A Southern Nation of Speechifiers: Heyrman and Eastman in Conversation

University of Chicago Press

Christine Leigh Heyrman’s Southern Cross makes a wonderful companion piece to Carolyn Eastman’s A Nation of Speechifiers. More precisely, Heyrman preemptively corrects a historical oversight in Eastman’s much more recent work. Both authors are concerned with identifying the relationships of nonelites to structures of power in the early national period. Both argue that the changes which took place after the turn of the century were not the rosy picture of democratization which has been the academic orthodoxy for politics, society, and religion for some time. Both excellently demonstrate their cases. Yet, while Heyrman treats her subject comprehensively within her limits, Eastman claims a broader scope than she is ultimately able to encompass.

In Nation of Speechifiers, Eastman argues that far from a great triumph of democratization that once dominated thinking on Jacksonian politics or even the perpetual repression of nonelites that has dominated some feminist and minority histories, the period immediately after the Revolution was one of profound cultural negotiation in which nonelites were able to seize access to public participation in limited but meaningful ways. She looks at politics, education, voluntary associations, trade organizations, publishing, and professional oratory to see the ways that women, children, and racial minorities had a public voice prior to 1810. After that, however, culture shifted as the nation solidified. A war won, a peaceful party transition, and a new vision of suffrage for white men all functioned to close the previously permeable borders of public participation and exclude nonelites.

Yet Eastman glaringly omits religion as an arena in which women, children, and racial minorities had a public voice, a curious oversight particularly in view of Eastman’s stress on oratory as a means of public power. The omission might have made a good avenue for further research had not Heyrman perfectly tackled the question more than a decade earlier. Heyrman takes the same period Eastman considers, treats the same nonelites that Eastman does, but focuses narrowly on religion in the South. The conclusions she draws are largely the same. A newly formed (at least in the South) evangelicalism is initially open to the public voice and at least informal authority of women, children, and racial minorities. After the turn of the century, however, Heyrman exhaustively and convincingly traces the restriction of power into the hands of older white males. She concludes, much as Eastman does, by attacking facile notions of democratization by asking the question democratization for whom.

Eastman’s omission of religion—and of the South and transmontane America almost in their entirety—clearly could have been corrected by reading Heyrman, and the failure to do so borders on inexcusable. Yet readers of Heyrman can benefit from consulting Eastman as well. Heyrman explains the changes in evangelicalism largely as evangelistic necessities. “To put the matter bluntly, evangelicals could not rest content with a religion that was the faith of women, children, and slaves” (193). Growth required appeasing and then appealing to white men, in whose hands all temporal power rested. Eastman suggests there is something more at work in the culture at large here. Eastman’s exclusion of the South from her study may throw this observation into doubt for the arena of Heryman’s work, but nevertheless the question must be raised whether or not evangelistic necessity adequately explains the need for a more male-oriented, “traditional” religious structure. Even if it does, do the broader cultural changes charted by Eastman explain what is driving this evangelistic need? In Heyrman, essentially, evangelicals hit a glass ceiling above which a movement of women could no longer ascend. The early nineteenth century as the period of transition is incidental; it is just when the need for change outweighed the inertia of convention. Eastman’s work suggests there is something more happening in the period.

Both books are supremely readable, and Heyrman in particular has a literary flourish rarely seen among historians. Though my interests and preferences tend toward Heyrman's work, I confidently recommend either for general reading. Eastman's more theoretical framework may scare off non-academics, but anyone who has even a hobbyists interest in the period will be more than amply rewarded by putting in the effort to understand her argument. Together, these two works give a picture of early national American democracy that will challenge the narrative taught in most colleges not to long ago and still, consequently, taught in most grade schools.

Dorothy Day, the Activist

Having reflected on the the false tension between Catholicism and social justice from the perspective of Day as a Catholic, it is time now to turn to that more familiar persona of Day as an advocate for social justice. That Day should be an powerful voice for the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized should by no means surprise anyone. But as I read The Long Loneliness, I was struck by the emotional depth and theological richness of her conviction as she narrated the very painful and very personal journey from a child who understood only the impossible gap between what was real and what was right to a woman who could blur those lines so that even what was possible would come in to doubt. Whatever the success or the validity of her methods as they began to express themselves practically, the acute connection that Day shared to society's outcasts crafted in her a moving ethos in which the active pursuit of social justice was central. Writing of time she spent imprisoned with other activists, Day said:

I lost all feeling of my own identity. I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin. That I would be free after thirty days meant nothing to me. I would never be free again, never free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us were guilty. The mother who had murdered her child, the drug addict—who were the mad and who the sane? Why were prostitutes prosecuted in some cases and in others respected and fawned on? People sold themselves for jobs, for the pay check, and if they only received a high enough price, they were honored. If their cheating, their theft, their lie, were of colossal proportions, if it were successful, they met with praise, not blame. Why were some caught, not others? Why were some termed criminals and others good businessmen? What was right and wrong? What was good and evil? I lay there in utter confusion and misery.

What is striking here is just how profoundly Day the activist differs from both traditional evangelical activists and from contemporary left-wing activists. Unlike the conventional evangelical rendering of social ills, Day could not see poverty, prostitution, murder, greed, and the host of other evils merely as problems of sin in individuals. She recognized the truth which is attested in the most antique Christian tradition's reflection on sin: it is everywhere. Beyond the individual, sin perverts institutions, cultures, and even the physical world itself. Preaching repentance to sinners and charity to saints would never be enough to combat an all-pervading sin like this.

I had an ugly sense of the futility of human effort, man’s helpless misery, the triumph of might. Man’s dignity was but a word and a lie. Evil triumphed. I was a petty creature, filled with self-deception, self-importance, unreal, false, and so, rightly scorned and punished.

The solution advocated by so many activists now, activists who have laid hold to Dorothy Day as a patron saint, is institutional reform. That can never be the essence of Day's activism though because, like all Christian anarchists, she realizes that sinful people cannot employ sinful means to redeem sinful institutions. Instead, she recommends a different path, one that can all too easily be misconstrued--in the decontextualized form I offer it--to be just another admonition to charitable works. To interpret it this way is to admit a complete ignorance of the Catholic Worker movement and of Day's life, an ignorance I was supremely guilty of before starting this project. What Day advocates here is not charity (in the sense of material benevolence) but empathy. It is an actual, existential participation in the life of the oppressed. It is Christ eating with prostitutes and publicans. It is a living out of the radical equality which has been reduced to rhetoric in our sanitized relationship to the "least of these" Christians exist to serve.

Going to the people is the purest and best act in Christian tradition and revolutionary tradition and is the beginning of world brotherhood.

Transgressing the Boundary Between History and Myth

The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement is, in fact, not a history. Douglas A. Sweeney's rather liberal use of the term "history" in the subtitle ought to fool noone. It is, at a point approaching the critical mass of generosity, a historically themed apology the purpose of which is to offer a palatable rendering of evangelical history intended to make the term invoke a pleasant warming sensation rather than the rancor the politicization of "evangelical" now produces. In truth--insofar as the book is a narrative construction by evangelicals, for evangelicals, about evangelicals in an effort to define and order evangelicalism--Sweeney's work is a myth, in the most neutral, academic sense of that term.

Part of my (hopefully obvious) disappointment with this offering is that it was recommended to me as a scholarly work for history, a fact which the title and the author's own preface seemed to reenforce. Sweeney purports to present the reader with a serious but brief introduction to the history of evangelicalism which avoids "the sins of the worst scholarly texts" by writing in an accessible, narrative style. The deliberately nonacademic style, however, only serves to accentuate the nonacademic content of the work.

The first and personally the most grating, though by no means the most serious, flaw in Sweeney's work presented as a history is the constant and undefended (because it is indefensible) presentation of God as an agent in history. The reader need not wait long before encountering, I hope with shock and incredulity, this explanation for the Great Awakening:

In a work of amazing grace and by the power of the Holy Spirit, untold numbers of Protestant leaders began to join hands across these [denominational] boundaries and to collaborate in the work of Gospel ministry.

I wonder if it ever occurred to Sweeney that non-Christians, non-evangelicals, or even evangelical historians with a firm grasp of academic standards might shy away from the belief that it was "amazing grace" and the intervention of the "Holy Spirit" which were the primary causes of the Great Awakening. That is, after all, the problem with appeals to the historical agency of God. As a Christian, I believe (and struggle with the reasoning of those who do not) that God is an active agent in the movements of history. The problem in an academic history arises in trying to lay claim to what events are the products of His machinations and which are not. That is why historians, even Christians historians, restrict themselves to historical agents who act within history rather than those (i.e. God) that act on history from without. Sweeney, not having received that memo, goes on to make various other historically untenable assertions: God elected George Whitefield, Charles Wesley, and John Wesley for a special purpose, God used George Whitefield's fame to spread the Gospel, God provided an "amazing outpouring of the Holy Spirit" at Cane Ridge, and more.

Coupled with this minor hermeneutical faux pas of baptizing his particular history in special providence, Sweeney offers up several historical "imprecisions" (because "errors" would seem incendiary, which is clearly not my intention). For example, he mentions in passing that the Southern Baptist Convention was formed for the purpose of more effectively coordinating Baptist evangelism. He never seems bothered by the fact that the Southern Baptist Convention actually organized in reaction to the more racially egalitarian, anti-slavery position of northern Baptists. Again, he mentions that Jonathan Edwards split with his church over his revivalist tendencies, when in fact Edwards was forced out of his church because he took a much stricter view on formal membership than had Solomon Stoddard. The biggest issue with these types of inaccuracies is not that Sweeney could have avoided them with even a Wikipedia level education (though, one has to wonder about the fact that Sweeney is an Jonathan Edwards specialist), but that in each case they seem to be glossing over historical realities which do not accord with the author's purpose.

In fact, the entire text reads like a hagiographical rendering of the Great Thinker model of history. One wonderful evangelical man (and token woman) after another is extolled for his virtue, evangelistic excellence, and furtherance of the movement as a whole. (I was particularly struck by the decidedly subjective and ahistoric pronouncement that Charles Wesley was the "greatest writer of hymns in all of history," an honor I reserve for Fannie Mae Crosby.) Add to this the not-at-all-subtle, but duly disclaimed, suggestions that evangelicalism has been a champion of racial equality, women's rights, global missions, and social reform. His bias and willingness to downplay features of history that do not accord with it are thinly veiled, if at all. He seems to have no qualms showing his marked preference for Pentecostalism (and its spiritual relatives)--which he prophesies "those who walk the privileged corridors of worldly power" will soon be forced to take note of--over against fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism, which he stops just short of depicting as a self-defeating drag on evangelicalism as a whole.

The worst feature, however, the most unforgivable sin (so to speak) is that Sweeney never accomplishes what he sets out to do. After outlining the contemporary debate over the scope of evangelicalism--one of the few bright points in the entire work--Sweeney offers his own definition of evangelicals as orthodox Protestants with an eighteenth century twist. The rest of the book, he promises, will be outlining what precisely that definition means. Only, the meaning of the "eighteenth century twist" proves to be as vacuous as its wording is flippant. The reader searching for a historically rooted, taxonomically sound understanding of evangelicalism (as I was) is left no better off than for having read the work. It ought to go without saying, but I cannot imagine any circumstance in which I think it would be prudent to recommend this book to anyone. In fact, my only recommendation is that scholars with any social conscience find this book at their local or university library and reshelve it in a dark and dusty corner where even the librarians never venture. That way, anyone who is looking for it will be saved the mental anguish of finding and reading it.

The Myth of the Founding Fathers: Answering the Wrong Question

Having established in the last installment that the faith of the Founders is ultimately irrelevant, it may seem odd or even self-defeating to turn now and attempt to shed light on the question of whether or not the Founders were Christians. I can offer only two excuses. The first is a reiteration of Thomas Kidd's assertion quoted in the previous post that, no matter how inconsequential the faith of the Founders may be, it nevertheless presents an interesting topic for inquiry. Additionally, even while the debate over the faith of the Founders is ridiculous because the topic is ancillary at best, there is a whole additional layer of absurdity in the way it is being argued. The arguments are so utterly superficial and historically naive that they couldn't be said to demonstrate the point one way or the other, even if the point were relevant. With that in mind, I would like to suggest two misconceptions in the popular discourse which when corrected allow for a clearer insight into the religious make up of the Founders.

Most attempts to co-opt the Founding Fathers suffer from the common flaw of anachronism. This is particularly true in the discussion of their religion, as people fail to recognize the fluidity of language and the concepts which it represents. This is certainly true of the deism of the more liberal Founders. When people read the critiques of contemporary Christian concepts (e.g. biblicism, election, hierarchy), they transport them too readily and too directly into modern discourse. What modern pundits do not seem to be aware of is that eighteenth century deism was a movement within Christianity. E. Brooks Holifield, in his Theology in America, points out that not only did deists at the time typically not see themselves as a religion separate from Christianity, deists actually "saw themselves as contributing to a reform of Christian thought in accord with eighteenth-century norms of reason." Certainly there were some exceptions, and Thomas Paine would likely be in that category, but Holifield stresses that the strongest and most influential deists, among whom he includes Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, "tended to be sedate, aristocratic, prudent, and willing to identify themselves with a purified Christian theology." It is critical to remember that Thomas Jefferson self-identified as a Christian and assumed that the freedom of religion he thought to enshrine at every level of government would lead to a generation of Americans who were predominantly Unitarian Christians. Deism, pluralism, and even Unitarianism have all been caught up in a liberal, secular drift that wants to, and perhaps rightly does, claim people like Jefferson in their intellectual heritage. These are the movements of history, however, and an intellectually honest appraisal of religion among the Founding Fathers must admit that, almost to a man, the Founding Fathers were Christians. They were diverse in their shades of Christianity, certainly, but Christians nonetheless, both by self-identification and contemporary standards.

But before anyone gets too excited, I am not endorsing any argument that the Founders were Christians in any way that is meaningful in the present and certainly not in a way that legitimates an understanding of America as a Christian nation. Just as the contemporary understanding of Deism is read incorrectly back onto the Founders, so too is a contemporary understanding of what it is to be a Christian. Those who argue most ardently that the Founders were Christians tend to be of a certain conservative, democratic, conversion-oriented brand. In short, they are almost uniformly evangelicals. It is important for evangelicals to remember that to whatever degree the Founders may be have been Christian, they were not the kind of Christians that most politically vocal Christians are today. Evangelicalism certainly contributed to revolutionary thought because the movement had its inception in the First Great Awakening. Nevertheless, as it would not reach its ascendency until the Second Great Awakening, one should not overestimate the degree to which even the most Christian Founders would have felt at home in the religious context of modern Christianity. Positions of power, intellectual and political, were as likely or more likely to be occupied by the theologically liberal, socially progressive patriots than any of the new revivalist groups. Add to these the Anglican power structures which dominated spheres of power in the South in the earliest republic and the ultra-conservative Reformed thinkers of New England, and what is left is a religious landscape in which the radically revivalistic, individualistic, and socially conservative evangelicals of modern times would have been largely without a home. Modern Catholics are even more self-deluded in appealing to the faith of the Founders, because for early Americans Christianity was synonymous with Protestantism. They had no qualms for centuries resorting to oppressive legislation to stem the power of Catholicism in the States. The same is true of Mormons.

In short, people who appeal either to the secular humanism of the Founders or to the pious Christianity both misunderstand the religious climate of the earliest days of the nation. Were any of the Founders whisked into the present on a time machine, they would like be considered by most liberals to be Christians and by most Christians to be nominal adherents if not outright pagans.