholic Masses with Gospel choirs and the politics of parishes like St. Sabina’s on the South Side of Chicago.  Black Catholics sometimes baffle because they pose a problem for scholars and laypeople alike.  African American religious studies, until relatively recently, may be one of the few instances in which popular imagination and scholarly interpretation align quite neatly.  When African Americans and religion are invoked a specific image usually comes to mind, and black Catholics don’t quite fit.
 
Lucky for me, while working on this dissertation about black Catholics in Chicago, a number of books have interrupted popular and scholarly assumptions.  What I have realized over the past few years, with equal parts gratitude and relief, is that we have not simply witnessed a number of great books.  Rather, we stand in the midst of a new generation of African American religious studies. African American Religious Studies: The Next Generation, as I’m thinking of them, challenge at least three persistent theses about African American religion.¹

The first thesis presumes black people are naturally religious or, if not naturally religious, at least more religious than other Americans. The second thesis assumes black people are not just more religious, but more religious in very particular ways. Black religiosity is presumed to be stylistically emotional and politically liberationist. The third thesis, which speaks more to the internal discourse of black religious communities than to their external study, challenges the “blackness” of those not conforming to the standards of the first two. If a black person or black community is not religious in a particular way, they remain racially suspect.²

But the Next Generation has come to challenge these popular assumptions that black people are naturally religious, that there is one way to be black and religious, and that those black religious outliers are somehow suspect. The real flurry of publications began in 2008.³ Two works in that same year took on the two presumptive pillars of African American religion: the notion of an essential “black religion” and the myth of “the Black Church.”⁴

Curtis Evans’s The Burden of Black Religion traces the intellectual construction of “black religion” and how this essentialism was weighed down by “the burden of a multiplicity of interpreters’ demands,” whether imagined as “amorphous spirituality, primitive religion, emotionalism, or…‘the Negro Church.’”⁵ In the end, Evans hopes to free scholars of the burden of black religion’s essence, so that they might be attentive to the actual lives of religious black people—lives that vary quite dramatically in terms of theology, worship, and politics.⁶

Barbara Dianne Savage’s Your Spirits Walk Beside Us interrogates the narrative of “the Black Church” as necessarily involved in black liberation. She incisively identifies the ways iconic civil rights movement images definitively shaped how black religion and politics were imagined ever since. By unearthing the many debates within the black community about the potential political potency of African American churches, Savage reveals how many scholars “misread the successes of that [civil rights movement] period and applied them retrospectively over the entire span of African American political history, seeing the past through the haze of a post-civil rights consciousness.”⁷ She successfully demonstrates there is nothing necessarily liberationist about the Black Church and, in fact, “the Black Church” itself is a normative notion which tells us more about internal debates over the politics of black religion than it does about black religion in se.

The Next Generation continues to redefine the field of African American religious studies and reshape the ways we think about African American religions and American religion more broadly.⁸ The New Black Gods: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions, edited by Edward Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler, collects the work of eleven other representatives of this new era in an attempt to reinvigorate Fauset’s attempt to study African American religions beyond the Christian conception of the Black Church.

Essays by Sylvester Johnson and Kathryn Lofton offer just two brief examples of this rich contribution. Johnson argues that the search for “religion proper” (the essence of religion) cannot be understood apart from the colonialist construction of “proper religion” (the legitimization of particular ways of being religious and the marginalization of others). Thus, for Johnson, the study of “other” African American religions like the Moorish Science Temple of America not only moves African American religious studies beyond the Black Church but also serves as a postcolonial critique of the normative implications of Black Church history.⁹

Lofton also brings critical theory to bear on African American religious history, pointing out the ways black religion has been categorized as the primitive foil to the contemplative, cosmopolitan, modern religious subject. Lofton notes that scholars reinforce this primitivist reading in their reproductions of an abstract emotional Black Church, assuming they already intuitively know what African American religion looks and sounds like: “the African American believer remains the body in motion, the voice in song, with eyes affixed, unblinking, to God.”¹⁰

Though it has apparently become popular to declare the Black Church “dead,” or to note that it never existed, this is not what makes The Next Generation truly revolutionary.¹¹ It is not enough to simply add in new characters, jettisoning the Black Church for a diversity of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. No, their work is revolutionary because it has transformed what we mean by “religion” when we describe African American religions and narrate African American religious history. It is not that “the Black Church is dead,” per se, but rather we’ve moved beyond it altogether.

Matthew J. Cressler is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Northwestern University. He holds a B.A. from St. Bonaventure University and a M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School. He is currently working on his dissertation, “To Be Black and Catholic: African American Catholics in Chicago from the Great Migrations to Black Power,” which won the American Catholic Historical Association’s 2011 John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award.

 

Notes

[1] Yes, challenging the singularity of African American religion is one of them.

[2] This is, of course, an incredibly truncated summary of the long and rich tradition of African American religious studies. I have selected these three theses not because they are representative of all works on African American religions, but rather because they are the primary theses this Next Generation attempts to tackle.

[3] There were, of course, scholars who preceded this new generation. Theologian Anthony Pinn’s Varieties of African American Religious Experience is just one example, which clearly stated “African American religious experience extends beyond the formation and practice of black Christianity.” Anthony B. Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998): 1.

[4] Barbara Dianne Savage has recently published an excerpt of her work under the title “The Myth of the Black Church,” on the online journal Religion & Politics.

[5] Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 5.

[6] Ibid., 279-280.

[7] Barbara Dianne Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008): 2.

[8] Sadly, I don’t have the space to discuss every book in the ever-growing corpus of The Next Generation, which would also include, among many others, Marla F. Frederick, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (California, 2003); Wallace D. Best, Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (Princeton, 2005); Jonathan L. Walton, Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (NYU, 2009); Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Harvard , 2010).

[9] Sylvester A. Johnson, “Religion Proper and Proper Religion: Arthur Fauset and the Study of African American Religions” in The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009): 145-170.

[10] Kathryn Lofton, “The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious History” in The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions, ed. Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune Sigler (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009): 171.

[11] The “Black Church is dead” debate, sparked by Eddie Glaude in 2010, is obviously intertwined with this Next Generation. However, to a certain extent, this debate is an altogether different beast with normative implications that sometimes overlap and other times diverge from the topic at hand. For more see: “The Black Church is Dead” and “Call and Response on the State of the Black Church”.

On June 24, 2012, the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) voted to officially repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery (DOD). The what, you say? Exactly. The DOD (or Doctrine of Christian Discovery, as it is sometimes referred to) is one of the most important historical and contemporary issues that Native activists and communities talk about, educate regarding, and work against, and yet the vast majority of non-Natives have never heard of it.

In short, the Doctrine of Discovery is the deceptively simply historical notion that Europeans had rights to the lands of the Americas by right of discovery and verbal fiat from the Pope and Christian European kings and queens. Although this may sound to most modern readers like historical malarkey that we have all abandoned long ago (and, in fact, never subscribed to in the first place), this notion has resurfaced repeatedly in American history and, indeed, silently undergirds not just public discourse about Native land rights and sovereignty, but the U.S. Federal Court system as well.

The DOD has its roots in pre-Columbian European expansion, mainly in the colonization of the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands by the Portuguese and Spanish in the fifteenth century. Most scholars date the official origin of the DOD to the papal bull issued in 1452 by Nicholas V to King Alfonso V of Portugal, which specifically sanctioned the colonization of non-Christian lands by Christian European monarchs and their emissaries. It was with this fictive legal and religious authority that Columbus first claimed the island of Guanahani (San Salvador, in the present-day Bahamas) for Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 (an authority that was reconfirmed by Pope Alexander VI in 1493).

Papal bulls between 1481 and 1529—including The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494—attempted to keep the peace between competing and expanding European empires by officially dividing the newly “discovered” lands of the northeastern Atlantic, the Americas, and the West Indies between the Spanish and the Portuguese. After the 1520s, Protestant nations like England and eventually the Netherlands followed suit, replacing the authority of the pope with that of a king or ruler.

It takes little effort to convince most modern-day Americans (or Euro-American residents of the Americas) that this was a preposterous notion, rooted firmly in the arrogance of Europeans’ self-perceived cultural and religious superiority. So then, what’s the big deal?

The problem is that the DOD—or at least the ideas behind it—has never gone away. It still influences much of the cultural assumptions of non-Native inhabitants of the Americas, particularly in the U.S. and Canada. More perniciously, the DOD actually continues to inform the U.S. legal system in terms of how it determines the ongoing rights of Native peoples within its borders. One of the clearest examples of this is the infamous 1823 Johnson v. M’Intosh ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. In it, Chief Justice Marshall ruled that only the U.S. Congress had the right to buy and sell Native land and based this right on the original “discovery” and conquest of the Americas by Europeans who were sent by Christian kings and queens to Christianize and conquer the “heathen” peoples.

The implications of this ruling were simply tragic, and its logic defies rational and historical analysis. In an astonishing overturning of colonial practice and belief, in one fell swoop American Indians were decreed to have never been the rightful possessors of their land in the first place, all based on this notion of the authority of European discovery (the word “discovery” is used twenty-three times in the ruling).

Johnson v. M’Intosh has had a long shadow. Up through the present, it remains the legal standard for Native land rights cases and was indirectly cited in court decisions as recently as the 2005 decision City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of N.Y. (this 2005 ruling cited a 1985 ruling, County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation, which explicitly references the “doctrine of discovery” and cites Johnson v. M’Intosh as one of the prior precedents).

In many ways, however, the tide is turning, even if officially this legal precedent is still firmly in place. Some of the most interesting recent developments have been taking place on the international stage. The United Nations established a Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2000. In 2007 the United Nations overwhelmingly passed an unprecedented document, titled the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It is the boldest and most comprehensive statement to date on the rights of indigenous populations worldwide, but particularly of those in the “Lands of the Demographic Takeover,” as Alfred Crosby has described it (PDF), or North and South America (including the Caribbean islands), New Zealand, and Australia. The United States was only one of four nations out of 147 that voted against UNDRIP (the other three were, predictably, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia). Although the governments of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia have all subsequently signed on to UNDRIP, the U.S. remains the sole holdout. Obama declared in December 2010 that the U.S. will sign UNDRIP, but so far he has been unable (or unwilling) to get the U.S. Congress to officially endorse it.

As groundbreaking as the UUA resolution was last month, it was not the first such motion by a religious body. That honor goes to the Episcopal Church, which in 2009 passed a resolution that officially denounced the DOD and called for the U.S. to sign on to UNDRIP. The World Council of Churches eventually followed suit in February 2012 during its executive committee meeting in Switzerland. The hope is as other denominations learn about this doctrine and its history, they, too, will be compelled to repudiate it officially and join the growing chorus of calls for the U.S. to adopt UNDRIP. The DOD even has its own Wikipedia page (which marks a certain coming of age in the wider public consciousness, I guess).

In the meantime, despite the wider academy’s failure to engage the DOD as a serious academic topic of inquiry, Native academics have led the way, putting together panels at academic conferences, running regional seminars and listservs (like the one out of Syracuse University), creating an informative website, and publishing books and articles on the topic (one of the best summaries of the DOD is a little essay titled “Five Hundred Years of Injustice,” by Steve Newcomb). This dedicated cadre of Native scholars and activists deserve the credit for bringing this important historical and present-day issue to the attention of literally millions of people around the world, including a growing number of Christian churches and other religious bodies.

Linford D. Fisher is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University and author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford, 2012).

Several years ago, a professor of mine assigned Jill Lepore’s article, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography”. The essay begins with an account of Lepore’s encounter with a lock of Noah Webster’s hair in a New England archive. Lepore describes feeling “an eerie intimacy with Noah himself. And, against all logic, it made me feel as though I knew him—and, even less logically, liked him—just a bit better” (129).

When I read this essay, I, a newly-minted Ph.D. student with minimal archive experience, responded to this narrative in what I assume was the natural way: “Isn’t that sweet? Weird, and a little too attached for a historian, but strangely endearing.” That was then.

 

Via Wikimedia Commons

 

Now, the time has come for me to make my own foray into the archives, and a few weeks ago, in a similarly “crisply air-conditioned Special Collections reading room” to the one where Lepore shared a tender moment with Webster, I found it: a laminated sheet containing a lock of John Humphrey Noyes’s hair and a portrait drawn by his youngest sister, Charlotte. (“Portrait of J.H.N. by C.A. Miller (before 1840),” Box 69.)

Noyes, the founder and leader of the Oneida Community, a nineteenth-century Perfectionist Christian commune known for its unusual sexual practices and selective breeding experiment, is not a figure who commonly inspires tender-hearted nostalgia from historians. Writings by and about him reveal a man who sought to secure the exclusive affection and loyalty of his followers, and the historiographic consensus paints him as a needy, controlling, possibly mentally ill, autocrat. Sociologists Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge, in their The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation, cite Noyes’s Oneida Community as the prime exemplar of the “psychopathology” model of cult formation.

Despite knowing all of this, and despite my own significant misgivings about the system of sexual relations that Noyes devised (all members were expected to “circulate” sexually, and teenagers were initiated by much older members), when I opened the folder containing that lock of hair, I found my heart strangely warmed. I regretted, even, that it was laminated because it prevented me from reaching that next level of bizarre across-the-centuries intimacy that Lepore felt: I couldn’t touch the hair.

A week or so later, I went with a friend to visit the Oneida Community Mansion House, where we took a tour, and I walked around slack-jawed, feeling almost as close to these communitarians as I had when I beheld that lock of hair in the archive. I spent about two weeks’ food budget on books. Our tour guide was excited that I was a graduate student writing about Oneida, and he graciously offered to share with me his genealogical work on the Community.

 

Nancy Gluck (CC BY-NC 2.0)

The Oneida Community Mansion House

 

Afterward, though, I confessed to my friend my subtle disappointment that he and the other Mansion House staff hadn’t been more thrilled to have me in their presence—they hadn’t swept us into closed-to-the-public back rooms, broken open exhibition cases for our perusal, given me a special discount at the gift shop. “I’ve spent almost my entire adult life studying this community and these people,” I whined. “I just want to shake them and say, ‘I know you! I’m your historian!’”

I was aware of the absurdity of this statement even in that moment; the truth is, the Oneida Community already has its share of capable historians (though I’m hoping there’s room for at least one more). They don’t need me to give them their history. Our tour guide had spent decades studying the Community, living right next door to the place where these people had lived and worked, and he knew things about their lives that I, a wide-eyed academic, couldn’t have gleaned from a few weeks in an archive.

Potential creepiness and naïve hubris aside, the inherent illogic of the heart-swell that that tangle of hair inspired in me, and the scholarly pride-swell that being at the Mansion House provoked, got me thinking about the ways in which we relate to our subjects. Why did I, following Lepore, feel that a few strands of old hair drew me closer than ever to this long-dead religious leader? How could I write in a balanced—much less, detached—way about a man whose diary I’d read, whose hair I’d held in my hand?

None of us, of course, is ever really detached. Some of us have secret, or not-so-secret, political or ethical agendas, hoping that the messages we carry from the past will illuminate our present circumstances and choices; others want to redeem the legacies of the historic people and movements that have occupied so much of our own twenty-first-century lives. My own agenda falls somewhere along the lines of rescuing Noyes from the insane asylum of history—of recognizing, even in one of the many apparent “whackos” (a term jokingly employed by one of my former professors) who people the game-board of U.S. religious history, an affinity with the theology of Second Great Awakening revivalism and a sincere effort to be as fully and authentically Christian as possible. Perhaps a deeper understanding of Noyes and the people who devoted themselves wholeheartedly, wholebodiedly, to his mission might soften our judgment of so-called religious “whackos” past, present, and future.

In the end, I think the real identity of John Humphrey Noyes lies somewhere between the troubled, tyrannical charlatan who fits the “psychopathology model of cult formation” and the soft-spoken, earnestly religious, adored leader whose sister lovingly preserved a lock of his hair. There is something seductive (or, in Oneida Community parlance, “magnetic”) about each of these poles of interpretation, but I hope that avoiding (at least for the most part) seduction from either side will make the story I tell more real and important.

Kathleen Williams is a Ph.D. candidate in American religious history at Vanderbilt University. She holds a B.A. from Davidson College and an M.A. from the University of Georgia. She is currently working on her dissertation, “The Art of Glancing:” Disciplining Bodies and Affections in the Oneida Community.

I’ve been writing on women evangelists for some twenty years now, and I thought I’d seen it all: Maria Woodworth-Etter who fell into forty-five minute trances during her sermon with her right arm raised above her head, moving slowly back and forth, and her index finger pointed upward, or Uldine Utley, a child prodigy dressed in her signature all-white dress, hose, and shoes, who at age fourteen filled Madison Square Garden for a four-week, two-sermons-a-day evangelistic campaign.

Then in December, I made a trip from Seattle down to Portland, Oregon, where I met, face to face, the legacy of Florence Crawford, a Pentecostal evangelist from the initial, heady days of the 1906 Azusa Street Revival. From Los Angeles, Crawford traveled north to bring the apostolic faith message to the Pacific Northwest and eventually settled in Portland, where she founded the Apostolic Faith Mission (AFM). Her creative and expansive adaptation of transportation technology for evangelism in and around her Portland headquarters ranks as an entrepreneurial marvel.

 

Photos courtesy of the Apostolic Faith Church, Portland, OR.

 

Crawford began modestly enough with a gospel wagon purchased for $250 in 1908. She owned only the wagon; horses had to be hired for each evangelistic meeting in a Portland park. White canvas stretched tautly over each side of the wagon provided a surface for gospel slogans printed in large capital letters: PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD and TURN YE FOR WHY WILL YE DIE.

She quickly transitioned from a horse-drawn wagon to the automotive horsepower of a Federal truck, complete with detachable seats for carrying literature. In 1913, a band of a dozen workers took the truck on its first evangelistic trip, driving from Portland to Vancouver, British Columbia, a one-way distance of more than 300 miles. Within two years, by 1915, she had purchased enough automobiles, fourteen in all, to ensure that each city with an AFM mission—Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, Eugene, Dallas, and Portland–had at least one car to use for evangelism.

 

Apostolic Faith Church.

 

Once she had amassed a garage full of automobiles, she purchased a 3-passenger Curtiss Oriole, The Sky Pilot, in 1919. Her son, Raymond, pioneered aerial evangelism, which entailed dropping religious papers from the air, like 1000 papers over rural Idaho and 9000 invitations over Portland.

 

Apostolic Faith Church.

 

Targeted areas for the literature drop included Oregon’s state penitentiary, reform schools, poor farms in Multnomah and Clackamas countries, and town centers throughout greater Portland on a Saturday afternoon. Dive bombing areas with religious literature did not last long, however, because in 1922, legal restrictions were passed, prohibiting the practice, so Crawford sold The Sky Pilot.

Not content to evangelize by road and air, Crawford initiated an evangelistic outreach to the sailors aboard merchant ships from many countries docked in the Portland harbor, located about 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean on the Willamette River. For harbor evangelism, she bought a 28-foot motorboat named the Morning Star. AFM workers steered the Morning Star alongside docked ships, and, when given permission by the captain, set up an extension ladder to climb aboard in order to distribute religious literature and invite sailors to services at the mission.

 

Apostolic Faith Church.

 

For ships whose captains prohibited them on board, the workers launched “gospel grenades”— waterproof packets of religious papers printed in the language of the sailors on that ship. Factoring in the height differential between the Morning Star and a seagoing ship, the grenades had to be thrown as high as fifty feet in the air in order to land on deck.

Obviously, Crawford was nothing if not entrepreneurial in her use of transportation technology for evangelism. Yet there is something distinctive in the way she chose to exercise that entrepreneurial spirit: she hunkered down in one location and launched evangelistic forays from her Portland headquarters. She bought cars to be driven up and down the coast from Oregon north to British Columbia. She bought a plane to drop literature throughout Oregon. She bought a boat to ply the Portland harbor. In other words, Crawford stayed put and focused her entrepreneurial evangelism in nearby neighborhoods and cities.

In the years prior to the Progressive Era, women evangelists with that same entrepreneurial spirit chose to itinerate. Jarena Lee, for example, who in the 1820s and 1830s itinerated throughout New England, north into Canada, and west into Ohio, traveling by foot, stagecoach, and boat to preach in churches, schools, camp meetings, barns, and homes. Her contemporary, Nancy Towle, preached throughout the United States, Canada, England, and Ireland. These evangelists embody the moniker, “rootless women,” coined by Elizabeth Elkin Grammer in her book, Some Wild Visions: Autobiographies by Female Itinerant Evangelists in 19th-Century America.

Crawford represents the next generation of women evangelists, who settled down from a wandering itinerancy and built institutions to gather in converts, engage in evangelism, and establish a legacy in brick and mortar, in the bylaws and printed materials of their churches, denominations, schools, rescue homes, and rescue missions.

Like Mattie Perry, who, at a nondescript crossroad at the foothills of the Appalachians, opened Elhanan Training School in a former hotel, which she refurbished and furnished. Like Emma Whittemore, who launched her first of nearly one hundred Door of Hope rescue homes amidst the squalor of a New York City tenement. Like Bishop Mary Lena Lewis Tate, who gathered her converts first into “Do Rights” bands, then into her denomination, the Church of the Living God, the Pillar and Ground of the Truth. These largely unsung entrepreneurial women evangelists resolved to settle down and build institutions, often financing them with little more than donations of pennies and crates of apples. Remarkably, many of their institutions continue a century later, including Crawford’s Apostolic Faith Mission, which sends out across the globe from its Portland headquarters more than two million pieces of literature each year.

Priscilla Pope-Levison explores more about the institution building of women evangelists in her book due out with NYU Press in 2013. Her previous book on women evangelists is titled Turn the Pulpit Loose: Two Centuries of American Women Evangelists (Palgrave Macmillan 2004). More information is available on her web site, Women Evangelists: A Forgotten History. She teaches theology, church history, and women’s studies at Seattle Pacific University.