Is Mormon-Evangelical Dialogue "Western"?

by John-Charles Duffy

Question: What’s the difference between (a) a study of religion in the American west and (b) a study of American religion that happens to take place in the west

Case study: A few months ago I defended my dissertation, which examined interfaith dialogue between Mormons and evangelical Protestants in the United States—a recent (late 1990s) and unexpected development. To explain why the dialogue emerged when it did and what it “meant,” I contextualized it in relation to historical and cultural developments on a national scale: evangelical anxieties about Mormonism’s expansion outside the Intermountain West;  Mormon efforts to reshape public perceptions of their movement; the rise of the new religious right and “culture war” politics; and the emergence of a nationally distributed literature in which evangelical thinkers grappled with questions around religious pluralism, interfaith dialogue, civility, and tolerance. The big “payoff” point for the study was that Mormon-evangelical dialogue offered a window into how American religious conservatives at the beginning of the 21st century were coming to terms with pluralism.

While the contexts I sketched for the dialogue were national in scale, the dialogue itself was centered in western states. Not surprisingly, Utah was a key location: one of the most active evangelical dialogists was a young Baptist pastor working in that state; most of the Mormon participants were professors at Brigham Young University; and Utah was a natural site for conferences and other events intended to promote friendlier relations between the two faith communities. Evangelical institutions in Colorado and California played key roles as well. A faculty member at Denver Seminary (Littleton, CO) coauthored the first published Mormon-evangelical dialogue with a colleague at Brigham Young University (Provo, UT); a number of closed-door meetings between Mormon and evangelical dialogists were hosted at Fuller Seminary (Pasadena, CA); and Biola University (La Mirada, CA) exchanged student delegations with BYU.

While Mormon-evangelical dialogue was centered in the west, it certainly wasn’t confined to that region. Mormon and evangelical scholars scheduled gatherings to coincide with the annual meetings of the AAR/SBL. One published Mormon-evangelical dialogue began as a public forum held at Roanoke College (Salem, VA). Dialogists were featured at high-profile Mormon studies conferences hosted by the Yale Divinity School and the Library of Congress. Dialogists made “field trips” to Mormon sacred sites in New York and Illinois.

Still, the dialogue took place largely in the west. Occasionally, I was even surprised by how western it was—or at least by which western locales came into the story. I wasn’t surprised, given the geography of early 20th-century fundamentalism and pietism, that the most prominent evangelical presses publishing works of Mormon-evangelical dialogue were located in the Midwest: Illinois, Michigan. I hadn’t expected, however, to find significant works of anti-Mormon polemics (the kinds of literature for which the Mormon-evangelical dialogue was supposed to provide a salutary alternative) coming from an evangelical publishing house located in Eugene, Oregon. Nor would I have predicted that one of the most famous evangelical anti-Mormon writers would set up shop in Issaquah, Washington.

In the end, though, I’m unsure how much significance to assign to the fact that Mormon-evangelical dialogue has been a predominantly western phenomenon. I’m convinced that the dialogue represents something noteworthy about “American religion” at the beginning of the 21st century. But does it illuminate anything meaningful about “religion in the American west”?

•    Certainly I can frame the dialogue as a consequence of Mormonism’s expansion beyond the Intermountain West. That is, I can frame the dialogue as a response to evangelical anxieties triggered by Mormonism’s increased visibility and to a more widely diffused uncertainty among Americans over where to place Mormonism on the national religious landscape. (Is Mormonism Christian? Is it a cult?)

•    Certainly the Californian evangelists and institutions that have participated in the Mormon-evangelical dialogue can be placed in a history of evangelical outmigration from the South into the western part of the Sun Belt.

•    Less certainly, I am inclined to think that the story of Mormon-evangelical dialogue shows the continuing importance of eastern institutions as arbiters of cultural significance: this western-centered initiative was able to claim some measure of national prominence when it gained access to eastern venues such as Yale Divinity School or the Library of Congress.

•    It is tempting to assign regionally framed significance to the fact that the coordinators of Mitt Romney’s 2007-2008 presidential campaign flew the two most prolific Mormon-evangelical dialogists from the Intermountain West to New England to advise them on how to cope with evangelical opposition centered in the South and the Midwest.

Perhaps, though, I’m overemphasizing the regional in all this. When I see that Mormon-evangelical dialogue is centered at institutions in Utah, Colorado, and California, I think—Of course, how natural, the key players are in geographical proximity. But how important is geographical proximity in an era of telecommunications and air transportation? Recall the Mormon-evangelical dialogues at Roanoke College or the AAR/SBL. Could Mormon-evangelical dialogue have flourished just as well if the individuals passionate about pursuing it had been located not at places like Denver Seminary and Fuller but at institutions farther east—maybe Wheaton (Illinois) or Gordon-Conwell (Massachusetts)? Then again, would those individuals have become so passionate about dialoguing with Mormons if they hadn’t lived in or near major Mormon population centers—that is, if they hadn’t lived in California or the Intermountain West? How important is the west in the story of this dialogue? Is the largely western setting meaningful or incidental?

Tim Tebow: The New Western Man?

by Brandi Denison 

First, a confession. Although I am a Coloradoan at heart, and therefore, a Bronco’s fan, I am only a fair-weather football fan. My knowledge of the game is through osmosis. I have absorbed the rules and rhythms of the game through the hours my dad, uncles, and cousins have spent watching and hoping that the Broncos will recover their former glory. But there is a new man in town and he has caught my attention.

Photo by Mark Seliger

 What? No, not that. I meant Tebowing.

This gesture has started a craze among athletes—ranging from high school players to professionals, including skier Lindsey Vonn. Vonn, a native Coloradoan, said that she would Tebow if she won a race in Colorado (a feat that the world-class skier has never accomplished). When she won her first race in the States at Beavercreek last week, she knelt down in front of her skis. In honor of God? No. When asked why she did it, she said: “Go Broncos. I did it. Got to represent.” 

Many Coloradoans of all religious stripes might be in agreement with Vonn. For fans that have seen their team come so close to glory only to have it slip away in a fumbled football, Tebow is their savior. Tim Tebow fits into a mythic narrative Coloradoans have of themselves and of their sports teams—a little scrappy, but he gets the job done. Except last night, but an SNL skit predicted that this would happen.

But there’s more to Tebow than meets the eye.In addition to being portrayed as the savior of the Broncos, he has been heralded as the new face of evangelical Christianity. For one thing, he has a mythic birth story. In short, according to his parents, Tim Tebow shouldn't be here.

He has caught the attention of non-Christians as well. In an article for the ChristianScience Monitor, Dan Lebowitz, the executive director of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in Boston said:

I happen to be Jewish … and it’s not Tebow versus other religions,” Mr. Lebowitz says. “I believe in a new construct of manhood. You can be tough as heck on the football field, but still be kind, compassionate, respectful of women…. He sends a message that there may be dignity in choosing partners carefully, or respecting your body and someone else’s body as a temple. I respect that.

So, is Tebow, situated in the American West, giving us a new vision of manhood? One that is tough as nails in the workplace, but kind, compassionate, and respectful of women everywhere else? 

No, of course not. Tebow is just engaging a very old idea of American masculinity, popularized by many writers and actors, including John Wayne. Here’s a clip from Rooster Cogburn (the 1975 sequel to the original True Grit), where Cogburn advises Eula Goodnight (played by the “Yankee” Katherine Heburn) on his take on gender and religion. In short, Goodnight asks Cogburn if his name is written in the Book of Life. After some back and forth, Cogburn responds by advising Goodnight to follow the apostle Paul's recommendation that women stay quiet.

Cogburn was tough in a fight but always willing to help ladies in need out. Sounds a little like another popular hero (albeit a mid-western one): 

 

Truth, Justice, and the American Way are secular ideals that Tebow, among other western heroes, embodies. Wait! You might object, as Tebow is the first to popularize an evangelical message on the national football arena

Oh? Do you remember this guy?

Tim Defrisco/Getty Image

Bill McCartney was the storied coach of the University of Colorado at Boulder football team from 1982-1994. During his tenure as coach, he led the team to win 3 consecutive Big Eight Conference titles. Off the field, though, McCartney worked to fight another battle. 

In 1990, McCartney founded Promise Keepers, an organization whose mission is to: “ignite and unite men to become warriors who will change their world through living out the Seven Promises.” These Seven Promises include supporting men in “building strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values.” Promise Keepers teaches men that they need to be the spiritual head of their household, leading their wives and children into salvation. 

McCartney also participated in another storied birth story—that of Timothy Chase (TC) McCartney, a quarterback at LSU. TC is the son of McCartney’s daughter, Kristy, and one of his football players from the CU team, Sal Aunese. Sal was diagnosed with cancer when Kristy was pregnant. Before Sal died, Bill McCartney led Sal to Christ. You can read the story here. 

I’m sure that this list could go on. Tebow is just one of many other Christian athletes working to use sports to transform images of both Christianity and masculinity. Look for Annie Blazer’s book, Faith on the Field: Sports, Gender, and Evangelicalism in America in the coming months to help contextualize male athleticism within a broader evangelical culture. 

Now, I have to ask. Is this a type of masculinity that we want modeled for us? Tebow’s optimism, sportsmanship, and charity work do seem quite admirable. Indeed, in the face of NFL scandals like Rob Gronkowski’s photo shoot with a porn star, Tebow stands out as a quarterback parents could encourage their kids to look up to. 

However, we need to interrogate even Tebow's version of masculinity. Are these really the only two ways of being a man in the United States today? Neither one is desirable, as both define themselves against subordinating women. On the one hand, women become valued as objects of male desire, but on the other hand, women are powerful only in their capacity to sacrifice themselves  in order to build an evangelical home. In both of these visions of American manhood, women stand behind the men. We do need new constructions of manhood. I'm just not sure that we have found our guy in Tebow.  

Book of the Month:

Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt
review by Tisa Wenger

Editors' note: Today we kick off a new feature on the blog -- the Book of the Month. On the first Monday of each month, we'll have a review of a new or not-so-new book that is pertinent to the study of religion in the American West. We begin today with Tisa Wenger's review of Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism.

Most of you will already have heard about Darren Dochuk’s widely acclaimed new book, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (W.W. Norton, 2011). This book is already accumulating richly deserved awards: the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians; and, just announced last month, the Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association, named every other year for “the best book on any subject pertaining to the history of the United States.” Congratulations, Darren!

From Bible Belt to Sunbelt is chock-full of colorful characters and new historical insights that will be of interest to readers of this blog. Dochuk describes the migration of southern evangelicals to California (a move that began during the Depression and accelerated in the 1940s), their conversion to conservative political activism, and their importance in the subsequent emergence of evangelical conservatism nationwide. He does not present the convergence of evangelicalism and conservatism as inevitable in any way, and in fact he shows how volatile and varied these migrants’ political commitments were when they first arrived in California.

Sara’s last post described the discussion at the seminar meeting about whether are or should be making any claims of regional distinctiveness. This question has haunted the seminar, and every time we face it we seem to feel the need to justify our existence, to justify our focus on the West within the field of American religious history. I think Darren’s book helps us move beyond that question simply by demonstrating so well the value of attentiveness to region and to local regional cultures. Indeed he helps us understand not only Southern California but also the “western south” (Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas) where many of these migrants originated, and in far more detail than previous accounts he also shows how important these grassroots conservatives and these regional cultures were for the “religious right” that came to national prominence with Reagan’s election in 1980.

All this raises another one of our seminar’s perennial questions, which does not involve justifying a regional focus, but what seems to me the more substantive problem that there is in fact no single “West.” California is not Utah is not North Dakota is not Texas, and none of these states can be taken as a unitary entity in themselves. There are multiple regional cultures and subcultures within the purview we’ve claimed, and the question is whether bringing them together within the rubric of “Religion in the American West” obscures more than it illuminates. I could ruminate much longer on all this, but I fear I’d be testing your patience as well as moving even further away from the book I’m supposed to be reviewing. So I’ll stop here with a single piece of advice: if you haven’t yet read Dochuk, yourself a favor, and read it. NOW.

More notes from the Editors: Have you read this book? What do you think about it? Join the conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments! If you have a suggestion for a future book of the month, or if you would like to review a book for the book of the month series, please contact us. Next month, Quincy D. Newell reviews Gregory Smoak's Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2006).

Iconoclasm, Western Style

by Sara M. Patterson  

Photo by Doug Crowl

About one month ago, Kathleen Folden drove almost one thousand miles from Kalispell, Montana, to Loveland, Colorado (a town that touts itself as having a thriving arts community), in order to walk into the Loveland Museum/ Gallery and destroy a lithograph with her crowbar. The offending lithograph Folden deemed too blasphemous to be, was an image of Jesus, decked out in a light blue bustier, receiving oral sex. Jesus looks pleased. As she tore the lithograph, one witness noted that she mumbled “How could anyone desecrate my Lord.” Since then, her supporters have likened her to the biblical Jael who, committed to her faith, was “hard as nails.”

Folden was not the only person offended by the lithograph that was only one panel of a twelve-panel, accordion-style piece. About three weeks after the exhibit opened to allow visitors to see the work titled The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals by California artist and Stanford University professor Enrique Chagoya, there was a complaint about the Chagoya lithograph that a city councilor tried and failed to place on the council's agenda. After word got around that the museum had this piece on display, protesters demonstrated outside the museum with picket signs. They believed they did not need to actually see the artwork; they knew that “This is not beauty, this is smut.”  (For an photo of the destroyed art work, visit here.  Visit this site for an image of the original.  Be warned. The image is graphic and may offend some readers.) 

One week after his art was ripped to pieces in the Loveland Museum/Gallery, artist Enrique Chagoya accepted a commission from a Loveland church to create a portrait of Jesus Christ, which he will do free of charge. Jonathan Wiggins, the head pastor at Resurrection Christian Fellowship, emailed Chagoya to inquire about his intentions in the original artwork. Chagoya responded with his explanation that the lithograph was a critique of the institutional church rather than Jesus himself. After the email correspondence, Chagoya said that he considered Wiggins his friend. Wiggins accepted Chagoya’s explanation and invited him to create a newer (and tamer) depiction of Jesus.

How does this relate to our discussions of religion in the American West—aside from the obvious answer that this is a western artist, whose artwork was displayed in the west and supported, protested and destroyed by westerners? It seems to me that these incidents are very much tied to what Tisa Wenger identified in her November 3, 2010 blog as the “power of religious imagination to shape local and national identities.” The rhetoric of the Loveland protesters clearly revealed that they perceived Chagoya as a religious outsider, one who could not be tolerated in Loveland, Colorado, a place they believed had Christian values that were not being protected by the local, tax-funded museum. And yet, the choice of the Resurrection Christian Fellowship Church to accept Chagoya’s new artwork—a piece of artwork done for free and with “no disrespect” to Jesus—allowed him to be reaccepted into the community. He was expelled as a “sodomite” and a “sinner” and reaccepted as a repentant believer. The narrative that allowed for his inclusion was deeply embedded in the narratives of evangelical Christianity. "I hope it's just a new beginning,” Chagoya said. His repentance of sorts was an indication that he could be welcomed; he could be a Lovelander, a westerner, because he promised not to sin again. 

News articles related to this incident:

http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20101007/LOVELAND01/101007001/Woman-bashes-controversial-Jesus-display-in-Loveland-with-crowbar

http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2010101015001

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/07/enrique-chagoya-work-wont_n_755199.html