“The Burden of Church History”… in the American West

by Cara L. Burnidge

Celebrating 125 years of the American Society of Church History in New Orleans last weekend, fellow Religion in the American West contributor Laurie Maffly-Kipp gave fellow ASCH members plenty to ponder in her presidential address, “The Burdens of Church History,” at the Society’s Winter Meeting.

Drawing inspiration from C. Vann Woodward’s The Burden of Southern History, Maffly-Kipp asserted the continued importance of “church history” despite theoretical problems it carries within Religious Studies. While noting her interest in expanding the focus of church history to include people, events, and objects outside of a traditional notion of a “church,” Maffly-Kipp admitted that she cannot avoid the “nagging feeling” that she must hold on to the “church” part of “church history” because it mattered to historical actors she studies. Drawing on her own work on African American religions, Maffly-Kipp pointed to the tension that often gets overlooked within African American Christianity: even though Jim Crow weighed heavily upon churches, many African American Christians sought membership in and gave value to belonging to a church. In a short paraphrase of Maffly-Kipp’s remarks: it mattered to them, so it should matter to us.

What, you might ask, does this offer for scholars of religion in the American West? More than you might think. As her address drew to a close, Maffly-Kipp emphasized the significance of collectivities, networks, and institutional structures that shape historical actors’ individual experiences. Rather than choose between “fight or flight” with a traditional “church history” method, Maffly-Kipp pointed ASCH members to a renewed interest in institutions—and institutional memory—as a vantage point for scholarship. This, it seems to me, can be of great interest to RAW readers. How do collectivities (be they formal institutions like churches or not) and networks of collectivities shape religion in the American West or, alternatively, the notion of the “west” itself?

At first blush it may seem that RAW readers have a healthy distance from “church history,” both the physical spaces and the outdated model of scholarship. There may be much to gain, however, in reconsidering the relationship between the two. 

REMINDER: AAR and ASCH Proposals Due Today!

Hi everyone -- your friendly blog editors here, reminding you that proposals for the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting are due today.  For the Religion in the American West Seminar call for papers, see our blog post here; for full details and the complete AAR call for papers, head over to their CFP. 

Also, proposals for the American Society of Church History 2013 Winter Meeting are due today.  To see the call for papers and get more details, go to our blog post here, or click on over to the ASCH website.  Happy Thursday!

REMINDER: Many Things Are Due Today (or Soon)!

Hi everyone -- your friendly blog editors here, just reminding you that proposals are due to the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians today.  To see the calls and get more details, go to our AHA blog post here and our OAH blog post here.  Also, proposals are due for the American Society of Church History on March 15, a month from today.  To see the call for papers, go to our blog post here or just click on over to the call on the ASCH website.  Happy Wednesday!

American Society of Church History Call for Papers

Hey! It's time for CFP #3, this time from the American Society for Church History. Perhaps you saw Cara Burnidge's swell recap from this year's ASCH meeting last week in this space. (If you didn't, click here for part 1 and here for part 2. There's even music!) The ASCH meets with the AHA in the winter (scroll down for our post on the AHA's CFP), but the deadline for ASCH proposals is a month after AHA proposals are due. Here's the call:

The annual Winter 2013 meeting of the American Society of Church History will be held Thursday to Sunday, January 3-6, 2013, in New Orleans, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA). We invite ASCH members and other interested scholars to submit paper and session proposals on any aspect of the history of Christianity and its interaction with culture, including proposals for formal papers, panel and round table discussions, consideration of a major recent book, critical assessments of a distinguished career, and other relevant themes and issues.

In addition to traditional categories relating to periods, geographical areas, and special topics, we will give special consideration to proposals that consider broader themes across periods or regions; engage in interdisciplinary discussion; place theological ideas in historical context; examine particular genres, source materials or methods; or treat the current state of the study of church history. We also invite sessions that deal with pedagogical issues of concern in the teaching of the history of Christianity, or with issues in the publication and dissemination of research to specialist and general audiences. Panels should exhibit diversity of gender, rank, and scholarly location in their composition.

Proposals for entire panels/sessions are strongly preferred, though proposals for individual papers will also be considered. The committee welcomes international participation and particularly encourages proposals (whether for full panels or individual papers) from those who live and work outside the United States. Sessions are typically two hours in length and allow for three or four papers, a formal response, and Q&A with the audience. In order better to group individual papers into sessions, such proposals for individual papers should address one of the following themes:

• Christianity and public life, or the relationship of church and state
• Christian responses to disaster and suffering
• Christianity and race, or creole cultures

The deadline for proposals is March 15, 2012.

(For those interested in submitting joint proposals to the AHA and the ASCH, the deadline for AHA proposals is February 15, 2012. See www.historians.org.)

Paper proposals should consist of (1) a short description of less than 300 words, (2) a biographical paragraph or CV summary of the applicant, and (3) a current mailing location, email address, and phone number for the proposed presenter. Session proposals should contain all of the above for each of the presenters as well as (1) the session title, (2) a brief description of less than 300 words outlining the theme or topic of the session, and (3) biographical data and contact details for the chair and the respondent (which can be the same person). Use of audio-visual equipment is limited to the hotel provider’s equipment, has become very expensive, and must be restricted to presentations for which it is strictly necessary. The proposed use of computers, internet, or projectors in the session must therefore be stated and rationalized in the proposal.

Please send proposals, preferably by email, before March 15, 2012, to the program committee at asch2013@regent-college.edu. Acknowledgements and further information will be sent out as proposals are received. The program committee reserves the right to reconfigure sessions as needed.

NOTE: All program participants must register for the annual meeting and be members of the ASCH at the time of the Meeting.

Bruce Hindmarsh, Program Chair
Regent College, 5800 University Blvd., Vancouver, BC, CANADA, V6T 2E4

Independent Scholar and Graduate Student Awards

Independent scholars and graduate students presenting a paper at the Winter Meeting in New Orleans can apply for an Independent Scholar or Graduate Student Award. The award includes a monetary prize of $500.00 for independent scholars and up to $500.00 for graduate students.

Application forms for these awards will be available for download from September 1.

On Plausibility: Trying to Assess "Influence" in the American West

a.k.a. The ASCH Recap, Part II
by Cara Burnidge

Editors' note: The first part of Cara Burnidge's ASCH recap was published on Monday. Click here, or just scroll down, to see it. Here's the second, and concluding, part.

In his response to the ASCH panel “Violence and Religion: Nineteenth-Century Massacres in the American West,” Gilded Age and Progressive Era historian Walter Nugent drew attention to the way in which the panel focused on cross-cultural “borrowings.” Indeed, Jan Shipps and Sarah Gordon emphasized how both Mormons and Native Americans utilized sacred garments to protect themselves in battle. Just as the Lakota believed that their shirts could protect them from bullets at Wounded Knee, Saints felt assured their undergarments would protect them from injury at Mountain Meadows. Though interested in these points of convergence, Nugent was not convinced that the relationship was necessarily mimetic. He offered a subtle caution in overstating the influence of religious worldviews when direct evidence of interconnectedness is lacking.

Although connections were present, Nugent considered the associations only plausible, wondering out loud to the group “Is that good history?” Without clearer indications that the presence of an idea—however prevalent it may be—shapes historical actors, to what degree can we, as historians, claim its “influence”? Or, as Nugent asked the audience: How much does “floating around” solidly cause influence?

In my own musings on Nugent’s questions for the panel, I understand the import of ensuring the certainty of our evidence. However, I also contend that when we ignore what is merely plausible, we would have “good” history but we might not have better history. Perhaps my specialization in religious history has caused an exaggerated sense of comfort in light of insufficient materiality, but I find “solid” evidence a rare occurrence in the historical record. My doubt (pessimism?) in writing the unquestionably certain historical narrative does not dishearten the search for “what happened,” but rather animates it.

Take for instance the massacre at Mountain Meadows: For nearly 150 years, many believed that Native Americans—and not Mormon Saints—were responsible for the tragedy. Uncovering the truth behind Mountain Meadows required historical inquiry based on the plausibility of errors in the historical account, in this case the band of Mormon men lying about their experiences. Eventually, the nagging plausibility of another explanation led to more accurate information about what happened.

How do other readers reconcile potential narratives that are plausible but not certain in their own research?

Unearthing the "Spiritual Underpinnings of the American West"

a.k.a. The ASCH Recap, Part I
by Cara Burnidge

For those of you could not attend the American Society of Church History’s winter meeting, your presence was certainly missed as we continued the ongoing conversation about the role of religion in the history of the American West.

In a particularly fascinating examination of “Violence and Religion: Nineteenth-Century Massacres in the American West,” Patricia Nelson Limerick, Jan Shipps, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Jennifer Graber, and Walter Nugent led an important conversation that incorporated many themes discussed at the 2011 AAR meeting. (You can review those themes by reading our AAR recap and further discussion.) The two presentations that composed this panel provided a necessary reminder to all historians that studying the American West is an exercise in unearthing a matrix of ideologies that clash as much as they complement one another.

Limerick opened the panel affirming what fellow blog readers and writers have come to assert: religion has been too long neglected in histories of the American West. Co-presenters Jan Shipps and Sarah Barringer Gordon illustrated this point well with their paper, “The Sins of the Fathers: The Mountain Meadows Massacred as a Religious Event.” In a tripartite analysis Shipps and Gordon described three religious ideologies that converged in Southern Utah in the fall of 1857. Beginning with the perpetrators, Jan Shipps untangled the complicated history of the incident. Despite the LDS Church’s previous claims, Shipps asserted that Mormon men—and not Native Americans—attacked unsuspecting western travelers over 150 years ago. Sarah Barringer Gordon built upon Shipps’ account by explaining the religious significance of the event, for Mormons, lay in the doctrine of Blood Atonement. The Mountain Meadows Massacre, despite previous claims otherwise, involved a blending of religious, political, and military ends evidenced not least of all in the Saints' tithing their plunder to the Church.

Gordon then turned her attention to the Native Americans framed for the massacre as well as the victims of Mormon assault. Even though historians tend to focus on Utah as the site of Mormons' religious worldviews, Gordon pointedly reminded her audience that religious commitments to the landscape existed in the area prior to and distinct from Mormon settlement. Not content to focus exclusively on points of conflict, Gordon concluded her remarks by asserting the ways in which these three groups and their ideologies complemented one another. All three groups understood the landscape to hold spiritual significance within a cosmic history; all three relied on revelation and prophecy to determine individual and communal action; and, finally, all three belong to “meta-critical narratives” that demand attention outside of secular chronologies of the American West.

In her presentation, “’The Indians Have No West Point’: The Meanings of Frontier Violence among Missionaries to the Lakota,” Jennifer Graber offered an equally rich re-consideration of an oft-cited event of the American West. Rather than offer a re-telling of the Ghost Dance movement, Graber compared the experiences of two missionaries to the Lakota: Father Francis Craft and Mary Collins. Graber explained that both Craft and Collins believed themselves to be “friends” of Native Americans yet articulated different views about the role of Christianity for the Lakota, especially following the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. Father Francis Craft, a Jesuit missionary, considered the Ghost Dance movement as an opportunity to bridge the divide between Christianity and Lakota beliefs. Not merely present at the massacre but wounded during battle, Craft became energized by what he believed to be Lakota openness to a Messiah figure and blood sacrifice. Congregationalist Mary Collins, on the other hand, became convinced that the Lakota had misappropriated Christian doctrine for the Ghost Dance. Absent when the massacre occurred, Collins shifted her attention from being a defender and “friend of the Indian” to being open to the use of force in the process of assimilation. Above all else, Graber demonstrated the distinctions among Christian missionaries particularly when it comes to issues of violence. The proximity of armed conflict coupled with contested Christian doctrines related to violence and blood caused these two Christians to intimately re-consider their own convictions...with very different results. Together Craft and Collins contribute to what Graber named the “spiritual underpinnings of the American West.”

This panel was a welcome reminder that scholars of the American West must be good jugglers. The number of balls the field keeps in the air—a multiplicity of religious ideologies as well as the political, economic, and social forces wrapped up within them—proves that the study of the American West poses a unique challenge that continues to unfold.

In this effort to unearth the spiritual underpinnings of the American West, I leave readers with a particularly rich, if more contemporary example: 

Editors' note: Stay tuned for part II of the ASCH recap, which will be posted in a day or two -- that's right, this week you get EXTRA blog posts, because 2012 is just that great!