Two Blog Interviews

Many thanks to John Fea at the Way of Improvement Leads Home and Tommy Kidd at the Gospel Coalition for posting interviews with me about my new book on Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture. For Fea's interview, click here. For Kidd's interview, click here.

More Books That I Am Reading

Two new books arrived in the mail today. I look forward to reading George Marsden's new biography of C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. As a member of the C. S. Lewis lecture committee at UTC, I hope to nab George Marsden for our next annual lecture. The other book that I recently received was John Fea's The Bible Cause, which chronicles a history of the American Bible Society. I talk quite about about the American Bible Society in my annual course at UTC on "Religion in American Life," and so I imagine that Fea's work will be very useful for me.

Also, today I noticed that Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture is now available for pre-order on OUP.com and Amazon.com--still waiting on the cover art for the dust jacket and the blurbs.

Church Courses on Evangelicalism

Over at the Way of Improvement Leads Home, John Fea reflects on a course on the history of evangelicalism that he is teaching at a church.

I hope that more religious scholars consider teaching such courses at local churches. I taught a course on the history of Christianity at Upland Community Church a few years ago when my family and I were living in Indiana. It was a lot of fun talking about church history and interacting with other adults about various aspects of religious history and theology.

Thanks John!

As I was checking my usual blogs and websites this morning before I began working on my lectures for "Religion in American Life," I was delighted to read John Fea's comments about Early Evangelicalism: A Reader that he posted on his blog, "The Way of Improvement Leads Home."

Thanks John!

Playing the Lottery

Over at TWOILH, John Fea assesses some recent comments about the religious studies job market.

In case you have been living in a cave, the faculty job market for humanities professors is terrible, to say the least. Fea notes that some recent candidates have been "stunned" to find out they did not make it as a finalist for various religious history positions. But as Fea rightly notes, no one these days should be surprised to find rejection emails in their inbox. On the contrary, the shocker would be an invitation to participate in some form of a job interview. Basically, this means that at this point, you are one of the lucky people who have matched five of the white balls in Powerball. If you match the last one one, you win the lottery, a faculty job in the humanities.

John Fea Delivers LeRoy Martin Lecture

Last night, John Fea of Messiah College delivered the second LeRoy Martin lecture on "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?" The title of his lecture was the same as his recent book published by Westminster John Knox. It is hard to say how many people attended the lecture, but I would estimate about 200.

Fea took a strong stand against what he called "Christian Nationalists," those who promote a Christian "heritage" understanding of America. According to Fea, these people tend to view America as founded by Christians who intended to implant religion into the culture and government of the early republic. Against the simplistic and biased interpretation of America's founding by pundits like David Barton, Fea argues that history is complex, especially when it comes to evaluating the role that religion has played in America's government.

Fea had four main points in his lecture. First, he said that Americans have always understood themselves as living in a Christian Nation. He gave examples from David Barton and Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as the Confederate Constitution. Second, he talked about the use of scripture in the American Revolution, claiming that the Bible more than any other book was cited by the Founding Fathers. He zeroed in on a specific verse, Galatians 5:1, which was interpreted by one American minister differently before and after the War of Independence. Third, he dissected the U.S. Constitution and the fact that God is nowhere mentioned in it. Finally, Fea argued that all the Founders defended religious liberty, believing that Christianity was good for society's "moral fiber." His overall point: Neither the Religious Right or the Left has correctly interpreted American religious history.

The lecture was very interesting, and I appreciated Fea's style of speaking. He has a booming voice and presence that commands attention. During the lecture, I remember thinking that he would have made a good itinerant preacher during the Great Awakening. If Fea would be willing to impersonate biblical characters and weep profusely during his talks, perhaps he could rival the national attention that George Whitefield received!

If anyone is looking for an excellent speaker to give a lecture at his or her church, college, or seminary, I would highly recommend John Fea.

John Fea in the Chattanooga Times Free Press

I'm now back from the recent biennial meeting of the Conference on Faith and History, held at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. I had a great time seeing old friends and meeting new ones. I had not seen my friend and fellow Bebbington student Andy Tooley for three years. I also was able to spend time with my former colleague Sam Smith, who I had not seen in nearly two years. Sam and I gave a paper at a Saturday morning panel on "Print Culture  in Early America." It is always fun to talk about John Erskine, and, on this occasion, his involvement in the dissemination of Enlightenment texts in America, Britain, and Europe. Several people told me after the session that they intend to buy my book on Erskine. To my knowledge, Enlightened Evangelicalism: The Life and Thought of John Erskine has been reviewed nine times, but these reviews do not seem to have penetrated beyond some of the leading eighteenth-century scholars. Maybe my next book should be on the Founding Fathers, or, if Mitt Romney wins the election, on Mormonism. I can't wait to read Sam Smith's new book, A Cautious Enthusiasm: Mystical Piety and Evangelicalism in Colonial South Carolina, due out in February with the University of South Carolina Press. Sam's main argument is an important one: that colonial Anglicans in the Low Country South were not simply Latitudinarians, but in many cases, full-blow evangelicals who were influenced by mystical pietism.


Today, I was pleased to see John Fea's op-ed piece on America's religious heritage in the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Fea teaches at Messiah College and is an avid blogger at the Way of Improvement Leads Home. On Tuesday, October 9 at 5pm at the University Auditorium at UTC, Fea will be speaking on "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?," which is also the topic of his most recent book.

In Fea's article in the Times Free Press, he begins with a brief description of the US's Treaty of Tripoli (1797) and the significance of the following statement in the treaty: "The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." Fea argues that despite the blatant language dissociating America with Christianity, "The words of the Treaty of Tripoli can hardly be reconciled with the way that most politicians, clergy, educators and other writers perceived the United States over the course of the next 200 years. The idea that the United States is a 'Christian nation' has always been central to American identity." Fea then goes on to cite several religious leaders (liberal and conservative), such as Horace Bushnell, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Martin Luther King, Jr., who explicitly describe America as a Christian nation. Fea closes the article by saying, "one thing is for sure--the members of today's Christian Right who argue that the United States is a Christian nation have a good portion of American history on their side."I look forward to hearing his lecture this Tuesday, as I believe he will nuance the closing argument in this article.

D. G. Hart at UTC

Today (September 27), D. G. Hart will be speaking at UTC on the topic: "What Makes the Religious Right Different from Political Islam?" Daryl is Visiting Professor of History at Hillsdale College, and is the first LeRoy Martin Distinguished Lecturer of the academic year. His talk today comes out of his new book, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of  American Conservativism. His lecture should spark some interesting discussion. The public is invited, and so if you are nearby please feel free to join us. More information on the lecture series, including times and parking can be found here.

The overall theme for the fall's lecture series is religion and politics. After Daryl, John Fea will be speaking on October 9 on "Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?," which is based on his recent book. After Fea, Amanda Porterfield will be speaking on "Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation," which is also a topic stemming from a recent book. I'm excited that UTC will be hosting these distinguished scholars.

Founding Fathers

I have been doing some light reading to determine the possibility of teaching a course on "Faith and the Founding Fathers." After reading about half of John Fea's book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? and The Founding Fathers and the Debate over Religion in Revolutionary America, edited by Thomas Kidd and Matthew Harris, I was convinced that such a course would be interesting and informative for students. I find the debate over Washington's faith particularly interesting since in some ways he seemed ambivalent toward Christianity, yet he surpassed the other Founders in his reliance on God's providence.

As far as a textbook goes, I may use the reader by Kidd and Harris or James Hutson's The Founders on Religion: A Book of Quotations. I ordered the latter along with four other  books on the founders and their view of religion.

How Do They Do It?

How do they do it? It seems that individual authors are pumping out more and more books these days. Mark Noll is one of the best examples of this trend. For years he has consistently churned out such academic titles as Christians in the American Revolution (1977), one of my favorites, Princeton and the Republic (1989), Religion and American Politics (1989), A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (1992), his best-seller, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994), Turning Points (2001), The Princeton Theology, 1812-1921 (2001), The Old Religion in a New World (2001), the "magisterial" America's God (2002), The Rise of Evangelicalism (2004), Is the Reformation Over? (2005), God and Race in American Politics (2008), and The New Shape of World Christianity (2009). His Clouds of Witnesses came out in March 2011, and was quickly followed by Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind in July 2011, which came out only a few months before his Protestantism: A Very Short Introduction. I recall Bruce Hindmarsh quipping that he could not read as many books as Noll produced in a year!

Other examples abound. After publishing his PhD dissertation as The Protestant Interest in 2004, Thomas Kidd went on to write a series of impressive texts including, The Great Awakening (2007), American Christians and Islam (2008), God of Liberty (2010), and Patrick Henry (2011). He is on target to complete a biography of George Whitefield by 2014, the 300th anniversary of the Grand Itinerant's birthday. The list continues. The religious historian Paul Harvey, author of Freedom's Coming, has published Through the Storm, Through the Night as well as Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South in 2011. His fellow "blogmeister," Randall Stephens, published The Fire Spreads in 2008, and has co-authored the much-talked about The Anointed at the end of 2011. John Fea turned his dissertation into The Way of Improvement Leads Home in 2008, helped to edit Confessing History at the end of 2010, and only months later released Was America Founded As a Christian Nation? How do they do it?

In fairness, many of these books are offshoots of the research done on previous projects. But still, it is remarkable how efficient these scholarly are. Rick Sher once told me that it took him ten years to revise his Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (1985), and in the preface of his award-winning, The Enlightenment and the Book (2007), he states that he began research for the book in the early 1990s. I think John Wigger said something similar, that it took him about a decade to write American Saint: Francis Asbury and the Methodists (2009).

What I find interesting is that some authors do not need to write multiple monographs to become leaders in their field. Rick Sher, John Wigger, and George Marsden serve as evidence of this fact. Sometimes, all that is needed is one ground-breaking book to catapult a person to literary stardom. Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture was a runaway success that permanently etched his name into the annals of Christian scholarship. A second example is Nathan Hatch's The Democratization of American Christianity, which has been cited as one of the best monographs on religious history in America. The lesson to me is: although it is impressive to produce multiple books in a decade, it only takes one seminal monograph to make a dramatic impact in the academy.

Jonathan Yeager