Two Years Old--Thoughts on Gilded Age/Progressive Era Baptists

I just thought that I would note that this blog is turning two years old today. Over the past two years, I've posted 126 posts. This one makes the 127th. I have had over 27,000 page views according to the on-site stats.

Some of the things that I've found most interesting are the things that other people are searching for on the internet. Surprisingly, the most popular post that I've had is related to the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. I would not have figured that nearly 1,600 people would have an interest in this relatively narrow topic, although it is pretty interesting because of the fact that it shows that the Puritans were very interested in education and were actually willing to levy taxes to pay for it.

Much of my work on this site has focused on Puritans. I have other interests, and my recently-approved dissertation actually focused upon Gilded Age/Progressive Era North Dakota Baptists. These folks tended to emphasize many of the same things that the general Protestant establishment did. Prohibition, a Progressive Era reform (in spite of the idea that it was a conservative concept), showed up in the minutes of just about annual meeting of the North Dakota Baptist State Convention--even after Prohibition became the law of the land in 1918.

The North Dakota Baptists would have agreed largely with Rudyard Kipling's idea of the "White Man's Burden" as the idea of evangelizing and civilizing seemed to come together and get conflated at the time. Of course, it is interesting to note that Jesus said to make disciples, not Anglo-Americans, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many believed that these two ideas were one and the same. Some would still seem to think that this is the case.

I'll be interested to see what the next two years has in store as I begin the transition from full-time grad student to full-time instructor.

New Church History Resource from Baylor

I know that some who might read this blog from time to time might be interested in a new resource collection that Baylor University is about to publish. An individual from the publisher contacted me with the information.

This three-volume series is titled the Baylor American Church History Collection. It includes the following titles that focus upon 18th and 19th century American religious history:

  Preaching Politics: The Religions Rhetoric of George Whitefield and the Founding of a New Nation, by Jerome Dean Mahaffey
  Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–1800: Strict Congregationalists and Separate Baptists in the Great Awakening, by C. C. Goen
 Shenandoah Religion: Outsiders and the Mainstream, 1716–1865, by Stephen L. Longenecker

The main site to purchase the series is available at the Logos Bible Software link here. For a limited time, the set can be purchased for a fairly large discount. I do want to note that I have neither read these, nor will I get any type of commission from any sales. I'm merely passing on a few titles that some might find of interest.

Conference Paper in Omaha

I started my "Spring Break" a couple of days early by canceling my last class before the break. I did this, not to skip out, but because I had a conference presentation. I note Spring Break with quotes because Grand Forks just got nearly a foot of snow last Monday, and there is snow in the forecast over the next week (tonight and tomorrow included).

My presentation took place at the Missouri Valley History Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. I've never actually been in town here before, and the downtown seems to be fairly interesting. My panel dealt with the Great Plains to some degree, and my particular paper tried to cram a few major ideas from about 100 pages of dissertation into ten pages.

I titled my paper "Sin, Superstition, and Socialism: Protestant Sermonizing in Early Twentieth-Century North Dakota. The paper detailed some of my work on the local Baptist history, and included some material from the North Dakota State Archives from the North Dakota Baptist Convention collection that I added to my dissertation work. The superstition in the title was related to the nativist and anti-Catholic worldview that the North Dakota Baptists held. The socialism dealt with the anarchism of the newer European immigrants and the activities of the Nonpartisan League (NPL) in North Dakota.

There was a major opposition to the NPL in the late 1910s, when the organization actually took control of the state government. I noted a couple of sermons that non-Baptists preached that I had the opportunity to come into contact with. The first was at a political rally advertised in the Grand Forks Herald. This rally promised to have a sermon from an ordained minister against the evils of socialism.

The second was a sermon published by F. Harley Ambrose of the First Presbyterian of Grand Forks. Ambrose is noteworthy in a not-so-good kind of way because of his holding the position of the Grand Poohbah (actually it was the "Exalted Cyclops") of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. This "Sermon on Applied Socialism," from my cursory reading of it (I did not include it in the official copy of my paper or my dissertation, so I did not go to great lengths to deconstruct it) seemed to have quite a bit of economic theory, but not much that actually came from the Bible.

The main portion of my paper at the conference actually dealt with the "sin" in the title. Although evangelism was clearly the most important goal of the North Dakota Baptist Convention, moral reform was a not-so-close second. Every annual meeting of the NDBC dealt with the topic of prohibition. They even had a Committee on Temperance set up to promote the cause, and they called for ministers to preach sermons directly related to the topic. Additionally, desecration of Sunday and the "white slave" traffic aroused suspicion.

There were a few good questions related to the paper, and the experience was pretty enjoyable overall.

Article Published and Next Class

Today, after a three week trip home and abroad for the inter-semester break, I received my latest edition of the journal Baptist History and Heritage. I've been getting this journal for about five years or so, but this edition was a bit different than the others I've gotten. I was looking forward to this issue because I have an article that they decided to publish.

My latest article looks at a conservative Southern Baptist theologian who was a part of the denominational establishment during the post-WWII era in American history. The article, titled "Social Justice and American Exceptionalism in the Writings of Southern Baptist Statesman H. Cornell Goerner" is very close (basically the same paper) to a paper I read at the Red River Valley History Conference last April. This article shows how Goerner was a conservative evangelical who called for Christianizing the masses and the importance of America in the world, but it also shows how the economic attitudes of many have shifted over the past fifty years or so based upon the writings that Goerner had published by the denominational presses.

This Thursday, I sent over my syllabus for printing. My latest class is a class that I am creating titled "Religion in American Politics and Culture." It will be a hybrid class that incorporates aspects of a lecture-based course and a seminar format. I am hoping to engage students with the important place that religion has had and continues to have on American cultural and political traditions. The course will not be a continuous narrative that attempts to be exhaustive, but will rather choose a few chronological topics to emphasize the importance of religion in American history.

The War on Christmas

We are quickly closing in upon the Christmas season. Many people believe that there is a war on Christmas. I've seen the governor of Rhode Island on television talking about his state's "holiday tree." A large number of Americans are put off by this point. Some Americans would like to avoid having any public displays of religion. However, the purpose of this post is not to talk about the contemporary war on Christmas.

Many Americans trace their religious heritage back to the Puritans in New England (although most Americans today would not fit into the Puritan society). What many Americans do not realize, however, is that the Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic were among the first to start a war on Christmas. During the Interregnum in England, Christmas was banned. There were no holiday trees or Christmas trees. Oliver Cromwell's attempt at a Christian theocracy thought that the holiday was too closely related to Catholic superstition. They also thought that the celebration was nowhere to be found in the Bible. Christmas feasts were replaced by Christmas fasts.

Puritans in the wilderness of New England similarly banned Christmas by legal means. A Massachusetts law actually fined citizens of the colony for celebrating Christmas. It was not until the mother country restored the Stuart monarchy and set up the Dominion of New England in 1680 that laws banning Christmas were repealed. In spite of the new legal status for the holiday, many in New England decided to celebrate quietly to avoid offending the sensibilities of the dominant Puritan cultures. It was actually after the Civil War that Christmas became an official American holiday. Therefore, the idea of a war on Christmas goes back a long way in American church history.

Article Published at Prairie Voices Website

Back in the days of my Masters program, I took a class title "Problems in American History 1877-1917". Seeing that I am really, really interested in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (and the fact that graduate classes that interested me were at times few and far between), I decided to sign up. I hoped that industrialization, unionization, or some other similar topic would be on tap. I checked the book list online and found that this was not to be.

The book list included a wide variety of books about women on the frontier. I have to confess that I generally do not have a big interest in women's or gender history, but seeing the other classes on the schedule that particular semester, I decided to stick it out.

The main paper for the class turned out to be a case study that tested the validity of any claim made by one of the authors we had to read during the class. I was not terrible interested in the assignment, but at least we got to choose the topic ourselves. I proceeded to utilize the texts from the course (as well as some other outside readings) to investigate whether women had more job opportunities open to them in the American West. From what I could find, it seemed that the job opportunities were quite similar with those available in the Northeast or the South. This was the main argument of the paper.

I left the paper alone for about four years. When I began my studies at UND, I decided to send an abstract of the paper to the Northern Great Plains History Conference, which was then being held in Grand Forks. I got on the program and read this paper. I also sent it to Emporia University in Kansas, to see if they would publish it in one of their journals. While I did not get it into the publication I first inquired about, they did agree to post it as an open-access article on their website. While it's not the American Historical Review or The Historian, it is a publication that can go on the CV. Here is a link to my latest publication at Prairie Voices of my paper titled "Workin' Nine to Five in the West? Western Women and Work, 1865-1945". The moral of the story is that papers for classes that may not seem to be worth much can actually add to one's professional vitae, which definitely helps in job searches.

Gilded Age/Progressive Era American Christianity and Gender

Before I get into the main part of the post, I got information from the professor who was influential in editing my book that an older lady in California who grew up in Grand Forks visited this summer and was heartbroken to see that church had been torn down.  She contacted Dr. Caraher and he sent her a copy of my book.  I thought it was pretty cool to see that some work that I had done actually had a personal benefit to people. Here is the story as relayed on the New Archaeology of the Mediterranean World blog.

I've been reading quite a bit on Gilded Age and Progressive Era religion in America.  This is part of an independent study that I'm doing to prepare a historiographical essay on the period for my doctoral project/dissertation. I'm not really much into gender history, and any jobs that want an expert in that field are quickly ignored in my search for post-doctoral employment. However, I've read a couple of books this week that were pretty interesting on the subject, Clifford Putney's Muscular Christianity and Margaret Lamberts Bendroth's Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present. The first focused mainly upon mainline churches, while the latter emphasized the more conservative branch of Christianity.

I personally found them both quite interesting in spite of my general aversion to reading gender histories. I especially found Bendroth's account a bit more interesting, given my personal background. One thing that I found a bit interesting was the ease with which women tended to operate in fundamentalist churches, given the goal of muscular Christianity held out by the mainline.

In other words, a picture appears in which the fundamentalist churches were actually more liberal for a time when it came to allowing women to preach and be evangelists. The proclamation of the message was more important than the messenger to these people. Even such such stalwart fundamentalist institutions as Moody Bible Institute and William Bell Riley's Northwestern College allowed women to study for the ministry, and Riley even personally endorsed traveling women evangelists. This liberality was quite surprising given the current reversal of attitudes on gender in which mainline liberals have no problem with women preachers and conservatives hold more to the view of John R. Rice, who wrote a book titled Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers, that supported the Victorian ideal of a woman.  Liberals who were afraid of the feminization of churches in the late Victorian age called for more adherence to the strenuous life and downplayed women's activity in churches. These books were actually a welcome respite from reading nearly exclusively about the Social Gospel.