The Devil’s Music, Part One
by Randall Stephens with William Trollinger
In Righting America we note that “in the twenty-first century, the study of American fundamentalism has really come into its own, with a surfeit of outstanding works, many of which pay close attention to economics and politics” (315). Now add rock ‘n’ roll to the list of topics, with Randall Stephens’ The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ‘N’ Roll (Harvard University Press, 2018). In this post and the next we feature Randall’s interview with rightingamerica, which certainly should motivate readers to purchase the book!
Randall J. Stephens is an Associate Professor and Reader in History and American Studies at Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. He is the author of The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Harvard University Press, 2008); The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); and editor of Recent Themes in American Religious History (University of South Carolina Press, 2009). Stephens has also written for The Atlantic, Salon, Wilson Quarterly, Christian Century, The Independent, Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times. In 2018 he will be taking up a new post as Associate Professor of British and American Studies at the University of Oslo.
The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll. Image (c) 2018, Harvard University press.
The topic of your book is just fascinating. How did you end up working in this area?
It started when I was working on my first book on southern pentecostalism. When I moved into the mid 20th century, I noticed all sorts of links between the tongues-speaking faith, cultural innovation, and high-energy music. One chapter in that first book dealt passingly with the religious roots of Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and some other key figures in rhythm and blues and rock and roll. It just seemed like there was more to tell there. As I started working more on the rock project, I thought it would be a good idea to take the story forward by focusing on the birth of Christian rock and the many battles that played out among conservative Christians over race, sex, and pop culture.
Of course, it really helped in my research that there is so much excellent work out there already on rock ’n’ roll, race, religion, youth culture, and other topics. I’m thinking about the scholarship of my colleague here at Northumbria University, Brian Ward, along with the work of Larry Eskridge, David Stowe, Kerry Segrave, Linda Martin, Shawn David Young, Paul Harvey, and a host of others. At the risk of being too simplistic, what I tried to bring to the table was the long history of conservative religious groups and their relationships with the new hybrid rock ’n’ roll.
Given the current controversy over racism within white evangelicalism, it makes great sense that race and racism are so important to your story. Could you talk about this?
Probably the strongest opposition to rock ’n’ roll, especially in the early years, was wrapped up in ideas about race and decorum. I spend quite bit of time in the book looking at the ways that white evangelicals and Catholics used arguments about the “savage” origins of the music in order to caution teens and their parents about dances, records, and performers. The language of a hell-hatched music and of demonic influence was all over the place. And this shaded into rants about race.
One section of the book particularly focuses on Baptist, pentecostal, Catholic, and Presbyterian sermons and print material, Sunday school lessons, and more. Quite often, laypeople and ministers liked to link together the “jungle music” of the mission field and the barbarous rhythms and dances associated with rock ’n’ roll. The music often took them to the southern hemisphere of their imagination. So, key figures such as W.A. Criswell, Jack Wyrtzen, and William Ward Ayer play important roles here. I also spend some time looking at the kind of religious arguments that the White Citizens’ Council developed.
The anti-rock ’n’ roll argument certainly went beyond this. Black leaders like W. Herbert Brewster, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Charles D. Beck made a strong case about the low origins and/or sinfulness of the music and associated dances. Still the racialization and demonization of the music was a powerful kind of argument among believers. Much of this kind of rhetoric faded by the 1970s, though it remained front and center in fundamentalists circles at Bob Jones University or in the lectures and tracts produced by Bob Larson, Tim LaHaye, or David Noebel.
Is the emergence of Christian rock in the early 1970s part and parcel of evangelicalism’s co-optation of the Jesus Movement?
Christian rock definitely owes quite a bit to the Jesus People movement. Most of the earliest performers—Phil Keaggy, Barry McGuire, Andraé Crouch and the Disciples, Larry Norman, Randy Matthews, the Armageddon Experience, Agape, Sound Foundation, and Honey Tree—were closely connected to or had some links with the Jesus movement. It’s hard to say precisely which came first. They emerged at about the same time, I suppose. Early venues like coffee shops and churches owed a great deal to the efforts of Christian hippies. The same is true of the first large festivals. Even the highly successful Explo ’72 fest in Dallas Texas, at which Billy Graham preached and Johnny Cash performed, had a certain hippy aesthetic about it. In the years 1967-1970, hotspots like the Bay Area, and Los Angeles were instrumental. You see the casual language of Christian hippies in song lyrics and in newspapers/magazines that covered the movement. One of my favorite headlines is from a late-60s issue of the Hollywood Free Paper: “JESUS IS BETTER THAN HASH.” That speaks volumes about the early Jesus music scene as well as the countercultural excitement around Jesus rock. It almost seems like a parody that would have appeared in Mad Magazine.
I also make the point that it was a certain kind of pentecostalism that fueled the movement. Songs and sermons dealt frankly with premillennialism, spiritual gifts, healing, the reality of hell and the devil, and stern ideas about judgment. There was also a decidedly non-denominational and anti-institutional element at play.
The End of Global Warming is Not Even Close
by Shuang-Ye Wu
Dr. Shuang-Ye Wu is a climatologist working in the Department of Geology at University of Dayton. Her research focuses on how climate change alters the hydrologic cycle and the consequent precipitation patterns. In particular, she is interested in changes in extreme events such as extreme storms, floods and droughts. Dr. Wu has published 36 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and obtained grants from NSF, EPA and other funding agencies. Dr. Wu obtained her Master and PhD degrees from Cambridge University in UK, majoring in environmental geography. She is currently teaching courses in the Earth system science, climate change, and geographic information systems at UD.
UPDATE 6/26/18:Steve Gollmer has posted as response to this post here (link also available in comment below).
In an Answers in Genesis article entitled “The End of Global Warming?” , Steven Gollmer – Professor of Physics at Cedarville University – cited the data of global temperature to show a “plateau” of temperature since 1998, and suggested that even “if CO2 is causing global warming, it will eventually reach a saturation point, and temperatures will level off at a new equilibrium.” Here is what is wrong with his evidence and arguments.
1. Global temperature is NOT stabilizing.
The global temperature data used by Gollmer ended at 2013. Since then, we had three consecutive record-setting years (2014, 2015 and 2016) in terms of global temperature (see figure below, data source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Despite the bitter cold winter we experienced in the US, the year 2017 is the second warmest year on record, and the warmest year without El Niño. All but one of the 18 warmest years on record occurred in the 21st century. The only exception is the year 1998 when we had a strong El Niño. Climate system has its internal variability, so temperature can exhibit short-term increase and decrease. The so-called “plateau” is just one of those temporary variations. Despite such variability, the long-term increasing trend of the global temperature is very clear in the data, and this trend is going to continue with increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere because of greenhouse effect.
Global Land and Ocean Temperature Anomalies, January-December.
2. We are NOT at, or even near, equilibrium.
Gollmer used the analogy of a water bottle with holes to illustrate the idea of the equ
ilibrium state. In order to explain this better, we need first set up the analogy more accurately. Suppose we have a water tank with an inflow and an outflow (see figure on the right). When inflow equals outflow, the water level in the tank remains constant. If we increase the inflow to a higher rate, the water level will increase. Higher water level will lead to higher pressure at the bottom of the tank, forcing the water to flow out faster. Therefore, as water level increases, the outflow will increase until it equals the inflow. At this point, the water level will reach a new stable level that is higher than before: a new equilibrium is reached for the water tank system. However, a new equilibrium (a stable water level in this case) can only be reached if the input is constant. If we keep increasing the rate of inflow, the equilibrium will not be reached until the inflow stabilizes first.
The global temperature, like the water level in the tank, changes in response to energy input and output. The Earth receives the Sun’s energy (input), and warms up as a result. As it warms, it radiates energy into the space (output). The amount of energy it radiates out depends on its temperature. Higher the temperature, more output radiation. When energy input equals output, the Earth’s temperature remains constant. If the input increases, such as more solar energy reaching the Earth or higher level of CO2 trapping more energy, the Earth will warm up. As it warms up, the Earth will also radiate more energy out. However, a stable temperature can only be reached if the change in the energy input stabilizes first. Our data shows a continued increase of the CO2 in the atmosphere (figure below) at accelerated rates. Under such circumstances, we are far from reaching an equilibrium. For a more detailed scientific explanation about why the CO2 effect is far from saturation, please see https://skepticalscience.com/saturated-co2-effect.htm.
3. A new equilibrium is NOT what we want.
It is true that the Earth will reach a new equilibrium once input stabilizes, but as Gollmer also pointed out, is the new equilibrium what we want? Equilibrium or not, it is the actual temperature increase that will affect all of us. Climate models project 2-4 degrees (Celsius) increase by 2100, 6-8 degrees increase by 2300, and 6-15 degrees of eventual increase (i.e. equilibrium) if we burn all the fossil fuel (likely within the next 100 years). To put these numbers in some context, the difference in average global temperature between Medieval Warm Period (when people settled in parts of the Greenland) and Little Ice Age (when major rivers in Europe such as the Thames froze in winter) is 0.5-0.8 degrees. Global temperature decrease during the last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago (when large ice sheet in North America reached Dayton) is about 4 degrees. A completely ice-free Earth would be about 6-10 degrees warmer than present (Crowley and North 1991). In addition, those great climatic changes in the Earth’s past occurred over tens and hundreds of thousand years, whereas the present temperature increases occurs over just hundreds of years. The rate of change of global temperatures we are experiencing now far exceeds even the greatest rates that occurred during the catastrophic deglaciations of the Pleistocene – the most extreme and abrupt climate change recorded in the geological records. Such fast rate of change limits the ability of natural environment or even human society to adjust and adapt to the changes, leading to devastating consequences.
So no, the new state (equilibrium or not) is NOT what we want.
Religious “Nones” and Social Decay in the Heartland
by Zach Spidel
Zach Spidel is a minister with the Brethren in Christ Church and is currently serving as the pastor of two congregations in Dayton, Ohio, including The Shepherd’s Table – a church he led in planting on the city’s struggling east end. A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary and currently a student in the University of Dayton’s Ph.D. program in theology, Zach is an eclectic and ecumenical Anabaptist who aims in ministry and in scholarship to simply follow Jesus.
In a recent post, this blog featured a map of the United States which illustrated the proportion of religious adherents across the country. Many features of that map confirm long-known features of America’s religious geography. But the map also includes some surprises. One of the biggest, perhaps, is the remarkable a-religiosity of a geographic region including southern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, and West Virginia. What’s going on here?
Faithland map, 2018. Created by Alex Egoshin using data provided by the Association of Religion Data Archives.
I don’t know for sure, but as a pastor of two small congregations in southern Ohio, I have a couple thoughts to share on the matter.
First, I must say that from my vantage point (and this is necessarily anecdotal), this map is an accurate depiction of my area’s relative religiosity. A couple of summers ago, for instance, I was walking down a street in the neighborhood where I live and minister, when a boy of about ten ran down from the porch of an abandoned house to greet me. It was Sunday and my relatively dressy clothes made me stand out. I stopped to greet him, and the boy immediately asked me who I was and where I worked. When I explained that I was a pastor who worked at a church, he stared back confusedly. It turned out that this naturally bright and inquisitive ten-year-old did not know what either a pastor or a church was. The words were, perhaps, vaguely familiar, but essentially foreign to his lexicon.
I have met multiple others like this boy. Their stories are extreme, but telling. Most people around here at least know what a church is, but the vast majority of people don’t go to one and haven’t gone in a very long time (if they ever did). Nor do they have any regular religious practice.
And this brings me to the second thing I want to share. I live in a poor, urban, largely white neighborhood on Dayton’s East Side. Last I checked, the median household income here was around $22,000. I feel confident that number is too high – I know plenty of people who call this place home but live in abandoned or semi-abandoned homes with no utilities, or who sleep in alleys, or in copses of trees in the park, or who pay 10 bucks a night to sleep on a “friend’s” covered porch whenever they can scrounge that up. I know far too many people – some living, some dead – whose lives have been altered by the ongoing opioid epidemic.
My neighborhood is a poor place, ravaged by a breakdown in all traditional forms of community. And the church has not been exempted. Recently the Atlantic ran a piece on how hard it is to keep churches in poor communities open.
Here’s another story in this regard. In many other places today, generally irreligious people still find themselves under a religious roof for events such as weddings and funerals. But that is not so here. When a young woman I knew wandered (under the influence of heroin) into the street and was run over by a car, I asked her mother if she would let the church hold a funeral for her daughter – all the expenses covered by the church. Her mother was reluctant to say yes, because she felt it would be unfair. She had not had a funeral for her husband when he died, or for either of her other two dead children. In all three of those cases she’d merely collected their ashes from the morgue and taken them home, still in the morgue-provided boxes, to place their remains on top of a filing cabinet in her cramped dining room. She and her husband had been married in the court house, not a church. At none of these pivotal moments in her life, did this woman experience the warmth of Christian fellowship or any other traditional form of community.
It is worth noting that her daughter’s death, and much of the unhappiness in her family’s life over the years, involved drug abuse – especially opioids. Below is another map – this one a state-by-state account of opioid related deaths. Notice any overlap with the map above?
Opioid Deaths in 2015. Map created by the Washington Post for the WonkBlog, December 13, 2016.
For multiple reasons, traditional centers of community are breaking down in neighborhoods like mine. I don’t know if economic, social, moral, or spiritual causes “came first” in this story of community breakdown – or if that question even makes sense. What I do feel confident about is that all four of those factors are involved and interwoven with one another today in perpetuating it. There is one sort of a-religiosity that exists amongst many of America’s cultural elite on the coasts. There is another that exists around here amongst those left behind in this new gilded age of ours, and it is emblematic of a deadly social decay.
Finally, let me leave you with a bit of hope. I moved to this neighborhood because I believe churches can help to turn the tide in places like this. However this breakdown started, I’m a Christian who believes Jesus can give rest to the weary, sight to the blind, and hope to those lost in darkness. In following him, I believe the church can be part of building up what has broken down.
If you do away with the yoke of oppression,
with the pointing finger and malicious talk,
and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness,
and your night will become like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you always;
he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land
and will strengthen your frame.
You will be like a well-watered garden,
like a spring whose waters never fail.
Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings. Isaiah 58: 9b-12
The Surprising Geography of America’s Religious “Nones”
by William Trollinger
Much has been written and said about the rapidly growing numbers of Americans who identify themselves as religious “nones,” i.e., atheists, agnostics, and “nothing in particular” religiously. But given that so many smart people have argued that America is the exception to the secularization that has swept western Europe in the past seven decades or so, it is worth highlighting the numbers. Drawing from the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study:
- In 2014 23% of U. S. adults identify themselves as religious “nones,” which is a dramatic increase from just seven years before, when “nones” made up 16% of Americans.
- Of Americans born between 1981 and 1996 (a.k.a., Millennials), 35% are atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” religiously.
- In 2014, the median age of the “nones” was 36, which is one decade younger than the median age of American adults.
- As regards religious switching, four Americans have become “nones” for every one who has moved from being a “none” to being religiously affiliated.
Interestingly, there is a geography to the religiously nonaffiliated. Some of it is what one might expect. That is to say, there is a much higher concentration of the religious “nones” in New England, the Pacific Northwest, and the Mountain West (excluding, of course, Utah).
But take a look at the fascinating “Faithland” map below, created by using data from the 2010 Religious Data Archives that documents the percentage of religious adherents in each county in the United States. Look closely. Note the place that is not along the coasts and that is not in the West and that has a high concentration of “nones.”
Really? In our next post, we will talk about this demographic surprise.
Faithland map, 2018. Created by Alex Egoshin using data provided by the Association of Religion Data Archives.
Even in Sandusky, A Lynching
by William Trollinger
“Was it the Ku Klux Klan who lynched a black man here in the 1870s?”
This was the final question I (Bill) was asked Saturday afternoon at the Sandusky (OH) Library, after my presentation on “Terrorizing Immigrants and Catholics: The Ohio KKK in the 1920s.” Sponsored by the Ohio Humanities Council, this address was part of the Sandusky Library’s series on the “Legacy of Race and Ethnicity in Ohio.” 56 people were in attendance, and they were quite lively, asking twenty-odd questions at the end of the presentation. And the conversation went far beyond the Second Ku Klux Klan, with much discussion of the ways in which violence and the threat of violence has been used to buttress white supremacy in the United States for the past 400 years.
That we were in Sandusky made this conversation particularly interesting. In antebellum America this town on the shores of Lake Erie was an important final stop on the Underground Railroad, a place where fugitive slaves – if they could avoid the slave-catchers that often lurked about the port – boarded boats for Canada. Not only did Harriet Beecher Stowe feature Sandusky as the gateway to freedom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but a shorefront park commemorating the Underground Railroad was dedicated in 2007.
Sculpture at Facer Park, Sandusky, Ohio. Image courtesy of Erie County Historical Society.
Notwithstanding the town’s illustrious antislavery history, on September 4, 1878 William Taylor – a black man accused of murdering a white woman – was taken from sheriff’s custody by a mob of thousands and dragged through the streets of Sandusky while the crowd kicked and beat him. While Taylor continued to plead his innocence, the crowd tied a rope around his neck and hung him from a downtown lamppost.
As I pointed out at the Sandusky Library, this horrific lynching was not the Klan’s doing, as the First KKK (unlike the Second Klan) was limited to the South and had died out by the early 1870s. And this was not the state’s only lynching. As documented by the Equal Justice Initiative, Ohio witnessed 15 lynchings, including the 1892 murder of the only black man in Holmes County, who apparently was lynched for staring at people. While there were 4084 lynchings between 1877 and 1950 in states of the former Confederacy, there were “more than 300 racial terror lynchings in other states during this time period.”
Given Sandusky’s illustrious antislavery history, it would seem that – of all places – the town should find some way to mark the lynching of William Taylor, even while it also rightly celebrates its place on the Underground Railroad. As W.E.B. DuBois asserted in his monumental work, Black Reconstruction:
Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things . . . And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?
For Evangelical Colleges, is Safe a Losing Strategy?
by William Trollinger
In our recent Q/A with Adam Laats about his newly-released book, Fundamentalist U, he pointed out that
In order to survive, [evangelical] schools have had to maintain reputations as both guardians and teachers of a necessarily vague dream of eternal and unchanging orthodoxy, even as ideas about proper orthodoxy changed over time. The only reason for evangelical colleges to exist – the only way they could continue to attract students and maintain the good will of alumni – was to remain absolutely committed to truths that derived their power from their eternal, unchanging source, yet were in practice always changing.
Is it possible to thread that needle? As Adam documents in Fundamentalist U, it has been quite difficult. But in 2018 the challenge may be becoming downright hazardous for evangelical colleges.
Recent polling data reveals that the percentage of Americans who are white evangelicals is shrinking, from 23% only one decade ago to 17% in 2017. More startling, the median age of white evangelicals is 55; 30% of white evangelicals are over the age of 65 while only 11% are between the ages of 18 and 29; and, only 8% of American adults under the age of 30 are white evangelicals. millennials identify as evangelical. Reasons for alienation from evangelicalism include outrage over white evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump and Roy Moore, the sense among many millennials that Christianity is anti-intellectual and anti-science, and, perhaps most striking, the much greater openness on the part of young evangelicals regarding matters of sexuality and same-sex relationships.
In short, evangelical colleges must appeal to parents and donors on the basis of theological, cultural, and political orthodoxies that are losing their appeal, particularly among the young. Can evangelical colleges successfully appeal to both young and old by gradually and subtly moderating their “orthodoxy” without appearing to change at all? Can they moderate their positions without producing the sort of backlash that overwhelmed Cedarville University when conservative constituents (and fundamentalist faculty) concluded that the changes taking place at the school were actually violations of orthodoxy? (Righting America, 210-214)
Or, to the contrary, will there be evangelical colleges that look at the declining numbers of white evangelicals and conclude that being “safe” is a losing strategy? Could there even be the bold evangelical college that decides to pull down the theological and cultural walls?
P.S. In an event sponsored by the Ohio Humanities Council, this Saturday afternoon (Feb. 03) Bill is giving a talk on the 1920s Ku Klux Klan as part of the series, “Legacy of Race and Ethnicity in Ohio.” The talk will be at 2 PM at the Sandusky (OH) Library.
Looking In From the Outside: Evangelical Colleges and Donald Trump
by Adam Laats with William Trollinger
Adam Laats’ eagerly anticipated book, Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, comes out next week from Oxford University Press. We have posed a few questions for Adam about his book, and in this post and the next we will feature his responses.
Adam Laats is Professor of Education and History (by courtesy) at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His earlier books include The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard UP, 2015) and, with co-author Harvey Siegel, Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Adam blogs at the wonderfully named I Love You But You Are Going to Hell.
Image courtesy of Oxford University Press.
Read Part One of our interview here.
You did not grow up evangelical or fundamentalist, and yet you write Fundamentalist U. How did your “outsider” status affect your research and writing on this topic?
My status as a non-evangelical historian of evangelicalism gives me both benefits and drawbacks. I don’t have the same feel for the language and tones of evangelical culture that evangelical scholars have. When it comes right down to it, for example, I get skeeved when I hear Betsy DeVos talking about working in public schools to bring the “Kingdom of God.” That’s not language I grew up with and as I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s easy for secular people like me to misunderstand what some people mean by that kind of talk.
However, I also think that a non-evangelical perspective also gives me and other non-evangelical historians a boost in some ways. I don’t care personally about the scandal of the evangelical mind. I don’t feel any need to justify the intellectual respectability of early fundamentalism. Nor do I hope to deride fundamentalists as boorish and bigoted. I have no interest in defending one or another vision of “real” evangelicalism. I don’t have a dog in any of the fights I’m studying. I don’t feel influenced in any direction by the church I didn’t grow up in and the personal memories I don’t have of individual fundamentalists.
I’m certainly not denigrating the significance and importance of the work of historians who come from evangelical backgrounds. Like everyone else, I’ve been guided by the work of historians such as George Marsden, Mark Noll, and Joel Carpenter. But I don’t think one has to be evangelical to care about evangelicals. After all, I’m also not a Kennedy, but I think understanding the Kennedys is of great importance to anyone who wants to understand America’s twentieth century. The same can be said for institutions such as Liberty University, Moody Bible Institute, Bob Jones University, and Wheaton College. When every significant GOP presidential candidate for the past forty years has included campaign stops at evangelical colleges or universities, those institutions are of intense interest to all of us, not just to evangelicals themselves.
Given that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, and given that white evangelicals (despite Trump’s declining approval numbers) remain among his staunchest supporters, what does this say about fundamentalist and evangelical colleges and their faculty and administrators?
This question is a good example of the ways writing about evangelical culture from the outside can be both a help and a hindrance. The twentieth-century history is pretty clear: many—not all!—white evangelicals share a sense that something bad has happened to America. Many white evangelicals feel as if they have been kicked out of their leading role in American society; they feel usurped, denied, ousted. This isn’t a theological thing, but a very powerful cultural one. For people who feel as if they’ve been unfairly treated—who feel as if the past was far superior to the present—a candidate who promises to “make America great again” can seem very attractive.
Though many white evangelicals have actively fought against this tendency, evangelical colleges and universities have always fueled feelings of usurped “Christian” social dominance; they have emphasized beleaguered, defiant white nationalism. In other words, evangelical colleges have always promoted a very Trump-ish vision of white “Christian” nationalism. In the twentieth century, even the more otherworldly schools such as Moody Bible Institute never hesitated to engage in down-and-dirty political fights along these lines, and all the evangelical institutions that I studied bragged about the fact that they actively taught a very this-worldly America Firstism. A while back, I made this argument briefly at History News Network.
John Fea, a historian I admire greatly, objected to my sketch. As an evangelical scholar teaching at an evangelical college, Fea wrote, he didn’t see faculty actively teaching any sort of Trump-friendly ideas. Quite the opposite. As Professor Fea put it, “If students at evangelical colleges voted for Trump–and there were many who did–it was not because they were fed pro-Trump rhetoric from their faculty.”
Fea made an important point. Evangelical colleges and universities may welcome many Trump-supporting white evangelical students. But they also provide institutional homes for evangelical intellectuals who have articulated strident critiques of both Trump and Trump’s evangelical fans.
Nevertheless, I stand by my earlier argument. Evangelical universities absolutely need to attract students from among the evangelical public. To survive, they need to be seen as safe homes for young evangelicals. Regardless of the sophisticated thinking that goes on among the evangelical faculty—what Fred Clark has so aptly called “faculty lounge” white evangelicalism—plenty of white evangelicals agree with Trump’s America-first image. And schools need to appeal to that. Anti-Trump ideas among faculty members are not the most powerful force driving the decisions of evangelical school leaders.
What are you working on now that you have finished Fundamentalist U?
First, I’m finishing up a book manuscript about American creationism. In Why Is Jesus on a Dinosaur, I’m trying to explain creationism to other non-creationists like myself. Even people who generally know a good deal about creationism tend to make pretty basic goofs, like a “retro report” recently in the New York Times. Thanks to a fellowship from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, I plan to finish the manuscript in the next couple of months and look for a publisher.
The second book is different. I’m researching the first major, multi-city urban school reform in United States history. Joseph Lancaster opened a school in London in the early 1800s for poor children. It worked, sort of. The Borough Road School attracted a lot of attention and the experience went right to Lancaster’s head. Like so many school reformers after him, Lancaster quickly believed his own hype and promised he could save American cities from the perils of poverty. It didn’t work. Lancaster ended up broke and bitter and his schools didn’t produce the dramatic results he had promised. I’m hoping to tell both Lancaster’s story and the broader story of school reform in America.
The Perilous Challenge of Keeping Evangelical Colleges Safely Orthodox
by Adam Laats with William Trollinger
Adam Laats’ eagerly anticipated book, Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education, comes out next week from Oxford University Press. We have posed a few questions for Adam about his book, and in this post and the next we will feature his responses.
Adam Laats is Professor of Education and History (by courtesy) at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His earlier books include The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard UP, 2015) and, with co-author Harvey Siegel, Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Adam blogs at the wonderfully named I Love You But You Are Going to Hell.
Here at rightingamerica we love this quote from the conclusion to Fundamentalist U:
There has never been a clear definition of the boundaries of fundamentalism or evangelicalism and the campuses of colleges, universities, seminaries, and Bible institutes have often been the places at which those boundaries were endlessly debated. . . .At many schools, administrators hoped to keep the boundaries as wide and as fuzzy as possible, in order to attract as many students as possible and to keep their reputations as ‘safe’ schools for fundamentalist and evangelical students.
Could you elaborate?
Like anyone studying evangelicalism or evangelical higher education, I was influenced significantly by Tim Gloege’s study of Moody Bible Institute. Tim was kind enough to read and comment on my manuscript and our conversations helped me to see that the endless talk about orthodoxy at evangelical institutions can’t be confused with actual theological orthodoxy. As Tim argued in his book and right here at RACM, building a brand based on the performance of orthodoxy is not the same as orthodoxy.
The mission of evangelical educational institutions has been doubly difficult. In order simply to survive as institutions, they have had to safeguard their reputations as trustworthy guardians of true evangelical belief. But what is “true evangelical belief”? Everyone agrees that it ought to include a reverence for the Bible and a yearning to save souls. But does it include confidence in a premillennial return of Jesus? Can it include rigid ideas about predestination? Even more troubling for leaders of evangelical institutions, must it include a ban on things such as drinking alcohol? On interracial dating?
In order to survive, schools have had to maintain reputations as both guardians and teachers of a necessarily vague dream of eternal and unchanging orthodoxy, even as ideas about proper orthodoxy changed over time. The only reason for evangelical colleges to exist—the only way they could continue to attract students and maintain the good will of alumni—was to remain absolutely committed to truths that derived their power from their eternal, unchanging source, yet were in practice always changing. In a situation like that, school leaders hoped to maintain and promote a big-tent vision of conservative evangelicalism, because their ability to maintain the confidence of the evangelical public was only possible if leaders had a little wiggle room.
A couple of examples might help illustrate the ways this dilemma played out. By the middle of the twentieth century, ideas about race and racism were changing for all Americans. More and more white Americans were abandoning white-supremacist rhetoric, even if they didn’t do too much to challenge the deeper structures of racism. White evangelicals participated in this nebulous cultural shift, and it meant a change in the segregatory practices of their schools. While several older evangelical colleges originally had authentically anti-racist policies on the books, often leftovers from nineteenth-century evangelical abolitionism, between the 1930s and the 1950s evangelical colleges generally enacted and enforced segregatory policies. In this evangelical school leaders were following trends in mainstream higher education to increase racial segregation. Even evangelical institutions that kept older anti-racist language on the books adopted in practice the white-supremacist notions of the wider American culture.
But as these notions changed again in the late 1950s and 1960s, most evangelical colleges changed, too. But not all. Famously, Bob Jones University clung for decades to its older policy of strict racial segregation and white supremacy. Why? Mostly because founder Bob Jones Sr. publicly argued in 1960 that racial segregation was part and parcel of true fundamentalist religion. Once Jones established the idea of racial segregation as part of his vision of fundamentalist orthodoxy, it was nearly impossible for the institution to change it.
Schools that had not enshrined their white-supremacist segregatory policies as part of their religious commitment had an easier time changing those rules. Importantly, leaders of these schools did not talk as if they were changing to keep up with changing mainstream trends. Rather, they agreed with faculty and student reformers who argued with great historical justification that real evangelical religion had always been anti-racist. In other words, schools had to make changes, but did not want to be seen as changeable.
It wasn’t only fundamentalist stalwarts like Bob Jones U that experienced the tension between the need to change outdated rules and the need to maintain an image as unchanging adherents of eternal truths. At Wheaton College, for example, keeping up with shifting orthodoxies always represented intense institutional dilemmas. In the early 1960s, earnest students pushed for greater student freedom. Two students in particular pushed the limits by publishing and distributing a newsletter that challenged Wheaton’s strict student rules. Even though they had broken no official rules, the students were suspended for a full year. Why such a harsh punishment? As some sympathetic faculty members pointed out, students who drank alcohol or broke sexual rules often received far milder penalties. In this case, the student rebels received such a shocking punishment because they had threatened Wheaton’s image and reputation as a safe evangelical institution. As one rebel reported, then-President V. Raymond Edman had told him, “This college will be a place Christian parents can send their children to with the confidence that their faith will be established and not shaken.”
Privately, Edman and other leaders might have agreed with the student rebels. But when it came to running their schools, administrators recognized the need for caution and the value of vagary. They needed to be able to look parents in the eye and tell them that their school would “establish” their children’s faiths, whatever that meant to evangelical parents at the time.
For Wheaton’s leaders as much as for Bob Jones’s, survival as evangelical institutions meant ruthless protection of the schools’ reputations for unflinching and eternal orthodoxy, even when the rules kept changing. It played out in different ways for different issues at different schools, but all evangelical colleges and universities languished in the same difficult position when it came to defining and defending “true” evangelical religion.
The Moody Crisis: Part 2
by Tim Gloege
And now, the second of two posts from the best possible scholar to comment on what is going on at Moody Bible Institute. (Read Part 1 here.)
Tim Gloege is a historian and independent scholar based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He earned his Ph.D. in United States History from the University of Notre Dame in 2007. His first book, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. (See Bill’s glowing review of Guaranteed Pure.) Most recently, he contributed an essay to The Business Turn in American Religious History (edited by Amanda Porterfield, Darren Grem, and John Corrigan). Thanks to a grant from the Louisville Institute, he is researching a second book on Protestant liberals in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. You can follow Tim on Twitter @timgloege.
The Moody Bible Institute in Chicago (MBI), a venerable evangelical institution, is hot news. Christianity Today, the Christian Post, even Inside Higher Ed have reported allegations of excessive compensation for administrators and “liberalism” among its faculty. But despite these sensational charges, heresy hunters will search in vain for a whiff of liberalism at this hopelessly conservative school. More than this, and as the chart below reveals, management costs were 4.19% of expenditures in 2017, historically low for MBI and well-within the non-profit norms for administrative overhead.
MBI’s Major Expenses, 2005-2017. Chart produced by Tim Gloege, 2018.
No, evidence of the real crisis is found in its annual financial and ministry reports, which are summarized in the charts below.
MBI’s Revenue Sources, 2005. Chart produced by Tim Gloege, 2018.
MBI’s Revenue Sources, 2017. Chart produced by Tim Gloege, 2018.
MBI’s Revenue, 2005-2017. Chart produced by Tim Gloege, 2018.
While it is difficult to trace the precise timing of MBI’s current crisis – given that online financial records begin in 2005 – several contributing factors are clear enough. First among equals is when mainstream publishers discovered the lucrative world of evangelical publishing in the 1980s, and consolidation ensued. Where the sector once was dominated by mid-sized firms, most major evangelical publishers today are subsidiaries of publicly-traded behemoths like News Corp. They have access to resources that dwarf independent publishers like Moody. Today, sure-sellers already have a platform and a following; they go with the deepest pockets, or perhaps form their own in-house publishing concern. Only the unknown, risky, propositions need the validation of the Moody brand.
That MBI’s publishing revenues have recovered to pre-recession levels is no small accomplishment, but signs of future trouble abound. While Moody Press published 120 new titles annually in the 1960s, last year it released only 56. Annual ministry reports suggest their most profitable title is Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages, first published in 1995. I’m no expert in this sector, but I see no equivalent on their current roster. This lack of marquee authors hurts their bottom line today and diminishes their brand in the future.
Moody Radio shows similar signs of stagnation. The million listeners it reaches weekly is unchanged from the decade before. Media forecasters predict steep declines in radio audiences, displaced by the fractured world of podcasts, streaming music, and other on-demand services. Where Moody could have positioned itself as the evangelical NPR of religious podcasting, it is frantically playing catch-up instead.
MBI’s biggest miscalculation came with its flagship magazine, Moody Monthly. Like many other periodicals, subscriptions had fallen calamitously in the 2000s. But while others cut costs and shifted operations online, MBI shuttered the magazine through which it had spoken into the issues of the day for a century. This effectively rendered MBI mute; alienating the Moody brand from its longstanding corporate personality.
Having rested on the laurels of its old media empire for thirty years, MBI is paying the price today. Evidence of its severely weakened brand is starkly represented in its donation revenues; adjusted for inflation they have yet to recover to 2005 levels. The only thing preventing truly apocalyptic budget shortfalls are increased revenues from student fees. (Today they constitute 31.4% of MBI’s total income, versus 16.5% in 2005.) The cost of providing education has risen also, and now makes up over half of total expenses, up from 42% in 2005.
But this focus on education is a historical anomaly at MBI, and given the state of higher education, as risky as a hand of cards with Jerry Jenkins. When enrollment declines, as happened last year, the fixed costs remain. From this perspective, the decision to shut down its Spokane campus may simply be a return to its traditional ratios. MBI’s newest building project, the Gary D. Chapman Center, seems to be another investment in public ministry. Opening this spring, it will house both the publishing and radio departments and provide space for new digital publishing and multimedia production.
But all this will be for naught without a concerted effort to rehabilitate the Moody brand. As it stands, the 79 million self-identified evangelicals who have never listened to Moody radio are as mystified by the “Moody” label as the average Katy Perry fan. For these evangelicals, the names that they trust lie elsewhere.
Moody has become the Sanka of evangelical brands; it’s still around, but you probably don’t know it. Whether Moody is still with us in twenty years remains to be seen.
The Moody Crisis: Part 1
by Tim Gloege
And now, the first of two posts from the best possible scholar to comment on what is going on at Moody Bible Institute.
Tim Gloege is a historian and independent scholar based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He earned his Ph.D. in United States History from the University of Notre Dame in 2007. His first book, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. (See Bill’s glowing review of Guaranteed Pure.) Most recently, he contributed an essay to The Business Turn in American Religious History (edited by Amanda Porterfield, Darren Grem, and John Corrigan). Thanks to a grant from the Louisville Institute, he is researching a second book on Protestant liberals in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. You can follow Tim on Twitter @timgloege.
The Moody Bible Institute in Chicago (MBI), a venerable evangelical institution, was hot news last week. Christianity Today, the Christian Post, even Inside Higher Ed reported allegations of excessive compensation for administrators and “liberalism” among its faculty.
The most sensational accusations revolved around MBI board member Jerry Jenkins, author of the spectacularly successful Left Behind series of apocalyptic novels. He apparently has a penchant for poker and was given sole use of a luxury suite in an Institute-owned building. All this came to light amid a financial shortfall that led MBI to close its Spokane campus and cut ten percent of its Chicago faculty.
MBI “is facing what is arguably one of the most serious crises… [of] its 132-year history” declared Julie Roys, a radio personality and self-described whistleblower who publicized these allegations. MBI leadership apparently agrees; both its president and COO resigned and its provost announced retirement (it also summarily fired Roys). The future of accused faculty members remains unclear.
I agree with Roys’ claim of crisis, but for none of the reasons she outlines. Heresy hunters will search in vain for a whiff of liberalism at this hopelessly conservative school. Management costs were 4.19% of expenditures in 2017, historically low for MBI and well-within the non-profit norms for administrative overhead. Her charges of “reverse racism” are bizarre (and particularly troubling in light of MBI’s ongoing struggles addressing white supremacy). Given the fresh, Trump-grade, scandals we are forced to endure each week, I can’t imagine folks remembering any of this in February, presuming MBI simply does nothing.
No, evidence of the real crisis is not found in gossipy blogposts from MBI’s rightwing fringe, but in its annual financial and ministry reports. The numbers they contain suggest a crisis of marketing, not morality. For most of the twentieth century, MBI could claim ownership of a premiere (perhaps the premiere) conservative evangelical brand. Its longstanding tagline touted Moody as the “name you can trust.” Today, it is the name hardly anyone remembers.
***
MBI was founded in 1889 by Dwight L. Moody: a celebrity revivalist to middle-class Protestants. It began as a training school for men and women who wished to engage in religious work, but were unable to attend college or seminary. (Ironically enough, it offers accredited undergraduate and seminary degrees today.)
If education were the measure, MBI would be long-forgotten; but its real significance came elsewhere. In the 1910s, MBI had been remade into a new type of religious corporation: an unaffiliated producer of religious media. Such organizations are so commonplace today we assume they always existed; but MBI helped create the template. Its techniques, rooted in modern business principles, have been imitated by nondenominational churches and parachurch organizations across the country. It radically transformed American Protestantism.
MBI’s transformation was inaugurated by a man who knew the power of modern media. Henry Parsons Crowell made a fortune by promoting his Quaker brand as the only oatmeal guaranteed pure. At MBI, he redirected its educational mission to promoting his brand of “pure religion” and fighting liberal theology. A wide array of products drew many evangelicals into MBI’s orbit: magazines, radio, books, music, evangelistic meetings, and later, evangelistic films and satellite broadcasts. Education continued, but these “public ministries” were responsible for both the majority of outlays and revenues: most importantly, the steady stream of small donations that kept the lights on. Donors believed in MBI’s mission because they consumed its products.
Crowell brilliantly leveraged the reputation of Dwight L. Moody as a virtual trademark, guaranteeing that their message was neither “liberal” nor “fanatical,” but simple, wholesome, “old-time religion.” Even as people forgot Moody the man, they still associated Moody the brand with trustworthiness.
MBI maintained the Moody brand by studiously avoiding flash, fad, and controversy of any sort. It was stylistically stodgy and corporate by design; controversy was enemy number one. The strategy served them well into the 1990s; its white evangelical constituency might sample the exotic flavors of the fringe—the counterculture of the Jesus People or the new breed of prosperity-oriented tele-evangelists or the cathartic political tantrums of Jerry Falwell. But like oatmeal for breakfast, they considered Moody’s inoffensive products a staple of their media diet. And when push came to shove, Moody was the name they could trust.
With MBI demonstrating proof of concept, innumerable non-denominational churches and para-church organizations imitated its strategies. Many early competitors had direct ties to MBI (its personnel were regularly poached by other evangelical institutions in the mid twentieth century). But by the 1980s, the landscape was thick with competitors from all corners of the evangelical ecosystem. Media-savvy mega-churches and parachurch organizations like Focus on the Family began undermining MBI’s privileged position.
