{"id":59624,"date":"2020-05-13T01:42:10","date_gmt":"2020-05-13T05:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=59624"},"modified":"2020-05-12T07:58:42","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T11:58:42","slug":"non-religious-turning-points-religious-history-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2020\/05\/non-religious-turning-points-religious-history-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Non-Religious Turning Points in Religious History: The 20th Century"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Will we one day look back at the COVID-19 pandemic<\/a> as a turning point in the history of Christianity and other religions? We won\u2019t know for many years, but it wouldn\u2019t be the first time that a seemingly non-religious event reshaped religious practice, belief, community, imagination, etc. Yesterday Beth, Philip, and Tal nominated three such turning points<\/a> from before the year 1900: the Black Death, the Little Ice Age (in particular, the years 1675-1685), and Chicago\u2019s Columbian Exposition of 1893.<\/p>\n

As we conclude our brief series today, three of our Americanists will discuss events from the second half of the 20th century. But I\u2019ll get us started with something that technically happened in the late 19th century, but whose fullest effects weren\u2019t realized until after 1900\u2026<\/p>\n

The Invention of Radio<\/h2>\n

The printing press obviously belongs on this list, but I\u2019m too much of a 20th century-ist to write knowledgeably about that invention. And I\u2019m not enough of a self-promoter to add Charles Lindbergh\u2019s 1927 flight to Paris<\/a> to this list, though surely the advent of transoceanic travel (and the hero worship that attended it) had important implications for Christianity<\/a>. But I do think we need something from the history of technology on this list, so let\u2019s talk about the invention of the radio, which was intertwined with Christianity from its origins. After Guglielmo Marconi made the first wireless transmissions in the 1890s (he later created Vatican Radio), the first human voices heard \u201con the air\u201d belonged to a Brazilian priest named Roberto Landell de Moura (1900) and the Canadian-American engineer Reginald Fessenden (1906), an Anglican minister\u2019s son whose pioneering Christmas Eve broadcast included two carols and a reading of Luke 2:14.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Hangen,<\/a>Of course, Christians had been using communications technology to spread their faith and link their communities since Paul first wrote and dictated his epistles. (Christians <\/span>still use letters<\/span><\/a> in that way.) Almost as long, they\u2019ve feared that such innovations might erode Christian community or enable rivals to drown out the gospel. Indeed, much of our current angst about worshipping online has antecedents in anxieties about the radio enabling Christians to skip church and worship at home. But <\/span>historian Tona Hangen argues<\/span><\/a> that the religious history of radio helps to explain why America did not follow Europe\u2019s path to secularization. <\/span>While \u201creligious experience could have been watered down, marginalized, or supplanted by the public\u2019s engagement with new forms of mass entertainment,\u201d radio instead \u201cserved as a pulpit for evangelism on a scale impossible only decades before.\u201d Fundamentalists and evangelicals were especially adept at using the new media, using them to \u201c[channel] messages that were conservative (orienting, placing) and transformative (disorienting, displacing).\u201d(See also Philip\u2019s post this past Monday<\/a>, on Paul Matzko\u2019s new book, <\/i>The Radio Right.)<\/i> Here too, a non-religious innovation had a religious effect that soon extended beyond religion, as conservative Christians recognized the power of mass media to shape political behavior. (Not just Protestants: Father Coughlin wasn\u2019t called \u201cthe radio priest\u201d for nothing.) In that sense, the invention of the radio also set the stage for Fox News and other right-wing media becoming the primary sources of spiritual formation for many American Christians.\u00a0(Chris Gehrz)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The Cold War<\/h2>\n

The Cold War transformed the U.S. politically, economically, socially, culturally, and militarily, and it also changed the U.S. religiously. This period witnessed Americans\u2019 continued sacralization of political culture and enthusiastic embrace of civil religion. For example, as Americans sought to distinguish themselves from the godless communists in the Soviet Union, the 1950s saw an uptick in public celebrations of religion \u2014 a shift represented, for example, by the adoption of \u201cin God we trust\u201d as the national motto in 1956. This moment of consensus also prompted a reimagination of religious diversity in the US. Religious groups that had once been at odds with each other \u2014 Protestants, Catholics, and Jews \u2014 found themselves united as equal members of a \u201ctri-faith America\u201d during the Cold War.<\/p>\n

The nationalistic religious fervor of the Cold War shaped developments not only within the U.S., but beyond it. As the U.S. sought to establish its international dominance and secure alliances in the global struggle against communism, one of the ways the U.S. expressed its power was through demonstrations of benevolent \u201cChristian Americanism.\u201d As a result, the Cold War period saw the growth of Christian humanitarian international aid organizations, which have played an important role in public-private humanitarian work overseas. Moreover, it was partly due to the geopolitical considerations of World War II and the Cold War that the U.S. ended Asian exclusion, reformed its immigration laws (see below)<\/em>, and opened its doors to refugees in the second half of the twentieth century.\u00a0(Melissa Borja)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
1965 anti-war protest at the University of Wisconsin, Madison \u2013 CC BY 2.0 (UW Digital Collections)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Vietnam War<\/h2>\n

The Vietnam War is seen as a watershed moment in twentieth-century American history, and rightly so. What is less frequently recognized is that the war was also a watershed moment in the history of American Protestantism. It was during that war that American evangelicals clearly aligned with the U.S. military and with the war effort, even as many other Americans, and mainline and liberal Protestant leaders in particular, became increasingly critical both of the U.S. military intervention and the soldiers who fought the war. (Similar dynamics played out within American Catholicism during this time as well).<\/span><\/p>\n

At a time when mainline leaders were expressing their ambivalence toward the administration, evangelicals were rewarded with increased stature and access to power. It was against the backdrop of Vietnam that conservative evangelicals mobilized as a partisan political force, and their social and political views reflected their pro-war, pro-military stance. Evangelicals were not only motivated by anti-communism, but also by the fear that America\u2019s inability to defeat a ragtag enemy in the Vietnamese jungles reflected a failure of American manhood and a threat to Christian America. Thus, as evangelicals sought to define \u201cbiblical\u201d gender roles, they <\/span>embraced a militant masculinity<\/span><\/a> as a model of all-American and God-given Christian manhood. Feminism threatened this militant masculinity and needed to be opposed at every turn. In this way, a rugged, aggressive (white) masculinity and a submissive femininity stood at the heart of conservative evangelicalism as it evolved as a religious, political, and cultural movement. <\/span>(Kristin Du Mez)<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965<\/h2>\n

Popularly known as the Immigration Act of 1965, the transformative Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act dramatically shifted the distribution of visas. Prior to its passage, 82% of visas went to northern and western Europeans, sixteen percent to eastern and southern Europeans, and only two percent to the rest of the world. After 1965, European immigration slowed, and immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America exploded. Capping all countries at 7% of the annual total, it especially favored Cold War refugees, families trying to reunify, and those with \u201cespecially advantageous\u201d job skills. By 2005, 38.4 million immigrants, 90 percent of whom did not claim European heritage, called the United States home. Together with their American-born children, they comprised about 25 percent of the U.S. population.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
President Lyndon Johnson signs the bill into law in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty \u2013 LBJ Presidential Library and Museum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The\u00a0impact of the Hart-Celler Act on American religious life has been \u2014 and continues to be \u2014 monumental. According to scholar Jehu Hanciles, himself an immigrant from Sierra Leone, nearly two-thirds of immigrants are Christian. Through the 2010s, more than 600,000 Christian immigrants received green cards each year. To be sure, non-Christian diversity also spiked in the decades since 1965, but the new immigration, notes sociologist Stephen Warner, is bringing about \u201cnot so much a new diversity among American religions as diversity within America\u2019s majority religion.\u201d The striking story is that as the United States becomes less Christian by the attrition of Americans with European heritage, it becomes more Christian through non-white migration. \u201cWe\u2019re witnessing the re-Christianization of America,\u201d writes scholar Gast\u00f3n Espinosa.\u00a0(David Swartz)<\/em><\/p>\n

What have we left out? Feel free to nominate your own non-religious turning points for religious history in the Comments section below.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As our series of non-religious turning points in religious history continues into the 20th century, Melissa, Kristin, David, and Chris look at an invention, a piece of legislation, and two related wars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2794,"featured_media":59752,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2974,833,3033,4408],"tags":[2839,459,6755,1727],"class_list":["post-59624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chris-gehrz","category-david-swartz","category-kristin-kobes-du-mez","category-melissa-borja","tag-cold-war","tag-immigration","tag-radio","tag-vietnam-war"],"yoast_head":"\nNon-Religious Turning Points in Religious History: The 20th Century<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As our series of non-religious turning points in religious history continues into the 20th century, Melissa, Kristin, David, and Chris look 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