While Prohibition is a byword for failed legislation, temperance concerns survived the ratification of the 21st Amendment. But in recent years, more restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol have been disappearing. Read more
While Prohibition is a byword for failed legislation, temperance concerns survived the ratification of the 21st Amendment. But in recent years, more restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol have been disappearing. Read more
Ian Lovett’s recent Wall Street Journal essay traces a growing trend among traditional Christians to move to remote locations, often near a monastery, to recreate a kind of life that recalls Christian devotion in an earlier time, like the Middle Ages. In Oklahoma, California, Texas, and Arkansas, Lovett finds new outposts of Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass and want to live with like-believing neighbors. These people “are part of a burgeoning movement among traditional Christians. Feeling besieged by secular... Read more
I have not read this yet, but I just came across a book that looks exactly my kind of thing. This is Adam Jortner, Blood from the Sky: Miracles and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Virginia Press, 2017). Here is the description: In the decades following the Revolution, the supernatural exploded across the American landscape―fabulous reports of healings, exorcisms, magic, and angels crossed the nation. Under First Amendment protections, new sects based on such miracles proliferated. At... Read more
I wrote about the relationship between immigration and religious change, and the enormous impact of successive immigrant movements in shaping American religious patterns. Immigrant churches or congregations generally share certain characteristics and habits that provide useful tools for analysis and prediction. But that gets to some thorny issues of definition, and specifically about how we should use the term “immigrant.” Technically the word has a specific meaning, but we customarily use an expanded sense. Far Right activists in Europe denounce... Read more
“At times of crisis it is a natural human reaction to turn to the past for support.”[1] These words were written by evangelicals, to evangelicals. In 1983. Wait—1983? But Ronald Reagan was president at the time. What could possibly have been the source of evangelical angst back then? In fact, the causes were many. The wounds of Vietnam and Watergate were still fresh, the economy seemed on precarious footing, and the threat of nuclear annihilation persisted. Add to that evangelical... Read more
Recently I was made aware of an online church history curriculum. At first glance, it seemed promising (at least from my perspective as a medievalist). It dedicated two weeks to the Medieval Church (five if you include the three weeks of Reformation), and it began the lesson for the High Middle Ages with this disclaimer: “Common belief is that the Middle Ages was a truly horrible time period with no redeeming qualities. But the more we examine [we] realize just... Read more
While many Christians have criticized the Trump administration's embrace of an "America First" policy, the pre-WWII movement that made that phrase famous had the support of a wide array of American Christians. Read more
Whatever might drive them to move, migrants carry their religions with them. Yet the religions they bring to their new lands do not remain unchanged. The fact of movement itself is a powerful dynamic force in religious change, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the United States. In his classic book The Uprooted (1951), Oscar Handlin wrote the famous words “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants... Read more
I posted recently on issues of migration and mission, and how each of those terms can be applied to the spread of religions. In particular, I stressed the many factors that might cause a religion to spread, quite apart from conscious, deliberate evangelization. Often, we exaggerate deliberate missionary activity while underplaying the role of other forms of population movement that might be non-intentional, casual, even accidental, and definitely not directed toward religious goals. To illustrate this, let me draw a... Read more
“After he has lunched on his God on Sunday, / You should worship his turd on Monday.” So the French Huguenot polemical poet Agrippa d’Aubigné mocked the Catholic Eucharist. Early Protestants felt and feigned horror at the idea that Catholics believed that they chewed, swallowed, and digested the very body of Jesus Christ. They were cannibals (“papal anthropophagy,” per John Milton). They were théochèzes, or “God-shitters.”[1] It was a bit harder to mock absence than presence, but Catholics responded in... Read more
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