The use of persuasion by Reformation-Era Christians and their Spiritual Successors

Public displays of images used in conjunction with lines of symbolic rhetoric are powerful tools of propaganda.[1] As moving as printed propaganda can be, they are unintelligible and therefore without power unless the viewer has access to the proper context. Propaganda seeks to encapsulate and communicate a group’s worldview in a compact space. Necessarily, the propaganda pieces boil down the presenting group’s worldview to the components that are most important to those seeking to foster change. Two such instances of religious propaganda are a 2007 Baptist parade float and a 16^th century Lutheran woodcut entitled The Contents of Two Sermons. This paper will seek to explore each of these images and to structurally compare the two. Structures work to create effective propaganda through spatial and relational juxtapositions; these structures are reliant on their situation within larger, over-arching structures for meaning, and serve to expand or restrict the presenting groups’ social borders.

On Relations: A Guide to Structuralism

Structuralism is an approach to the study of phenomena that places the emphasis on the relation between objects as its primary source of analysis. Jensen, in his chapter entitled “Structure” in The Guide to the Study of Religion, describes structure as “…a set or network of relations which gives a phenomenon an identity as a closed system or interdependent parts.”[2] Structures are rule-laden; internal rules govern how elements within the structure behave and are defined against one another. (more…)

Throughout the early development of Christianity, groups of Christians adopted certain apostles as their patrons. The most evident feature of these communities is the corpuses of literature that either were written in the name of the patron apostle, or have the patron apostle prominently featured in the literature. The best example of such a school is the Johannine school. A lesser known, but equally important school was the Thomasine school, located in Syria from at least the second century until at least the fourth. The works associated with the Thomasine school are The Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Thomas, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and The Book of Thomas the Contender.

If these books indeed were from an extinct school of Christianity, which I intend to demonstrate, then a construction of their social world would be useful in the study of Christian history. James C. Scott’s theory of societal transcripts allows scholars to use a text to build a picture of how power is constructed and resisted by and within a community. Scott’s approach allows the humanities, and consequently Biblical studies, to avoid reductionism by privileging the social experience of domination and subjugation through the lens of human feelings and interactions. This emphasis helps to reduce the dependency and overemphasis on the material and social dimensions of societies found in material studies. Scott’s theory enables one to peer beyond the material to the experiential aspects of domination. Scott’s approach has been adapted from its original use in modern communities, such as American plantations in the eighteenth century, to communities in antiquity, such as the Pauline communities.

In order to apply the modified version of Scott’s theory to the Thomasine corpus, several preliminary steps need to be taken. First, the existence of apostle schools must be defended. Secondly, the inclusion and exclusion of the Thomas texts need to be justified. After this is completed, the texts are to be situated historically and culturally into the communities in which they were written and used. Only then can Scott’s theory be applied to the Thomasine corpus. Once this is finished, the results can be arranged chronologically allowing one to see how the group adapted to changing conditions. By analyzing each text through Scott’s theory and exploring the development of the group as the texts progress chronologically, we can more clearly understand the history and culture of the Thomasine community. Specifically, we will see that Syriac Christians from the second to fourth century used the Thomasine corpus to resist domination and to create their own alternative power structure.

It is very easy to import modern ideas and standards of history writing onto Ancient texts. However, to do so, will skew one’s reading of the text in a way that the author did not intend. The following are several concepts to keep in mind when reading ancient texts.¹

1) Lost in Translation Often the only copies of texts that we have today are copies of copies. Furthermore, they are often translations of the original text. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas was probably written in Syriac, but the earliest copy we have is written in Greek. On top of this, sometimes the original texts were translations of the speeches being recorded. An example of this last point are Jesus’ speeches recorded in the Gospels. Jesus spoke Aramaic; the Gospels were written in Greek.² It is important keep this process in mind when the exact order of words is being scrutinized.

2) History was for instruction, not for tracking details Ancient histories were not designed to be modern ones. Their primary focus was not on keeping track of historical minutia, nor was it designed to show a character’s development throughout time. Instead, it was designed to illustrate lessons to be learned by the reader. There was “… great freedom with which many ancient writers adapted their materials to achieve such goals…”³ This frame of mind should be accounted for when when studying ancient texts of all origins.

3) Look - Peter wrote this; hence it must be true Ancient authors had no problem with attributing works to authorities in order to give their work credibility. Christians have not been immune to this phenomenon. As early as the middle part of the first century, Christian leaders were complaining about letters being written in their name that contradicted with their positions.⁴ The problem for “Christian texts” only got worse as the years went on. Robin Fox writes:

In the period c.400-600, “aggressive forgeries” added false letters to the collection of almost every early Christian Letter writer. These fake texts of theology helped to enlist the great authorities of the past on this or that side of a contemporary schism or unorthodoxy.⁵

Imagine someone finding a letter from Paul where he argues quite clearly for each of the five points of Calvinism. The problem was so bad that it was not until the 1500s that people could begin to sort the forgeries from the authentic letters. ⁶

4) Good Forgeries Even when people were not outright co-opting authorities for the sake of their own positions, there is the problem of attribution. It was common in Classical and Hellenistic Greek culture for a student to classify their own positions and work as their teacher’s work. For example, there are more texts attributed to Aristotle that he could have humanly wrote. It is hard to determine in some cases where the teacher’s writing ends and the student’s begins. James H. Charlesworth has delineated the above idea into seven rough categories:⁷

1. Writings not by an author, but containing some of the author’s own thoughts
2. Writings by someone who was influenced by another work whom the work is attributed
3. Writings influenced by someone who was influenced by the earlier works of another author to whom the work is assigned
4. Writings attributed to an individual, but actually deriving from a circle or school surrounding that individual
5. Christian writings attributed by their authors to an Old Testament personality
6. Once anonymous writings that have been incorrectly attributed to another individual
7. Writings that intentionally try to deceive the reader into thinking the author is someone else

Quite naturally, the accuracy, dependability, ect, depends on which category the text being examined falls.

5) Recording Speeches There were not any tape recorders or stenographers around in Antiquity. Because of this, not all of the speeches recorded in ancient texts are verbatim copies of the original works. As a matter of fact, people recording the speeches often either gave abridged or paraphrased versions of the speech in question. Sometimes, the speech was elaborated on for the sake of effective rhetoric. Thucydides, an ancient Greek historian, admitted as much in his History of the Peloponnesian Wars.

I have found it difficult to remember the precise words used in the speeches I have listened to myself and my various informants have experienced the same difficulty; so my method has been, while keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of the words that were actually used, to make the speakers say what, in my opinion, was called for in each situation.

After about 300 B.C.E speakers issued written copies of their speeches to combat this problem.⁸

6) Say it enough, and people will think it is true Remember Hitler’s idea of the “Big Lie?” Same principle at work. If an author had a agenda to push, there was nothing to keep the author to fudge the facts to push their version of history. In a less deliberate manner, if errors crept into the historical record and subsequent authors relied on erroneous accounts of history for their facts, the resulting account will carry or perhaps magnify the original error, intentional or not.

Despite these difficulties, it is still possible to sift through historical manuscripts to uncover the most likely account of history by our modern standards of accuracy. My next post will deal with how to correct for these errors.

1. The above list was taken from Novak. Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts. pp 3-7 [↩]
2. The Canonical ones were all written in Greek. There is a slight chance that the Gospel of Matthew was written in Hebrew, but it is most likely that it was written in Greek like the rest [↩]
3. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
4. See Second Thessalonians 2:1-5 [↩]
5. Novak. Ibid. p.4 [↩]
6. Fox. Ibid. p. 154. [↩]
7. James Charlesworth. “Pseudo-Epigraphy”. Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. p.765-767 [↩]
8. Novak. Ibid. p.6. [↩]

Last week I posted about going to a talk on the Gospel of Judas by Elaine Pagels. It was a fascinating talk on something that I have never read. I have recently started reading The Forbidden Gospels Blog by Dr. April DeConick of Rice University. She has a book that is coming out very soon that contests the meaning of the Gospel of Judas. It makes me want to read the book by Pagels/King and the book by DeConick.

The Forbidden Gospels Blog: The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says

“I didn’t find the sublime Judas, at least not in Coptic. What I found were a series of English translation choices made by the National Geographic team, choices that permitted a different Judas to emerge in the English translation than in the Coptic original. Judas was not only not sublime, he was far more demonic than any Judas I know in any other piece of early Christian literature, Gnostic or otherwise.”

DeConick contends that the Gospel of Judas is not about a “good” Judas, or even a “poor old” Judas. It is a gospel parody about a “demon” Judas written by a particular group of Gnostic Christians known as the Sethians who lived in the second century CE. The purpose of the text was to criticize “mainstream” or apostolic Christianity from the point of view of these Gnostic Christians, especially their doctrine of atonement, their Eucharistic practices, and their creedal faith which they claimed to have inherited from the twelve disciples.

Audio from the Lecture (mp3 - 46mb)

I was lucky enough to attend Dr. Pagel’s lecture on the Gospel of Judas. It was a fascinating and informative talk. Here are some of my observations from the lecture. Pagels has just published a new book on this Gospel with Karen King, entitled Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity. I have not read the book, nor the Gospel of Judas.

While I have read some of Pagel’s work, most specifically, Beyond Belief, I have never heard her in person. She is a very effective speaker, humor and wit with are intermixed with history and background to illuminate her points, she approaches the audience on the popular level and does not talk above their heads. While some of her popular works are criticized for being sensational at times, she is very disarming in her approach - she does not start out shocking the audience with grandiose claims. Instead, Pagels introduced the text and presented 4 problems that she found contained within it and then lead the audience to the answers she came to during her research.

The talk centered around the Gospel of Judas, a repressed gospel dating to the early days of Christianity. Dating is always and estimate. The manuscript that we have was found in upper Egypt and written in Coptic. Most likely the manuscript was from a monastery in the region and dates to somewhere in the fourth century(300-400 CE). It seems to be a translation of a much earlier text, somewhere in the second century (100-200 CE). She did a good job introducing to the audience the issues surrounding the Gnostics, how the term “Gnosticism” is not a good category, but a convenient one that really does not do them justice. There are groups of Christians that deviate from what would become Orthodox views, but to categorize this very messy group as Gnostics is misleading and inaccurate.

To Pagels, the text seems to center around a dispute between Judas and the other Apostles and the topic of martyrdom. While I don’t have the texts that she was working with (see below for the NG translation), I’ll do my best to reproduce what she was talking about. The gospel opens with Jesus ridiculing the Twelve for how they were worshiping. The twelve get angry at Jesus and in response, he challenges them to stand before him. Only Judas is able to stand before Jesus and Jesus rewards him with teachings. The Twelve have dreams about people sacrificing children on an altar. Jesus explains that the people doing the sacrificing are the Twelve. Judas has had another dream, this one shows how he is different from the others. I don’t remember much else about it - see the audio for more.

Pagels looks at this text not as a window into the lives of Jesus and the Twelve, but as a window into the controversies in the early church, most specifically, the one about Martyrdom. She thinks it reflects, in part, a voice standing against “eager martyrdom.” A conception had spread that one should seek out being killed for Christ rather than fleeing to another city, like the Gospel of Luke would suggest. Instead, the best death a Christian could have is to be killed for the cause. The people behind the Gospel of Judas were concerned about this, thinking that this is not the way Jesus wanted us to live because God values life, not death, so we should not actively seek death.

That was the main gist of her presentation. It was more a look into the history of the Early Church than anything else, and for that, I throughly enjoyed the talk. Please see the MP3 for the audio of the lecture.

I’ll have the audio up later. See below for the audio

Resources:

• National Geographic Translation of the Gospel of Judas (PDF)
• Audio from the Lecture (mp3 - 46mb)

Jon Krakauer’s book on the Ron and Dan Lafferty’s religious slaying of Brenda and Erica Lafferty is gripping and sensational. In Krakauer’s exploration of why Ron and Dad committed these murders, he examines their fundamentalist background. He not only investigates how Dan and Ron were drawn to Mormon fundamentalism, but also illuminates the links Mormon fundamentalism has with mainstream Mormonism’s past. In doing so, Krakauer raises some interesting questions that he teases the reader with though out the book, but never really deals with seriously. The work is an excellent account of the Lafferty murders, recounting vivid details and well-crafted turns of phrase. Krakauer’s skill at writing for effect cannot be discounted. However, after reading the work, one feels as though they are only getting one version of the events, especially as it when the book describes and analyses Mormon history. It as if his interpretation is driving the book rather than the sources.

The only real nuanced discussion of Krakauer’s sources comes in the interesting point-counterpoint appendix to the book. Krakauer reprints the entire review of Under the Banner of Heaven by Richard Turley Jr., the managing director of the Family and Church History Department of the LDS church. In a scathing review, Turley makes many of the same observations as I do here. The best part of his review for the reader of the book is the discussion of sources. Turley claims that Krakauer has cherry-picked his sources and does not critically analyze the entirety of Mormon scholarship. Perhaps the most damaging is Turley’s criticism of the heavy uncritical use of Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, especially in regards to the 1832 castration attempt by an Ohio mob. Turley’s overall point is well founded, since all of Krakauer’s sources tend to agree, there is no mention or use of conflicting reports. It is as if Krakauer only used the sources that agreed with him. There is not any discussion of conflicting sources or scholarly working throughout the book. Krakauer does admit to several errors in the work, which he has corrected in the more recent editions of the book. He also defends his selection of sources in his rebuttal, but this is the only real place any dissenting views are considered instead of just the ones that support his clear and simple narrative. The best counter-point Krakauer offers lies in his point of the selectivity of inside Mormon scholarship noting that all LDS accounts of Mormon history have to be “faith promoting” and therefore exclude any real critical analysis of the history of the LDS church. Within this interesting point lies a rich discussion that is barely broached by Krakauer in his rebuttal. An interesting discussion could be had between the writers of critical Mormon works, like Krakauer; and the sympathetic writers of Mormon history, such as Richard Bushman, author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.

Krakauer tries to situate the Lafferty case in terms of the early history of the Mormons. Among the major themes that he links from the early Mormon Church to the fundamentalist Lafferty brothers were the propensity to hear the voice of God, the idea of blood atonement, and most prominently, the ideal of plural wives. Very carefully, the narrative switches back and forth from accounts of Smith, Young, and other early Mormons to the events leading up to murders. This serves to form in the reader’s mind a close attachment – an almost casual one – between the two eras. The reader cannot but help to think that Krakauer wants his readers to think that the Lafferty’s were being true to the foundations of their religion and that there is something inherently wrong with the LDS Church. While he is not explicit in this connection, he also does not try to avail these concerns. This connection is one in a series of connections that Krakauer flirts with, but does not ever really come out and defend or refutes.

The subtitle to the work is as lengthy as it is controversial, “On July 24, 1984 a woman and her infant daughter were murdered by two brothers who believed they were ordered by to kill by God. The roots of their crime lie deep in the history of an American religion practiced by millions.” Here is an example of Krakauer showing his intent to connect the murders not only to Mormon fundamentalism, but also to mainstream Mormonism. It does not stop here, however. In the first few pages of the introduction, he states that his work will raise questions about the nature of religion itself. In doing so, he must connect the murders not only to fundamentalist and mainstream Mormonism, but also to Christianity and religion in general. Over all, he fails in this respect. While he makes a very damning case in terms of the violence and the damage polygamy does to those involved both in the early Mormon Church and in the fundamentalists that have separated themselves from the LDS Church; he is unable to connect the larger threads. This is because he either does not take into account or fails to discuss the purposeful separation of the current incarnation of LDS Church from these doctrines and events. An analogous situation is linking fundamentalist terrorism with all of Islam, or all Christians in the actions of the Crusades. It is an example of contamination by proximity.

The book is most successful when looking it examines the religion, motives, and history of both the Laffertys and the fundamentalist Mormon movement, in its journalism. It is least successful when it tries to link historical themes together in a nuanced manner; in fails as a scholarly work. If Krakauer were to nuance his work and leave out his larger, under discussed implications, a much better book would be had.

For my American Religious Experience final project, I have the freedom to look outside American religion and to my thesis field, New Testament Studies. I am interested in building a picture of lived religion for early Christianities. I don’t know yet what branch I am going to target - most likely it will be urban Christians. As to what Christianity to look at, I want to go as early as possible, so there would be no established branch that can be distinguished from another.

I need to focus on practices (lived religion) and the common people, not beliefs nor elites. Interesting thing here is the creation of elites from the common people. I think that is what is happening, especially if you define elite as “one with authority or power.” I’ll also try to keep a close eye on the changing roles of women. I preliminary guess is that, like always, they were given newfound power and responsibility at first, and then as the movement crystallized, they were shut out of authority.

As of right now, I am using the following books for the basis of my research.

• Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Wilken
• Hidden Transcripts and the Arts of Resistance by Horsley
• Christianity and the Roman Empire: Background Texts by Novak
• Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Corinthians

I plan on focusing on the religious background that the Christians developed out of and look for differences that made them stand out. I will assume for the sake of the paper that everything else was maintained. Even though I have no way of knowing if they dropped certain practices or not, I’ll assume for the preliminary examination that they do. Perhaps in a later project I can look for the differences, say perhaps in another thesis chapter?

George Marsden attempted to give an accurate portrayal of the life, times, and effects of Jonathan Edwards in Jonathan Edwards: A Life. He had identified several misappropriations that other scholars had utilized in their portrayal of Edwards. Marsden thought that many of these mischaracterizations stemmed from am importing of outside ideas onto Edwards and his time. To counter these flawed portraits, Marsden tried to give an account of Edwards through the same lens from which Edwards saw the world. Inter-spliced throughout Edward’s personal story are descriptions and explanations of the Edward’s historical backdrop. This serves to further immerse the reader into Edward’s life and worldview. With this aim in mind, Marsden is remarkably effective.

In light of the ease of which one can find an inaccurate view of Edwards, Marsden does a commendable job sorting out the issues. Much care and detail was given in explaining the ins and outs of the religious controversies of New England in the 1700’s. Similar care was given in relating these issues to the larger whole, the movements and currents in public and religious thought of the Western world as it impacted New England. The exposition of the relationship between the Old and New Lights and how they related to Whitefield’s ministry and those that came after him were especially helpful. This helped to further ground Edward’s actions and predispositions in their proper context.

The largest obstacle that this approach encounters is that sometimes the narrative is confusing to the modern reader. This is especially the case if the reader is not a white male protestant. The narrative is written so closely to the point of view of Edwards that the effect is that his sensibilities, such as the equivocating of the Catholic Church with the Antichrist of the book of Revelation. While careful and through examination will exonerate Marsden from this charge, there are times in which the casual reader could be lead to believe that Marsden held these views in line with Edwards.

Another issue that came up in the work was, at times, the apparent undue sympathy that Marsden gave Edwards. His character flaws are minimalized or explained away while those of his adversaries are enlarged or painted in a selfish light. Examples of this are the conflict with the town of Northampton and the conflict over the Stockbridge. The reader is given in depth explanations of how Edwards was operating off the best of intentions and was impaired by personal flaws, such as the inability to communicate or the grafting of his moral perfectionism onto the townspeople of Northampton. The reader is given diary accounts, personal testimony among other sources to strike home this point. No such in depth explanation is offered of the opposing parties’ motivations. Again, the reply to this criticism could be that Marsden was trying to get the reader to see the world from Edward’s perspective, to see how he viewed the matter and how Edward’s attempted to live out his ideals in the swamp of his personal foibles.

These minor criticisms set aside, Jonathan Edwards, A Life accomplishes something much more than a mere biography of Jonathan Edward’s life. It paints an astonishingly detailed portrait the later stages of the Puritan movement. For instance, through descriptions of Edward’s view of millennial history and God’s relation to humanity, gives insights as to how the Puritans viewed the progression of God’s plan in history. It also showed how the Puritan canopy cracked as was Noll posited in America’s God. It illuminates what Noll meant when he gave the advice to “read Edwards” if one wanted to understand pre-Revolutionary War colonial America.

In the book, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, Paul Johnson attempts to show how, in Rochester, New York, Finney’s religious revivals helped to develop the free labor market. (1) In doing so, Johnson takes a careful measurement of the economic, social, political and religious life in Rochester and sees how these issues were intertwined and changed over time, with the hope of discovering how these forces influenced one another. Johnson traced the shifting moods through a variety of methods, utilizing detailed statistical analysis to uncover trends.

Before Finney arrived in Rochester, the town had undergone a tremendous social upheaval. From 1820 to 1830, the town’s economic structure had transitioned from Medieval, guild based economy, to a more capitalistic one, with divisions of labor and a separation of the producers from the owners. With this economic shift came class struggle, most notably in the form of the abuse of alcohol and the unrest that comes with it. When Finney came to Rochester, he attacked the religious authorities and the Calvinistic determinism that came with them. In Finney, the shopkeepers found a solution to the problem – autonomy. No longer were they innately depraved persons who needed to be lorded over by the regenerate. With effort, they could be relied and expected to be the solid, dependable citizens and workers that the city needed. It is Johnson’s contention it was not Finney’s religious platform alone that attracted so many of the middle class but it was Finney’s platform as a way to garner the control that they had lost that was the real factor behind the success of the revivals. It is because of this claim that the work is reductionist in scope, despite Johnson’s claim that the revival was not a capitalistic plot. (2)

Johnson’s presentation differs substantially from Hatch’s depiction of the role and aims of Christianity in the formation of America and its national values. Johnson indicates that Christianity and its revivals helped to shape the economic landscape, providing the moral framework and economic power that enabled the wealthy elites of the upper class to maintain control over the lives of their workers. Hatch, on the other hand, maintains that the new forms of Christianity that exploded onto the stage during the post-Revolutionary were all forms of social protest, not social control.(3) Far from playing into the hands of the powerful, Hatch describes Finney as calling for a Copernican revolution in Christianity and “railed at ecclesiastical bureaucracy.”(4) I think that Johnson would agree with this, but he would add that the effect of Finney and his attack on religious authority helped the churchgoing businessmen to give men moral and religious autonomy – an autonomy that the worker could be held responsible for.

The most important point of divergence in the two studies is the scope and classes that Hatch and Johnson studied. Hatch looked at the religious leaders across a broad spectrum of beliefs and localities, whereas Johnson looked at the entire social order of one town over time. With Hatch, one is able to see the wider developments in society. With Johnson, one is able to see how economics, class, and gender are able to shape and influence the spread of Christianity. Hatch did not include these factors in his study. Hatch gives a functioning description of how the democratization of Christianity allowed it to regionally spread in new forms. Johnson on the other hand, focuses his historical lens with a much smaller scope, but a higher resolution. This detail allows one to see how economic, political, and class structures helped create the space for Finney’s revivals to flourish. It is implied that since this was the case for the town of Rochester, the most evangelized and economically powerful cites in the republic, that it is a mold for how religion worked in general in the United States. To apply a specific case, one that is analyzed in such detail, to the religious experience of the United States as a whole is an overgeneralization. Varying social, political, and religious factors make this a impossibility. One cannot apply this situation to the homogenous American setting because it has never existed.

One is better served limiting Johnson’s approach from the primary reason that the revivals were a success to one of the contributing factors behind the success. Then one can then incorporate elements from Hatch’s thesis into one’s analysis of the success of the religious revivals. In doing so, one can have a more complete picture, one that incorporates more segments of society, resulting in a more accurate picture of the development of American Christianity.

Footnotes:

1. Johnson. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium. pages 138-140.
2. Ibid. page 141.
3. Hatch. Democratization of Christianity. page 225.
4. Hatch. ibid. page 199.

  

In reading both Material Christianity and Parlor Piety, I had mixed reactions to Colleen McDannell’s claims. At first glance, she presented two clear arguments for the change of Christian American attitudes towards the home over time and the change in how the social sciences viewed American Christianity over time. She did a great job looking at issues and tying them to the larger picture. However, there were also some minor issues that kept creeping up, such as the backing of claims and the lack of distinction amongst religious groups.

The question of relevance has been one of the themes of the semester so far. At what point does an ethnographic study of religion cease to be linked to larger themes and become a curiosity? McDannell was obviously aware of this and was quick to bypass the problem in both her articles. I noticed that she was quick to make her studies relevant to the larger whole of scholarship very early on in both articles. In Material Christianity, she links her study of the photograph as a case study of American Christianity, saying , “..throughout American history, Christians have explored the meaning of the divine, the nature of death, the power of healing, and the experience of the body by interacting with a created world of images and shapes.”(1) In her other article, she immediately states that her cases in the article are “quintessential examples” of the larger American picture of Christianity. (2) By her linkage of the specific to the general, McDannell attempts to demonstrate how ethnographic sketches, even ones done over time, can be relevant to the larger picture.

In her articles, I kept running into what felt like unfounded claims. They were not outright falsehoods, but were just too much of a stretch for me without concrete examples. For instance, she claimed that “bad architecture encouraged sinfulness.”(3) While this might have been the case, she only quotes one or two architects in support of the converse of the above quote. How can the reader be sure that such a quote is representative of the general attitude of Christian America at that particular time? It might be more sensible that the architect that said the structure of the home influenced morals was speaking instead from a sales pitch instead of encapsulating the attitudes of Christian America. Another instance of this was later on in the same article where she stated, “Merely believing was not enough. Christians must visually demonstrate their piety. They must make their homes sacred.” (4) Perhaps this was not the only reason for how they decorated their homes. Perhaps it was in their belief that having such a home was an outward sign of an inward faith instead of making their homes sacred. Another issue that kept creeping up was the lumping together of all the denominations into a single group. While she was upfront about this, it still seemed as though there might be more at work behind the scenes besides the issues she described. I am not saying that she is incorrect in these statements, but a more careful approach is needed to convince me completely of her claims.

Overall, I would have liked a more careful look at the issues she raised. At the same time I realize that if she had looked as carefully as I would have liked, I would be reading two books this week instead of four articles.

Footnotes

1. McDannell, Material Christianity, p.24.
2. McDannell, Parlor Piety: The Home as Sacred Space in Protestant America, p.162.
3. Ibid. p. 165.
4. Ibid. p. 170.