Edward Said Meets Dwight L. Moody

Edward Said Meets Dwight L. Moody April 12, 2016

For readers who have spent time with Edward Said’s influential book, Orientalism, the thought that a leading critic of the West’s understanding of the East was a graduate of Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts will no doubt surprise. Mount Hermon was the creation of the revivalist, Dwight L. Moody, and as Said observed in his autobiography, Out of Place, thoroughly beholden to quirks of evangelicalism in the United States:

The mythology of D. L. Moody dominated the school and made it the not-quite-first-rate place it was. There was the “dignity of manual labor” part, which seemed to me totally silly. There seemed to be unquestioned asset to the man’s incredible importance: it was my first encounter with enthusiastic mass hypnosis by a charlatan, because except for two of us, not one teacher or student expressed the slightest doubt that Moody was worthy of the highest admiration. . . .

And so it was with religion — the Sunday service, the Wednesday evening chapel, the Thursday noon sermon — dreadful pietistic, nondenominational (I disliked that form of vacillation in particular), full of homilies, advice, how-to-live. Ordinary observations were encoded into Moodyesque sturdy Christianity in which words like “service” and “labor” acquired magical (but finally unspecifiable) meaning, to be repeated and intoned as what gave our lives “moral purpose.” . . . We were all Hermon boys, six hundred of us marching on after Moody and Ira Sankey, his faithful sidekick.

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